1781 — The Zong Massacre

On November 29, 1781, the crew of the British slave ship Zong began throwing enslaved Africans overboard — 54 souls that first day alone — so the owners could claim them as lost cargo at 30 pounds a head. Human beings were entered in the ship's accounts as insurable property, and their lives, not the owners' profits, were thrown away first to protect a claim.

When insurers refused to pay, the case Gregson v Gilbert treated mass murder as an insurance dispute, and no one was ever prosecuted. The freedman Olaudah Equiano carried the story to abolitionist Granville Sharp, and the Zong became a rallying symbol of the fight against slavery.