Pablo F. G\u00f3mez has recently published a book with the University of Chicago Press, that “upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.”<\/p>\n
From the publisher: “Bloody<\/em> Numbers<\/i> is a provocative account of the violent world of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Atlantic slave-trading societies, where traders, financiers, officials, surgeons, notaries, ship captains, and others 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. G\u00f3mez explores how figures within the world of slave trading 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\u2014though they employed their calculations with the aim of protecting their financial interests rather than of 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.”<\/p>\n