This is the best book to date on the manuscript culture and practice behind the first two centuries of the slave trade to the Americas, showing how this traffic shaped ideas about quantifying, standardizing, and aggregating the human body and diseases. As a brilliant historian of science, Pablo Gómez examines the manuscript culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Iberian Worlds, seeking to understand the production of knowledge, governability, and ideas about the body (e.g., race and medicine), independently (and before) the canonical principles of print culture and the public sphere of the so-called scientific revolution. Slave traders, accountants, royal officials, and colonial authorities, but also African merchants and enslaved Africans, participated, though of course some forcibly, in the production of new ideas about the body and its aggregation and standardization. The term “Iberian Atlantic” does not capture the extent to which this first transatlantic slaving system was cosmopolitan, involving peoples across Western, Central, and Southern Europe, as well as Africa and the Americas. Gómez points out that North African slave markets influenced Iberian practice in the half-century before Columbus’s voyages. Simultaneously, Iberian traffickers had to know West African numeracy and systems of exchange to conduct trade, as exemplified by Portuguese sources reporting that West African merchants gathered captives into groups of five (40).
New systems of quantification, aggregation, and standardization of bodies, which are unnatural conceptualizations, developed from the practice of human trafficking. Account books and financial paperwork emerging from merchants’ practices led to the creation of a new mathematics of the body, developed to increase social and political gains, and, of course, profits. The merchants and officials who kept libros de cuentas annotated bodies and goods together, with the unit of record for transactions being the piece of cloth, or pano, in the early sixteenth century, but also, increasingly, the idealized body of a captive as convened by the term “black of payment.” The terms pieza and peça inscribed human bodies in ledgers using double-entry accounting, enabling equivalences across systems of numeracy and measures of value, and allowing captives and goods to be recorded together (thus within the private practice of merchants rather than the public act of paying taxes to the Crown). Practice crystallized these terms and preceded their manuscript inscription. These aggregations and estimates about Black bodies also shaped the decisions of those loaning funds for slave voyages, as well as the Spanish Crown’s estimates regarding the labor force in the Americas.
The study of the terms armazones and piezas offers a fascinating reflection on the history of bodies and modernity. Slave traders used these two terms to aggregate people while buying, selling, and transporting, thus turning groups of captives into numerical abstractions, and creating a new model of language for corporeality. Those organizing the slave voyage, the armadores, alongside the royal authorities of the House of Trade, generated the term armazón to tax this commerce. In this context, pieza, as the abstraction of an ideal captive’s body, became the building block of the armazón, or the group of captives traveling together.
Gómez offers an excellent analysis of the term muleque as dependent in Kimbumdu and how this term became boy, young child, or mature boy (muleque, mulequillo, mulecón) depending on age. Slavers calculated the term pieza by how they assessed age, gender, and disease in captives’ bodies in relation to the abstract idea of the value of a standardized captive body. But what about height? While Gómez incorporates height as the main marker of “pieza in the Indias” from the 1660s onward, this feature seems missing from the first 150 years of this traffic, from Columbus’s voyages to the end of the Iberian Union. This reviewer is tempted to speculate that as further and even more foreign external financiers and companies engaged with the asiento, starting with Grillo and Lomelino in the 1660s and then with Dutch, French, and British slavers in the following decades and into the eighteenth century, height became the key feature shaping pieza, but without the disappearance of the three other factors. This transition from “age-gender-disease” to “height” is open to further examination.
The practice of slaving created multiple categories of body and thought. Chapter 4 studies the justicia disputes over trade and contraband, producing facts about the body for legal purposes, such as dominion and investment, and serving as signs of slave subjecthood (as captive Africans were considered ensouled people by the Catholic monarchy). This chapter offers one of the most vivid examinations of the slave sales in the early Spanish Americas, drawing on sound, paper, and the ideas of captives who traveled together as a community, which Latin American scholars have examined as shipmate networks. Chapter 5 analyzes the procedure for the arrival of slave vessels, which created an empirical process for averages, taxonomies, and the registration of large groups of people based on perceptions of value. In this procedure of disembarkation, disease became an ontological reality, was quantified, and shaped the forms of aggregation. Gómez’s study on disease is based on the quantification of nearly four thousand enslaved Africans, the largest study of health conditions and conceptions of medical humanities for a very large sample in the early modern period. Chapter 6 focuses on probabilities, calculated death, and the creation of a sense of a normalized death rate. Here, the author offers a thorough examination of projects on the slave trade, population growth, and governance from the colonies.
Gómez does an excellent job but does so without engaging with scholarship on estimates of the slave trade and contraband in Spanish America. It is misleading to imply a very large amount of contraband invisible in historical records by stating that “smuggling was prevalent” (26) or “contraband was rampant” (70), because contraband in the Spanish Americas left a paper trail, which is the thread of documents that Gómez beautifully examines. This same paper trail allows other scholars to study what we know about the slave voyages that were legal, those that were illegal but legalized “ex post facto” (thus legalized contraband), the “known-unknowns,” and finally, the “unknown-knowns” of the volume, timeline, and direction of this horrific traffic. These broad generalizations about contraband do little to represent a field that also seeks truth through science.
While the author rightly points out that most people arriving in the Americas up to the late eighteenth century were Africans, he then goes on: “The majority of captives, or at least those registered in extant documentation, also arrived in the Spanish colonies. This meant that most people coming to the Americas from the Old World before the late eighteenth century entered the paperwork of the state through the procedures of value calculation described in this book” (18). This is an overstatement, because a search on www.slavevoyages.org shows that Spanish America was not the main area for the disembarkation of enslaved Africans in the century and a half after 1660. In fact, the British, Portuguese, and French Americas each absorbed more enslaved Africans than the Spanish colonies in that period. Yet, this poses a generative question. Further research will interrogate how the body’s conceptualizations of the Iberian traffic, and the manuscript culture of the libros de cuentas, shaped the practice, records, and ideas of the British and French slave trade, as well as in the Luso-Brazilian South (meaning below the equator) Atlantic.
