Census-taking and political economy in Britain, c. 1790-1840
This is an ESRC-funded (PTA-031-2005-00272) doctoral research project being carried out by Stephen Thompson under the supervision of Professor Richard Smith.
This research project is concerned with two related lines of enquiry. First, the tracing the administrative history of British census-taking between 1801 and 1841, taking into account the institutional context of government information gathering, the motivations behind it and the policy applications of the data that were collected. Secondly, studying the impact of population statistics on economic and social thought in the wider public sphere, with particular emphasis on the function of empirical data in contemporary debates on 'reform'. Central to this second strand will be a re-consideration of two pieces of legislation: the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (the so-called 'New Poor Law'). In other words, the research is concerned with, on the one hand, the role of the early census in governing and policy formation, and, on the other, its impact on society more broadly, in terms of the ways in which quantitative modes of description challenged more qualitative conceptions of social and economic change.
This research will supplement the existing historiography in a number of ways. First, it will test the extent to which sociological models of state surveillance are applicable to early nineteenth-century Britain. In the late 1970s Michel Foucault developed the concept of 'bio-power' to describe the mechanisms by which 'the basic biological features of the human species' became 'the object of political strategy' in modern Western societies. According to Foucault, one important feature of bio-politics in late eighteenth-century Europe was the increasing use of statistics - particularly demographic statistics - in both government and economic analysis. Statistics provided the means to discern the 'natural phenomena' of population, such as birth and death rates and the incidence of disease, thereby eliminating the model of the household-family from government (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population). Study of the early British census will examine the validity of these theoretical claims by looking at the role of demographic statistics in policy-making and political economy. Preliminary research on the dominant figure in British census-taking, John Rickman (1771-1840), suggests that there was a highly antagonistic relationship between statistics on the one hand, and Malthusian political economy on the other.
Secondly, this project will increase our knowledge of the institutional context of census-taking prior to the establishment of the General Register Office in 1837. Much of the existing literature on the history of British vital statistics overlooks the first four censuses (1801-31) due, in part, to the extremely poor survival of original nominative returns, and because it has proved difficult to identify either a clear institutional framework or policy agenda in which to locate the collection of census data. What the current research hopes to show is that parliament is the most appropriate context for understanding the policy significance of early census-taking. The first census was part of a raft of measures taken by parliament in response to widespread food shortages in the autumn of 1800. Its backbench proposer, Charles Abbot, explicitly justified the census in terms of its domestic policy applications, rather than its potential military or fiscal uses. Moreover, the techniques developed by Abbot's secretary, Rickman, provided an organisational model for a range of other statistical enquiries ordered by the legislature in this period, including the Poor Rate Returns (1803, 1813-15) and the Local Taxation Returns (1839).
Finally, this research will shed new light on the nature of centre-periphery relations in the 'unreformed' British state. Extant census listings generated in the localities will be analysed so that the impact of information gathering on parochial governance can be evaluated. Census data were collected by overseers of the poor in England and Wales and by schoolmasters in Scotland until the appointment of census enumerators in 1841. Part of the research plans to undertake a comparative case-study of at least one rural and one urban situation in order to examine some of the stresses and strains of the parochial system during the Industrial Revolution. Did parish officers number the people willingly, or was there resistance to central government interference? What local precedents were there for the census? Given the prominent role of poor law overseers in census-taking the research hopes to determine if, and how, household listings were used for poor relief purposes.
A wide range of published and unpublished sources will be used in this project. Parliamentary papers, contemporary periodicals, economic treatises, private papers, and local and centrally-created records will be exploited using qualitative and quantitative methods to achieve the research objectives outlined above.