Enfilade

Reviewing the book for The New York Times, Marcus Rediker highlights successes—broadly describing it as “a model of sophisticated research, lucid writing and engaged conscience”—as well as moments of overreach. From Macmillan:

Siddharth Kara, The Zorg: A Tale of Greed and Murder That Inspired the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2025), 304 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1250348227, $30.

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning ‘care’) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg would become the first undeniable argument against slavery.

When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship’s captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship’s owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.

The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. 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 people or cargo?

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States. The Zorg is the astonishing yet little-known true story of the most consequential ship that ever crossed the Atlantic.

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. Kara has written several books and reports on slavery and child labor, most recently the New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, Cobalt Red. Kara also won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has lectured at Harvard University and held a professorship at the University of Nottingham. He divides his time between Los Angeles and London.