ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Embodied Economies of Freedom: Afro-Caribbean Corporeal Finance in the Seventeenth Century

• In Event: Bodies, Values, Materiality: New Histories of Health and Illness in Early Modern Latin America

English Abstract

Drawing on previously unstudied notarial, governmental, and private records from seventeenth-century Havana, Cuba, this paper examines the first instances of the financialization of human bodies and their diseases as they emerged in Caribbean urban settings. Scholars have long discussed the relationship between human corporeality and economic systems, including slavery. They have, however, paid little attention to the specific intersections of bodies, disease, and economic value in pre-modern, non-capitalist contexts. In the 17th-century Caribbean, unlike what occurred in places such as the antebellum US South, strategies for the financialization of human bodies were used primarily by non-elite economic actors (including free and other enslaved individuals of color). The records examined in this paper reveal that early Afro-Cuban communities developed a sophisticated understanding of the valuation of their own bodies and diseases, using this knowledge to negotiate freedom for themselves and their families, improve working conditions, and seek legal redress for mistreatment and enslavement. The paper further shows that in these mercantilist, and crucially non-capitalist, spaces, vibrant financial markets centered on bodily value arose—especially during times of scarcity such as pestilences. For instance, the mid-seventeenth-century yellow fever epidemic that devastated Havana, spurred new models for fractioning the value of enslaved bodies in loans through financial instruments known as retroventas. In this context, both owners and captives collateralized debts using portions of the human body, allowing access to smaller, short-term credits. This fractioning of bodily value opened pathways to partial self-ownership, as enslaved individuals could purchase portions of themselves, and calculate the value of diseases and corporeal characteristics. In early modern Caribbean urban economies, the value of enslaved bodies, thus, was tied less to land and possibilities for production than to corporeal attributes. Bodies and their afflictions functioned as forms of “capital” within social and economic relationships in these precapitalist societies (capital, after all, also exists outside capitalism). The dynamics examined here thus challenge analytical trappings that center modern capitalism as the defining framework for examining the relationship between economic value and corporeality.

Author

• Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison