Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-m8qmq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T22:55:57.043Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660–1750

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2013

Abstract

Current approaches to the history of early modern population thought focus on the state and secular governance, while standard treatments of Restoration and Augustan “political arithmetic” emphasize its economic or social-scientific content. This article recovers nonsecular uses of demographic quantification, excavating the use of political arithmetic in religious polemic between ca. 1660 and ca. 1750. As a form of empirical natural philosophy, political arithmetic suited the polemical needs of latitudinarian Anglicans and others combating deism, atheism, and preadamism; the demographic regularities it revealed furnished evidence of providential solicitude, while the history of population growth was a potential prop for scriptural chronologies. A strand of “sacred” political arithmetic thus contributed to natural theology while modeling—albeit inconsistently—new historical applications for empirical methodology. The article concludes by considering possible causes for the decline of this “sacred” strand of demographic quantification, while suggesting connections between it and better-known secular forms of Enlightenment-era population thought.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2013 

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.)

References

1 On Botero, see Tuck, Richard, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 81, and Descendre, Romain, L’État du monde: Giovanni Botero entre raison d’État et géopolitique (Geneva, 2009)Google Scholar; on Petty, Reungoat, Sabine, William Petty: Observateur des Îles Britanniques (Paris, 2004)Google Scholar, and McCormick, Ted, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Buck, Peter, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics,” Isis 68, no. 1 (March 1977): 6784CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buck, Peter, “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 73, no. 1 (March 1982): 2845CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hacking, Ian, The Emergence of Probability: A Philosophical Study of Early Ideas about Probability, Induction and Statistical Inference, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 2006), 102–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hoppit, Julian, “Political Arithmetic in Eighteenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 49, no. 3 (August 1996): 516–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slack, Paul, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England,” Past and Present 184 (August 2004): 3368CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slack, Paul, “Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England,” Economic History Review 57, no. 4 (November 2004): 607–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Slack, Paul, “Plenty of People”: Perceptions of Population in Early Modern England (Reading, 2011).Google Scholar

2 See Beer, George Louis, The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578–1660 (1908; rpr. Gloucester, 1959), 3253Google Scholar; Furniss, Edgar S., The Position of the Laborer in a System of Nationalism: A Study in the Labor Theories of the Later English Mercantilists (1918; rpr. New York, 1965)Google Scholar; compare Campbell, Mildred, “‘Of People Either Too Few or Too Many’: The Conflict of Opinion on Population and Its Relation to Emigration,” in Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Notestein, ed. Aiken, William Appleton and Henning, Basil Duke (London, 1960), 169201Google Scholar; Cassedy, James H., Demography in America: Beginnings of the Statistical Mind, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, MA, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Glass, D. V., Numbering the People: The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Farnborough, 1973)Google Scholar; Appleby, Joyce, Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton, 1978), 129–57Google Scholar. See also Statt, Daniel, Foreigners and Englishmen: The Controversy Over Immigration and Population, 1660–1760 (Newark, DE, 1995)Google Scholar; Blum, Carol, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth-Century France (Baltimore, 2002)Google Scholar; Rusnock, Andrea, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sussman, Charlotte, “The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations,” Cultural Critique 56 (Winter 2004): 96126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barber, Sarah, “Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion: A Comparative Study of the Placement of Peoples,” in British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Brady, Ciaran and Ohlmeyer, Jane (Cambridge, 2005), 280–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cody, Lisa Forman, Birthing the Nation: Sex, Science, and the Conception of Eighteenth-Century Britons (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Klepp, Susan E., Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tuttle, Leslie, Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (Oxford, 2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 See Letwin, William, The Origins of Scientific Economics (London, 1963), 123–57Google Scholar; Olson, R., The Emergence of the Social Sciences, 1642–1792 (New York, 1993), 5770Google Scholar; Ogborn, Miles, Spaces of Modernity: London's Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York, 1998), 158200Google Scholar; see also Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA, 1990)Google Scholar. On governmentality, see Michel Foucault, “Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Criticism of Political Reason,” Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Stanford University, 10 and 16 October 1979, in Religion and Culture, ed. Carrette, Jeremy R. (New York, 1999), 135–52Google Scholar, and Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin, and Miller, Peter (Chicago, 1991), 87104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Carroll, Patrick, Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (Berkeley, 2006), 113–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Enlightenment population debates, see Tomaselli, Sylvana, “Moral Philosophy and Population Questions in Eighteenth Century Europe,” Population and Development Review 14, Supplement (1988): 729CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Political Economy: The Desire and Needs of Present and Future Generations,” in Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains, ed. Fox, Christopher, Porter, Roy, and Wokler, Robert (Berkeley, 1995), 292322.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Strangeland, Charles Emil, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population: A Study in the History of Economic Theory (New York, 1904)Google Scholar; Bonar, James, Theories of Population: From Raleigh to Arthur Young (1929; rpr. London, 1992)Google Scholar; Johnson, E. A. J., Predecessors of Adam Smith: The Growth of British Economic Thought (New York, 1937)Google Scholar; Hutchinson, E. P., The Population Debate: The Development of Conflicting Theories Up to 1900 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Overbeek, Johannes, History of Population Theories (Rotterdam, 1974)Google Scholar; Hutchison, Terence, Changing Aims in Economics (Oxford, 1992), 15Google Scholar. Compare Skinner, Quentin, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in Visions of Politics I: Regarding Method (Cambridge, 2002), 5789Google Scholar; Tribe, Keith, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (London, 1978), 523Google Scholar; Kreager, Philip, “Histories of Demography: A Review Article,” Population Studies 47, no. 3 (November 1993): 519–39CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

5 Dean, Phyllis, The State and the Economic System: An Introduction to the History of Political Economy (Oxford, 1989), 23Google Scholar; Magnusson, Lars, Mercantilism: The Shaping of an Economic Language (Abingdon, 1994), 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, John A., British Empiricism and Early Political Economy: Gregory King's 1696 Estimates of National Wealth and Population (Westport, CT, 2005)Google Scholar. Compare Finkelstein, Andrea, Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought (Ann Arbor, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See Pincus, Steve, “From Holy Cause to Economic Interest: The Study of Population and the Invention of the State,” in A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, ed. Houston, Alan and Pincus, Steve (Cambridge, 2001), 272–98Google Scholar; Pincus, Steve, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, 2009)Google Scholar. See also Reinert, Sophus, Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Robertson, John, The Case for Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760 (Cambridge, 2005), 325–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hont, Istvan, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 1156.Google Scholar

8 Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols. (London, 1776), 2:121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winch, Donald, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 103.Google Scholar

9 Poovey, Mary, “Between Political Arithmetic and Political Economy,” in Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Bender, John and Marrinan, Michael (Stanford, 2005), 6176Google Scholar. See also Donnelly, Michael, “From Political Arithmetic to Social Statistics: How Some Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Social Sciences Were Implanted,” in The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity: Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850, ed. Heilbron, Johan, Magnusson, Lars, and Wittrock, Björn (Dordrecht, 1998), 225–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Hoppit, “Political Arithmetic,” 516–17; Taylor, British Empiricism, 83.

11 Rohrbasser, Jean-Marc, “William Petty (1623–1687) et le calcul du doublement de la population,” Population 54, nos. 4–5 (July–October 1999): 693705CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nipperdey, Justus, “Johann Peter Süssmilch: From Divine Law to Human Intervention,” Population [English edition] 66, no. 3 (May 2011): 611–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 See Popkin, Richard H., Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, 1987)Google Scholar; Champion, J. A. I., The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge, 1992)Google Scholar; Israel, Jonathan, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Malcolm, Noel, “Hobbes, Ezra, and the Bible: The History of a Subversive Idea,” in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), 383431CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kidd, Colin, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006), 5478CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Livingstone, Davin N., Adam's Ancestors: Race, Religion and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore, 2008).Google Scholar

13 Buchwald, Jed Z. and Feingold, Mordechai, Newton and the Origin of Civilization (Princeton, 2013), 164–94.Google Scholar

14 Poole, William, The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth (Oxford, 2010), 56Google Scholar, 55–74; Rudwick, Martin J. S., “The Shape and Meaning of Earth History,” in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Religion and Science, ed. Lindberg, David C. and Numbers, Ronald L. (Berkeley, 1986), 306Google Scholar. See also Porter, Roy, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain, 1660–1815 (Cambridge, 1977), 6290Google Scholar; Rossi, Paolo, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Cochrane, Lydia G. (Chicago, 1984)Google Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., “Within the Margins: The Definition of Orthodoxy,” in The Margins of Orthodoxy: Heterodox Writing and Cultural Response, 1660–1750, ed. Lund, Roger D. (Cambridge, 1995), 3353CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rappaport, Rhoda, When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750 (Ithaca, 1997).Google Scholar

15 Gaukroger, Stephen, The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford, 2010), 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harrison, Peter, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), 266–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Gaukroger, Collapse, 1–8, 32–34; Nipperdey, “Johann Peter Süssmilch.” A recent collection of essays on French political arithmetic touches on physico-theology only in reference to Süssmilch. Bru, Bernard, “De la physico-théologie démographique à la physique statistique,” in Arithmétique Politique dans la France du XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Martin, Thierry (Paris, 2003), 7188.Google Scholar

17 A review of Graunt's work in the Journal des Sçavans 31 (1666): 359–70Google Scholar, noted (359): “C'est une chose particuliere aux Anglois de faire des Billets de mortalité, c'est à dire des listes qui contiennent combien il naist de personne chaque semaine, combien il en meurt, & quelle est la cause de leur mort.” See Jenner, Mark S. R., “Plague on a Page: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us in Early Modern London,” Seventeenth Century 27, no. 3 (Autumn 2012): 255–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Simon Szreter, “Registration of Identities in Early Modern English Parishes and Amongst the English Overseas,” in Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History, ed. Keith Breckinridge and Simon Szreter, Proceedings of the British Academy 182 (2012): 67–92.

18 Shapiro, Barbara, “Early Modern Intellectual Life: Humanism, Religion and Science in Seventeenth Century England,” History of Science 29, no. 1 (March 1991): 4571CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapiro, Barbara, “Natural Philosophy and Political Periodization: Interregnum, Restoration and Revolution,” in Pincus and Houston, A Nation Transformed: England After the Restoration, 299327.Google Scholar

19 Jacob, Margaret C., The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Ithaca, 1976).Google Scholar

20 Gibson, William, The Church of England, 1688–1832: Unity and Accord (London, 2001), 13Google Scholar; Sirota, Brent S., “The Trinitarian Crisis in Church and State: Religious Controversy and the Making of the Postrevolutionary Church of England, 1687–1702,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (January 2013): 3233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 See, however, Olson, Richard G., “Tory-High Church Opposition to Science and Scientism in the Eighteenth Century: The Works of John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson,” in The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton, ed. Burke, John G. (Berkeley, 1983), 171204.Google Scholar

22 Young, B. W., Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England: Theological Debate from Locke to Burke (Oxford, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pocock, J. G. A., Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols. (Cambridge, 1999–2011), 1:1349CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Young, B. W., “The Union in British History,” in The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar, 174. See also Redwood, John, Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660–1750 (London, 1976)Google Scholar; Shaw, Jane, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, 2006)Google Scholar; Sorkin, David, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics From London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008).Google Scholar

23 See Winship, Michael P., Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment (Baltimore, 1996), 74110Google Scholar; Landsman, Ned C., From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–1760 (Ithaca, 1997), 6370Google Scholar; Kidd, Thomas S., The Protestant Interest: New England after Puritanism (New Haven, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gregory, Jeremy, “Refashioning Puritan New England: The Church of England in British North America, c. 1680–c. 1770,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (2010): 85112.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24 Claydon, Tony, “Daily News and the Construction of Time in Late Stuart England, 1695–1714,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (January 2013): 58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

25 Preston, Thomas R., “Biblical Criticism, Literature, and the Eighteenth-Century Reader,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Rivers, Isabel (New York, 1982), 97126Google Scholar; Arnold, R. J., “‘Learned Lumber’: The Unlikely Survival of Sacred History in the Eighteenth Century,” English Historical Review 125, no. 516 (October 2010): 1139–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 See Thierry Martin, “Introduction: Une arithmétique politique française?” and Damien, Robert, “Prolégomènes français à une science politique future: Vauban, Lavoisier, Volney, Neufchâteau, Chaptal,” in Arithmétique Politique dans la France du XVIIIe Siècle, ed. Martin, Thierry (Paris, 2004), 113 and 17–34Google Scholar, respectively. Compare Slack, “Plenty of People”; Clark, J. C. D., “Providence, Predestination and Progress: Or, Did the Enlightenment Fail?” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 559–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 In 1 Chronicles 21:1 (King James Version), “Satan stood up against Israel, and provoked David to number” the people; see also 2 Samuel 24:10. See Damien, “Prolégomènes”; Cohen, Patricia Cline, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago, 1982), 35Google Scholar; Levitan, Kathrin, A Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2011), 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Foucault, “Omnes.”

28 The first British national census was taken in 1801; civil registration supplanted parish registers from 1836. Szreter, “Registration,” 88–91.

29 Waterman, A. M. C., Revolution, Economics and Religion: Christian Political Economy, 1798–1833 (Cambridge, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Winch, Riches, 221–405.

30 Petty, William, Political Arithmetick (London, 1690)Google Scholar, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691)Google Scholar, and Several Essays in Political Arithmetick (London, 1699)Google Scholar. See Harris, Frances, “Ireland As a Laboratory: The Archive of Sir William Petty,” in Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Hunter, Michael (Woodbridge, 1998), 7390Google Scholar; Aspromourgos, Tony, “The Mind of the Oeconomist: An Overview of the ‘Petty Papers’ Archive,” History of Economic Ideas 9, no. 1 (2001): 39102Google Scholar; McCormick, Petty, 6–8, 259–84.

31 Graunt, John, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made upon the Bills of Mortality (London, 1662)Google Scholar. Bras, Hervé Le, Naissance de la mortalité: L'origine politique de la statistique et de la mortalité (Paris, 2000)Google Scholar, assigns principal authorship to Petty, but most scholars disagree. See McCormick, Petty, 131–32.

32 Graunt, Observations, sig. A3v; Petty, Political Anatomy, sig. A5r; McCormick, Petty, 40–83.

33 See ‘The LCC Burns Journal’: A Manuscript Notebook Containing Workings for Several Projected Works,” in The Earliest Classics: John Graunt and Gregory King, ed. Laslett, Peter (Farnborough, 1973)Google Scholar. King's table appeared as Scheme D” in Davenant, Charles, An Essay upon the Probable Methods of Making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade (London, 1699)Google Scholar, between pages 22 and 23. See Taylor, British Empiricism; Holmes, Geoffrey, “Gregory King and the Social Structure of Pre-Industrial England,” in Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679–1742 (London, 1986), 281308.Google Scholar

34 Hont, Jealousy, 201; D. A. G. Waddell, “The Career and Writings of Charles Davenant (1656–1714)” (DPhil diss., Oxford University, 1954); Pocock, J. G. A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), 423–61.Google Scholar

35 Davenant, Charles, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and On the Trade of England (London, 1698), 2Google Scholar. Aubrey, discussing James Harrington's Rota Club, described Petty's “reducing politics to numbers”; Aubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. Barber, Richard (Woodbridge, 1982), 247.Google Scholar

36 Halley, Edmund, “An Estimate of the Degrees of the Mortality of Mankind, Drawn from Curious Tables of the Births and Funerals at the City of Breslaw,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society [hereafter PTRS] 17 (1693): 596610.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

37 Rusnock, Andrea, “Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon (Chicago, 1999), 53Google Scholar; Hoppit, “Political Arithmetic,” 517; Hacking, Emergence, 92–121. For political arithmetic in Europe, see Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, “Essay de quelques raisonnemens nouveaux sur la vie humaine et sur le nombre des hommes” [1680s?], in Leibniz et les raisonnements sur la vie humaine, ed. Rohrbasser, Jean-Marc and Véron, Jacques (Paris, 2001), 105–23Google Scholar; Süssmilch, Johann Peter, Die göttliche Ordnung in den Veränderungen des menschlichen Geschlechts (Berlin, 1741)Google Scholar; Kersseboom, Willem, Essais d'arithmétique politique, contenant trois traités sur la population de la province de Hollande et Frise Occidentale [1742] (Paris, 1970)Google Scholar; Deparcieux, Antoine, Essai sur les Probabilités de la Durée de la Vie Humaine (Paris, 1746)Google Scholar; Wargentin, Pehr, Tables of Mortality based upon the Swedish Population in 1766 (Stockholm, 1930).Google Scholar

38 See Petty, Political Arithmetick, sig. A4r; compare Wisdom of Solomon (Apocrypha), 11:20. See Higgs, Edward, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens Since 1500 (Basingstoke, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), 118CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, “Political Arithmetic,” 231; Levitan, British Census. Compare Sussman, “Colonial Afterlife,” 101–04.

40 Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 19–24; Jenner, “Plague”; Warrington, John, ed., The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 3 vols. (London, 1953), 2:116–65Google Scholar; Defoe, Daniel, A Journal of the Plague Year (Mineola, 2001), 154–55Google Scholar. See Graunt, Observations, 4–7.

41 Szreter, “Registration.” On American colonial practice, see Shapiro, S., “Development of Birth Registration and Birth Statistics in the United States,” Population Studies 4, no. 1 (June 1950): 86111CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gutman, Robert, “Birth and Death Registration in Massachusetts: I. The Colonial Background, 1639–1800,” Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 36, no. 4 (October 1958): 5874CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Cassedy, Demography, 16–19; Klepp, Susan E., “The Swift Progress of Population”: A Documentary Study of Philadelphia's Growth, 1642–1859 (Philadelphia, 1991), 315.Google Scholar

42 Graunt, Observations, 13–15. See also Birch, Thomas, A Collection of the Yearly Bills of Mortality, from 1657 to 1758 inclusive (London, 1759), 47.Google Scholar

43 See, for example, Finkelstein, Harmony; Poovey, Mary, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, 1998), 92143CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skinner, Quentin, “Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 8, no. 2 (January 1966): 153–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

44 McCormick, Petty, 168–258.

45 Graunt, Observations, sig. A3v, 2.

46 McCormick, Petty, 40–83.

47 Boate, Gerard, Irelands Naturall History (London, 1657)Google Scholar, sig. A3r–A3v. See Barnard, Toby, “The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland,” in Samuel Hartlib and the Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, ed. Greengrass, Mark, Leslie, Michael, and Raylor, Timothy (Cambridge, 1994), 281–97Google Scholar; Fox, Adam, “Printed Questionnaires, Research Networks, and the Discovery of the British Isles, 1650–1800,” Historical Journal 53, no. 3 (September 2010): 593621.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 Petty, William to Hartlib, Samuel [early 1649], Hartlib Papers: A Complete Text and Image Database of the Papers of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62), 2nd ed. on CD-ROM (Sheffield, 2002)Google Scholar, 7/123/2a.

49 Bacon, Francis, The New Organon, ed. Jardine, Lisa and Silverthorne, Michael (Cambridge, 2000), 235–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Graunt, Observations, sig. A3v; William Petty, “Materialls for a New History of Life & death,” Add. MS 72897, ff. 157–58v, British Library, printed in Marquis of Lansdowne [Petty-Fitzmaurice, H. W. E.] (ed.), The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols. (London, 1927), 1:1889Google Scholar. See also Shapiro, Barbara, “Empiricism and English Political Thought, 1550–1720,” Eighteenth-Century Thought l (2003): 133Google Scholar; McCormick, Ted, “Governing Model Populations: Queries, Quantification, and William Petty's ‘Scale of Salubrity,’” History of Science 51, no. 2 (June 2013): 179–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

50 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, 3 vols. (London, 1739), 1:4.Google Scholar

51 Smail, Dan, “In the Grip of Sacred History,” American Historical Review 110, no. 5 (December 2005): 1343.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

52 Don Allen, Cameron, The Legend of Noah: Renaissance Rationalism in Art, Science, and Letters (Urbana, 1963)Google Scholar; Kidd, Forging, 19–78; Livingstone, Adam's Ancestors, 1–25.

53 See Grafton, Anthony T., “Joseph Scaliger and Historical Chronology: The Rise and Fall of a Discipline,” History and Theory 14, no. 2 (May 1975): 156–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rudwick, “Shape,” 301–02.

54 Livingstone, Adam's Ancestors, 1–25.

55 Grafton, “Scaliger”; Rappaport, Geologists, 76–81; Rossi, Dark Abyss, 121–92. See also Marshall, P. J. and Williams, Glyndwr, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, 1982), 98127.Google Scholar

56 Allen, Legend, 66–91; Buchwald and Feingold, Newton, 164–94.

57 Malcolm, “Hobbes”; Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 445–76; Rappaport, Geologists, 72–76; Popkin, La Peyrère.

58 Grafton, “Scaliger,” 171; Ussher, James, The Annals of the World (London, 1658)Google Scholar, 1. See Jackson, Patrick Wyse, The Chronologers’ Quest: Episodes in the Search for the Age of the Earth (Cambridge, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strathmann, Ernest A., “Ralegh on the Problems of Chronology,” Huntington Library Quarterly 11, no. 2 (February 1948): 129–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Parry, Graham, The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 1995), 130–56Google Scholar; Ford, Alan, James Ussher: Theology, History, and Politics in Early-Modern Ireland and England (Oxford, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

59 Barr, James, “Pre-Scientific Chronology: The Bible and the Origin of the World,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 143, no. 3 (September 1999): 379–87Google Scholar; Jackson, Chronologer's Quest, 13–31.

60 Allen, Legend, 71.

61 Buchwald and Feingold, Newton, 164–94.

62 Stillingfleet, Edward, Origines Sacrae; or, a Rational Account of the Grounds of Christian Faith (London, 1662), 556Google Scholar. On Temporarius, see Rosenberg, Daniel and Grafton, Anthony, Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline (Princeton, 2010), 7071Google Scholar. See also Egerton, Frank N. III, “The Longevity of the Patriarchs: A Topic in the History of Demography,” Journal of the History of Ideas 27, no. 4 (October–December 1966): 575–84.Google Scholar

63 Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, 556; Buchwald and Feingold, Newton, 164–94. See Exodus 1.

64 Hale, Matthew, The Primitive Origination of Mankind (London, 1677), 145, 205–06Google Scholar. For Petty's judgment of Hale, see Marquis of Lansdowne, ed., The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676–1687 (London, 1928) [hereafter PSC], 4448Google Scholar. See also Lewis, Rhodri, “William Petty's Anthropology: Religion, Colonialism, and the Problem of Human Diversity,” Huntington Library Quarterly 74, no. 2 (June 2011), 261–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cromartie, Alan, Sir Matthew Hale, 1609–1676: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge, 1995), 137–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sir Matthew Hale on the Gradual Increase of Mankind,” Population and Development Review 36, no. 4 (December 2010): 831–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

65 Compare Buchwald and Feingold, Newton, 164–94, which stresses the difference between these groups rather than the common features of their encounter with political arithmetic.

66 Peyrère, Isaac La, Men before Adam (London, 1656)Google Scholar; Peyrère, Isaac La, A Theological Systeme Upon That Presvpposition, That Men Were before Adam (London, 1655)Google Scholar. See Romans 5:12–14.

67 La Peyrère, Theological Systeme, 239–41, 248–58. See Popkin, La Peyrère, 115–76; Livingstone, Adam's Ancestors; Kidd, Forging, 79–167.

68 William Petty to Robert Southwell, 20 August 1681, in PSC, 92.

69 Graunt, Observations, 47–51.

70 Ibid., 51–52.

71 King, “LCC Burns Journal,” 101–03; Leibniz, “Essay,” 121.

72 Arbuthnot, John, “An Argument for Divine Providence, Taken from the Constant Regularity Observ'd in the Births of Both Sexes,” PTRS 27 (1712): 186–90.Google Scholar

73 Eames, John, “A Short Account of Mr. Kersseboom's Essay . . . upon the Number of People in Holland and West-Friezland, as Also in Harlem, Gouda and the Hague; Drawn from the Bills of Births, Burials, or Marriages, in Those Places,” PTRS 40 (1737–38): 401Google Scholar; Short, Thomas, New Observations, Natural, Moral, Civil, Political, and Medical, on City, Town, and Country Bills of Mortality (London, 1750), 180.Google Scholar

74 de Secondat, Charles-Louis, de Montesquieu, baron, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Cohler, Anne M., Miller, Basia Carolyn, and Stone, Harold Samuel (Cambridge, 1989), 266Google Scholar; de Beausobre, Louis, Nouvelles Considerations sur les Années Climatériques, la Longueur de la Vie de l'Homme, la Propagation du Genre Humain, & la Vraie Puissance des Etats, Considérée dans la Plus Grande Population (Paris, 1757), 19.Google Scholar

75 Derham, William, Physico-Theology; Or, a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from His Works of Creation, 3rd ed. (London, 1714), 169.Google Scholar

76 Ibid., 171–78.

77 Brooks, Colin, “Projecting, Political Arithmetic and the Act of 1695,” English Historical Review 97, no. 382 (January 1982): 3153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

78 Taylor, John A., “Gregory King's Analysis of Clerical Livings for John Chamberlayne and the Governors of Queen Anne's Bounty,” Historical Journal 39, no. 1 (January 1996): 241–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Spaeth, Donald A., The Church in an Age of Danger: Parsons and Parishioners, 1660–1740 (Cambridge, 2000), 3058.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

79 Hoppit, “Political Arithmetic,” 517.

80 Graunt, Observations, 63.

81 Focusing on Graunt's use of averages, Buchwald and Feingold (Newton, 44–106) downplay the significance of political arithmetic; but however flawed, Graunt's use of “doubling periods” to estimate of global population increase represented a new application of empirical methodology to history.

82 William Petty, “The Scale of Creatures,” Osborn Shelves MS fb.135, document 3, f. 8v, Beinecke Library. See Lewis, Rhodri, ed., William Petty and the Order of Nature: An Unpublished Manuscript Treatise (Tempe, 2012)Google Scholar; McCormick, William Petty, 224–30.

83 Petty to Southwell, 20 August 1681 and 17 February 1682/3, in PSC, 92, 115; Petty, Essays, 16–25. Letters from September 1685 discuss “full peopling” in relation to scripture; PSC, 143–68.

84 Petty, Essays, 25.

85 Ibid., 22; PSC, 115.

86 See, for example, Hume, David, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London, 1779)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also John, Henry St., Bolingbroke, viscount, Historical Writings (Chicago, 1972), 44.Google Scholar

87 Shapiro, Barbara, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca, 2000), 163–88Google Scholar; Shapiro, “Early Modern Intellectual Life”; Jacob, Newtonians.

88 Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, 556.

89 Ibid., 556–58.

90 Livingstone, Adam's Ancestors, 53–54; Egerton, “Longevity.”

91 Warren, Erasmus, Geologia; Or, A Discourse Concerning the Earth Before the Deluge (London, 1690), 273–79Google Scholar; Beaumont, John, Considerations on a Book, Entituled the Theory of the Earth (London, 1693), 8897Google Scholar; Miln, Robert, A Course of Physico-Theological Lectures Upon the State of the World, From the Creation to the Deluge (Carlisle, 1786), 256.Google Scholar

92 Stillingfleet, Origines Sacrae, 1–24.

93 Hale, Primitive Origination, 204.

94 Ibid., 92.

95 Ibid., 97–110.

96 Ibid., 131.

97 Ibid., 145. See Livingstone, Adam's Ancestors, 53.

98 Bentley, Richard, The Folly and Unreasonableness of Atheism (London, 1693)Google Scholar. See Jacob, Newtonians, 162–200.

99 Bentley, Folly, 20.

100 Jacob, Newtonians, 32, 61, 106–15; Rossi, Dark Abyss, 33–41; Gaukroger, Collapse, 32–35.

101 Burnet, Thomas, The Theory of the Earth (London, 1684)Google Scholar; Force, James, William Whiston, Honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985), 3340Google Scholar; Levine, Dr. Woodward's Shield, 18–47.

102 Burnet, Theory, 22–23.

103 Ibid., 17.

104 Ibid., 181.

105 Ibid., 185.

106 Whiston, William, A New Theory of the Earth, from Its Original to the Consummation of All Things (London, 1696).Google Scholar

107 Nicholls, William, A Conference with a Theist (London, 1696), 68Google Scholar. Nicholls seems to have authored a passage on racial difference (135–49) attributed by Livingstone (Adam's Ancestors, 54) to the Universal History (London, 1736).Google Scholar

108 Nicholls, Conference, 69–74.

109 Ibid., 78.

110 Ibid., 79.

111 Whiston, New Theory, 174–98.

112 Ibid., 388; Petty, Essays, 18.

113 Warren, Geologia, 274, 279–80.

114 Beaumont, Considerations, 95–97.

115 Woodward, John, An Essay Toward a Natural History of the Earth (London, 1695).Google Scholar

116 Even in the early Stuart period, the line of demarcation between miracles, providences, and prodigious but entirely natural events was very hazy indeed.”Walsham, Alexandra, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 230Google Scholar. See also Shaw, Miracles.

117 Cotton Mather to Richard Waller, 29 November 1712, EL/M2/33, Royal Society Library, excerpted in Mather, Cotton, “An Extract of Several Letters From Cotton Mather,” PTRS 29 (1714): 71Google Scholar. See Winship, Seers, 29–52, 74–110; Kidd, Protestant Interest, 1–50; Gregory, “Refashioning”; see also Jeske, Jeffrey, “Cotton Mather: Physico-Theologian,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 4 (October–December 1986): 583–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On Mather's physico-theology see Mather, Cotton, The Christian Philosopher, ed. Solberg, Winton U. (Urbana, 1994).Google Scholar

118 Mather to Waller, EL/M2/33, Royal Society Library; Graunt, Observations, 62.

119 Mather, Cotton, Biblia Americana, Volume 1: Genesis, ed. Smolinski, Reiner (Grand Rapids, 2010), 1017.Google Scholar

120 For example, Mather, Cotton, Corderius Americanus: An Essay on the Good Education of Children (Boston, 1708)Google Scholar, Seasonable Thoughts Upon Mortality. A Sermon Occasioned by the Raging of a Mortal Sickness in the Colony of Connecticut, and the Many Deaths of Our Brethren There (Boston, 1712)Google Scholar, and Life Swiftly Passing and Quickly Ending: A Very Short Sermon, on the Shortness of Humane Life (Boston, 1716)Google Scholar. See Smith, Daniel Scott and Hacker, J. David, “Cultural Demography: New England Deaths and the Puritan Perception of Risk,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 26, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 367–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

121 Mather's stance still puzzles medical historians. See Williams, Gareth, Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox (Basingstoke, 2010), 96126CrossRefGoogle Scholar; compare Stearns, Raymond Phineas, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana, 1970), 403–26.Google Scholar

122 Nary, Cornelius, A New History of the World (Dublin, 1720), 30.Google Scholar

123 Jackson, John, Chronological Antiquities, 3 vols. (London, 1752), 1:50.Google Scholar

124 Bedford, The Scripture Chronology Demonstrated by Astronomical Calculations (London, 1730)Google Scholar, 205b. See Newton, Isaac, The Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Amended (London, 1728)Google Scholar; Mandelbrote, Scott, “Bedford, Arthur (bap. 1668, d. 1745),” in Oxford Dictionary of Natiopnal Biography (Oxford, 2004)Google Scholar, online edn., http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1927 (accessed July 22, 2012).

125 Cumberland, Richard, Origines Gentium Antiquissimae (London, 1724), 148.Google Scholar

126 Ibid., 156.

127 William Petty, Political Anatomy, 26.

128 Shuckford, Samuel, The Sacred and Prophane History of the World Connected, 3 vols. (London, 1728–1737)Google Scholar; Arnold, “Learned Lumber,” 1144–45; Preston, “Biblical Criticism,” 101.

129 Shuckford, History, 1:140.

130 Clayton, Robert, The Chronology of the Hebrew Bible Vindicated (London, 1747), 53.Google Scholar

131 Ibid., 51.

132 Ibid., 52. See Graunt, Observations, 45; Petty, William, Observations Upon the Dublin-Bills of Mortality, MDCLXXXI (London, 1683), 2Google Scholar; Swift, Jonathan, A Modest Proposal (Dublin, 1729), 9, 1112.Google Scholar

133 Cockburn, Patrick, An Enquiry into the Truth and Certainty of the Mosaic Deluge (London, 1750), 92.Google Scholar

134 Ibid., 80–90.

135 Ibid., 61–62.

136 Worthington, William, The Scripture-Theory of the Earth (London, 1773), 210–11Google Scholar. Compare, however, Newton, Thomas, The Works of the Right Reverend Thomas Newton, D.D. Late Lord Bishop of Bristol, And Dean of St. Paul's, London (London, 1787), 157.Google Scholar

137 Petty, William, The Discourse . . . Concerning the Use of Duplicate Proportion in Sundry Important Particulars (London, 1674), 8288Google Scholar; McCormick, Petty, 217–20.

138 Howard, Philip, The Scriptural History of the Earth and of Mankind (London, 1797), 162Google Scholar. This made sense of Sarah's pregnancy (see Genesis 17:16–19 and 18:10–19) at the age of 90—rather young for proponents of late puberty.

139 Hume, David, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Miller, Eugene F. (Indianapolis, 1987), 377464Google Scholar; Arnold, “Learned Lumber,” 1164–65.

140 See de Secondat, Charles-Louis, de Montesquieu, baron, Lettres Persanes (Cologne, 1754), 88119Google Scholar; Buchwald and Feingold, Newton.

141 Sheehan, Jonathan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, 2005).Google Scholar

142 See Kersseboom, Essais, 38; Brakenridge, William, “A Letter . . . concerning the Number of People in England,” PTRS 49 (175–56): 275Google Scholar; Brakenridge, William, “A Letter… Containing an Answer to the Account of the Numbers and Increase of the People of England,” PTRS 50 (1757–58): 472Google Scholar; Forster, Richard, “An Extract of the Register of the Parish of Great Shefford, Near Lamborne, in Berkshire, for Ten Years: With Observations on the Same,” PTRS 50 (1757–58): 358Google Scholar. See also Glass, Numbering, 11–40, 47–77.

143 Short, Thomas, A General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, &c. in Sundry Places and different Times, 2 vols. (London, 1749)Google Scholar, New Observations, and A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England, and Several Countries Abroad (London, 1767)Google Scholar; Rusnock, Vital Accounts, 143–72.

144 Short, New Observations, xi–xii.

145 Ibid., 13.

146 Ibid., 236–41.

147 Ibid., 1.

148 Ibid., 249–57.

149 Ibid., 259–61.

150 Malthus, Thomas Robert, An Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Effects the Future Improvement of Society (London, 1798).Google Scholar

151 Waterman, Revolution, 15–112.

152 Each appears in Hale's Primitive Origination; see “Sir Matthew Hale.”

153 Derham, Physico-Theology, 177.

154 Ibid., 178.

155 Cockburn, Enquiry, 57. See also Parker, Benjamin, A Review of the State of the Antediluvian World (London, 1748), 5152.Google Scholar

156 Malthus, Essay, 365.