Medicine, Race, and Slavery in the Transatlantic World, 1600–1850

As the title suggests, the provocation of this supplement is simple: that the histories of medicine, transatlantic slavery, and race cannot, and should not, be viewed separately.Between 1440 and 1888 more than twelve million African people were forcibly trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean, enslaved in plantations, cities, and homes across the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. 2 We are used to thinking about this as a 'triangle', in which the flows were raw materials and trafficked individuals, and the static points geographic sites.3 Imagine instead a triangle where the points are medicine, slavery, race.The analogy is imperfect, of course: professional expertise, historical phenomena, and conceptual fallacy are not schematic points on the same plane.But like the support structures of a triangle, they exist in a relational tension: remove any one and the edifice collapses.The essays in this supplement 1 This Supplement is the result of workshops, conversations and conferences over the course of several years, funded by the UKRI FLF project, Medicine and the Making of Race [MR/T041528/1].I am grateful to the funders who have made this possible, and to my project team: Carolin Schmitz, whose work appears here, Eli Cumings, whose writing does not, but whose influence is indelible, and Becca Taite, who made it all possible.

Agency (philosophy) · Field (mathematics) · Government (linguistics) · Perspective (graphical) · Central European and Russian historical studies · Central European national history · Moravian Church and William Blake