The Colonial Afterlife of Political Arithmetic: Swift, Demography, and Mobile Populations

In 1828, a pamphlet protesting government-subsidized schemes to promote emigration from Britain evoked the style and subject matter of Jonathan Swift's savage critique of Irish poverty and colonial oppression, "A Modest Proposal":

If we were to attempt to export children, the supply would at once increase with the demand, and we should neither lessen our distress, nor diminish our population. Our wagons would be filled with "children for exportation," as at Christmas our coaches are with Norfolk turkeys. (Head 1828, 50)

The reappearance of these rhetorical techniques—the satirical dehumanization of children and their comparison to food—one hun- dred years after Swift's tour de force reminds us that the problem of what came to be called "redundant" or "surplus" population occupied Britons throughout the eighteenth century and long predated Malthus. Most often the issue was linked, by both policy makers and the concerned public, with the possibilities for human mobility—more cruelly put, the exportation of bodies. Swift, like the author of this early nineteenth-century text, conceives his scheme for consuming children in relation to emigration.

The process of calculating the financial worth of a population was known in the eighteenth century as political arithmetic. This essay argues that Swift's tracts about the condition of Ireland provide us with a crucial critical purchase on the rhetorical effects of this new statistical science. The tracts' dissociation of its discursive elements from "real data" reveals the cultural power of political arithmetic as a form of language. Swift's interest, during the 1720s and 1730s, in the relation between the new statistical sciences and Ireland's colonial status has long been known to scholars. Louis Landa first in- vestigated Swift and "populousness" over sixty years ago (1942), and George Wittkowsky put it succinctly when he claimed that "A Modest Proposal" was written under the influence of the "muse of political arithmetic" and is a sustained attack on the premises of mercantilist theories of population (1943, 101). There is a tendency, however, in investigations of these texts, to see Swift's critique of British imperialism as confined to his objections to Ireland's suffering under England's mercantile policies. I argue, instead, that placing Swift's writings in a longer history of population theory reveals the broader implications of his anticolonial satire. His manipulation of the discursive elements of political arithmetic for satirical effect allows us to see the relationship between the scientific imagination and colonial expansion during the period.

Demography has always been a political science. Here in the United States, the second section of the first article of the Constitu-tion ensures that the nation takes a census every ten years in the hope that the population will thus be represented equally and fairly. Yet the question of how that counting should be done stirred as much controversy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as it does now. From the first national censuses in the 1790s, the question of how much information should be requested was a matter of congressional debate (Wells 1975, 21). The census of 1840, for example, gave rise to a political scandal. Along with numbering the people of the United States, the data gathered erroneously showed a high level of insanity among blacks in the North, fueling the proslavery argument that slavery was healthier than freedom for African-Americans; thus the debate over the ethics of slavery was carried out, for a time, through a controversy over the accuracy of statistics (Cohen 1982). In 1999, the debate over whether the constitutional clause would be better served by statistical sampling or strict enumeration even reached the Supreme Court. The court decided in favor of enumeration, a move that angered advocates of inner-city populations, notoriously difficult to count, and thus in danger of inadequate political representation.

These controversies reveal the problems with assuming that the census is merely an objective tool for realizing the Enlightenment ideal of democratic...