Book contents
- Human Empire
- Ideas in Context
- Human Empire
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Transformations in Demographic Thought
- Chapter 1 Mobility and Mutability in the Early Tudor Body Politic
- Chapter 2 Marginality, Incivility and Degeneration in Elizabethan England and Ireland
- Chapter 3 Beyond the Body Politic: Territory, Population and Colonial Projecting
- Chapter 4 Transmutation, Quantification and the Creation of Political Arithmetic
- Chapter 5 Improving Populations in the Eighteenth Century
- Conclusion Malthus, Demographic Governance and the Limits of Politics
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - Transmutation, Quantification and the Creation of Political Arithmetic
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 April 2022
- Human Empire
- Ideas in Context
- Human Empire
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction Transformations in Demographic Thought
- Chapter 1 Mobility and Mutability in the Early Tudor Body Politic
- Chapter 2 Marginality, Incivility and Degeneration in Elizabethan England and Ireland
- Chapter 3 Beyond the Body Politic: Territory, Population and Colonial Projecting
- Chapter 4 Transmutation, Quantification and the Creation of Political Arithmetic
- Chapter 5 Improving Populations in the Eighteenth Century
- Conclusion Malthus, Demographic Governance and the Limits of Politics
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
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.
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- Human EmpireMobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, pp. 139 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022