This episode examines the racialized structures of finance. It sets off from the infamous Zong massacre and legal case of 1781 to explore the patterns of exploitation that underpin finance, and to show that contemporary finance is built on structures and practices established by eighteenth century slavery. It finds modern parallels in the speculative credit of the financial crisis and its legacy of austerity. There’s a personal narrative, as well, a family genealogy that circles the slave trade, winding up in the sometimes contradictory figure of the critical management academic.
Transcription
A picture, a poem, a legal text. Three representations of the same unspeakable truth.
The picture: Turner’s greatest masterpiece – at least in the eyes of the art critic John Ruskin – the Slave Ship, or ‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying, typhoon coming on’. A swirling mass of violence, colour, and anger, held together by a lowering sun, red, ochre, orange; the sea smashing in from the left, foaming, boiling, the whole picture askance. In the background the stricken ship, sails secured, ploughing through the spume. But the foreground, oh, the foreground: a severed black leg, manacle attached; hands reaching, the ironwork of that abhorrent trade somehow floating; hideous fishes descending ravenous, gulls circling, the water carmine to match the sunset. It’s hard to look at. I’ve never seen it in the flesh, this painting, but by all accounts its physical presence is even more unsettling. Ruskin, its first owner, could never find a place to put it, and the image haunted Mark Twain’s writings for years.
The picture, first exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1840, thirty seven years after the abolition of slavery in Britain and its colonies, evoked the sum of brutality and horror that the slave trade embodied. Yet it referenced one event in particular: the Zong massacre of 1781, an event that came to be emblematic of the horror of slaving and did much to galvanise the public to the abolitionist cause. The Zong was a slave ship and its captain, Luke Collingwood, ordered the drowning of 133 of his captives.[1]
Let’s not rehearse the details here. Let’s go instead to the poem. A cycle, in fact, called Zong! (with an exclamation mark) by M. NourbeSe Philip. You can find her reading from the cycle online; it is a tone poem of seemingly random words, forcing the listener to recognise the need to make sense of a happening that never can be understood. This, she writes, ‘is the closest we will ever get, some 200 years later, to what it must have been like for those Africans aboard the Zong’.[2]
The words are not entirely random.
The Zong massacre came to prominence through the efforts of leading abolitionist Granville Sharp. Sharp heard of the event from freed slave and campaigner Equiano, and recognising its rhetorical and political possibilities, compiled a weighty dossier which now rests in the archives of the National Maritime Museum. The massacre has, in this way and that, been expropriated ever since: as a symbol not of tyranny, but of salvation, of the abolitionist narrative that allows Britain to take credit for abolishing a practice that it had done so much to establish. A recreated Zong even sailed into the Thames for a 2007 celebration of the vote that abolished slavery.
There is another source, however, a prosaic account of the legal hearing that followed. It was not, you might be surprised to hear, a murder trial but a civil case, Gregson v Gilbert. For the massacre was not just an atrocity but the basis of an insurance claim, and when the underwriters refused to pay the slavers took them to court. Philip’s poem draws on this document. An early version of her poem, available online, begins as follows: ‘Captain slave ship Hispaniola Jamaica voyage water slaves want water overboard.