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The Zong Massacre: Insurance, Murder, and the Law
In November 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 132 enslaved Africans thrown overboard to their deaths—not in a storm, not in a revolt, but because he wanted to collect insurance money. This episode of The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering examines the Zong massacre, the subsequent legal case that treated enslaved people as cargo, and the unlikely figure who brought the atrocity to public attention: Olaudah Equiano, the formerly enslaved abolitionist. We explore how the case became a rallying cry for the abolition movement, the legal doctrine that…
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