In his letter on inoculation (1733), Voltaire noted that the “Christian countries of Europe” considered the English “Fools and Madmen. Fools, because they give their Children the small-pox to prevent their catching it; and Mad-men, because they wantonly communicate a certain and dreadful Distemper to their Children, merely to prevent an uncertain Evil.” The English, on the other hand, he continued, “call the rest of the Europeans cowardly and unnatural. Cowardly, because they are afraid of putting their Children to a little Pain; unnatural, because they expose them to die one Time or other of the Small-pox.” This wide gulf separating English and French views of inoculation was not bridged until late in the eighteenth century, when the death of Louis XV from smallpox in 1774 silenced most opponents. This is not to say that there were no individuals who promoted inoculation in France – many of the philosophes were outspoken advocates. Voltaire's letter on inoculation, wedged between his letters on English government and the English philosophers Bacon, Newton, and Locke, literally placed inoculation on the agenda of enlightened subjects and, at the same time, cemented its association with the English.

The origin of quantitative studies of population is most often traced to a single book: John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality published in 1662. In this modest volume, Graunt, a London tradesman, argued that “Trade and Government may be made more certain and Regular” through the application of arithmetic, and that knowledge of “how many People there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religion, Trade, Rank, or Degree, &c.” provided a fair method “to balance Parties and Factions both in Church and State.” Writing in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War, Graunt was keenly aware of the suffering caused by religious intolerance and economic turmoil. He also felt the widespread desire for order and stability after Charles II's ascension to the throne. Through quantification, Graunt sought to construct a new form of knowledge that could provide a trustworthy resource for reducing conflict, maintaining political equilibrium, and cultivating commercial prosperity.

Graunt's friend and patron William Petty fervently embraced the new project and coined a name for Graunt's method: political arithmetic. Petty shared Graunt's confidence in the certainty and regularity of mathematics.

During the 1750s and 1760s in the county of Suffolk, the English surgeon Robert Sutton developed a new inoculation technique that produced a milder case of smallpox and greatly reduced the risks of dying. Instead of making a deep incision, Sutton made a very slight puncture. His son, Daniel Sutton, followed his father's practice and popularized the new procedure. “The lancet being charged with the smallest perceivable quantity (and the smaller the better) of unripe, crude or watery matter,” Daniel Sutton explained, “immediately introduce it by puncture, obliquely, between the scarf [epidermis] and true skin [dermis], barely sufficient to draw blood.” Daniel Sutton became a prolific inoculator and cultivated the practice of general inoculations, where all the inhabitants of a small town or village would be treated at once. He and his partners claimed to have inoculated 55,000 persons between 1760 and 1767, “of which number six only died.”

When inoculation was first introduced in England, physicians and surgeons had interpreted the practice in humoral terms and deemed it necessary to prepare an individual for the procedure. For up to a month prior to the actual incision, the patient would be bled, purged, and put on a low diet.

In 1798, Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in which he sought to convince the public of the threat of overpopulation after decades of debate over depopulation. Malthus's fear of overpopulation differed significantly from the long-standing anxiety over depopulation. The latter, as we have seen, was treated as a fundamental impediment to the wealth and strength of a nation, and accordingly, attention focused almost entirely on the external threats to a nation with a small or diminishing population: insufficient number of men to bear arms, too few laborers to till the fields, a decline in commerce and learning. Juxtapose this scenario with the internal threats provoked by overpopulation: hunger, death, and possible rebellion. Malthus's question was not one of good or despotic government, but of the ability to govern at all. Only an event as disruptive as the French Revolution could have produced such a radical change of perspective. The internal threats posed by the people of Paris, rather than the external threats of foreign armies, were held responsible for the excesses of the events in France. Looking around his own country, Malthus could only assume that the dislocations in population brought on by manufacturing would lead inevitably to a similar bloody outcome.

Malthus was not alone in expounding this emerging internal danger. Politicians in both Britain and France perceived the same unruly possibility, and for this reason, both governments imposed a national census in the early years of the nineteenth century.

Just as the fear of plague led to the collection and publication of the London bills of mortality, which Graunt had so creatively used in his Natural and Political Observations, smallpox stimulated the development of medical arithmetic during the eighteenth century. Although smallpox had a significantly lower fatality rate than plague, its impact on public life was almost as great. Numerous members of the royalty succumbed to smallpox, including Queen Mary of England in 1694 and Louis XV of France in 1774. Smallpox caused disfigurement, blindness, and widespread suffering, which haunted the popular imagination. But it was not just the experience or fear of smallpox that led individuals to analyze its mortality rates. As with plague, the hope of preventive measures to offset the incidence of smallpox played an important role. Quarantine and fleeing potentially risky environments for safer climes were standard public health measures used to prevent or at least to limit plague epidemics. However, there existed a more potent preventive measure for smallpox: inoculation.

Inoculation provided an individual with a measure of safety – of immunity – against future smallpox epidemics.

In his brilliantly satirical Lettres persanes (1721), the French philosophe Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) asked somewhat seriously whether the modern world was less populated than the ancient world and answered a resounding yes. “After a calculation as exact as may be in the circumstances,” he asserted without providing any evidence of such calculations, “I have found that there are upon the earth hardly one-tenth part of the people which there were in ancient times. And the astonishing thing is, that the depopulation goes on daily: if it continues, in ten centuries the earth will be a desert.” Montesquieu not only saw the world's population as declining, but even more fundamentally, regarded it as changing. Population had a history as well as a future.

In mercantilist writings, population had generally been treated as a static or finite entity, and questions focused on geographical comparison: Was London larger than Paris? Was Holland more densely populated than England? By contrast, Montesquieu focused attention on temporal comparison and the dynamics of population – what the French called the movement of population. His dire prediction for a dramatic decline in population was regarded by contemporaries with alarm and propelled the subject of depopulation into the realm of public controversy throughout Europe.

This book is about the activity of counting – specifically the counting of births and deaths – during the long eighteenth century. From the 1660s on, the numbers of born or dead, it was argued, would shed light on numerous political and medical issues. Yet despite this emerging desire for numbers, there were almost no government institutions, either at the national or local level, to collect and record these numbers. Rather, it was individuals from rural clergy to metropolitan physicians who did the counting. These political and medical arithmeticians, as they were called, invented ingenious methods of quantifying. They counted not just the number of christenings or burials in a specific geographic area but also, and often more importantly, different groups of individuals identified and classified by particular taxonomic schemes. These activities were as much about what to count as about how to count: The two were inextricable. Arithmeticians, in this way, brought quantitative analyses to bear on discussions of medical practice and therapy, salubrity and fecundity, and the growth or decline of population. Vital accounts – the numbers of dead and born – became, in short, the quantitative measure of public health and welfare.

Counting, Samuel Johnson told James Boswell in 1783, “brings everything to a certainty, which before floated in the mind indefinitely.” Johnson was not the only one to admire the bracing effects of counting.

Introduction

The received wisdom of the past 200 years describes the traditional Indian concept of time as cyclic, excluding all other forms and incorporating an endless repetition of cycles. This was in contrast to what was perceived as the essentially linear time of European civilisation. Implicit in this statement is also an insistence that cyclic time precludes a sense of history, a view which contributed to the theory that Indian civilisation was ahistorical. Historical consciousness it was said, required time to be linear, and to move like an arrow linking the beginning to a final eschatological end. Concepts of time and a sense of history were thus interwoven.

Early European scholars working on India searched for histories of India from Sanskrit sources but were unable to discover what they recognised as histories. The exception was said to be Kalhana's Rajatarangini, a history of Kashmir written in the 12th century. It is indeed a most impressive pre-modern history of a region, but it is not an isolated example, since this genre finds expression in other regional chronicles, even if the others were not so impressive. These others were ignored, perhaps because they were less known to European scholarship; perhaps because if Indian civilisation were to be characterised by an absence of history it would become all the more necessary that Indian history be ‘discovered’ through the research of scholars who came to be labelled as Orientalists.

What is time? We are all too familiar with our inability to escape the inexorable passage of time, and yet we are hard-pressed to say what time is. St Augustine famously replied to this question by saying that he knew the answer as long as no one asked him for it, but that as soon as he tried to explain it he no longer knew. Are we now, more than a millennium and a half after St Augustine found himself in this unfortunate position, better equipped to shed some light on the nature of time?

St Augustine's problem stems at least in part from the fact that the question of the nature of time is multifaceted in a manner in which few other subjects are. Each questioner will emphasise a different aspect of the question ‘What is time?’. So, from different perspectives, we find ourselves asking whether time is linear or cyclic, whether it is endless, whether it is possible to travel in time, how the experience of the flow of time arises, how our own internal clocks are regulated and how our language captures the temporality of our existence.

The contributions to this volume reflect this multifacetedness. No attempt is made to devise a single conclusive answer to the question of the nature of time. Instead, eight eminent researchers explore how investigations in their respective fields impinge on questions about the nature of time.