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Juan Miranda, un cartagenero de condición libre, padeció esclavitud en Nueva York en el siglo XVIII. Aun adolescente, enfurecidos corsarios de Curazao lo atraparon en un navío en la costa de Venezuela, hacia 1733. Miranda estuvo preso en la isla neerlandesa; sin embargo, un capitán inglés lo sacó del encierro y, con falsas promesas, lo condujo a Nueva York. Con trucos y disimulos, resultó esclavizado en la urbe. A los veinte años de esclavitud, se atrevió a solicitar su libertad con el apoyo del británico William Kempe, el nuevo fiscal general de la ciudad. Los Van Ranst, propietarios de Miranda, se empecinaron en negarle, en cada instancia, la libertad reclamada. Los hechos que marcaron a Miranda, como el terror enfrentado durante el supuesto “Gran complot de los negros”, de 1741, permite entrever las vidas de otros hispanocaribeños o Spanish Negroes: hombres capturados de barcos de las colonias españolas y, por el color de la piel, vendidos como esclavos en Nueva York. Este es el primer libro, escrito en cualquier lengua, sobre el tema de los Spanish Negroes o “negros españoles”, presas de los corsarios ingleses en el mar Caribe, antes de la guerra de la oreja de Jenkins, durante y después de esta, entre Inglaterra y España.

In September 1781, the captain of the British slave ship Zong ordered 133 slaves thrown overboard, enabling the ship's owners to file an insurance claim for their lost “cargo.” Accounts of this horrific event quickly became a staple of abolitionist discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Ian Baucom revisits, in unprecedented detail, the Zong atrocity, the ensuing court cases, reactions to the event and trials, and the business and social dealings of the Liverpool merchants who owned the ship. Drawing on the work of an astonishing array of literary and social theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Giovanni Arrighi, Jacques Derrida, and many others, he argues that the tragedy is central not only to the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the political and cultural archives of the black Atlantic but also to the history of modern capital and ethics. To apprehend the Zong tragedy, Baucom suggests, is not to come to terms with an isolated atrocity but to encounter a logic of violence key to the unfolding history of Atlantic modernity.Baucom contends that the massacre and the trials that followed it bring to light an Atlantic cycle of capital accumulation based on speculative finance, an economic cycle that has not yet run its course. The extraordinarily abstract nature of today's finance capital is the late-eighteenth-century system intensified. Yet, as Baucom highlights, since the late 1700s, this rapacious speculative culture has had detractors. He traces the emergence and development of a counter-discourse he calls melancholy realism through abolitionist and human-rights texts, British romantic poetry, Scottish moral philosophy, and the work of late-twentieth-century literary theorists. In revealing how the Zong tragedy resonates within contemporary financial systems and human-rights discourses, Baucom puts forth a deeply compelling, utterly original theory of history: one that insists that an eighteenth-century atrocity is not past but present within the future we now inhabit.