Sources for Medicine, Slavery & Race-Making in the Early Modern World: An Introduction
Sometime around the year 1611, four children were trafficked into slavery on the West Coast of Africa, enslaved on a Dutch merchant ship. The event was recounted by a Swiss barber-surgeon travelling with the fleet, whose observations were subsequently published in a bestselling German-language travel-narrative, Schiffahrten or Sea-voyages [1]
“They[2] also have for sale many people, whom they obtain from their enemies by stealing both old and young and whom they sell for money, or for 3 or 4 massen of Spanish wine, or even for two or three handfuls of abuy.[3] After such people have been sold, they are taken about a thousand miles away and resold, one being worth about a hundred ducats. The people are brownish black, but beautiful in shape. This induced us to buy a few people, although forbidden to do so by the States-General: we took four exceedingly beautiful young boys from them and presented them to the factor or merchant on the ship. In exchange we gave them a little barrel of Spanish wine containing about 9 massen. The factor had them clothed, for they were quite naked. We later took them to Guinea where they soon learnt the Dutch language.”
Schiffahrten or Sea-voyages, courtesy Universitatsbibliothek Basel
This might not seem like the most obvious source with which to begin a series on medicine, slavery, and race-making. With the exception of the author’s profession, there is little by way of medicine here, and the act of enslavement, as the author makes very clear, was an illegal venture – Dutch traders had been expressly forbidden to take part in the slave trade. In contrast to the physical proximity and corporeal details of ‘spectacular suffering’ in later accounts of slavery, there is an indirectness about this extract, a rhetorical passivity or tonal detachment which distances the reader (and writer) from the violence at its heart.[4] But it is because of this distance, rather than despite it, that this source is important. This passage, and the narrative within which it is contained, demonstrate the critical, if sometimes apparently indirect role, that medical professionals played in the establishment and maintenance of the early transatlantic slave trade, as well as the way in which racializing processes and professional aspiration coincided, in both text and practice.
Here, the text’s social and political context is key. Travel from the Netherlands to the West Coast of Africa was openly ‘prospecting’, investigating the profitability of trade and determining what returns different kinds of trade might make. The founding of the West Indies Company (WIC) in 1621 demonstrated that a critical mass of investors had been convinced of the profitability of trading in enslaved people. In the centuries that followed Dutch merchants trafficked hundreds of thousands of individuals to Brazil, the Caribbean and beyond.[5] Printed observations such as this, which teased the possibility of profit and exchange in open defiance of the law, were part of the ways by which the business of slavery achieved widespread legitimacy.
This passage about the legitimacy of slaving occurs in a text preoccupied with the status of profession. A barber-surgeon provided the veneer of legitimacy to slaving; by writing a best-selling travel narrative starring himself, the same surgeon also built a successful profile for his expertise.[6] As a first-hand observer, Brun situates himself as present throughout this process and so, at this moment of the inception of the slave trade his work testifies to the presence of medical professionals such as himself. And in his carefully chosen language, he made a personal intervention in broader European literary trends. His choice of descriptive vocabulary – “beautiful in shape”, “exceedingly beautiful”, “young”, “naked” – and its promise of high profit, (a hundred ducats value for each child, swapped together for a barrel of Spanish wine) links exoticizing, race-making literary processes to the financial ‘reckonings’ of slavery. Race-making may be subordinate to professional expertise in this, but it is present all the same.
In sum, this is a source that testifies to the quotidian place of medical practitioners in the establishment of the burgeoning European slave trade, and consequently in its day-to-day maintenance. But it is equally a source that shows how the role of such men could appear indirect and elusive. In this, it reveals one of the central methodological dilemmas of our work. From the earliest encounters of Europeans with slavery on the West Coast of Africa, medical practitioners were eyewitnesses to and participants in the processes of creating the slave trade. The sources that testify to this process are ubiquitous; but the role of medicine in the processes they describe is rarely the object of record.
In the process of applying for funding for this project, I referred to the historical research it would involve using the well-worn analogy of looking for a needle in a haystack – with the caveat that in this case we knew there were lots of needles. But searching in a haystack full of needles is still a frustrating process: the process of finding them can be laborious, and often the contents are diffuse. Like the narrative here, many accounts describe a presence which is curiously passive and indirect. Others are more direct, with detailed descriptions of hands-on practices and embodied, interpersonal interactions. The rhetorical differences between such sources can be difficult to grapple with, even when it seems clear such differences are strategic. How do we read across such genres, and how do we relate them? The incorporation of information from sources as diverse as port records, medical case-studies, administrative correspondence, ethnography and travel-writing, wills, deeds and records of colonial administration, inquisitorial records, and visual and material culture has forced us to reckon with how often historical research in the past has been driven not simply by the contents of the historical archive, but by the close connection between specific historical methodologies and genres of record-keeping as well.
Willem Blaeu, “Africa nova description”, 1644. Courtesy Princeton Library.
As we move through our programme of research, one of the questions that has emerged is: what is a medical source for the history of slavery? As in the case of our opening extract, sources written by medical practitioners often have little to do with medicine, while sources on healing and medical knowledge are as bountiful from the pens of missionaries and merchants as they are from official practitioners. The slipperiness of such record-keeping poses challenges to the centrality of medicine and health in our thinking, especially when the scale and central activities of the slave trade abrogated concerns with health and safety in tandem with abrogating the humanity of those they enslaved.
These are important questions that in some senses test the remit of our project. How do sources in the history of slavery reveal (or indeed conceal) the fraught history of medicine as a constitutive component of the Transatlantic Slave Trade? How do sources on slavery and the work of race-making speak to each other, in this context and in the contexts of the early modern metropole, which already in the early modern period presented itself as far removed from the activities on which its wealth and imperial status increasingly rested?
Is there a value to thinking about medicine, or medical and scientific practitioners, when the greater ethical imperative exists to recover agency and human experience denied by their actions? Over the past years, numerous scholars have thought about and theorized the place of the archive, as well as the methodologies of research on this subject. An introductory blog post cannot possibly summarize this rich body of scholarship, but some recent historical work which has energized and informed this project in particular includes scholarship by Marisa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, Jessica Marie Johnson, Herman Bennett, Jenny Sharpe and Cécile Fromont.[7] In tandem, their work unpicks the fraught dynamics by which historical use of the archive serves to consolidate elision and reinscribe violence, but also by which an insistence on the possibilities of new sources and methodologies as well as sustained attention and lingering can nonetheless provide new insights as well.
This blog series aims to make a basic, practical intervention in this ongoing process, with a particularly pedagogical focus on building and expanding the corpus of sources available to students and scholars.[8] Bringing together historians and interdisciplinary scholars of the early modern in all walks of life, it focuses on sources. Each blog piece is focussed on a source, many (though not all) of which are accessible online. Offering a brief introduction and contextual remarks, our contributing writer demonstrates one expert way of considering this source in relation to slavery, medicine and/or race-making (not necessarily together), which can serve as an example of how this material can be used.
These are also interventions by scholars with expertise in a wide range of associated disciplines and subfields, from the history of animals, to medieval physiognomy. We hope by publishing these together we can create some potentially surprising connections, bringing together disparate fields in conversation. Race-making, as a broader community of interdisciplinary experts continue to show, was a central preoccupation of early modern European culture. Even under the relatively niche umbrella of ‘medicine’ it stands to reason that we can see very different impulses for, takes on, and descriptions of slavery and racialisation.
We envision this contribution as a successive set of ‘series’, featuring six blogs at a time.
If you would like to write a blog post or suggest a source for a future piece, please get in touch via our email address, mmor@kcl.ac.uk. Please be encouraged that we take a broad and capacious view of the subject of these blog posts: we’re interested in creating as diverse a range of sources and inclusive a set of contributors as possible. We’re particularly interested in sources that are not in English, although we welcome work in any geographical field. We pay contributors a fixed sum of £250, and offer editorial support and advice.
HM
[1] Samuel Brun, Schiffahrten, 1624
[2] Brun references the inhabitants of “Ambosy” here.
[3] The local currency. This term is not used in other sources, though possibly refers to a local shell currency. See Toby Green, A Fistful of Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution, Penguin, 2020 for information on the complex economy of precolonial Africa.
[4] Ramesh Mallipeddi, Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth Century British Atlantic. University of Virginia Press, 2016.
[5] Karwan Fatah-Black and Matthias van Rossum, “Beyond Profitability: The Dutch Transatlantic Slave Trade and its Economic Impact, Slavery & Abolition” 36, (2015), 63-83; Johannes Postma, The Dutch in the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1600-1815, Cambridge, 2009; Filipa Ribeiro da Silva, Dutch and Portuguese in Western Africa: Empires, Merchants and the Atlantic System, 1580-1674, Brill, 2011.
[6] On the role of such texts in professional advancement see: Paolo Savoia, Skills, Knowledge and Status: The Career of an Early Modern Italian Surgeon, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 93 (2019), 27-54; Celeste Chamberland, Between the Hall and the Market: William Clowes and Surgical Self-Fashioning in Elizabethan London, The Sixteenth Century Journal 41 (2010): 69-89.
[7] Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016; Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads”, Social Text, 36 (2018): 57-79, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7145658; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018; Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Disapora Poetics of Loss, Northwestern, 2020; Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola, Penn State University Press, 2022.
[8] Other important source collections include the foundational text by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, and the recent, wonderful volume by Anna Wainright and Matthieu Chapman eds. Teaching Race in the European Renaissance: A Classroom Guide, ACMRS Press, 2022, which includes essays on medical and scientific sources amongst its contents.
