Chapter 5 - Improving Populations in the Eighteenth Century

Summary

Chapter 5 examines the fate of transformative demographic governance in the eighteenth century, beginning with the proliferation of demographic numbers and political-arithmetical arguments in a range of print genres: sermons and sacred histories, literary essays and satires, newspapers and pamphlets. These encouraged a new demographic subjectivity in their audiences – a sense of participation in demographic processes – that raised questions of agency and its limits. Some concerned the constraints of environment, conceived of in discussions of medicine and public health as a partially manipulable “situation”; others concerned the power or responsibility of the public to foster the improvement of populations through projects such as Societies for the Reformation of Manners or Coram’s Foundling Hospital. In colonial contexts, debate raged over the relationship between climate, health and race, and – as Benjamin Franklin’s work shows – over both the relative fecundity of America and Europe and the ideal racial composition of the colonies and the world. By the later eighteenth century, demographic governance had become a point of contention between colony and metropole.