Governing Model Populations: Queries, Quantification, and William Petty's “Scale of Salubrity”

Abstract

INTRODUCTIONThe proliferation of scientific questionnaires in the later seventeenth century has long been recognized as an important clue to links between European expansion and transformations in the production of scientific knowledge. As travel - for commercial, political, religious or other purposes - became increasingly common within and beyond Europe, queries for travellers bore witness to the shifting methods and aspirations of natural history, as the pursuit of exotic curios gave way to the systematic collection of empirical data that might ground deeper and broader comparisons between different regions of the globe.2 The emergence of natural -historical questionnaires has also been connected to the early stirrings of recognizably social -scientific efforts, which long depended on analogous forms of collaborative data collection through the epistolary exchange of local observations.3 Preeminent among such efforts was the articulation from around 1660 onward of a 'political arithmetic' employing precise, quantitative demographic and economic observations; yet the role of such quantification in early scientific queries for travellers has attracted little examination. A comparison of various late-seventeenth-century questionnaires with a set of queries from the archive of political arithmetic's inventor suggests that while quantitative questions appeared haphazardly in interrogatories aimed at producing volumes of descriptive, empirical natural history, their systematic deployment in a 'political -arithmetical' questionnaire was linked to the potential for very specific types of data to facilitate future colonial settlement and projections of state power in unfamiliar locales. Here, political arithmetic's sustained use of quantification, displacing more familiar qualitative concerns, played a crucial role in adapting the cosmopolitan methods of natural history to the service of the imperial state. Perhaps more surprisingly, thinking about how this adaptation could be applied depended less on envisioning new bureaucratic machinery for the secular state than on reconfiguring the established church as both a scientific and a governmental agency.When one thinks of scientific travel and European overseas expansion in the early modern period, William Petty 's (1623-87) is not the first name to come to mind. Perhaps it ought to be: his of 1 650s Ireland, a multi-year project that sent thousands of ordinary soldiers ranging across the recently conquered country as surveyors, directed by a series of printed instructions and forms, can surely be considered one of the most ambitious and effective collaborative scientific projects of the early modern period.4 Yet Petty 's intellectual reputation rests chiefly on his later creation of political arithmetic, generally understood as an early form of quantitative economic, demographic or social analysis - more specifically, an endeavour to justify political decisions or legitimate political projects by reference to quantitative data relating to population, social divisions, and economic activity. However closely connected this may have been to his activities in Baconian natural philosophy or his training in medicine, this was a thinner sort of science than the early anthropology, ethnology or natural history more frequently linked to early modern scientific travel, dealing less in rich and marvellous relations than in mundane enumerations.5 After medical studies in the Low Countries and France in the 1640s, and work for the Cromwellian regime in Ireland, Petty's Restoration itinerary consisted almost entirely of shuttling between London and various improvement projects on his Irish estates.6 Influenced by the scientific circle around Samuel Hartlib and by his own survey, he may have planned a natural history of Ireland to supplement or surpass the work of fellow Hartlibians Arnold and Gerard Boate, but it never appeared (though he did eventually release an atlas based on Down Survey maps). …