Chapter 12 has to do with Atlas Maritimus & Commercialis (1728), a major compilation on nautical matters produced with the support of Edmond Halley. This was originally planned as a means of advertising a new projection system for maps, but over the course of its preparation it evolved into a pioneering attempt to go beyond the narrow function of most previous atlases, and to provide a work of economic geography that would be of special use to the mercantile community. The figures behind the enterprise included William Taylor, the publisher of Robinson Crusoe in 1719; the mathematician Henry Wilson; the engraver John Harris; and the mapmaker John Senex. Previous scholarship suggested that Defoe, with his long record as a student of trade, had a hand in its composition. This is the first attempt to specify the degree to which the Atlas is indebted to the Tour for almost all of its coverage of Britain, and to set out the ways in which it is made up of naked citation, metaphrase and paraphrase of Defoe’s original. Extensive evidence is cited to indicate that Defoe himself edited this recension of his work

The origins of sociological science are traced back to England in the second half of the seventeenth century and in particular to the contributions made by John Graunt and Edmond Halley. Their work is distinguished from the political arithmetic of William Petty in having a more general concern with population regularities and in being based on ‘reasoning with numbers’ of a more advanced kind. Graunt’s Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality is a pioneering analysis of social data in numerical form and characterised by a remarkably scientific attitude. Halley’s life-table represents the first application to such social data of elements of modern probability theory. Unfortunately, little was done to build on their work until the early nineteenth century.