The clause is among the surprising details uncovered in Underwriting Souls, a public, digitized archive and collection of exhibits related to the history and role of insurance in making the transatlantic slave trade possible. Developed by sociologist and historian Alexandre White, the archive was assembled from documents and objects from the collection of Lloyd’s, a London-based insurance market that was active during the legalized British slave trade.

“We gain something from taking seriously these seemingly dry financial archives,” says White, assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. “What they tell us are both stories of dispossession and oppression, but also stories of resistance to slavery, stories of Africans challenging and confronting enslavement.”

Scrawled on the battered parchment of a document outlining policies for the Guipuzcoa, a slave ship traveling from Liverpool to the African coast and Cuba, are the words, “Free from particular average by insurrection under 5 per cent.” In the dispassionate financial language of an insurance policy, the clause notes how much the Guipuzcoa’s underwriters would cover in damages to the ship or loss of value in enslaved people—each individually insured for 45 British pounds—due to their deaths in an insurrection.

Uncovering new truths

After Lloyd’s issued a formal apology in 2020 for its role in the transatlantic slave trade, White secured funding from “Black Beyond Data” (a JHU research project analyzing data to uncover new truths about Black history) and approached the insurance market about collaborating to digitize its related materials. White and graduate student co-lead Pyar Seth took several research trips to the United Kingdom to learn more about the materials—and the people and ships detailed within.

Along with revealing a wide and sophisticated business network of slave ship owners and underwriters, White and Seth also found that many of the key individuals named in the archive’s documents had personal experience with slavery. They owned plantations and slave ships, and sometimes captained voyages. The owner of one of the archive’s two risk books, each documenting dozens of slaving voyages, was born in Prince George’s County, Maryland, ran a tobacco brokerage with his brother, and, according to census data, lived on a property owned by his brother with more than a dozen enslaved people.

“The business of insurance was, for many of these men, part of a much larger set of business empires organized around the enslaving of people and the profiting from the products that they produce,” White says.

What [the archives] tell us are both stories of dispossession and oppression, but also stories of resistance to slavery, stories of Africans challenging and confronting enslavement.”

—Alexandre White

Underwriting Souls includes several insurance agreements and two full insurance agreements pertaining to a slaving ship as well as two risk books documenting dozens of slaving voyages. Also included are photographs of related objects, such as an ornate, trophy-like silver cup and cover that was gifted by Lloyd’s underwriters to a slaving ship captain for protecting his ship from French privateers. (Lloyd’s had no financial involvement or editorial authority in the Underwriting Souls project, White says. All materials were independently peer reviewed.)

The exhibit also features Uprising & Resistance, a volume of poetry and art by Black writers and artists as a response and counterpoint to the distressing and violent material documented in the archive. “Underwriting Souls attempts to speak to the practices of dehumanization that are occurring in the process of insuring slaving voyages,” White says. “What’s being underwritten are not just ships and cargo, but living, breathing people who are enslaved.”

On July 1, 1997, the United Kingdom ended its 156-year colonial rule of Hong Kong, making the territory and its 6.5 million residents a “special administrative region” of China that, under the One Country, Two Systems policy, would keep its currency, capitalist economic system, legal system, and civic freedoms for the next 50 years.

One question, for both residents and outsiders, was whether Hong Kong would pull China toward the freedoms of the West, or whether China would push Hong Kong in a more restrictive direction.

In her new book, A Free Press, If You Can Keep It: What Natural Language Processing Reveals About Freedom of the Press in Hong Kong, Giovanna Maria Dora Dore, associate teaching professor, provides some unsettling answers.

Analyzing the papers

For the book, Dore analyzed the language in 4,522 news articles from six major Western English-language newspapers, and two Hong Kong English language newspapers, to see how they covered civic protests in Hong Kong between 1998 and 2020.

Large-scale civic demonstrations have long been a way for Hong Kong residents to express dissatisfaction with their government. After the 1997 handover, demonstrations became more frequent and attracted more participants.

Civic demonstrations are an expression of freedom of speech, Dore says, and media accounts of them were important indicators of press freedom that could be seen by the government and the people of Hong Kong as a way to encourage or discourage more protests.

Wording counts

Dore wanted to know: How extensively were the actions covered? Was context included about the reasons for the protests? Were they characterized as violent and illegal riots, or as legitimate forms of political discourse? Did coverage of protests change between 1998 and 2020, and if so, how?

Her research found that the English-language, Hong Kong-based newspapers—the China Daily and the South China Morning Post—covered the protests more frequently and in more detail than Western-based newspapers, but used the contextualizing terms “democracy” and “freedom” less frequently.

She also found that the Hong Kong based papers avoided certain words. “In their coverage, these newspapers negatively characterized the protests, for example saying they were bad for Hong Kong. However, they don’t talk negatively about the protesters to avoid being accused of curtailing freedom of speech. By not labeling the protesters as rioters or terrorists, they shield them from the harsh penalties that rioters face under Hong Kong laws,” says Dore, associate director of the Program in East Asian Studies. “The Western newspapers more often explained the use of radical tactics and violence as the most effective way for protesters to be heard domestically and internationally.”

Searching for keywords

For the computational analysis, Dore collaborated with doctoral candidate Arya D. McCarthy of the Center for Language and Speech Processing in the Whiting School of Engineering, and James A. Scharf, a researcher focusing on human language technology at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Dore and her co-authors limited the analysis to print rather than online editions of these newspapers, and articles of at least 300 words that were about the protests, not ones that mentioned them in passing.

The researchers developed machine learning programs to search for keywords like confrontation, crackdown, democracy, freedom of speech, resistance, rights, riot, rule of law, and terrorism; and to categorize the articles by whether they focused on the financial implications of the protests, Hong Kong’s relationship with the mainland of China, public violence, or activism and democracy.

Dore suggests that newspapers in Hong Kong have grown more cautious between 1998 and 2020. “Many of the articles from the English-language Chinese newspapers offer nothing more than painfully step-by-step descriptions, like a cookbook,” she says.

Many of the articles from the English-language Chinese newspapers offer nothing more than painfully step-by-step instructions, like a cookbook.”

—Giovanna Maria Dore Dore

“They write, ‘The protests started at 9 a.m., people were wearing this kind of clothing.’ There is a description, but there is no discussion of why protesters were investing in those activities. This technique allows the journalist to write about something without expressing a point of view in favor of or against the topic. The book offers empirical evidence of how the boundaries of press freedom have changed in Hong Kong, and that freedom of speech has effectively diminished over the last two decades.”