The captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 132 enslaved Africans thrown overboard in 1781 so the owners could claim them as lost cargo under marine insurance; the subsequent legal dispute became a catalyst for British abolitionism.

The Zong case directly inspired Romantic abolitionist poetry, including works by Cowper and later J.M.W. Turner's painting 'The Slave Ship'; the moral obscenity of treating human beings as insurable property galvanised the humanitarian strand of Romantic literature.