Medicine and the Making of Race

Medicine and the Making of Race examines the role of European medical practice in the early transatlantic slave trade and the way it shaped developing ideas about race. In the first three years of our project we have explored archives across the UK, the Netherlands, Barbados, Spain, and the Canary Islands, together with a wide-ranging programme of research into travel narratives, manuscript culture and correspondence, and medical publications. Fully integrating our research into the history of Europe, rather than seeing it as a fundamentally colonial or North American preoccupation, our work has helped to shape a new understanding of the participation of medical practitioners from all over Europe in constructing systems of slavery; challenging the interpretation of the 'triangular slave trade' as a transnational force shaped by macroeconomic developments, and conceptualising it instead as created and shaped by many thousands of personal interactions. In its renewal phase, MMoR will shift our focus from people to medical practices – specifically diagnosis, pharmaceutical treatment, and postmortem dissections, and their increasingly racialised performance on the bodies of enslaved individuals. We will explore the local practices that European medical writers encountered on the west coast of Africa, with an explicit focus on their engagement with western African “plantworlds”, a relational concept in which plants link ecology and human behaviour. Thousands of west African plants were recorded, and sometimes sent by medical practitioners from all over the west coast of Africa. Stripped from their context, they were noted in scientific sources simply as botanical specimens, but elsewhere, through inquisition records, correspondence, and early ethnography, we can recover traces of the complex practices which surrounded them. Drawing on the innovations of postcolonial and Black feminist historians of slavery who have developed novel methodologies of reading colonial sources ‘along the biased grain’ to theorise human agency, we seek to use these records as resources for a reparative recovery of knowledge. To carry out this work, we are also turning to a new body of sources: the “detached” papers of the Royal African Company, the “other (overige)” files of the Middelburg company, and the “miscellaneous” records of the Brandenburg company. Deemed insignificant by their original archivists, and largely uncatalogued on a per item basis, they contain vast quantities of unstudied information, from letters of application, to complaints between provisioners, to examine how medical practices and knowledge moved across different geographical regions, and across increasingly solidified racial lines. The role of medicine we suggest, offers a case study of the ordinary, transactional and everyday ways in which regimes of slavery were enacted and integrated within the metropolitan centres of Europe, and affords insight into the ad-hoc, unsystematic way in which racialised knowledge was made. Foregrounding interpersonal encounters and embodied practices, our work offers a new way to think about one of the most fundamental problems in historical scholarship: how ideas of race came to frame Western thinking about the world.