Human Empire: Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800 by Ted McCormick Unavailable

“Human Empire” in the title of McCormick’s new book refers to the concept of population as a discrete subject of societal and governmental attention rather than to people in the British Empire. His argument is that the challenges to social stability in the Tudor era demanded new kinds of information about the sociology of population. Social problems such as vagrancy or the prevalence of disease and mortality in growing urban centers were problems of governance that demanded new ways of analyzing what constituted a population. Indeed, the word population first appeared in England in 1544, a moment when land enclosures and the growing fear of social decay posed serious social and political challenges. Population became an object of knowledge studied through the collection of facts, data and, most of all, statistics. Thus began a style of investigation and debate that reached its full formulation in the “political arithmetic” associated most...