Zong Massacre (Paperback)

The Zong Massacre was the name given to the mass-killing of African slaves that took place in 1781 on the Zong, a British slave ship owned by James Gregson and colleagues in a Liverpool slave-trading firm.The resulting court case, brought not by the authorities as a mass-murder charge against the ship-owners, but as a civil action by the ship-owners seeking compensation from the insurers for the slave-traders' lost "cargo," was a landmark in the battle against the African slave trade of the eighteenth century.The term "Zong Massacre" was not universally used at the time. It was usually called "The Zong Affair," the term "massacre" being used mainly by those considered to be "dangerous radicals," as late eighteenth-century politics stood.