Reparations activism has forced many large multinational insurance corporations to disclose their early profiteering from underwriting slavery and the slave trade. This paper further contributes to the reparative project of tracing slavery’s occluded legacies by analysing aspects of the development of British, French and American marine insurance law in response to shipboard rebellion in the transatlantic slave trade, and the American ‘domestic’ maritime slave trade. It explores the ways in which marine insurance developed and adapted its ancient legal concepts – notably, the concept of ‘inherent vice’ – to the requirements of commodifying life for the purposes of modern slave trading. This history further illuminates the conceptual lineaments and practices that were involved in the slave trade’s processes of dehumanisation but it also highlights the ways in which marine insurance lawyers, in the face of shipboard rebellion, were compelled to debate not only the humanity of the enslaved but their desire for freedom. In this context, the archive of marine insurance offers an unexpected route into the history of resistance to slavery.
Two notable recent examples of tracing material legacies of ‘race’ and slavery are Ta Nehisi-Coates, ‘The case for reparations’, The Atlantic, (June2014), available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/ and RalphMichael, ‘“Life … in the midst of death”: notes on the relationship between slave insurance, life insurance and disability’, Disability Studies Quarterly (Vol. 32, no. 3, 2012), available at: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/3267/3100 (accessed 10 February 2015).
2.
The recent call for reparations by the CARICOM nations is fuelling the current campaign. See http://caricom.org/jsp/pressreleases/press_releases_2013/pres285_13.jsp (accessed 14 February 2015); BecklesHilary McD., Britain’s Black Debt: reparations for Caribbean slavery and native genocide (Kingston, University of the West Indies Press, 2013).
3.
David Scott, ‘Preface: debt, redress’, Small Axe (Vol. 18, no. 1, 2014), pp. vii–x, p. ix.
4.
See the Legacies of British Slave-ownership project at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. Also, HallCatherine., eds, Legacies of British Slave-ownership: colonial slavery and the formation of Victorian Britain (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).
Joseph Inikori, Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: a study in international trade and development (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 314–61; LeonardA. B., ‘Reassessing the Atlantic contribution to British marine insurance’, in CoffmanD’Maris., eds, The Atlantic World (London, Routledge, 2015), pp. 531–45.
7.
WilliamsEric, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994), p. 38.
8.
RedikerMarcus, The Slave Ship: a human history (London, John Murray, 2007), pp. 9–10.
9.
SmallwoodStephanie, Saltwater Slavery: a middle passage from Africa to American diaspora (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 33–64.
10.
For the historical consolidation of the Law Merchant, see Lucy Sutherland, Politics and Finance in the Eighteenth Century (London, Hambledon Press, 1984), pp. 26–31. For the relative silence about transatlantic slaving within legal development more generally, see BushJonathan A., ‘Free to enslave: the foundations of Colonial American slave law’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (Vol. 5, 1993), p. 443.
11.
BennettHoward, The Law of Marine Insurance (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 231.
12.
MagensNikolaus, An Essay on Insurances, Vol. 1 (London, 1750), p. 10.
13.
WeskettJohn, A Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws and Practice of Insurance (London, 1781), p. 525.
14.
ThomasHugh, The Slave Trade: the story of the Atlantic slave trade, 1440–1870 (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997), p. 401; RaimundoAna Maria Galdini, ‘Escravidão e nostalgia no Brasil: o banzo’, Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental (Vol. 11, no. 4, 2008), pp. 735–61; Isaac Wilson in Observations on the Evidence Given Before the Committee of the Privy Council and House of Commons in Support of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (London, John Stockdale, 1791), p. 290.
15.
BehrendtStephen D., David Eltis and David Richardson, ‘The costs of coercion: African agency in the pre-modern Atlantic world’, Economic History Review (Vol. 54, no. 3, 2001), pp. 454–76.
16.
MillerChristopher, The French Atlantic Triangle: literature and culture of the slave trade (Durham, Duke University Press, 2008), p. 52.
17.
Under the heading, ‘Africa’ (rather than ‘Slaves’), Weskett records the following stipulation: ‘Ships and merchandizes from England to the coast of Africa, and at and from thence to our colonies in the West Indies, &c. are usually insured with the following clause in the policy, viz. “free from loss or average, by trading in boats; and also from average occasioned by insurrection, if under 10 per cent.”’ Weskett, op. cit., p. 11.
18.
The financial records of the Bristol slave-merchant, RogerJames, show that the ‘excess clause’ was standard in the early 1790s. National Archives (London), C107/3, 107/13, 107/15.
19.
EmérigonBalthazard Marie, Traité des Assurances et des Contrats à la Grosse (Marseille, 1783). The text was highly influential in English, French and American insurance practice, although it was not translated into English until 1850. See MeredithSamuel, A Treatise on Insurances by Balthazard Marie Emérigon (London, Henry Butterworth, 1850). This event was celebrated in the American law journal, The Monthly Law Reporter, where it was stated that ‘no foreign treatise has ever engaged half the influence upon American law, which has been enjoyed and exerted by the Treatise on Insurance of Balthazard-Marie Emérigon’, The Monthly Law Reporter, Vol. 13 (Boston, Charles C. Little and James Brown, 1851), p. 325.
20.
Emérigon, p. 394. (My translation)
21.
Ibid., pp. 394–5. (My translation)
22.
EstranginJean-Julien, Traité du Contrat D’Assurance de Pothier avec un Discours Préliminaire, des Notes, et un Supplément (Marseille, 1810), pp. 106–7 (my translation).
23.
Boulay-PatyP. S., ed., Traité des Assurances et des contents à la grosse d’Emérigon (Paris, Charles Bechét, 1827), p. 394 (my translation).
24.
Ibid., p. 395.
25.
For analyses of the revolt aboard the Creole, see JonesHoward, ‘The peculiar institution and national honor: the case of the Creole slave revolt’, Civil War History (Vol. 21, 1975), pp. 28–33; JerveyEdward D.Harold HuberC., ‘The Creole affair’, Journal of Negro History (Vol. 65, 1980), pp. 196–211; JohnsonWalter, ‘White lies: human property and domestic slavery aboard the slave ship, Creole’, Atlantic Studies (Vol. 5, no. 2, 2007), pp. 237–63; Anita Rupprecht, ‘“All we have done, we have done for freedom”: the Creole slave ship revolt (1841) and the revolutionary Atlantic’, International Review of Social History (Vol. 58, no. 21, 2013), pp. 253–77.
26.
For the only sustained analysis of the Creole insurances cases to date, see Jonathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: the emerging world of capitalism and risk in America (Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 21–59.
27.
‘Thomas McCargo v. The New Orleans Insurance Company’, in RobinsonMerritt M., Reports of the Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Louisiana (New Orleans, 1845), X, p. 277.
28.
Robinson, Reports, op. cit., p. 260. Despite the Judge’s efforts to police the parameters of the case, lawyers on both sides sought to confuse maritime commercial law with land-based slave law. Although they were not registered in the courtroom directly, the debate about ‘inherent vice’ may well have reminded listeners of another, well-used, set of Louisiana laws governing slave sales. The redhibition laws allowed a buyer to cancel a sale, within one year, if a slave was deemed to have certain ‘redhibitory vices’. Absolute redhibitory vices included leprosy, madness and epilepsy. Redhibitory vices of character included committing a capital crime, addiction, theft and running away. For a discussion of Louisiana redhibition see Judith Kelleher Schaffer, Slavery, the Civil Law, and the Supreme Court of Louisiana (Baton Rouge and London, Louisiana State University Press, 1994), pp. 127–48. For the ways in which these laws were debated in the courts, see GrossAriela J., Double Character: slavery and mastery in the Antebellum courtroom (Princeton, University of Princeton Press, 2000).
Tatham v. Hodgson (1796) 6 T. R. 656. For a discussion of the case, see ShyllonF. O., Black Slaves in Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 207–8.
