In September 1781, the British slave ship Zong set sail for Jamaica, with 442 Africans and 17 crew on board. Knowing that a large fraction of his ‘cargo’ would die en route, Captain Luke Collingwood overloaded the vessel, to ensure maximum profit. It usually took two months for a ship to reach Jamaica but incompetent navigation extended this particular voyage by six weeks. As the journey lengthened, seven crew and 60 slaves became seriously ill and died. At the end of November, fearful that the sickness would kill too many of the remaining slaves, Collingwood mitigated his losses by unshackling 133 sick slaves and throwing them overboard. Ten others committed suicide. From a subsequent lawsuit over an insurance claim for lost merchandise we know that Collingwood expected to be paid £30 for each of the drowned slaves.
Even in the vast catalogue of horrors produced by the Middle Passage, this incident stands out. Artists, poets and historians have repeatedly gone back to the Zong when trying to understand the worldview that allowed the trafficking of 10 million Africans to be passed off as legitimate trade. Some historians have noted that that during its early phases the Abolition movement — which was led by highly principled Christians — was less shocked by Collingwood’s indifference towards his slaves than the idea that he treated profits with something like idolatry. Selfish materialism, not inhumanity, was their primary spiritual concern. There is even a trace of this in the memoirs of the former slave Olaudah Equiano. In a well-known passage he describes the “intolerably loathsome” conditions in which slaves were kept to satisfy the “improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.”
During the last fortnight, some 1,600 people have drowned while being trafficked to Europe. (Another 11,000 have reportedly made the crossing successfully.) These deaths are part of a global resurgence in human trafficking that is rarely given the attention it deserves. Today, few of us realise that more people are being moved illegally across international borders, to be exploited for sexual purposes, or cheap labour, than at the height of the TransAtlantic slave trade.
Reactions to the latest wave of migrant deaths have ranged from general horror at the scale of the problem — and how poorly it has been addressed by the European Union — to deliberate callousness. One well-known British tabloid columnist has been widely condemned for describing migrants as “cockroaches” and “a plague of feral humans.” While it is important to hold anyone who voices such provocative and ill-informed opinions to account, merely doing so can become a distraction from the larger fact that European governments have consistently avoided an honest reckoning with mass migration. And while many Europeans may remain sceptical about the practical challenges of letting in too many migrants from famines and foreign wars, the economic pressures which will continue to fuel illegal migration from places like Libya are practically insurmountable.
Europe’s nationalist parties often appeal to well-established xenophobic tropes when arguing for tougher immigration policies: foreigners bring crime, take away blue collar jobs, overburden the welfare system, and undermine social and cultural stability. In fact most evidence suggests otherwise. Economists agree that migration boosts a country’s GDP, helps reverse its falling birth rates (the true reason for a great deal of economic decline). Immigration also tends to improve the incomes of local workers and evidence for increases in crime is, at best, shaky. It is hardly surprising then that the UK Independence Party is most popular in parts of the country least affected by immigration.
Until legislators in prosperous countries seriously consider the complex moral and practical reasons for open borders, the current half-baked and deeply immoral policies will remain in place. As the American journalist Dylan Matthews has observed, harsh immigration policies are part of a neo-colonialist mentality in which: “The rich world spends billions of dollars every year on armed guards and planes and drones to make sure the global poor stay poor.” As long as this mindset persists and migrants are treated as threatening foreigners, or economic abstractions, rather than human beings who deserve compassion, many more will continue to drown unconscionably close to Europe’s shores.
