Excessive memories: Slavery, insurance and resistance

Over the last few years, the African American led campaign for Slavery Reparations has combined the project of historical excavation with the demand for recognition and redress by moving cultural memory directly into the adversarial sphere. Activists have brought a set of court actions that identify seventeen major international corporations whose predecessors were enriched via the profits amassed, directly or indirectly, through the transatlantic slave trade and slavery between 1619 and 1865. While the cases have been dismissed, a series of Slavery Era Bills have been passed in several states. These Bills require companies that do business in the vicinity to research their records and to disclose evidence of any involvement in slavery or the slave trade. This article presents a detailed analysis of one such report by the insurance corporation Royal Sun & Alliance, submitted in 2002. It demonstrates that the company disclosure opens up a hitherto occluded aspect of slave resistance. As the report confirms, eighteenth-century maritime insurance policies on slaves in transit to the Americas initially developed in relation to European kidnap and ransom policies. In the later part of the eighteenth century underwriters began to include clauses in their policies that compensated traders for losses in the event of insurrection. Insurrection was considered to be so predictable that policies also included an excess of five or ten per cent. In conclusion, the article argues that the Reparations movement is reactivating the history of slavery by facilitating the exposure of connections between the past and the present. As the history of insurance reveals, slavery and resistance are central to the development of key conceptual structures that govern the financial and legal parameters of contemporary global capital.