Yet its findings are also relevant to our understanding of Atlantic slavery. The evidence it presents is largely drawn from the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean, and the case-study it examines unfolded in Medicean Tuscany. This article uses questions about slave jettison and GA as a means of detecting broader legal and conceptual transformations affecting the category of ‘slave’ across the early modern period. Could this ‘property’ ever be sacrificed? And should slave owners be obliged to contribute to GAs in turn? A moment of crisis forces the status of the slave to be clarified. Footnote 2 As Cicero notes, however, the issue of sacrifice and compensation was far less straightforward when the ‘cargo’ in question was comprised of enslaved persons. The animating principle of modern GA is ‘that which has been sacrificed for the benefit of all, should be made good by the contribution of all’. Now known as general average (GA), this procedure continued to be used after the fall of the Roman empire in the Christian and Islamic worlds, albeit with significant regional variation, and it remains a fixture of international maritime law today. A legal procedure has also existed for sharing the costs of such a sacrifice fairly between all interested players, with each party contributing to the loss in proportion to their original investment in the ship and/or cargo. The classic example is an act of jettison, in which cargo is cast overboard to lighten the ship during a storm. Since the time of the Roman empire (and possibly earlier), it has been considered legal for a shipmaster to sacrifice cargo or parts of the ship during a crisis in order to save the whole venture. Here our estate inclines us in one direction, our humanity in another… Footnote 1Ĭicero never gave his final answer to Hecaton's conundrum, posed in Book III of De officiis (On duties). He asks whether, if something should be thrown overboard at sea, it should be an expensive horse or a cheap little slave. To a certain extent, this finding justifies the conceptual divide historians have placed between Atlantic bondage and earlier forms of slavery. In some Mediterranean operational contexts, slaves were excluded from GA altogether. It finds that seventeenth-century jurisprudence generally ruled against slave jettison and that such a jettison could not be indemnified. This article uses historical GA records and early modern jurisprudence on human jettison to shed light on the legal conceptualization of the slave in the two contexts. A jettison, a moment of crisis, forces the slave's dual conception as person and property to be definitively resolved. However, the status of human cargo with respect to pre-modern GA remains unclear, beyond the well-known example of the eighteenth-century British slave ship, the Zong. GA then mandates that the costs of this sacrifice be shared proportionally between all interested parties.
Under the law of general average (GA), a shipmaster may legally sacrifice cargo or parts of a vessel to save a maritime venture from peril.
This article proposes a transition in Western European thinking on slavery by examining the legality of slave jettison and its indemnification in the seventeenth-century Christian Mediterranean and comparing this with the late eighteenth-century Atlantic.
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