Documents relating to a case in the Court of King’s Bench involving the ship Zong
Court papers in the insurance dispute.
Open the sourceA scope note for the group: UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery database covers British Caribbean, Mauritian and Cape slave-owners. To keep this a London–US topic we use it for method and for the compensation story, and keep cotton, banking and insurance tied to the United States.
1.Insuring human cargo
Lloyd’s grew from a coffee house in 1688 or 1689 into the leading marine insurance market. A fact sheet written for Lloyd’s by the historian Nicholas Draper estimates that slavery-related business made up between a third and 40 per cent of premium income in the second half of the eighteenth century. Of the 77 surviving names among the subscribers to New Lloyd’s in 1771, at least eight invested directly in slaving voyages.
The Zong case turned on this system. In 1781, 132 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard, and the dispute with the insurers reached the Court of King’s Bench in 1783 (Gregson v Gilbert).
Lloyd’s, marine insurance and slavery (Nicholas Draper)
Lloyd’s own account. We treat it as a source to analyse as well as a source of facts.
Open the sourceLloyd’s Register of Ships, digitised
Ship-level evidence, including the volume for 1783/84.
Open the source2.The cotton chain
American cotton went to Liverpool, and the bills of exchange that paid for it were often rediscounted by London discount houses. The same Lloyd’s fact sheet says the insurance of raw cotton shipments continued until slavery ended in the United States in 1865.
The Liverpool Cotton Market: Britain’s First Futures Market (Hall)
A study of how the market worked and how it was financed.
Open the source3.Banking the South
Barings worked with Hope and Co of Amsterdam on the bonds for the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Its archive also holds correspondence on lending to cotton planters and shippers in Louisiana and other southern states.
The Louisiana Purchase
The archive’s exhibition page on Barings and the 1803 bonds.
Open the sourceHouse correspondence: North America (HC5)
Series description for the North American letters.
Open the source4.Compensation for owners
After abolition in the British Empire the government borrowed £15 million in 1835 through Rothschild, with Moses Montefiore in the syndicate, to pay compensation to slave-owners. The debt was rolled into later loans and was finally paid off in 2015. The compensation records are at The National Archives in series T 71, and the LBS database is built on them.
Compensation, Abolition of Slavery, 3 August 1835
The Commons debate on the loan.
Open the sourceStaff Working Paper no. 1,006: the collection of slavery compensation, 1835–43
Recent research by Bank staff.
Open the sourceLBS database
The database and its project page.
Open the sourceWhy it matters now
The compensation loan was only repaid in 2015, so British taxpayers were paying for it within living memory. Lloyd’s now publishes its own history of its part in the trade, which gives us a modern institution explaining its past to compare with the documents from the period.
Bibliography
- Hall, Catherine, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang, Legacies of British Slave-ownership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
- Draper, Nicholas, The Price of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
- Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
- Walvin, James, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law and the End of Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
- Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
- Hidy, Ralph W., The House of Baring in American Trade and Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949).
- Oldham, James, ‘Insurance Litigation Involving the Zong and Other British Slave Ships, 1780–1807’, Journal of Legal History 28:3 (2007), 299–318.
Image credits
J.M.W. Turner Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On), 1840, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J.M.W._Turner_Slave_Ship_(_Slavers_Throwing_Overboard_the_Dead_and_Dying,_Typhoon_Coming_On)._1840.png). Painting by J. M. W. Turner. Licence on the Commons page: CC0. The painting is used as an illustration of the subject, not as evidence in the cases discussed.