Transmutation, inclusion, and exclusion: Political arithmetic from Charles II to William III

Journal of Historical Sociology

Volumn 20, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 259-278

  McCormick, Ted ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34848842145     PISSN: 09521909     EISSN: 14676443     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-6443.2007.00313.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (109)

1. For valuable comments, suggestions and/or discussions, I would like to thank Theresa Ventura, Rebekah Klein-Pejšová, Sarah Barber and the anonymous Journal of Historical Sociology referee. Revisions were undertaken with the generous support of a 2006-2007 Government of Ireland postdoctoral research fellowship, provided by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
2. Charles Davenant, Discourses on the Publick Revenues, and on the Trade of England (London: J. Knapton, 1698), 2.
3. Peter Buck, "Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics", Isis 68:1 (1977), 67-84;
4. Julian Hoppit, "Political arithmetic in eighteenth-century England", Economic History Review 49:3 (1998), 516-540,
5. Paul Slack, "Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England", Past and Present 184 (2004), 33-68.
6. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), especially, regarding political arithmetic, 223-225;
7. Geoffrey Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society In England, 1679-1742 (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), 281-308, and especially 285;
8. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 233-285.
9. For a less positive assessment of political arithmetic's significance, however, see Edward Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 56-58.
10. For Higgs as for most other writers, however, political arithmetic is significant to the extent that it contributed to state-formation (in this case, the centralization of data collection).
11. See Michel Foucault, "Governmentality", in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87-104.
12. On political arithmetic as biopolitics see Andrea A. Rusnock, "Biopolitics: Political Arithmetic in the Enlightenment", in William Clark, Jan Golinski and Simon Schaffer (eds.), The Sciences In Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 49-68.
13. Geoffrey Holmes claims that "as late as 1688 [political arithmetic's] distinguished practitioners had been few. However, over the next six or seven years what had started as a largely academic study received the stamp of deadly earnestness from the War of the League of Augsburg." Holmes, Politics, Religion and Society, 285. As we shall see, Holmes's characterization of pre-1688 political arithmetic is as misleading as Davenant's definition, though in a different way.
14. Not everyone does regard 1688 as a significant turning point, of course; see Eveline Cruickshanks, The Glorious Revolution (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). But several of those historians who regard political arithmetic as central to state-building do (following Brewer), and this is the problem.
15. For a recent argument for the significance of 1688, see Tim Harris, Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms (London: Penguin, 2006), 1-38, and especially 12-16.
16. The "Petty Papers" comprise volumes 72850-72908 of the British Library Additional Manuscripts (hereafter BL MS Add. 72,850-72,908). For a concise discussion of the papers with particular attention to science and colonization in Ireland, see Frances Harris, "Ireland as a Laboratory: The Archive of Sir William Petty", in Michael Hunter (ed.), Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 73-90).
17. For a more detailed description by a historian of economics, see Tony Aspromourgos, "The Mind of the Oeconomist: An Overview of the 'Petty Papers' Archive", History of Economic Ideas 9:1 (2001), 39-102.
18. The only currently available biography of Petty based on extensive original research is Edmond Fitzmaurice, The Life of Sir William Petty, 1623-1687 (London: John Murray, 1895);
19. it should be noted that the author was a distant descendant of Petty's. For a slightly more recent account based largely on secondary sources, see E. Strauss, Sir William Petty: Portrait of a Genius (London: The Bodley Head, 1954).
20. Various aspects of the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland (and the Restoration and Williamite settlements, which modified it) have attracted a huge amount of scholarship since the nineteenth century. Only a selection can be cited here: John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts and Green, 1865);
21. Karl S. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: The "Adventurers" In the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971);
22. Bottigheimer, "The Restoration Land Settlement in Ireland: A Structural View", Irish Historical Studies 18:69 (1972), 1-21;
23. T.C. Barnard, Cromwellan Ireland: English Government and Reform In Ireland, 1649-1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975);
24. Barnard, "Conclusion: Settling and Unsettling Ireland: The Cromwellian and Williamite Revolutions", in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 1641-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 265-291;
25. Kevin McKenny, "The Seventeenth-Century Land Settlement in Ireland: Towards a Statistical Interpretation", in Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 181-200.
26. See T.A. Larcom (ed.), The History of the Survey of Ireland Commonly Called the Down Survey by Doctor W. Petty, A.D. 1655-6 (Dublin: Irish Archaeological Society, 1851).
27. See also J.H. Andrews, Shapes of Ireland: Maps and Their Makers, 1564-1839 (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1997), 118-152;
28. William J. Smyth, Map-making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530-1750 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2006), 166-197.
29. Petty's material interest in exploiting Ireland is beyond doubt, but it is a mistake to reduce political arithmetic to a shamefaced planter's apologetics, as Mary Poovey, for instance, sometimes seems to do; see Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge In the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 120-138;
30. see also Margaret C. Jacob, "Factoring Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact", History and Theory 40 (2001), 280-289, and especially 282 and 286.
31. Petty was more intellectually (and politically) ambitious than that. For a more historically nuanced picture of Petty's activities as a planter in Ireland, see T.C. Barnard, "Sir William Petty, His Irish Estates and Irish Population", Irish Economic and Social History 6 (1979), 64-69;
32. Barnard, "Sir William Petty, Irish Landowner", in Hugh Lloyd-Jones, Valerie Pearl and Blair Worden (eds.), History and Imagination: Essays In Honour of H.R. Trevor-Roper (London, Duckworth, 1981), 201-217;
33. Barnard, "Sir William Petty as Kerry Ironmaster", Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy 82C:1 (1982), 1-32.
34. For the Hartlib Circle and its relationship to Ireland, see Toby Barnard, "The Hartlib Circle and the Cult and Culture of Improvement in Ireland", in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and the Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 281-297;
35. Patricia Coughlan, "Natural History and Historical Nature: The Project for a Natural History of Ireland", in Greengrass et al. (eds.), Samuel Hartlib and the Universal Reformation, 298-317.
36. On the Catholic lobby at the Restoration court, see Anne Creighton, "The Remonstrance of 1661 and Catholic Politics in Restoration Ireland", Irish Historical Studies 34:133 (2004), 16-41.
37. William Petty, BL MS Add. 72858, f.73.
38. Petty, BL MS Add, 72865, f.141.
39. Petty, BL MS Add. 72879, f.100.
40. There is an excellent discussion of the problem of reconciling (and distinguishing between) religious and political allegiance in Alan Ford, "'Firm Catholics' or 'Loyal Subjects'? Religious and Political Allegiance in Early Seventeenth-Century Ireland", in D. George Boyce, Robert Eccleshall, and Vincent Geoghegan (eds.), Political Discourse in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 1-31.
41. On the degeneration of the Old English, see for instance Graham Kew (ed.), The Irish Sections of Fynes Moryson's Unpublished Itinerary (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 1998), 25-26, 41, 46 and 49, where Moryson notes that "the English Irish [that is, the Old English] haue for many ages, almost from the first conquest, contracted mariages with the meere Irish, whose children of mingled race could not but degenerate from theire English Parents". Despite this seemingly biological racism, Moryson and others elsewhere focused as much or more on the Old English adoption of Irish cultural habits and their maintenance of Catholicism as on their mixed blood.
42. See also Aldan Clarke, The Old English in Ireland, 1625-1642 (Dublin: MacGibbon and Kee, 1966);
43. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580-1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001);
44. Steve Garner, Racism in the Irish Experience (London: Pluto Press, 2004), 69-90.
45. For a typically hostile view of the Irish see, for example, Gerard Boate, Irelands Naturall History (London: John Wright, 1652);
46. for an argument in favor of the "transplantation into Connaught" see Richard Lawrence, The Interest of England In the Irish Transplantation, Stated (London: Henry Hills, 1655).
47. Vincent Gookin - a more moderate planter and a friend of Petty's - directed two papers against Lawrence and the transplantation, which in some important respects anticipate Petty's arguments: see Gookin, The Great Case of Transplantation In Ireland Discussed (London: John Crook, 1655),
48. and Gookin, The Author and Case of Transplanting the Irish Into Connaught Vindicated, from the Unjust Aspersions of Col. Richard Laurence (London: Simon Miller, 1655).
49. I will discuss the relationship between Gookin's arguments and Petty's subsequent projects at greater length in a forthcoming article. See Patricia Coughlan, "Counter-Currents in Colonial Discourse: The Political Thought of Vincent and Daniel Gookin", in Jane Ohlmeyer (ed.), Political Thought In Seventeenth-Century Ireland: Kingdom or Colony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 56-82;
50. Sarah Barber, "Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion: A Comparative Study of the Placement of Peoples", in Ciaran Brady and Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.), British Interventions in Early Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 280-298.
51. Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London: D. Brown and W. Rogers, 1691).
52. Here and below I refer to the printed editions of The Political Anatomy of Ireland (first printed in 1691)
53. and Political Arithmetick (first printed in full, with the permission of Petty's widow, in 1690; a pirated, partial edition had appeared in 1683), which are for present purposes faithful reproductions of the relevant manuscripts, BL MS Add. 21127 and 21128.
54. Both are reprinted in C.H. Hull (ed.), The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899).
55. Petty, Political Arithmetick (London: Robert Clavel, 1690), 68.
56. Petty, Political Arithmetick, 92.
57. Petty, Political Anatomy, 29.
58. Petty, Political Anatomy, 29-30.
59. Petty, BL MS Add, 72879, f.71.
60. Petty, Political Anatomy, 30.
61. Petty, Political Anatomy, 31.
62. Petty's use of alchemical language and ideas - which framed his understanding of the mechanism by which English women could transform Irish households - is discussed in Ted McCormick, "Alchemy in the Political Arithmetic of Sir William Petty (1623-1687)", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 37 (2006), 290-307.
63. See Petty, BL MS Add. 72879, f.91. Notice, however, that there is no mention of English religion.
64. Petty, Political Arithmetick, 92. Emphasis mine.
65. Petty, BL MS Add. 72888, ff. 37-38. In late September of 1686 Petty reported to his friend Sir Robert Southwell that the King had "told mee expressly and voluntarily that Hee would neither break the Act of Navigation in England, nor the Settlement of Ireland", but added that "For my part I find the storme great". On November 6 he wrote Southwell, in the metaphorical mode which dominated their discussions of the settlement, that "The Posts which supported us were rotten and painted; you must not wonder that they should moulder away." A letter to Southwell of January 18, 1687, which catalogued signs of rising Catholic power in Ireland, noted "I do not wonder at your apprehensions because I take them to be very like my owne." See Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 1676-1687 (London: Constable & Co.), 234, 239, 251-2. Among the Petty Papers dated (tentatively) to 1686 is a brief manuscript entitled "The Method of Rebuilding up the Catholiq Church by K. James the 2d.", which contains a list of political changes similar to those Petty describes in his letters to Southwell (including the revocation of the settlement), and seems intended as an analysis or possibly a critique of James's strategy;
66. see Petty, BL MS Add. 72888, ff.75-76. Petty did sometimes (as, for instance, in BL MS Add. 72882, ff. 115-116) detach the rise of Catholic power from the fate of the land settlement - but even here, he saw political arithmetic's demographic aims as fundamentally different under James than they had been under Charles. His sense of impending crisis is well captured by the title of another paper from 1686: "The Ship of Ireland between Scilla and Charybdis".
67. See Marquis of Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, 2 vols. (London: Constable & Co., 1927), 1:56;
68. BL MS Add. 72882 f. 102.
69. Petty, BL MS Add. 72882 ff.65-66, for example, proposed "encreasing the Catholiques in England" twenty-four-fold through transplantation. Compare Petty, "A Briefe & Generall Proposal for Religion in England & Ireland", BL MS Add. 72888, ff. 125-126.
70. Petty, Political Arithmetick, 87.
71. One of the strongest and, for Protestants, most compelling assertions of Irish barbarism was Sir John Temple's The Irish Rebellion (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1646). Many writing in Temple's wake adopted greatly exaggerated numbers of Protestant deaths (upwards of 150,000 for the first year alone); Petty allowed that as many as 112,000 Protestants may have "perished by War, Plague and Famine" between 1641 and 1652, but calculated that the initial massacre claimed at most 37,000 victims (historians continue to differ on the point, but Petty's figure is itself regarded as much too high);
72. see Petty, Political Anatomy, 17-18.
73. On Temple and anti-popery in the wake of 1641, see Aidan Clarke, "The 1641 Rebellion and Anti-Popery in Ireland", in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising (Belfast: Queen's University of Belfast, 1993), 139-157;
74. Toby Barnard, "1641: A Bibliographical Essay", in Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641, 173-186.
75. On the 1641 rebellion, which has generated an immense volume of scholarship, see for instance Nicholas Canny, "What Really Happened in Ireland in 1641?", in Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation, 24-42.
76. Sir Richard Cox, in BL MS Add 21127, f.54. Cox was Lord Chief Justice of Ireland; his comments were handwritten in 1687 on a manuscript copy of The Political Anatomy of Ireland
77. Petty, Political Arithmetick, Preface.
78. See Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004), 79 and 88.
79. On Petty's relationship to Hobbes see Quentin Skinner, "Thomas Hobbes and His Disciples in France and England", Comparative Studies in Society and History 8:2 (1966), 153-167; on the land settlement see note 9 above.
80. Petty, BL MS Add. 72858, f.111.
81. The transplantation into Connaught mooted in the mid-1650s furnished one example, and the Spanish monarchy's expulsion of Muslims and Jews from the Iberian Peninsula from the 1490s another. See Sarah Barber, "Settlement, Transplantation and Expulsion". In general, the process of colonial plantation in Ireland and elsewhere ideally involved sustained planned migration (whether planned by the state itself or by private companies or proprietors);
82. see Raymond Gillespie, "Planned Migration to Ireland in the Seventeenth Century", in Patrick J. Duffy (ed.), To and From Ireland: Planned Migration Schemes, c. 1600-2000 (Dublin: Geography Publications, 2004), 39-56.
83. Planned or not, over 120,000 Europeans migrated to British colonies in the Americas in the first half of the seventeenth century - see Alison Games, "Migration", in David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (eds.), The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 41.
84. The transplantation of rebels, vagrants and other undesirables, which later took the form of "transportation" to penal colonies, was already familiar, as was the massive and rapidly expanding trade in African slaves. On the latter, see Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999).
85. See for example Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 32.
86. Petty, "Of Counter-Transplanting the Irish & English", BL MS Add. 72879, ff. 117-118.
87. See Sir Richard Cox's criticisms in BL MS Add. 21127, f.54 (see above, note 32).
88. Southwell repeatedly suggested that Petty's time would be better spent on writing than in litigation. See for example his letter to Petty of September 15, 1677, in Lansdowne (ed.), The Petty-Southwell Correspondence, 34.
89. Historical Manuscripts Commission [hereafter HMC], Fourteenth Report, Part VII, II, 286.
90. See Hoppit, "Political Arithmetic".
91. See for instance Petty, Another essay in Political Arithmetick, Concerning the Growth of the City of London (London: Mark Pardoe, 1683);
92. Petty, An Essay Concerning the Multiplication of Mankind (London: Mark Pardoe, 1686);
93. Petty, Five Essays In Political Arithmetick (London: Henry Mortlock, 1687);
94. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, fifth edition (London: John Martyn, 1676).
95. For Ormond's judgment see HMC, Fourteenth Report, Part VII, II, 294.
96. Davenant, Discourses, 6.
97. Davenant, Discourses, 2.
98. Davenant, Discourses, 2-3.
99. Davenant, Discourses, 3-4.
100. Davenant, Discourses, 4.
101. See Paul Slack, "Measuring the National Wealth in Seventeenth-Century England", Economic History Review 57:4 (2004), 607-635.
102. Davenant, Discourses, 2.
103. Davenant, Discourses, 5.
104. Davenant, Discourses, 6.
105. Davenant, Discourses, 6.
106. Mary Poovey's argument that the precise, quantitative expression of putative "facts" allowed Petty to conceal private interests behind a seemingly "impartial" façade of public service is both interesting and ironic in this regard, since Davenant stresses the impartiality of quantification precisely by pointing up, as a negative example, Petty's overtly political use of it. For Davenant, Petty's crime was serving a corrupt court; for Poovey, it was pretending to. See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, 120-138.
107. See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact. For a convincing argument that Petty and his successors (Gregory King - Charles Davenant's friend - in particular) manipulated numbers to suit their political goals in closely analogous ways, see Slack, "Measuring the National Wealth".
108. See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
109. But it should be noted that, early in the seventeenth century, there had been attempts - in some ways comparable to Petty's - to effect the inclusion of Catholics through the imposition of a carefully phrased oath of allegiance. See Ford, " 'Firm Catholics' ". Petty himself toyed with similarly inclusive oaths at the same time as he promoted his project of "Catholication" - for an example, see "An Oath of Allegiance & Supremacy" (1686), in Lansdowne (ed.), Petty Papers, 1:137-138.