Medicine and the Making of Race, 1440-1720

Between 1440 and 1720, more than 8 million enslaved people from a range of African kingdoms and territories were forcibly transported to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands more remained in Europe. From the very first moments of contact between African and European peoples, medical practitioners played a key role.

In practical terms, they staffed ships and treated passengers, they advised on purchases, and they contributed to some of the key systems of the slave trade. At ports, on ships, in the new estates of slave-owners, and even in their own homes, medical practitioners examined, treated and interacted with enslaved people. By the seventeenth century, expertise in the treatment of slaves was a valuable professional commodity.

And yet, there has been little attention to the role medicine and science played in the production of a 'system' of slavery, either in Europe or America; or to the emotional strangeness of caring for humans in a context that otherwise robs its victims of the status of individuals. The slave trade is often written about in macro-terms, as an economic, transnational 'force', in which individual people were rendered more or less meaningless.

Considering medical practitioners reveals the opposite. It shows us that the forces which streamlined slavery grew from individual interactions between practitioners and slaves. This is especially true when we consider the earliest years of the slave trade, and the close, often sustained contact between physicians or surgeons and the slaves for whom they 'cared'.

This project aims to uncover and analyze practical medical attitudes to slaves and Black Africans in early modern Europe, and in early modern Europeans' global encounters. It addresses four key research questions:

-What role did medical practitioners play in the increasingly systematic enslavement of African peoples, both in Europe and in the New World?

-Did African peoples in Europe communities provide alternative medical treatments, and if so, how did European medicine encounter and react to these practices? -Did medical treatment of "foreign bodies" inform developing ideas of "race"?

- How did such treatment accord to medical theory, if at all, and how did practitioners grapple with the disconnect between their experiences of enslaved bodies, and the theories by which they were trained?

In addressing these questions, this project will combine extensive archival research in Spain, Portugal, Malta, Italy, Britain, Germany and France, and 'New World' archives in Cartagena and Peru, with a focus on travel-narratives, medical correspondence and scientific publications. The wide geographical coverage transcends established national narratives, and aims to bring together the Atlantic and European worlds.

At the same time, by focusing on individuals - medical practitioners from all nationalities, who traveled and served in the earliest voyages south - the project explores the dimensions and chronologies of the relationship between slavery and race in an interpersonal, transnational and transcultural context, driven by human contact and practice, rather theory. Finally, by revealing medical interest in the practices of early modern diaspora communities, it examines the contribution played by African medicine to European knowledge.

This project ends where others have begun - with the medical and scientific publications of the late seventeenth century, in which the disputes about race had their origin. By building up to such works, the aim is not to present them as the natural conclusion to what came before, but to show how they acted as only one possible avenue of many: to reveal the contingent circumstances on which they rested.

Medicine and the Making of Race will provide a new understanding of the earliest years of what would become the transatlantic slave trade, and a new approach to the history of race.