IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB637769038

How to Read by Numbers: Plague, Political Arithmetic, and the Production of History (2020)

Sheldon, Ryan Kaveh (Author)

Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation
Volume: 61
Issue: 3
Pages: 391-410

URI: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/791114

DOI: 10.1353/ecy.2020.0026

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Academia.edu

Demography; population research Mathematics Political arithmetic Science and politics Science and government Vital statistics Plague 18th century 17th century England

Recent work in the history of science and epistemology has illuminated the rhetorical nature of the "anti-rhetorical" arguments of seventeenth-century political arithmetic, which turned to quantitative reasoning as a method for formulating state policy. This article examines a different aspect of political arithmetic argumentation—its ambivalent relationship to popular engagements with number during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—in order to achieve a more sensitive account of its method. By considering John Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (1661) alongside two literary histories of plague that draw upon printed mortality bills, albeit with a high degree of skepticism, to represent the spread of plague through London's urban environs—Samuel Pepys' Diary, and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722)—this essay demonstrates that the institution of the bills of mortality to combat the social and epistemological crisis of plague initiated a cultural consciousness of membership in a numerable body politic, and inspired new ways of visualizing the space of politics. Read in terms of form, imaginative and philosophical writing on plague alike reflect a dependence on number to counter the problem of witnessing the plague in viably empirical terms—and, more broadly, speak to its increasingly important role in representing social formations as quantifiable entities open to strategic policing and manipulation by state power.

...More

Citation URI

https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB637769038/

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Labbé, Morgane; (2008)
L'arithmétique politique en Allemagne au début du XIXe siècle: réceptions et polémiques (/isis/citation/CBB001021397/)

Article Rohrbasser, Jean-Marc; (2008)
Süssmilch lecteur de Petty. Arithmétique politique et théologie naturelle (/isis/citation/CBB001021398/)

Article Stamhuis, Ida H.; (2007)
A Nineteenth-Century Statistical Society that Abandoned Statistics (/isis/citation/CBB000773207/)

Book Schweber, Libby; (2006)
Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830--1885 (/isis/citation/CBB000772107/)

Article McCormick, Ted; (2013)
Political Arithmetic and Sacred History: Population Thought in the English Enlightenment, 1660--1750 (/isis/citation/CBB001214738/)

Article Vanessa Harding; (2019)
Reading Plague in Seventeenth-century London (/isis/citation/CBB583851162/)

Book Phillips, Howard; (2012)
Epidemics: The Story of South Africa's Five Most Lethal Human Diseases (/isis/citation/CBB001421023/)

Book Razzell, Peter E.; (2007)
Population and Disease: Transforming English Society, 1550--1850 (/isis/citation/CBB000932971/)

Article Veron, Jacques; (2008)
Alfred J. Lotka and the Mathematics of Population (/isis/citation/CBB001021399/)

Article Kristin Heitman; (2020)
Authority, Autonomy and the First London Bills of Mortality (/isis/citation/CBB308070543/)

Article Robert C. Allen; (2019)
Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: Lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867 (/isis/citation/CBB418072614/)

Article Turner, Henry S.; (2013)
Francis Bacon's Common Notion (/isis/citation/CBB001200734/)

Book Le Bras, Hervé; (2000)
Naissance de la Mortalité: L'origine Politique de la Statistique et de la Démographie (/isis/citation/CBB000500063/)

Article Steve Hochstadt; (2016)
Demography and Demographers in Modern Germany: Social Science and Ideology across Political Regimes (/isis/citation/CBB823898083/)

Article Totaro, Rebecca C. N.; (2003)
Plague's Messengers: Communicating Hope and Despair in England, 1550--1750 (/isis/citation/CBB000430321/)

Article Margaret Pelling; (2020)
'Bosom Vipers': Endemic Versus Epidemic Disease (/isis/citation/CBB218133605/)

Book Totaro, Rebecca Carol Noel; (2012)
The Plague Epic in Early Modern England: Heroic Measures, 1603--1721 (/isis/citation/CBB001550496/)

Article Neil Cummins; Morgan Kelly; Cormac Ó Gráda; (2016)
Living standards and plague in London, 1560–1665 (/isis/citation/CBB156415011/)

Book McCormick, Ted; (2009)
William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (/isis/citation/CBB001034181/)

Chapter Munkhoff, Richelle; (2010)
Reckoning Death: Women Searchers and the Bills of Mortality in Early Modern London (/isis/citation/CBB001253085/)

Comments

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}