Since nobody asked, here's a thread on Sir William Petty (1623-1687), who I wrote a book about and have never escaped -- and who is arguably Relevant, or at least interesting to think about, now.
Keywords: Colonialism, science, quantification, government, political economy
Keywords: Colonialism, science, quantification, government, political economy
Google Petty and you're likely to find him described as a pioneer economist or demographer; Marx thought him a founder of political economy, and Petty himself invented something he called "political arithmetic".
Looking back from an era neck-deep in quantitative data, we are apt to see in Petty's description of his invention -- as an application of "Number, Weight, and Measure" to policy -- an anticipation of modern statistics. Petty would like that.
But neither his numbers (based mostly on mortality bills or parish registers) nor his techniques (taking means, extrapolating from partial data using multipliers) were, in themselves, new. What was new were the promises he made about what they could do.
One big thing Petty wanted to do was turn the Irish (who had risen in 1641, to be bloodily suppressed in 1649-52, and subsequently expropriated -- not least by Petty himself) into English. As he put it, "to transmute one into the other".
This was not new, either, in a sense. English colonization schemes in Ireland had been going on for a long time, and ideas about preventing "degeneration" by mixing with the Irish -- and about "civilizing" the Irish themselves -- occupied 16th-century policy-makers.
But Petty brought both quantification and a self-consciously scientific attitude to the problem. So he estimated the size of the Irish population (more specifically, that part of it living in a "non-English" manner). And he estimated the number of marriages taking place annually.
And, having done that, he proposed to forcibly "exchange" young Irish women with their English counterparts, thousands at a time. The Irish women would vanish, apparently, spread thinly across 10,000 English parishes -- made into servants, perhaps.
But the English women would become the engine of Ireland's transformation. "Impressed" into service like so many sailors -- but, as Petty put it, to prevent rather than wage war -- they would marry Irish men and rear their children to speak, dress, and live in English ways.
In various manuscripts Petty estimated that this "transmutation"* could be completed in anywhere from 20 down to 9 years, depending on the scale of the forced migration involved.
(*As a physician familiar with alchemical work, he used the metaphor advisedly.)
(*As a physician familiar with alchemical work, he used the metaphor advisedly.)
From one angle, the "Exchange of Women" and the whole "transmutation of the Irish into English" look like baroque fantasies of social engineering. Which... they were. Though Petty sent proposals to kings and vice-regents, no such project ever got off the ground.
On the other hand, forced migration was hardly unthinkable. The expulsion of the Jews and the Moors from Iberia was well known; the Huguenots would be driven out of France as Petty wrote. Within the Spanish and Ottoman empires, large populations were relocated systematically.
Nor were "planned" marriage schemes unheard of. Petty may or may not have known about the "Filles du Roi", sent to New France to speed population there; he himself suggested that English colonists "purchase" indigenous girls in Virginia to keep English women reproducing at home.
And, of course, Petty wrote in the 1660s-80s: the decades during which English involvement in the slave trade, and English colonial reliance on enslaved labor, really took off. Petty did not write much about slavery, but enough to make clear that it figured in his thinking.
And although Petty's wilder schemes never got anywhere, the same contexts, the same challenges, and the same thinking underlie his "canonical" contributions to economic thought. He himself had considerable influence, and he also reflected broader trends.
So an important context for Petty's "political economy" was 17th-century pro-natalism; another was colonial expansion. Another was the politics of religion: Petty also suggested exchanging different religious populations to prevent rebellion in England, Scotland, and Ireland.
His numbers -- his "demographic" concerns, concerns that helped shape quantitative demographic thinking -- were *overtly* political. Quantification and measurement were marketed in terms of their power to produce desirable (useful, loyal, industrious, large) populations.
"Number, weight, and measure" were not neutral or obvious objects of knowledge, but tools for defining and manipulating objects of government -- often, for capturing and changing qualities of specific groups. In an era before statistics were everywhere, this use *justified* them.
More than this, though, Petty intimated a vision of government as the potentially constant manipulation of populations. Ireland was an extreme case, but even in England he envisioned channeling people into different professions based on need (as determined through calculations).
He suggested turning parish priests into systematic data-gatherers not only of vital statistics, but also of weather and climate, as well as disasters -- all of which information they would then both relay up through the church hierarchy and put to use in sermons to their flocks.
He died in 1687 and a revolution started the following year. But the 18th century merely amplified ideas about exploiting and transforming ("improving") populations, among other resources -- whether the agent of this was the crown, parliament, planters, companies, or charities.
Opinions about demographic trends changed. Calculations grew more complex. The axis of concern about "qualities" varied: industrious vs idle, Anglican vs Dissenter, moral vs dissolute. In colonial contexts especially, colour loomed large (read Franklin or Jefferson for examples).
Yet the desire -- even the perceived public duty -- to govern these qualities persisted, while the instrumental uses of quantification in these efforts, the refinements of technique at calculators' disposal, and the range of institutional forms that solutions took all multiplied.
But boundaries between groups hardened by the later 18th century. "Race" became an apparently immutable fact. The efficacy and the aptness of "reforms" that would elevate people above their station were questioned. "Nature", or human nature, promised to thwart ambitious projects.
These were the ambitions Malthus condemned in his attacks on "perfectibility". His Essay (1798) emptied the space from which earlier thinkers sought to control population, leaving nothing between an inexorable Nature and weak individuals.
In terms of canonical stature, and in his ventriloquism of a certain kind of politics as the voice of Nature, Malthus won out. In terms of our ongoing commitment to controlling the qualities of people, and to dressing ideology in the guise of numbers, we're also Petty's heirs.
