The Zong Massacre was a mass-killing of approximately 142 slaves that took place in 1781, on the Zong, a slave ship owned by a Liverpool slave-trading syndicate.
The resulting court cases, brought by the ship-owners seeking compensation from the insurers for the slave-traders' lost "cargo", established that the deliberate killing of slaves could in some circumstances be legal. It was a landmark in the battle against the African slave trade of the eighteenth century, and inspired abolitionists such as Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson, leading to the foundation of the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1787.
Read more about Zong Massacre: Effect On The Abolitionist Movement, The Zong Massacre in Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word massacre:
“It is hard, I submit, to loathe bloodshed, including war, more than I do, but it is still harder to exceed my loathing of the very nature of totalitarian states in which massacre is only an administrative detail.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)