Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-788cddb947-nxk7g Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-10T00:47:21.129Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - Beyond the Body Politic: Territory, Population and Colonial Projecting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2022

Ted McCormick
Affiliation:
Concordia University, Montréal
Get access

Summary

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.

Type
Chapter
Information
Human Empire
Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800
, pp. 103 - 138
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×