Cultural and literary study of the 1781 massacre on the slaveship Zong for the insurance money and the aftereffects of the event on the development of modernity

Acknowledgments ix
Part One: “Now Being”: Slavery, Speculation, and the Measure of our Time
1. Liverpool, a Capital of the Long Twentieth Century 3
2. “Subject $”; or, the “Type” of the Modern 35
3. “Madam Death! Madam Death!”:Credit, Insurance, and the Atlantic Cycle of Capital Accumulation 80
4.”Signum Rememorativum, Demonstrativum, Prognostikon”: Modernity and the Truth Event 113
5.”Please decide”: The Singular and the Speculative 141
Part Two: Specters of the Atlantic: Slavery and the Witness
6. Frontispiece: Testimony, Rights, and the State of Exception 173
7. The View from the Window: Sympathy, Melancholy, and the Problem of “Humanity” 195
8. The Fact of History: On Cosmopolitan Interestedness 213
9. The Imaginary Resentment of the Dead: A Theory of Melancholy Sentiment 242
10. “To Tumble into It, and Gasp for Breath as We Go Down”: The Idea of Suffering and the Case of Liberal Cosmopolitanism 265
11. This/Such, for Instance: The Witness against “History” 297
Part Three: “The Sea is History”
12. “The Sea is History”: On Temporal Accumulation 309
Notes 335
Index 377

Ian Baucom is Associate Professor of English at Duke University. He is the author of Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity and a coeditor of Shades of Black: Assembling Black Arts in 1980s Britain, also published by Duke University Press.