The Zorg

bySiddharth Kara

A Tale of Greed and Murder that Inspired the Abolition of Slavery

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The Zorg is the most consequential slave ship of the 18th century whose voyage changed the course of history, yet the story remains largely unknown.

Drawing on a trove of archival materials, New York Times bestselling author Siddharth Kara uncovers new details of the Zorg's voyage and takes the reader on a gripping journey from the Netherlands to Africa’s Gold Coast where it was captured by a British privateer before loading its human cargo and heading onto Jamaica on its ill-fated journey to fuel the lucrative sugar trade.

A series of unpredictable weather events and mistakes in navigation left the ship drastically off course, running out of food and water. To save the crew and the most valuable of the slaves, the captain decided to throw 140 slaves, mostly women and children, overboard.

What followed is a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal business of slavery into front page news. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery, in a notorious case that boiled down to a simple but 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.
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