Human Empire

Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800

Ted McCormick

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781009123266
• eBook ISBN:
  9781009275576
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

Arguing that demographic thought begins not with quantification but in attempts to control the qualities of people, Human Empire traces two transformations spanning the early modern period. First was the emergence of population as an object of governance through a series of engagements in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, Ireland, and colonial North America, influenced by humanist policy, reason of state, and natural philosophy, and culminating in the creation of political arithmetic. Second was the debate during the long eighteenth century over the locus and limits of demographic agency, as church, civil society, and private projects sought to mobilize and manipulate different marginalized and racialized groups – and as American colonists offered their own visions of imperial demography. This innovative, engaging study examines the emergence of population as an object of knowledge and governance and connects the history of demographic ideas with their early modern intellectual, political, and colonial contexts.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Transformations in Demographic Thought
• Chapter 1 Mobility and Mutability in the Early Tudor Body Politic
• Chapter 2 Marginality, Incivility and Degeneration in Elizabethan England and Ireland
• Chapter 3 Beyond the Body Politic: Territory, Population and Colonial Projecting
• Chapter 4 Transmutation, Quantification and the Creation of Political Arithmetic
• Chapter 5 Improving Populations in the Eighteenth Century
• Conclusion: Malthus, Demographic Governance and the Limits of Politics
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index