March 11, 2026 2:30-4:00pm
3647 Peel, room 101
Pablo F. Gómez, University of Wisconsin–Madison)
The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality
This talk examines how early Atlantic slave trading communities made human corporeality articulable with a new set of ideas about finance, facts, objectivity, and measurable risk that emerged in the early modern era. These communities drew on centuries of legal, commercial, financial, and maritime material customs and ideas. Through their violent procedures, Iberian Atlantic slave trading communities abstracted and assimilated groups of human bodies to numbers. They did so to protect their financial interests rather than 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. The model for understanding human bodies these communities created foreshadows and shares basic notions with those sustaining the intellectual edifice of disciplines as varied as political arithmetic, economics, population health, demographics, epidemiology, and contemporary biomedicine.
Past Speakers
Monica H. Green, Independent Scholar, 12 March 2025
Scott Podolsky, Harvard University, 13 March 2024
Nahyan Fancy, de Pauw University, 15 March 2023
Kirsten Ostherr, Rice University, 20 March 2022
Michael Stolberg, Institute for the History of Medicine, Würzburg, Germany, 1 April 2020
Sunil Amrith, Harvard University, 28 March 2019
Emma Spary, Cambridge University, 23 November 2016
Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University, 18 March 2015
Michael Hagner, ETH Zurich, 10 February 2012
Mike Harrington, Harvard University, 1 March 2010
Sander L. Gilman, Emory University, 30 March 2009
Allan Brandt, Harvard University, 5 March 2008