The Zorg

A Tale of Greed, Murder and the Abolition of Slavery

Siddharth Kara

$59.99

Hardback

Forthcoming
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English

Doubleday
16 November 2025

Social & cultural history; Maritime history; Slavery & abolition of slavery

The riveting tale of the 18th century slave ship voyage of the Zorg that led to the abolition of slavery.

FOR FANS OF THE WAGER

The Zorg tells the astonishing yet little-known story of one of the most consequential ships that ever crossed the Atlantic. Its fateful voyage in 1781 distils centuries of the Atlantic slave trade into a single journey which altered the course of history. By the time its journey ends, the Zorg had become the first undeniable argument against slavery. It was the one slave ship to stand for them all.

New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize Finalist Siddharth Kara brings history to life in this page-turning account of The Zorg's voyage from the high seas to the High Court that sparked the human rights campaign to end the slave trade.

Exposing the harsh reality of the slave trade through the lens of the Zorg's voyage from the Netherlands to West Africa and from there onto the Caribbean, where a series of unpredictable weather events and navigational errors led to the ship sailing off course and running low on supplies. To save the crew and the most valuable slaves, the ship's captain threw more than a hundred slaves overboard, only to then claim for their loss on insurance.

For the first time, concepts such as human rights and morality entered the discourse on slavery in a courtroom case that boiled down to a simple yet profound question- were the Africans on board the Zorg people or cargo? The case of the Zorg catapulted the nascent anti-slavery movement to one of the most consequential moral campaigns that changed the course of history.

Millions of slaves would eventually be freed because the Zorg showed the world for the first time that the Atlantic slave trade was a morally bankrupt system of greed and violence that unleashed incalculable misery on the people of Africa, while generating tremendous wealth for the slave merchants who financed the thousands of voyages that crossed the Atlantic.

By: Siddharth Kara
Imprint: Doubleday
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 240mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 40mm
Weight: 750g
ISBN: 9781529964325
ISBN 10: 1529964326
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 16 November 2025
Audience: General/trade , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher, and activist on modern slavery. He is a British Academy Global Professor and an Associate Professor of Human Trafficking and Modern Slavery at Nottingham University. Kara has authored several books and reports on slavery and child labour, and he won the Frederick Douglass Book Prize. He has also taught courses on modern slavery at Harvard University, UC Berkeley, and Cornell University. He divides his time between the U.K. and the U.S.

Reviews for The Zorg: A Tale of Greed, Murder and the Abolition of Slavery

This remarkable, riveting book about a famous event of nearly two and a half centuries ago finds a raft of new information that generations of historians (myself included) have missed. And the episode involved was not just one more atrocity onboard a slave ship at sea; it was the spark that helped ignite the greatest human rights movement of all time. * Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost, Bury the Chains, and American Midnight *