Ships’ Ballast

This chapter discusses how an ostensibly mundane material item, ships’ ballast, an object or set of objects used to counterweight a ship while it is afloat, was at the foundation of the transatlantic slave trade and the international law norms that first sustained and later dismantled African captive transport. Ships’ ballast took on a particular legal evidentiary use in the context of transatlantic slavery. This was because cargoes of human beings, being mobile and of variable weights and shapes, required countervailing weight in order to keep a ship carrying them righted. Hence, the presence, as well as the amount and type of ballast found on European ships in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was often a marker of slavery. In numerous legal and historical accounts regarding the interdiction of the slave trade via public international law, the presence and use of ballast is central.