Unaccountable Archives: A Review of Underwriting Souls

Samantha Stephens

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The archives of the transatlantic slave trade bear witness to the inhumane tabulation, valuation, and accounting of Black life. While imperial forces maintained financial accounts for the “cargo” enslaved people represented, they have historically refused accountability for the capture, dehumanization, trafficking, and trauma inflicted on enslaved Africans. In 2020 the Lloyd’s Insurance Market – a central site for insuring slaving voyages – formally apologized for their role in the slave trade.^[1] Underwriting Souls is the product of an independent collaboration between the Mellon-funded digital humanities initiative, Black Beyond Data, and Lloyd’s market “to present the artifacts related to slavery within the proper context of their production” and “address past harms.”^[2] This educational platform holds a digitized archive of key elements of Lloyd’s Collection and a set of online exhibits which illustrate the underexamined link between insurance and slavery. While this project focuses on a British archive from seventeenth- to nineteenth-century London, its impact looms large on the histories of the Caribbean, our understanding of the Black Atlantic, and the contours of the modern world.

Launched to the public in 2023, Underwriting Souls addresses the financial architecture of the slave trade through records of maritime insurance. While these maritime insurance archives threaten to render enslaved people as objects of financial calculation, Underwriting Souls prioritizes the humanity – or souls – of the uncountable people whose experiences lie beneath the surface of the ledgers. This digital project offers insight into how the “‘transmutation of Black flesh into integers’^[3] occurred, and the sorts of knowledges, financial instruments, business and familial networks, and practices that were necessary for it to happen,” as it brings these materials to the public for the first time in this context.^[4] This intervention is evident in the presentation of the digitized risk books, the ledgers in which underwriters recorded the insurance agreements they underwrote. Rather than simply reproducing manuscript pages, each record combines high-resolution images with a contextual narrative, metadata, and related archival materials that situate the document within the broader economy of the slave trade. Read together, the agreements become evidence not only of individual slaving voyages but of the practices of valuation, risk assessment, and financial coordination that transformed enslaved people into insurable assets. A valuable resource for scholars of slavery, the digital Black Atlantic, and the Black digital humanities more broadly, this project models ethical practices to rigorously and sensitively engage with archives that were created to manipulate living beings into data.

A hallmark of this project lies at once in its exceptional interpretive work and in its creative and collaborative dimensions. Underwriting Souls was co-created at Johns Hopkins University by Alexandre White and Pyar Seth, with research conducted by Eliza Zimmerman and in consultation with Lloyd’s archivist Victoria Lane. This collaborative ethos is evident throughout the project: scholars working across the disciplines of sociology, history, anthropology, and political science, innovate alongside students, archivists, artists, and poets. Rather than positioning the archival materials as the final scholarly product, Underwriting Souls encourages further interpretation through artistic and creative forms. Of particular note is the edited collection, Uprising & Resistance, which expands the project’s engagement with the archive through poetry and visual art. The collection represents a commitment to community-engaged work through Spread the Word, bringing together a group of Black creatives in London – several of which are Caribbean-descended – connecting multiple histories, cultures, and geographies routed through the currents of the Black Atlantic. In the face of a limited archive, Uprising & Resistance encourages readers to imagine ways the uncountable number of enslaved people in these archives might distort and resist colonial practices of accounting. These creative responses invite forms of interpretation that complement rather than replace historical analysis, expanding the archive’s reach to a broader public while foregrounding questions of memory, refusal, and the afterlives of slavery.

The methodological rigor of Underwriting Souls is matched by the thoughtfully designed digital environment that translates its scholarly approach to the user experience. The project integrates multiple archival and digital resources to reconstruct the commercial and social worlds surrounding Lloyd’s risk books. The project cross-references these ledgers with established digital resources like the Legacies of British Slavery Database and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, alongside genealogical records, Lloyd’s minute books, the Roll of Lloyd’s, and a wide range of primary and secondary sources. Rather than treating the risk books as isolated documents, this approach situates them within a broader network of historical evidence that enriches their interpretation. Built in WordPress, the project employs the Universal Viewer to provide high-resolution access to the digitized materials, while StoryMaps offer spatial and historical context that helps users understand the broader worlds from which these records emerged. Together, these design choices transform the archive from a searchable repository into an interpretive platform, moving beyond mere access to privilege relations across multiple scales, sources, and analytic modes. Robust documentation of the project’s research process through their “Ethics and Methods Memorandum,” underscores its commitment to transparency, while institutional support and external funding provide a strong foundation for its continued maintenance and development. As with any considerable digital humanities initiative, ongoing attention to technical maintenance remains important. During this review, a small number of absent links, inconsistent search filtering, and occasional loading issues with the Universal Viewer in Google Chrome suggested areas where continued refinement could further enhance the project’s accessibility and usability. These relatively minor technical issues, however, do not detract from the project’s substantial scholarly and methodological contributions.

Ultimately, Underwriting Souls showcases how digital scholarship can move beyond the digitization of archival materials to create new and dynamic forms of historical inquiry. By making visible the relationships among underwriters, shipowners, captains, merchants, and plantation economies, the project reveals the financial systems and commercial practices through which Black lives were tabulated and transformed into calculable risk. This work powerfully demonstrates how archives that once served imperial systems of accounting can become sites for critically reimagining the histories and lives they sought to subsume under ledger entries. In doing so, Underwriting Souls makes an important contribution to scholarship on slavery, the digital Black Atlantic, and the Black digital humanities, while offering new ways of understanding the financial histories that shaped the Caribbean and the broader African diaspora. It invites further inquiry into the economic and institutional systems that not only underwrote but undergirded slavery, offering a compelling model for collaborative, interpretive digital scholarship.

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1. “Our Historical Links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” Lloyd’s, (2020), https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/history/the-trans-atlantic-slave-trade#reflecting ↩︎

2. “Executive Summary,” Underwriting Souls, https://underwritingsouls.org/about/ethics-methods-memorandum/ ↩︎

3. Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text, 36, no. 4 (2018): 65. ↩︎

4. Alexandre White, Pyar Seth, and Eliza Bright Zimmerman, Underwriting Souls: Ethics and Methods (2023); PDF available at https://underwritingsouls.org/about/ethics-methods-memorandum/ ↩︎