Bloody Numbers
The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality
Seiten
2026
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-84516-6 (ISBN)
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-84516-6 (ISBN)
- Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Juni 2026)
- Versandkostenfrei
- Auch auf Rechnung
- Artikel merken
Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.
Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the Spanish, Portuguese, and African slave trades used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their probabilities with the brutal aim of protecting their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.
A pathbreaking work, Body Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, Gómez shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.
Bloody Numbers is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, officials, notaries, and ship captains began thinking about human bodies as aggregate populations understood through numbers: measurements, averages, and calculations of risk and value assessed through the tabulation of heights, weights, tumors, scars, and other characteristics. Pablo F. Gómez explores how figures within the Spanish, Portuguese, and African slave trades used this model for understanding human bodies to generalize about behavior and disease in ways that foreshadowed the work of modern epidemiologists and public health officials—though they employed their probabilities with the brutal aim of protecting their financial interests rather than caring for enslaved people. The ruthlessness inherent in these practices became ingrained in the modern corporeal mathematics that emerged from the early slave trade and diffused through its vast political, financial, logistical, and intellectual networks.
A pathbreaking work, Body Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, Gómez shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.
Pablo F. Gómez is professor of history and the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic and the coeditor of The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America.
A Note on Sources and Terminology
Introduction
1. Slave-Trading Communities
2. Accounts
3. Armazones and Piezas
4. A World of Facts
5. Procedure
6. Probabilities
Coda
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
| Erscheint lt. Verlag | 8.6.2026 |
|---|---|
| Zusatzinfo | 13 halftones, 4 tables |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 152 x 229 mm |
| Gewicht | 454 g |
| Themenwelt | Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte |
| Naturwissenschaften | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-226-84516-8 / 0226845168 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-226-84516-6 / 9780226845166 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Informationen gemäß Produktsicherheitsverordnung (GPSR) | |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
Mehr entdecken
aus dem Bereich
aus dem Bereich
eine Reise um die Welt zu außergewöhnlichen Persönlichkeiten, …
Buch | Softcover (2023)
Piper (Verlag)
CHF 25,20
Eine wahre Geschichte von Schiffbruch, Mord und Meuterei
Buch | Hardcover (2024)
C.Bertelsmann (Verlag)
CHF 34,95
