Creating Body Parts: Atlantic Slavery and the Imagination of the Quantifiable Body

• In Event: The Measure of an Organ: Epistemologies of Quantification and Bodily Visibility across Time and Space

Abstract

This paper studies the development of novel ideas about the human body and its components that appeared in Atlantic slave markets during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 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 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 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 century and eighteenth-century English, French and northern European learned circles, first emerged in sixteenth and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies. These transformations were also the result of slave traders need for the quantification of risk 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, specific body parts (like eyes, limbs and brains), diseases (such as the dysentery-like Bicho, and abdominal hernias), and newly conceived systems (like novel ideas about mental, muscular and skeletal constitutions), became salient and quantifiable within a new language of commerce, and appraisal of the flesh. The history of the slave body, the ultimate fetish of the histories of capitalism, paradoxically, travels the same paths that the history of the modern body of public health and biomedicine—a history at the center of the ideation of modern ideas about individuals, and the divide between people, things, and nature.

Author

• Pablo Gomez, University of Wisconsin - Madison