Slave Trade Insurance in the Age of Abolition: Archives, Politics, and Legalities

ABSTRACT In the late eighteenth century, slave trade insurance was a lucrative and visible business in British and American slave trading towns. Abolition, however, proved difficult. United States laws were patchwork and never reached the federal level. Britain banned slave trade insurance in 1807 alongside the slave trade, but enforcement remained scattershot and ineffective. This article offers three reasons for this state of affairs. First, the marine insurance business’s transnationality, the dispersion of its paperwork, and its sometimes deliberate obscurity produced a profound information problem for abolitionists that impeded both legislation and enforcement. The second reason has to do with the evolution of abolitionists’ priorities and strategies in a complex international environment. Third, there was an enduring problem in the relationship between insurance and the law. Napoleonic-era commercial law was characterized by reversals, exceptions, gray areas, and sovereignty dilemmas. This produced a vast realm of legal uncertainty – a domain in which insurers, accustomed to assessing legal risks, had always thrived. Insurers, therefore, are not best characterized as obeying or defying a single thing called ‘the law’ in this period. Rather, they were co-creators of a domain of legality within which slave trade insurance could be sold profitably for years after abolition.