Molly Farrell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190277314
- eISBN:
- 9780190277338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277314.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Chapter Two shows that population thinking was a central concern within Caribbean sugar colonies. It explores how slavery fostered new forms of human accounting, and reveals the storytelling inherent ...
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Chapter Two shows that population thinking was a central concern within Caribbean sugar colonies. It explores how slavery fostered new forms of human accounting, and reveals the storytelling inherent in the tables, lists, and budgets that endorsed the early decades of the Atlantic slave trade. The most extensive account of seventeenth-century English Caribbean sugar cultivation, Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, combines late-Renaissance aesthetic theories of measuring bodies with the emerging economy of extracting profits from indentured and enslaved labor to take a narrative census of a chaotic island. Ligon combines natural history, anecdotal storytelling, and plantation accounts to provide a snapshot of Barbados and its inhabitants decades before the first imperial census of the island. In the process, his text responds to the turbulence of the radically new social environment of Caribbean colonialism and makes the violent and dangerous seem beautiful and controlled.Less
Chapter Two shows that population thinking was a central concern within Caribbean sugar colonies. It explores how slavery fostered new forms of human accounting, and reveals the storytelling inherent in the tables, lists, and budgets that endorsed the early decades of the Atlantic slave trade. The most extensive account of seventeenth-century English Caribbean sugar cultivation, Richard Ligon’s True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados, combines late-Renaissance aesthetic theories of measuring bodies with the emerging economy of extracting profits from indentured and enslaved labor to take a narrative census of a chaotic island. Ligon combines natural history, anecdotal storytelling, and plantation accounts to provide a snapshot of Barbados and its inhabitants decades before the first imperial census of the island. In the process, his text responds to the turbulence of the radically new social environment of Caribbean colonialism and makes the violent and dangerous seem beautiful and controlled.
Molly Farrell
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780190277314
- eISBN:
- 9780190277338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190277314.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American Colonial Literature, American, 18th Century and Early American Literature
Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was ...
More
Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.Less
Quantifiable citizenship—in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas—is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for “population” in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred, instead, in the work of colonial writers such as Mary Rowlandson, who found, in the act of counting the “vast numbers” of Indians who held her captive, a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups. This book explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary prehistory of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine, and even intimate, interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.
