“A passionate and precisely delineated history of our world. Gómez’s remarkable excavation reveals a world from which the quantitative evaluation of human bodies emerged, a foundation for all forms of biomedicine. Forged in the mercantilist violence of the early Iberian Atlantic, the evaluations of corporeal substance performed on enslaved persons turned them into decontextualized, composite physical peças (pieces). He concludes that ‘the swarm of ciphers that arose in their wake holds the meaning of our flesh.’ Not to be missed.”

Harold J. Cook, author of “The Young Descartes: Nobility, Rumor, and War”

“Gómez’s new book is a work of extraordinary scholarship. It is also a revelation. For generations, scholars have placed the origins of modern, rational systems of quantifying people in Enlightenment traditions of political arithmetic and public reform. But there is an earlier, more troubling history to reckon with. This book shows how the practices of aggregating individuals, creating universalizing measures, and making quantified predictions of health and mortality emerged out of medieval European and African mercantile or slave-trading practices, scaled up to meet the needs of a large pan-European investor class, as well as growing Iberian imperial bureaucracies. These quantifying achievements obscured, justified, and amplified the violence and dehumanization inherent to the trade of humans across oceans and the exploitation of enslaved labor in dangerous work. Bloody Numbers is a must-read for historians of science and everyone who thinks about the role of quantification in societies around the world.”

Dan Bouk, author of “Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them”