Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (review)

The Atlantic has been haunting scholars for almost fifteen years.¹ Nonetheless, Ian Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic asks us to consider the Atlantic world once again. Rather than plumbing the Atlantic to apprehend a more inclusive and global take on national histories, Baucom’s book engages it both as a lieu de mémoire and as the birthplace of a modern subjectivity constituted in the very joints of slavery and finance capital.² In this sense, Specters is a postcolonial study, providing a trenchant critique of conventional discourses of modernity and offering an alternate one rooted in the practice of bearing melancholy witness—a concept central to Baucom’s philosophy of history addressed further below.³

The book’s fulcrum is the1781 massacre of enslaved Africans aboard the slave ship Zong, the two subsequent legal cases regarding the insurance claims for loss of property in and murder of 133 or 132 of the captives, as well as the use of the Zong affair in abolitionist discourse in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

“Part One” deftly extrapolates how Britain’s circum-Atlantic network of trade “needed not only a standard set of exchange mechanisms […], but [also] a standard imaginary, a standard grammar of trust, a standard ‘habit’ of crediting the ‘real’ existence of abstract values” which it found in credit, with abstract ‘slaves’ functioning as “a standard measure” through which to express the “value of the range of commodities and currencies available for exchange,” (89 – 90). This relates to the Zong case because the captain murdered the African captives by throwing them into the sea so as to translate their bodies and their potential for labor via insurance into currency, effectively evacuating them of their specific singular characteristics and turning them into abstract (and in the trade networks universal) units of exchange. One of the central claims of the book is that this facet of the Zong affair makes it a “truth event” that “identifies not a marginal or local abnormality within the system [of circum-Atlantic finance capital] but the global abnormality of the system itself,” (118 – 122).

Baucom’s intent is to salvage this submerged truth from the depths of historical memory both through his critical practice and aesthetics. For instance, Baucom reiterates Granville Sharp’s “repetitive, anachronistic mode of documenting the ‘case’” with 133 pages of text memorializing each of the 133 murders by discussing it himself on page 133 of Specters of the Atlantic. This formal aspect of the text also militates against the tendency to read either the case or Baucom’s representation of it as typical or universal (and abstract) and anchors both in their singular specificity, thus contradicting their status as “truth events.” The contradiction is intentional. Drawing on Gayatri Spivak’s Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Baucom claims that the answer to the question of whether the Zong affair is singular or exemplary is “a decision, not a necessity,” (168).⁴ He decides that it is both and that he has provided one answer in “Part One” and will provide another, more singular one in “Part Two.”

Through an engagement with writers from the Scottish and German Enlightenment to contemporary ethical theorists, Baucom works out the details of his politics of interested and partial melancholy witnessing which he contrasts with the putatively impartial, disinterested, speculative witnessing of the liberal and neo-liberal spectator. Needless to say, this discussion of ethics is nuanced, intricate and, though gripping, beyond the scope of a review such as this. So, at the risk of not bearing full witness to Specters of the Atlantic, I simplify.

In Adam Smith’s, Theory of Moral Sentiments and coursing through the nineteenth-century romantics, particularly the sometimes collaborators Sir Walter Scott and Joseph Mallord William Turner, Baucom identifies both speculative and melancholy spectatorship as twins in a “struggle for the soul of occidental modernity,” (264).⁵ Both make appearances in the Zong affair—speculative spectatorship embodied in the ruling in...