Few subjects in the historical world are hotter right now than the Atlantic slave trade. Benefiting from widespread interest in related fields and approaches—Atlantic history, African American history, subaltern studies, postcolonialism, and the like—as well as the widespread availability of important new sources, David Eltis, et al.'s Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM (1999) most notably, the Atlantic slave trade has captivated both scholars and the general public in recent years. A variety of indicators attest to the subject's appeal to the latter: the warm reception given to a number of novels on the slave trade, the much-publicized opening in August 2007 of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool, the surprising box-office success of the recent film Amazing Grace about British abolitionist William Wilberforce, and the key role (and popularity) of slave forts such as Elmina in the heritage tourism strategies of Ghana and other countries along the West African coast.

Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic is nothing so much as an avatar of the surging interest in the Atlantic slave trade. In this brilliantly insightful, wildly creative, and often frustratingly abstract (over-)interpretation of a well-known late-eighteenth-century atrocity involving a British slaver, the author, who teaches in the Department of English at Duke, at the very least gives economic historians much about to think. At the heart of Baucom's soufflé-like study is a 1781 enormity the monstrous nature of which still has the power to chill and disgust even today. In a voyage commencing in September of that year the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves (out of a cargo of more than 400) thrown overboard into the Atlantic while en route to Jamaica. This murderous act, however heinous, is just the beginning of this sordid tale, for the owners of the Zong were quick to sue the ship's insurer to recover the full value of the jettisoned (“lost”) slaves.

A celebrated, very public legal wrangle between these principals followed in short order, the ultimate resolution of which has been lost to the historical record. The complex legal proceedings began with a case in March 1783. During the trial the ship owners' claim was that the captain of the Zong had acted out of necessity: the ship was overcrowded, under provisioned, and rife with disease, their argument went. The ship owners were victorious in the first trial, but on appeal Lord Chief Justice Mansfield [William Murray] sided with the insurer on the matter, arguing that the vessel and the cargo, indeed, the entire voyage had been badly managed by the captain, Luke Collingwood, who himself died before the trials took place. Even after ordering a new trial, however, Mansfield never disputed the right of the captain to send the slaves to their deaths, stating that he and the other judges had “no doubt that (though it shocks one very much) the case of the slaves was the same as if horses had been thrown overboard.” Others were not so sure, though, and, due to the efforts of opponents of the slave trade such as Olaudah Equiano and Granville Sharp among others, the court cases regarding the matter were important in raising both the profile and the relevance of the abolitionist movement then beginning to emerge in the Atlantic world.

These then are the basic “facts” of the Zong affair. Baucom, however, is not so much concerned with archived facts, but, drawing from Walter Benjamin, with the construction of a “counterarchive,” as it were, that allows him to interpret the record—and gaps in the record—in such a way as to unveil the hidden structure and meaning of the atrocity. In order to construct this counterarchive Baucom invokes a veritable who's who of postmodern and postcolonial literary and social theorists, sometimes to good effect. Although this reader eventually tired of the author's heavy reliance on Derrida, Jameson, and Arrighi, not to mention the constant nods to Spivak and Zizek (among others), Baucom's approach allows him to make all kinds of interesting and often plausible connections between the Zong affair and both contemporaneous and long-term developments in the economic and cultural, indeed, even the spiritual and psychological realms.

Without sticking too closely to Baucom's constructs, much less to his language—much of his argument is premised, for example, on the “Benjaminian” link between “allegorization and commodification,” which link “lies in the ‘debasement,’ by both procedures of the ‘thingliness’ of the things on which they go to work” (p. 18)—the most important take away for economic historians is the connections he draws among the Zong affair, the eighteenth-century financial revolution in Great Britain, and the logic of finance capitalism in the twentieth century (and today). Simply stated, the fact that all of the principals involved in the civil cases arising from the Zong affair agreed that slaves, drowned or otherwise, were not merely commodities, but insurable commodities signifies (at least to Baucom) that finance capitalism had by the 1780s insinuated itself into the human domain, in so doing, rendering individual human beings into dematerialized abstractions with “utterly transactable, enforceable, and recuperable pecuniary value” (p. 139). Baucom argues vigorously that said insinuation had a cascading array of consequences over time, ranging from the “melancholy realism” of humanistic critics of slavery in the first half of the nineteenth century to the increasingly abstract and esoteric, virulently dematerialized and speculative form of finance capitalism with us today.

As Twain said about Wagner's music, Specters of the Atlantic is better than it sounds. Baucom's is a formidable intelligence, and his erudition vast. Would that he wrote more clearly because his allegorical deployment of the Zong affair to shed light on the hidden history of finance capitalism is at once provocative and profound.