Chapter 1 examines demographic ideas in early Tudor England, centering on connections between the mobility and mutability of particular groups of people. It first delineates sources for demographic ideas, in particular the Bible and Aristotle’s Politics, and emphasizes the centrality of qualitative concerns about multitudes of people as a factor in the health of the polis. It then turns to a major context for English demographic thought, the enclosure of land from the late fifteenth century. It delineates a key theme in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature of agrarian complaint, detailed in More’s Utopia: causal links between enclosure and depopulation (the removal of a functional multitude from a specific locale) and between mobility and degeneration (here, of ploughmen displaced by enclosure into criminals). The final section looks at the development – in Thomas Starkey’s Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, Thomas Smith’s Discourse of the Common Weal, and an anonymous set of “Polices” – of an idea of policy centered on restricting mobility to prevent degeneration and maintain proportions and relations between functional multitudes as components of the body politic.

Chapter 5 examines the fate of transformative demographic governance in the eighteenth century, beginning with the proliferation of demographic numbers and political-arithmetical arguments in a range of print genres: sermons and sacred histories, literary essays and satires, newspapers and pamphlets. These encouraged a new demographic subjectivity in their audiences – a sense of participation in demographic processes – that raised questions of agency and its limits. Some concerned the constraints of environment, conceived of in discussions of medicine and public health as a partially manipulable “situation”; others concerned the power or responsibility of the public to foster the improvement of populations through projects such as Societies for the Reformation of Manners or Coram’s Foundling Hospital. In colonial contexts, debate raged over the relationship between climate, health and race, and – as Benjamin Franklin’s work shows – over both the relative fecundity of America and Europe and the ideal racial composition of the colonies and the world. By the later eighteenth century, demographic governance had become a point of contention between colony and metropole.

Chapter 3 traces the expansion of demographic governance from ad hoc engagements with specific multitudes to a more systematic approach to the mobility and mutability of populations across expanding imperial territory. Important to this shift was the impact of reason-of-state political thought, notably in the work of Jean Bodin and Giovanni Botero, who both treated policy as an art that could improve upon or perfect nature. Botero drew attention to the instrumental use of colonies in managing population growth, and the chapter turns to English thinking about empire (in Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting and other works) as a solution to the threat of overpopulation – and to early colonial settlements in Virginia and New England as sites for envisioning the transplantation and transformation of excess or idle English people into loyal and industrious colonial subjects. Closing with a consideration of themes raised in Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, the chapter argues that by the second quarter of the seventeenth century, demographic governance was seen as a matter of constant management of populations across England and its expanding empire.

Chapter 4 connects the emergence of transformative demographic governance to changes in natural philosophy, in particular to Francis Bacon’s works and their influence among projectors associated with the Hartlib Circle in the mid-seventeenth century. The problem of managing the qualities of populations in an empire raised the question of natural constraints on the power of policy to “improve” populations; the chapter examines Hartlibian projects concerned with this question on a large scale, including some in which putatively immutable racial boundaries and the enslavement of Africans indicate both limits to and paradoxes of demographic governance. It then turns to Cromwellian Ireland, showing that opposed arguments for either Irish transplantation or English –Irish mixture proceeded from a similar centering of demographic governance. Mid-century projects fed into William Petty’s “political arithmetic” in the Restoration. This fused Baconianism, alchemical ideas and quantification, treating the control of the numbers and of the economic, political, religious and cultural qualities of populations in England, Ireland and the empire as essentially similar problems for the state.

The Conclusion reexamines Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population from the perspective of the transformative mode of demographic governance explored throughout the earlier chapters, as well as in terms of the eighteenth-century debates about the limits and locus of demographic agency examined in Chapter 4. Rather than seeing Malthus’s Essay as marking a definitive break with earlier demographic thinking, it argues for strong continuities, particularly concerning the importance of situation, the providential nature of demographic processes and the real effects of intervention in demographic governance. Instead, it identifies Malthus’s key departure as an emphasis on the propertied and rational individual as the legitimate locus of demographic agency under God. The conclusion ends by considering some of the implications of the history of early modern demographic governance for reinterpreting – and broadening – the history of modern demographic thought.

The introduction states the argument and introduces key concepts, including ideas of multitude and political arithmetic, as well as important distinctions, including that between quantitative and qualitative aspects of demographic thought. It briefly surveys past approaches to the history of population as an idea, paying particular attention to Michel Foucault. It then outlines the book’s episodic approach; explains its geographical and temporal scope (England, Ireland and the British Atlantic, circa 1500 –1800); characterizes the range and types of sources used; and describes its focus on the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and qualitative manipulation (referred to as demographic governance), as well as on questions of the locus and limits of power over population (referred to as demographic agency).

Chapter 2 shows how two Elizabethan and Jacobean engagements with problematic multitudes undermined the body politic as a framework for managing multitudes in a context of rapid population growth, economic change and political challenges beyond England. Turning first to growing anxieties about poverty and vagrancy in England, it examines how rogue literature constructed vagrants as a foreign and inherently idle counter-polity, rather than a displaced and degenerated multitude; it then shows how municipal ordinances, surveys and poor laws came to treat the mobile poor as inherently idle of quantification as well as regulation, for whom systematic intervention and routine management was necessary to instill the virtues of industry. Second, it follows late Tudor and early Stuart efforts to undo the degeneration (through mixture with the Irish) of the Old English in Ireland, and to civilize – through projects of plantation, conquest or legal reform – the putatively barbaric Gaelic Irish themselves. In both cases, problematic groups were no longer seen as displaced organs of a body politic but rather as populations that must be made governable in the first instance through policy.