:Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
:Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History
复制标题
:大西洋的幽灵：金融资本、奴隶制和历史哲学
DOI：
10.1086/ahr.114.1.148
复制
发表时间：
2009
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
S. Juengel
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
S. Juengel
1781年9月6日，满载奴隶的英国商船“宗号”起锚，从非洲海岸驶往牙买加。到11月下旬，疾病已经蹂躏了船员和船上的人类货物，卢克·科林伍德船长，尽管经过牙买加的视线，命令宗号回到海上，于是他命令船员开始把病情最严重的奴隶扔到海里。在三天的时间里，超过130名奴隶，其中许多人戴着手铐，被扔进了翻腾的大海。船一回到英国，船主就为丢失的“货物”提出了保险索赔，在这个过程中，金融资本以最无情的方式战胜了人心。同时，它们也为废奴运动提供了最动人、最有力的控诉，控诉这一无情的行业。伊恩·鲍康将宗宗悲剧作为现代性忧郁版本中的一个标志性事件进行了探索，并在此过程中相当真实地表达了历史意义的事件结构的深度。但鲍康的研究远远不止是对航海途中恐怖事件目录中一个可怕事件的历史记录。鲍康以近乎本杰明的勤奋和勤奋，渴望阅读宗事件的“全部事件”；或者，换句话说，想象一下133名奴隶的溺死是如何“与一个由大西洋资本积累周期的发展和思测认识论所支撑的漫长的20世纪的开端有关”（第167页）。对于流动性和投机的比喻一直困扰着宗案和更广泛的金融革命，这本书努力将宗案及其受害者置于鲍康所称的“浪漫历史主义”和“精算历史主义”之间，这是塑造事件会计的可能性的竞争条件（第42页）。宗宗的保险合同，以及围绕其效力的审判，因此成为投机和幽灵资本主义的寓言。
On September 6, 1781, the Zong, a British merchant vessel loaded with slaves, weighed anchor and sailed from the coast of Africa bound for Jamaica. By late November disease had ravaged both the crew and the ship’s human cargo, and Captain Luke Collingwood, despite passing in sight of Jamaica, commanded the Zong back out to sea, whereupon he ordered his crew to begin throwing the sickest slaves overboard. Over the course of three days, over one hundred and thirty slaves, many of them handcuffed, were ffung into the churning seas. Upon the ship’s return to England, its owners filed an insurance claim for lost “cargo,” and in the process exposed in the most pitiless fashion the triumph of finance capital over the human heart. They also, not incidentally, provided the abolition movement with its most moving and powerful indictment of a merciless trade.Ian Baucom explores the Zong tragedy as a signal event in a melancholic version of modernity, and in the process quite literally sounds the depths of the eventstructure of historical meaning. But Baucom’s study is far more than the history of a dreadful episode in the catalogue of middle passage horrors. Proceeding with an almost Benjaminian diligence and industry, Baucom longs to read “the total event” of the Zong incident; or, in other words, to imagine how the drowning of one hundred and thirty three slaves “bears on the inauguration of a long twentieth century underwritten by the development of an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation” and speculative epistemologies (p. 167). Ever sensitive to the tropes of liquidity and speculation that haunt both the Zong case and the financial revolution more broadly, this work strives to situate the Zong and its victims as they fficker between what Baucom calls “romantic historicism” and “actuarial historicism,” the competing conditions of possibility that shape the accounting of the event (p. 42). The Zong’s insurance contract, and the trials surrounding its efficacy, thus emerge as allegories for a speculative, and spectral, capitalism.