Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History

by Ian Baucom

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 one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.

Genres: History, Economics, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Theory

400 pages, Paperback

First published December 16, 2005

Reviews

[Leif · Rating 5 out of 5]

Engrossing, encompassing, inflamed: from the multiple threads of liberal philosophy, contemporary hermeneutics, and new historicism Baucom crafts an elegant telling of two stories: one, a historical narrative about events; and, two, an event which narrates how we tell history. Baucom touches on critical figures such as Adam Smith and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel through to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Edouard Glissant; his reference points inevitably returning to the Zong atrocity and the questions surrounding circum-Atlantic histories of British imperialism, the trade in African Slaves, Liverpool merchants, and contemporary writers and poets. If all this sounds like a lot to take it, well, it is. However in Baucom's elegant hands the book unfolds gracefully.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man I wish Ian Baucom wasn’t a huge hypocritical piece of shit.

[Vinay Khosla · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sheer extent of the theoretical ground this text covers is impressive and wide-ranging, though this also re-doubles as the text's weakness, as it can simultaneously come off too repetitive, drilling the same basic concepts over and over again, and too dense, unnecessarily wrapping these basic concepts in verbosity, while biting off more than it can chew, buffeting the reader from thinker to thinker in dizzying fashion. It is nevertheless an extremely erudite work, even if I have my quibbles. I found the introduction to the work of Arrighi the most fascinating, especially on the historical cycles of accumulation and financialization/specularization, supplemented as it is here by Benjamin and Jameson. Other placements I found confounding: Žižek in my mind is not a serious scholar to place alongside the rest. Badiou's treatment I did not fully understand: Baucom wants to the think the event not only as a singular eruption but also as representing a typicality. I am unsure the extent to which this reading of the event as typical is reconcilable with Badiou's reading of the event. The ties to literature and insurance were interesting but perhaps too scattered. The treatment of Ruskin on art was an interesting addition, though. The readings of Spivak and Glissant were serviceable. I thought the references to Derrida were helpful, those to Agamben less so (also not a very serious scholar, even if at least partially canonized). Overall, a strong work on the Zong massacre and the subsequent trial, on the usage of slaves as insurance collateral, on the legal system's treatment of them as insurable commodities instead of as human beings.

[Amber Manning · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book perplexed me until the last chapter. Then I felt the accumulation; I really felt it.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

brilliant.

[Aliya · Rating 1 out of 5]

i don’t care what this book contributed it stressed me out & made my head hurt so it gets 1 star for bad vibes 😭

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Where to start. Baucom examines the oscillations between commodity and finance capital systems, but focuses specifically on the "long 20th century" of finance capital that stretches back into the 18th century. He draws on Benjamin to develop a philosophy of history that emphasizes history's presence in the now, what he calls the constellation of past and present. He does this all by drawing upon the trope of the slaveship Zong, and manages to convey that event as both typical of finance capital and as specific, uncomparable. He demonstrates how novels and other texts helped form the commodity and speculative epistemologies. His language is stunning, his structure matches his theory (his work cycles and recycles, it montages history a la Benjamin), he treats Spivak, Jameson, Benjamin, Kant and others with equal grace. Incredible.

[Sohum · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the most complex, intricate, enthralling books I've read. This book sutures multiple theories of witnessing, violence, and philosophy of history, as elegantly as one can imagine.

ETA in 2026: unfortunately, i find this book far more frustrating as a materialist, historian and phd student than i did as a theory-pilled undergraduate.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, what a book. A study in perfectly managed ambition and scope.