Traditional scholarship in the history of science associates the quantifiable, universal human body with the European Enlightenment or ‘new science’. This measurable, universal body, it is argued, came to define modern medicine. Behind it lay the driving forces of political economy, statistics, life insurance and modern industrial capitalism. But this widely accepted history of the universalisation and systematisation of human corporeality ignores an earlier global history of enslaving and measuring bodies in the Indies, born of the Iberian slave trade between Africa and colonial Iberian America. It was in the violent and profitable world of this slave trade that universal concepts and calculations of health risks, disease and bodily characteristics first emerged. Indeed, the scale of data production about bodies in the early modern world of Iberian slave trading far outpaced all contemporary systems of production of knowledge about the human body. The key concept in this early modern quantification of the body was the pieza de Indias (Spanish) or peça da India (Portuguese).

Sixteenth- and 17th-century slave traders in the Iberian world imagined slave bodies and the diseases that affected them to be measurable and comparable on the basis of normalised or idealised, constant standards. The appearance of this new measure and epistemology was intimately linked to the unprecedented rise in the size and complexity of the transatlantic commerce in human bodies during the first decades of the 17th century. The new, universal measure of man was the result of the slave trade’s need to quantify the risks of investing in human corporeality and its modern afflictions. By the late 16th century, Iberian slave traders, governments, corporations and financiers from around Europe (particularly from Genoa, Florence and the Netherlands) were already thinking of the transportation of slave bodies as units of risk. The original licences for slaves transacted in Iberia were contractual concepts that did not refer to bodily characteristics. The licences were of limited help to slave-trading communities for calculating the productivity of capital. Consequently, slave traders and slave-trading organisations, including the House of Trade (Casa de Contratación) in Seville, developed methodologies that allowed them to translate slave bodies into numbers and calculate the inherent value of corporeality as it related to an increasingly normalised, constant unit called the pieza. The concept of the pieza (the piece) allowed for the creation of contracts where investors, providers and the state could prospectively calculate tariff, gains and risk using quantifiable notions of bodies that had not yet been purchased or evaluated.

The historical record makes clear that the concept of ‘the piece of the Indies’ itself was already firmly established across the Atlantic basin by the early 1600s. The literature on the subject associates the origins of the term peça/pieza to pieces of fabric exchanged for slaves in 15th- and early 16th-century Portuguese trading posts in West Africa, where traders exchanged adult male slaves for imported fabrics. Market forces in West and western Central Africa pressured Iberian traders to conceptualise slaves in a way that would allow the traders to define the specific characteristics of the bodies they were buying and selling. In addition to peça, Portuguese slave traders used several other terms to refer to slaves who were not adult males, reflecting an increasingly rich taxonomy that revealed traders’ rising ability to evaluate corporeality and maximise profits. Of relevance here were those terms related to children or youth. Muleque or muleca, for example, one of the terms slave traders used for children less than 12 years old, comes from the Kimbundu word muleke, which refers to a dependent. Cañengues classified children two to four years old, and the term comes from a word that means ‘child’ in Angola. Slave traders began using these terms to refer to young bodies that they discounted at rates of two or three to one, relative to adult male slave bodies. Calculating the value of cañengues, muleques and mulecas by converting them into standard adult male piezas was a common practice by the beginning of the 17th century. Portuguese officials in Sao Paulo da Assumpcao de Loanda deployed the concept when they tallied ‘the dispatch’, or fees due to the Portuguese crown, for the embarkment of African slaves bound for the Americas. Such methods to appraise slave bodies became normative in Spanish America for determining the tariffs that traders had to pay to introduce slaves in the New World. By the late 1530s, crown officials were counting the ‘pieces of slaves’ (piezas de esclavos) disembarking in Santo Domingo and selling them to miners, Jesuits, hacienda owners and even other Blacks to work in the mines and estates of the island. By the end of the 16th century, a concept of an ideal body for transportation and labour – as an object of trade – had emerged across the Atlantic, and during the first decades of the 17th century it was disseminated across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, being widely used in Dutch trading records.

In addition, slave traders and governmental officials used the term pieza to talk about other captive bodies from the Indies, most notably native or ‘Indian’ bodies in the Caribbean.

The concept of the piece of the Indies appears in full form in the 1660s as part of negotiations of the terms of the asiento de negros or slave monopoly between the Spanish crown and the Genoese financiers Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelín. The contract with the Grillos established that they would ‘bring 24,500 blacks, piezas de Indias, over the course of seven years and starting in 1662’. The monopoly established as one of its conditions that ‘the said quantity of blacks should be piezas de Indias, each one seven cuartas of height and up’. The measure of height was not arbitrary. Slave traders used height as a proxy for life histories of health and nutrition and as a predictor of the slave’s potential productivity in terms of physical labour. Height was also the most readily standardised aspect of bodily quantification for contracts that depended on appraisals made by a diverse array of evaluators around the Atlantic. Slave-trading communities created a complex system around the marker of height that accounted for diseases, gender and age. The catalogue of distinctions and markers is extensive, and space here precludes treatment of all categories. A few examples are illustrative of the efforts that slave traders made to standardise corporeality. Being female or having grey hair, for instance, translated into a reduction in value of one cuarta or one-seventh of the standard pieza. The conditions of ‘cloud in one eye [cataracts]’ signified a reduction of two cuartas; scurvy, two cuartas; phlegm, one and one-half cuartas; a ‘benign hernia’, one cuarta; a ‘broken navel’, two and one-fourth cuartas; being one-eyed, two cuartas; and having a lazy eye, one cuarta. Being older than 35 years merited a one-cuarta deduction from the standard of seven. Having signs of tinea capitis (scalp ringworm) meant a reduction of two and one-half cuartas; having a hernia (of the worst variety called carnosa), one and one-half cuartas. The presence of lobanillos (small tumours) was worth one and one-half cuartas’ reduction; small fingers, one-half cuarta; incapacitating scars (burns), one and one-half cuarta; loss of a toe, one-sixth of a cuarta; localised ulcers, one-sixth of a cuarta; generalised ulcers, one cuarta; scurvy, two cuartas; ‘humours’ or lesions in the hands, one-sixth cuarta; ‘humours’ in the feet, one-eighth cuarta; other ‘spots’, not of scurvy, three cuartas; broken hands, three cuartas; a broken finger, one-half cuarta; a broken toe, one-third cuarta; extreme old age, one cuarta; dropsy, one and one-half cuartas; apostema (a tumour or abscess), one cuarta; blindness, three cuartas; abnormal fingers, one cuarta; different sizes of eyes, one-eight cuarta; dysentery, two and one-third cuartas; ‘bicho’ disease, three cuartas; fistula in the scrotum, one and one-half cuartas; wounds with exposed bone, three and one-half cuartas; short-sightedness, two cuartas; missing arms, three cuartas; missing legs, three cuartas; missing molars, one cuarta; broken bones in the arms or hand, two cuartas.

The contractual articulation of the concept of the piece of the Indies, and the recording of the method used for its calculation, formalised slave-based knowledge production about human bodies. The contract assembled a vast storehouse of knowledge, much of it held in the House of Trade in Seville, obtained from thousands of records of bodily characteristics and diseases for hundreds of thousands of bodies that traders in Africa, the Americas and Europe had quantified and tabulated. The Grillos’ contract set a precedent for the 1679 contract between Spanish and Portuguese merchants and the Dutch West India Company. The 1696 asiento between Spanish crown and Francisco Marín and Nicolás Porcio, for example, agreed they would transport 10,000 tonnes of freight including 30,000 piezas de Indias of the ‘regular measure of seven cuartas’. Similarly, a 1709 contract between the French Compagnie de Guinée and Dutch slave traders, settled in Amsterdam, specified that the French would pay 110 pièces de huit (pieces of eight) ‘for each black piece of Indies’ delivered in the Caribbean. As the ‘new science’ of the European Enlightenment dawned in Europe, the piece of the Indies was well established as the most disseminated universal measure of the human body.

FURTHER READING

Blackburn, R. (1997) The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (New York, NY: Verso).

Cook, H. (2008) Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).

Curtin, P.D. (1972) The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

Hadden, R. (1994) On the Shoulders of Merchants: Exchange and the Mathematical Conception of Nature in Early Modern Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press).

Jorland, G., A. Opinel, and G. Weisz (eds.) (2005) Body Counts: Medical Quantification in Historical and Sociological Perspectives/Perspectives historiques et sociologiques sur la quantification médicale (Montréal/Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Law, R. (1991) The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

Miller, J.C. (1988) Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade, 1730–1830 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press).

Ormrod, D. (2003) The Rise of Commercial Empires: England and the Netherlands in the Age of Mercantilism, 1650–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Rosser Mathews, J. (1995) Quantification and the Quest for Medical Certainty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Wheat, D. (2016) Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570–1640 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press).