The key concept in the early modern quantification of the human body was the Iberian ‘Piece of the Indies’ or pieza de Indias in Spanish and peça da India in Portuguese. 16th and 17th century slave traders in the Iberian world made slave bodies measurable and comparable by inventing normalised standards based on ideal height and the visual presence of disease or ‘defects’ from the norm. 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 concept of ‘the piece of the Indies’ itself was established across the Atlantic basin by the early 1600s when it was associated with pieces of fabric exchanged for slaves in Portuguese trading posts in West Africa. Portuguese officials in San José de Loanda deployed the concept when they tallied fees due to the Portuguese crown for slaves bound for the Americas. The pieza as a measure of the ideal slave body for transportation and labour soon emerged across the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans, being widely used in Dutch trading records. Slave traders and governmental officials also used the term pieza to refer to other captive bodies from the Indies, most notably ‘Indian’ bodies in the Caribbean.
Pieza de Indias
M. Chambon, Le commerce de l’Amerique par Marseille (Avignon, 1764), vol. 2, plate 11, facing 400 (in Slavery Images: A Visual Record of the African Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Early African Diaspora; licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0; courtesy of John Carter Brown Library at Brown University)
Pablo F. Gómez
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).
