Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History

Abstract

Atlantic Modernity and the Wreckage of History Andrew Opitz (bio) Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History by Ian BaucomDuke University Press, 2005. The British Slave Trade and Public Memory by Elizabeth Kowaleski WallaceColumbia University Press, 2006. In September 1781, the British slaver Zong set sail from the western coast of Africa en route to the busy slave markets of Jamaica. In addition to its captain, Luke Collingwood, and a distinguished passenger named Robert Stubbs, the retiring governor of a coastal slave fort, the ship had a crew of seventeen sailors and a cargo of 440 Africans bound for sale and slave labor in the colonies. Disease and insufficient provisions made the transatlantic crossing particularly hellish and, as the Zong approached Jamaica, Captain Collingwood determined that he could best serve the interests of the voyage's investors by throwing the feeblest slaves overboard. Since the Zong was protected by a marine insurance contract, the owners could then seek compensation for their lost "property." Captain Collingwood's financial calculations led to a mass killing that would one day be called the Zong Massacre. Over the course of three days, the slavers forced 133 shackled human beings into the ocean. The ship's sole passenger, Governor Stubbs, passively watched the atrocity unfold from belowdecks as body after body plunged into the sea beneath his cabin window. Stubbs would later be called to testify at a trial in Liverpool, but the horrifying events [End Page 251] he witnessed were viewed by the court as potential insurance fraud rather than cold-blooded murder. When the Zong incident became publicly known, it helped to create a transatlantic abolition movement that would eventually close down the Middle Passage. Because of this, the Zong massacre is sometimes said by historians to mark the beginning of the end of transatlantic slavery. I mention the Zong here, however, because it is directly connected to two stimulating new pieces of scholarship that claim that the Atlantic slave trade is not merely our past but also our present—that the economic logic that produced the Zong tragedy continues to shape the twenty-first-century world in which we live. The Zong massacre and its aftermath are at the heart of Ian Baucom's ambitious new book Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Asserting that "time does not pass, it accumulates" (24), Baucom follows Walter Benjamin in suggesting that the past can be seen as series of catastrophes that exist in constellation with our present historical predicament. This connection becomes apparent at certain times and places especially weighted with the wreckage of history. For Benjamin, for example, the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris are "centers of commerce in luxury items" in constellation with twentieth-century manifestations of commodity capitalism (The Arcades Project, [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], 15). Ian Baucom argues that something similar can be said about the blood-stained Zong and its home port of Liverpool, one of the chief financial capitals of the eighteenth-century slave trade. Noting that the transatlantic operations of the slave trade helped to popularize now-familiar institutions like the insurance industry and the credit financing of speculative ventures, Baucom sees the Zong incident as an early embodiment of "finance capitalism," a culture of frenzied speculation that sociologist Giovanni Arrighi associates with transitional oscillations in the history of capitalism. This leads Baucom to identify the moment of the Zong massacre as one with which our "time" is noncontemporaneously contemporary, to read it as a moment in which a globalizing finance capital begins to develop those stock, bond, and paper money networks, those circuits of debt and credit financing . . . which inaugurate an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation, whose nineteenth-century midpoint enshrines commodity capitalism but whose [End Page 252] late-eighteenth and late-twentieth-century moments of beginning and end . . . operate under the signs of finance capitalism. (150) The Zong massacre is thus not simply a past act of violence but an event that encapsulates a wider capitalist logic that has only been perfected and intensified in our present historical moment. Baucom's book goes on to observe that the contemporary relevance of the...