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Introduction: Envisioning the Multitude Notes Introduction: Envisioning the Multitude 1. Quarterly Review 53 (1835): 56. 2. “Results of the Census of 1851,” Westminster Review 61 (1854): 323. Nineteenth- century observers often believed that the census would help them understand the past, present, and future state of the nation. See Manchester Guardian, October 26, 1853, 5. 3. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 4. Enlightenment thinkers’ interest in both taxonomy and probability is relevant here. See Lorraine Daston, Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). For the American census, see Margo Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). For French statistics, see Marie- Noelle Bourguet, Déchiffrer la France: la Statistique Départmentale à l’Epoque Napoléonienne (Paris: Editions des Archives Contemporaines, 1989); Jean- Claude Perrot and Stuart J. Woolf, State and Statistics in France, 1789–1815 (London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1984); Carol Blum, Strength in Numbers: Population, Reproduction, and Power in Eighteenth- Century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Joshua Cole, The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics, and Gender in Nineteenth- Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). 5. See, for example, Edward Higgs, A Clearer Sense of the Census: The Victorian Censuses and Historical Research (London: HMSO, 1996), and Making Sense of the Census Revisited: Census Records for England and Wales 1801–1901: A Handbook for Historical Researchers (London: Institute of Historical Research, 2005); Richard Lawton, ed., The Census and Social Structure: An Interpretive Guide to Nineteenth- Century Censuses for England and Wales (London: Frank Cass and Company Ltd., 1978); Muriel Nissel, People Count: A History of the General Register Office (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1987); and E. A. Wrigley, ed. Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 6. See D. V. Glass, The Eighteenth-Century Population Controversy and the Development of Census and Vital Statistics in Britain (Westmead: D.C. Heath, Ltd., 1973), and Andrea Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and population in Eighteenth- Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 7. See Gabriel Wolfenstein, Public Numbers and the Victorian State: The General Register Office, the Census, and Statistics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Ph.D. diss., University of California Los Angeles, 2004); Edward Higgs, The Information State in England: The Central Collection of Information on Citizens since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Life, Death and Statistics: Civil Registration, Censuses and the Work of the General Register Office, 1836–1952 (Hatfield: Local Population Studies, 2004); and Libby Schweber, Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830–1885 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 8. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); M. J. Cullen, The 207 208 Notes to Pages 3–6 Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The Foundations of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1975); and T. M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). 9. Ian Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 182. 10. Ibid. 11. Peter Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics,” Isis 68 (1977): 67–84. 12. See John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 140. 14. See Higgs for a summary of this argument: The Information State in England, Chapter 2. Higgs is skeptical of such a simple division between the premodern and the modern, as well as between local and central power. He sees nineteenth- century information gathering not so much as a new, but rather as “an old activity displaced from local to central government.” Furthermore, he believes that many of the supposedly centralizing reforms of the Victorian era actually gave more power to localities rather than less, but in a new national context of supervision and oversight, and that the state was not truly centralized until the late nine- teenth century. Census results, and the implications of these results, were also both national and local, since central information gathering could often lead to local action. Ibid, 25–26, 66–67. 15. Hacking, “How Should We Do the History of Statistics?”, 194. 16. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and Linda Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830,” Past and Present no. 113 (November 1986): 103. 17. Bruce Curtis, The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 4. 18. Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth- Century Britain and the United States (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 19. Giovanna Procacci, “Social Economy and the Government of Poverty,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 164. 20. See Higgs, The Information State in England, 21–23. He is skeptical of the simple division between preindustrial and industrial kinds of communities. Ibid, 67. 21. Ibid, 89. 22. Ibid, 98. 23. See Peter Buck, “People who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 73 (1982): 28–45. 24. Foucault suggests that modern society involves surveillance, but that the surveil- lance is not always conscious. He would not necessarily disagree with the idea that people were interested in the census as a technology for self- counting, or self- surveying. 25. See, for example, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Chapter 10, and Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). An exception is Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth- Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), who does focus on the census and identity in a European context. Notes to Pages 6–10 209 Also see Perrot and Woolf for the notion that a unified French nation during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic period required statistics to limit the importance of local divisions. 26. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, eds., Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2. “The requirement that each individual be pigeon-holed in a cul- turally defined category had major implications for how people came to think of themselves.” Ibid, 31. 27. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 166. 28. See Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), for chal- lenges to this nationalist exclusivity. 29. Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1st Series, 21 (1812): 400. 30. Kertzer and Arel, Census and Identity, 29. 31. The notion that numbers equaled power was not obvious, and in fact notions of the elite in the medieval and early modern world usually were based on the premise that power belonged to a select few. 32. Kertzer and Arel, Census and Identity, 33, 35. 33. Ibid, 27. 34. Illustrated London News, April 5, 1851, 263. 35. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). Also see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987). 36. Linda Colley, “Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830,” 97. See Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 37. These hostile groups were at the time understood as “classes,” but some histori- ans have called into question the idea that class is a product of clearly defined social and economic conditions, and have suggested that class identities can be understood as political as much as social identities and that class may be more a product of discourse than economic conditions. See Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For a survey of this debate, see Jan Goldstein, “Of Marx and Marksmanship: Reflections on the Linguistic Construction of Class
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