Equiano's Shipwreck: Insurance, Risk and Peril in Plantationocene Oceans

Abstract

Abstract: The 1767 shipwreck of the Nancy occupies a central place in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789); as many scholars have noted, it is not only the literal centerpiece of the textbut also a foundational rhetorical moment central to Equiano's intertwining political and theological arguments. This essay offers a reading of the shipwreck scene as a politicized redeployment of one of the foundational concepts of maritime insurance law: the "perils of the sea." As maritime insurance emerged as a central institution for eighteenth-century capitalism, legal disputes repeatedly shaped and contested the category of "the perils of the sea": dangers considered to lie outside the scope of human agency, foresight, or fault. Most infamously, the "perils of the sea" lie at the heart of Gregson v. Gilbert , the legal case that resulted from the massacre aboard theslave ship the Zong . Through both his long career as a sailor and his personal involvement with abolitionist campaigns to publicize the Zong murders, Equiano would have been deeply familiar with the contours of maritime insurance law, and this essay reads the shipwreck scene as pivotally and critically engaged with the "perils of the sea" as a category shaping the emergence of financialized risk and its elision of other modes of thinking peril, vulnerability, and the contested border between human agency and environmental threat. While much recent work in the blue humanities has called for literary scholars to attend to the ocean as an irreducible materiality that challenges anthropocentric narrations of agency, this essay argues that the logic of maritime insurance, too, relied on the invocation of "the sea" as the sublime opposite of human agency, prudence, and riskmanagement. By engaging with the "perils of the sea" and its legal construction of "the sea" in opposition to human agency, Equiano detaches racialized distributions of risk, peril, and vulnerability from the naturalizing figuration of them as attributes of "the sea" and insists that risk itself be an object of abolition struggle.