Abstract Summary
This paper studies the development of novel ideas about the human body that appeared in Atlantic slave-trading circuits during the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Using governmental, corporate, and private records from archives in Spain, Portugal, France, England, the Netherlands, The United States, Brazil, Colombia and Cuba, the paper explores the emergence in Atlantic slave-trading societies of a new epistemology that conceived of fungible and universal bodies whose parts were measurable and comparable, as the diseases that affected them, in quantifiable and reproducible ways on the basis of normalized, constant, standards. I argue that these ideas about bodies, which scholars traditionally identify as related to the rise of the New Science and political and medical arithmetics in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century English, French and northern European learned circles, first emerged in sixteenth and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies. These transformations came about as a consequence of slave trading communities’ need for the quantification of the risks involved in trading and investing in human corporeality and its afflictions in a vast Atlantic network of increasingly complex, commercial, technical, political and legal dimensions. As a result, human bodies’ characteristics (height, gender, age, weight, among others), and diseases became quantifiable and normalized as groupable and predictable within a new language of commerce, and appraisal of the flesh. The history of the African slave body, thus, travels (and precedes by several decades) the same paths followed by the history of the quantifiable and universal bodies of public health, epidemiology, and biomedicine.
