The Zorg

A Tale of Greed, Murder and the Abolition of Slavery

FOR FANS OF THE WAGER

The Zorg
tells the astonishing yet little-known story of one of the most consequential ships that ever crossed the Atlantic. Its fateful voyage in 1781 distils centuries of the slave trade into a single journey which altered the course of history.

New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Siddharth Kara brings history to life in this page-turning account of The Zorg's voyage from the high seas to the High Court that sparked the human rights campaign to end the slave trade. Millions of slaves would eventually be freed because the Zorg showed the world for the first time that the Atlantic slave trade was a morally bankrupt system of greed and violence that unleashed incalculable misery on the people of Africa, while generating tremendous wealth for the slave merchants who financed the thousands of voyages that crossed the Atlantic.

Exposing the reality of the slave trade through the lens of the Zorg's voyage from the Netherlands to West Africa and from there onto the West Indies, where a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the ship sailing off course and running low on supplies. To save the crew and the most valuable slaves, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard, only to then claim for their loss on insurance.

For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo? The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement to one of the most consequential moral campaigns that changed the course of history.
This remarkable, riveting book about a famous event of nearly two and a half centuries ago finds a raft of new information that generations of historians (myself included) have missed. And the episode involved was not just one more atrocity onboard a slave ship at sea; it was the spark that helped ignite the greatest human rights movement of all time.
Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and American Midnight

About Siddharth Kara

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University. Kara has authored several books and reports on slavery and child labour, and he won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has also taught courses on modern slavery at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University. He divides his time between the U.K. and the U.S.
Details
  • Imprint: Doubleday
  • ISBN: 9781529964325
  • Length: 336 pages
  • Price: £22.00
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