Pablo F. Gomez, "Bloody Numbers: The Early Atlantic Slave Trade and the Invention of Modern Corporeality" (U Chicago Press, 2026)

The early Atlantic slave trade established a foundational grammar for modern quantification, transforming human bodies into calculable units for taxation, risk assessment, and profit maximization. Historian Pablo Gomez, author of *Bloody Numbers*, details how Spanish colonial officials standardized the measurement of enslaved Africans—evaluating height, physical defects, and health status—to create abstract entities like the *pieza de Indias*. These practices, rooted in the brutal commodification of human life, pioneered techniques for managing mortality and morbidity that underpin contemporary epidemiology, public health, and demographic data. By reducing individuals to data points, these systems obscured the lived experiences and humanity of the enslaved while embedding a logic of population-level management that continues to shape modern biomedical and economic decision-making. This history reveals the persistent, often violent, tension between human corporeality and the cold abstraction of numerical data.