2026/03/04 by Brendan Röder · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #African history and culture analysis #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
paper · doi:10.1093/pastj/gtag006
openalex publication_date 2026/03/04 · openalex created_date 2026/06/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26
Abstract This article takes the case of a group of Ethiopian boys brought to Rome by Catholic missionaries in the early 1700s as an entry point to explore the connections between medical knowledge, religion, enslavement, and race-making. While these subjects have received increasing scholarly attention, existing work often focuses on the early modern Atlantic World or on Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This article complements such scholarship by looking at early modern Northeast Africa, specifically Ottoman Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sennar. Drawing on travel accounts and letters by missionaries, but also unstudied letters written by the Ethiopians who came to Rome, it argues that ideas and practices of medicine, health, and the construction of human difference played a crucial role in physical and religious mobility between Northeast Africa and Europe. Many European travellers to this region practised medicine and surgery, even if most were not university-trained professionals but Christian missionaries. Reading interactions between European missionaries and Ethiopians through the lens of health and medicine therefore also serves to expand the boundaries of who and what we understand as medical actors and medical sources.