Ted McCormick's Human Empire is a very good book. It examines demographic thought, the thinking of populations, their mobility, and transformation in Britain and its colonies from Ireland to North America from the early sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Although he focusses on the quantitative aspects of populations, McCormick's main argument throughout Human Empire is that qualitative ideas about populations underlay the attempts at quantification.
McCormick traces two major developments or changes in the demographic thinking of the period. First, during the Tudor and early Stuart periods, there occurred a major shift in the object of demographic knowledge. Whereas in the sixteenth century the object was what McCormick calls “multitudes” as qualitatively defined groups, by the mid seventeenth century this was replaced by “population” or even “the national population.” Underlying this change was, or so McCormick argues, new attitudes to the state and the natural world. The second major change, which took place in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and culminated in T. R. Malthus's work, concerned demographic agency. Whereas in the mid seventeenth century that agency rested on the state, in Malthus's work the individual was supposed to take “the moral responsibility of demographic decision-making” (3). The pivotal figure here was William Petty, the topic of McCormick's earlier book, William Petty: And the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (2009).
The book is divided into five chapters and a substantial conclusion, which concentrates on Malthus. Chapter one on the early Tudor period investigates the plans and attempts to address the problem of rural depopulation caused by enclosure, the conversion of arable land to pasture. The texts discussed include those of Thomas More, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith, as well as some anonymous tracts. Rather than talking about populations, these sources focused on a local multitude from a qualitative point of view and saw the governance of multitude as “the object of a new and self-conscious politics” (44). Numbers were sometimes mentioned, but they were mere symbols, not demographic data. Concerns about depopulation turned into concerns about overpopulation during the Elizabethan period and its rapid growth of population, as chapter two explains. This prompted a campaign against idleness and vagrancy with local quantification of the poor. But it also led to colonial projects in Ireland, to subject Ireland to an English civil administration by “the mobility, mutability and mixture” of the Irish and the Old English populations (81). In the process, however, as McCormick concludes, “marginal subpopulations came to be treated as national rather than local, and permanent rather than historically specific problems for government” (101).
The focus in chapter three is on the developments and changes during the early seventeenth century. McCormick rightly emphasizes the tradition of reason of state. The translations of Jean Bodin's and Giovanni Botero's treatises played vital roles here. McCormick sees Bodin as a proto mercantilist, who argued for a large population and who discussed environmental factors, above all climate and topography. Botero concurred and stressed the importance of knowledge of land and people and how these resources could be augmented. Botero wrote, after all, A Treatise, Concerning the Causes of the Magnificencie and Greatnes of Cities. The rest of chapter three explores colonial plantation projects of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Moving to the mid seventeenth century in chapter four, McCormick shows how demographic governance became an integral part of the plans for improvement. At the heart of the chapter is William Petty's “political arithmetic,” especially his “Down Survey” of Ireland. Although quantification became, for the first time, central, McCormick accentuates that Petty was even more preoccupied by qualitative transformation. McCormick argues, just like in his earlier book, that underlying the mid-century innovations was Francis Bacon's (natural) philosophical writings, which he briefly discusses. However, Bacon would have merited a more thorough treatment. He was a significant English exponent of reason-of-state thinking and emphasized the centrality of a large population in his writings on civic greatness. This is noted by McCormick, but he does not mention that Bacon's ideas were mainly critiques of Botero. Moreover, Bacon used these ideas to defend the Anglo-Scottish union against those MPs and others who claimed that the union would make England overpopulated. The whole debate about the union is curiously overlooked (as is Scotland overall), although questions of geography and climate were also explored in it. Nor does McCormick pay attention to Bacon's writings about Ireland, which would have offered an interesting contrast to those treatises he examines. Finally, he could have mentioned that in De augmentis (1623) Bacon integrated a large population into the third part of the three-part “civil science” (scientia civilis).
Chapter five takes the story to the eighteenth century and shows how the rhetoric of political arithmetic expanded into new areas, including medicine and sermons, and became ubiquitous. Yet, while numbers were increasingly important, they were still meant to help in the qualitative transformation of the population. The substantial conclusion focuses on Malthus and argues that, although there were continuities, on the whole Malthus departed radically from his predecessors. He was mainly interested in population as such, famously arguing that population grew according to a geometric series but food production only according to an arithmetic series. It followed, as McCormick argues, that improvement was “a potentially devastating nightmare” (245) and that the only manner of “intentional demographic agency” belonged to “rational and propertied individuals” (241).
Well researched, clearly argued, and engagingly written, Human Empire provides a multi-faceted account of demographic thinking from the early sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century in the British Atlantic world and deserves a wide readership.
