Bloody Numbers

The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality

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.

UK Delivery:

• Free delivery on all orders of £10 or more.
• £1.49 delivery fee on orders below £10.
• UK orders are shipped via Royal Mail 2nd Class.

International Delivery:

• Flat rate delivery charges vary by country.

Dispatch and Delivery Times:

• All orders are shipped from our warehouse in Northampton, UK within 48 hours of receipt during working hours.
• UK mainland orders typically arrive within 3-5 working days via Royal Mail 2nd Class.
• International estimated delivery times:
• Europe & Channel Islands: 7 to 10 working days
• USA: 7 to 15 working days
• Rest of the World: 9 to 21 working days

View our full delivery infomation here.