Human Empire
Human Empire
Arguing that demographic thought begins not with quantification but in attempts to control the qualities of people, Human Empire traces two transformations spanning the early modern period. First was the emergence of population as an object of governance through a series of engagements in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Ireland, and colonial North America, influenced by humanist policy, reason of state, and natural philosophy, and culminating in the creation of political arithmetic. Second was the debate during the long eighteenth century over the locus and limits of demographic agency, as church, civil society, and private projects sought to mobilize and manipulate different marginalized and racialized groups – and as American colonists offered their own visions of imperial demography. This innovative, engaging study examines the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and governance and connects the history of demographic ideas with their early modern intellectual, political, and colonial contexts.
- Emphasizes the concrete impact (and human costs) of sometimes very abstract subject matter
- Combines examinations of major texts, authors and policies with lesser-known projects and manuscript sources
- Shifts focus away from quantification and towards efforts to control the mobility and qualities of people
Reviews & endorsements
'Well researched, clearly argued, and engagingly written, 'Human Empire' provides a multi-faceted account of demographic thinking from the early sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century in the British Atlantic world and deserves a wide readership.' Markku Peltonen, Journal of British Studies
'… serves not only as a stimulating account of how population came to emerge as an object of both knowledge and government: it is equally a vigorous restatement of the coherence of the early modern period as a critical period of intellectual change, with ramifications for how we continue to understand populations and their mobility today.' Thomas Leng, Intellectual History Review
Product details
May 2024Paperback
9781009124614
310 pages
229 × 151 × 16 mm
0.454kg
Available
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Transformations in demographic thought
- 1. Mobility and mutability in the early Tudor body politic
- 2. Marginality, incivility and degeneration in Elizabethan England and Ireland
- 3. Beyond the body politic: territory, population and colonial projecting
- 4. Transmutation, quantification and the creation of political arithmetic
- 5. Improving populations in the eighteenth century
- Conclusion: Malthus, demographic governance and the limits of politics
- Afterword.
