Product details
- ISBN 9780226845166
- Weight: 481g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jun 2026
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Upends current thinking about how early modern people started to conceptualize human beings in terms of populations.
Bloody Numbers 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. Gómez 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—though 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.
A pathbreaking work, Bloody Numbers reveals the historical actions that rendered populations quantifiable. In doing so, it shows that confronting these origins is essential to understanding the violent political, legal, economic, and scientific practices that ascribe numbers to our own bodies.
Pablo F. Gómez is professor of history and the history of medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic and a coeditor of The Gray Zones of Medicine: Healers and History in Latin America.
