The Zorg by Siddharth Kara Book Review

About the Book:

In late October 1780, a slave ship set sail from the Netherlands, bound for Africa’s Windward and Gold Coasts, where it would take on its human cargo. The Zorg (a Dutch word meaning “care”) was one of thousands of such ships, but the harrowing events that ensued on its doomed journey were unique.

When a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the Zorg sailing off course and running low on supplies, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard in order to save the crew and the most valuable slaves. The ship's owners then claimed their loss on insurance, a first for slaves who had not been killed due to insurrection or died of natural causes.

The insurers refused to pay due to the higher than usual mortality rate of the slaves on board, leading to a trial which initially found in their favor, in which the Chief Justice compared the slaves to horses. Thanks to the outrage of one man present in court that day, a retrial was held. For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question: Were the Africans on board people or cargo?

What followed was a fascinating legal drama in England’s highest court that turned the brutal calculus of slavery into front-page news. The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement from a minor evangelical cause to one of the most consequential moral campaigns in history―sparking the abolitionist movement in both England and the young United States.

My Review:

This is one of those books you wish were not true, not part of our collective history. But it is a book that should be read, to see what we humans are capable of. This was not a page turner for me. The subject is hard but also, Kara's writing style lags in many places. I skimmed some areas where he went off a bit and the content was not as interesting. Some content could have been dropped without changing its impact, making it a more readable book.

The main message is how horrible the actions were and that news of it moved to have slavery banned in England long before the USA. 

My rating: 4/5 stars.

About the Author:

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor, an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University, and a Senior Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health. Kara has authored three books on modern slavery and won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Kara's first book was adapted into a Hollywood film, Trafficked.

Kara’s fourth book, "Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers our Lives," explores the conditions of cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A feature film inspired by Cobalt Red is currently in pre-production. He divides his time between the United Kingdom and Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Lynn Savarese

St Martin's Press: 304 pages.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent review.

(My star ratings: 5-I love it, 4-I like it, 3-It's OK, 2-I don't like it, 1-I hate it.)