Book ID: CBB466997778

The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War (2019)

unapi

Hartmann, Heinrich (Author)
Glebe, Ellen Yutzy (Translator)


Glebe, Ellen Yutzy
MIT Press


Publication Date: 2019
Physical Details: 280 pp.
Language: English

How data gathered from national conscriptions in pre–World War I Europe influenced understandings of population fitness and redefined society as a collective body. In pre–World War I Europe, individual fitness was increasingly related to building and preserving collective society. Army recruitment offered the most important opportunity to screen male citizens' fitness, raising questions of how to define fitness for soldiers and how to translate this criteria outside the military context. In this book, Heinrich Hartmann explores the historical circumstances that shaped collective understandings of fitness in Europe before World War I and how these were intertwined with a fear of demographic decline and degeneration. This dynamic gained momentum through the circulation of knowledge among European nations, but also through the scenarios of military confrontations. Hartmann provides a science history of military statistics in Germany, France, and Switzerland in the decades preceding World War I, considering how information gathered during national conscriptions generated data about the health and fitness of the population. Defined by masculine concepts, conscription examinations went far beyond the individuals they tested and measured. Scholars of the time aspired to pin down the “nation” in concrete numerical terms, drawing on data from examinations to redefine society as a “collective body” that could be counted, measured, and examined. The Body Populace explores the historical specificity and contingency of data-gathering techniques, recounts their uses and abuses, and provides a timely contribution to the growing historiography of Big Data. It sheds light on a crucial moment in nineteenth and early twentieth century European history―when statistical data and demographical knowledge shaped new notions of masculinity, fostered fears of degeneration, and gave rise to eugenic thinking.

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Reviewed By

Review Dirk Bönker (2020) Review of "The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War". American Historical Review (pp. 1954-1955). unapi

Review Morgane Labbé (2020) Review of "The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 406-407). unapi

Review Jon Røyne Kyllingstad (2020) Review of "The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War". Bulletin of the History of Medicine (pp. 164-165). unapi

Review Viktor Pál (2018) Review of "The Body Populace: Military Statistics and Demography in Europe before the First World War". Icon: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology (pp. 232-234). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB466997778/

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Authors & Contributors
Mazliak, Laurent
Magyar, László András
Campanile, Benedetta
Aleksandŭr Kostov
Dobson, Szabolcs
Kaat Louckx
Concepts
World War I
Statistics
Demography; population research
Mathematics
Medicine and the military; medicine in war
Science and politics
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
18th century
Places
Europe
Turkey
France
Belgium
United States
Balkan Peninsula
Institutions
Institut Henri Poincaré (France)
League of Nations
United States. Army
Rockefeller Foundation
France. Statistique générale
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