Bloody Numbers

Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualise 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. Here, 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, tumours, 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 generalise about behaviour 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, Bloody 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.