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Specters of the Atlantic - Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Paperback)
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Specters of the Atlantic - Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Paperback)
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In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong
ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship's owners to
file an insurance claim for their lost "cargo." Accounts of this
horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on
both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented
detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to
the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the
Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an
astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including
Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many
others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives
of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and
ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to
come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of
violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity. Baucom
contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to
light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on
speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its
course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today's finance
capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as
Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative
culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development
of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through
abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry,
Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century
literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates
within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses,
Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of
history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is
not past but present within the future we now inhabit.
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