The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875 by Bruce Curtis (review)

humanities 433 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 were university professors, five were doctors, and seven were nurses. Professional writers also included journalists, such as Kit Coleman and Gertrude Pringle. That women writers were most interested in history is evidenced by the preponderance of historical titles in this volume. Less surprising, perhaps, is their preference for autobiography. In addition, Dagg cites biography; books of travel and description, and essays; books on social issues, the arts, and education. The Feminine Gaze challenges the general assumption that until recently women were devoted primarily to private, domestic matters. Dagg describes writing by women whose interests were diverse and whose views were eclectic. The writers are united, however, in their diffidence, which is felt as a general tendency to diminish the value of their work and their efforts as published authors. Dagg traces an exaggerated humility among women writers that was intended to offset the ambition implicit in publication. Moreover, women authors frequently published their works anonymously or pseudonymously. Some dedicated their books to aristocratic friends whose names would lend authority to the published works. Today, women writers in Canada struggle less in their apprenticeship years and enjoy more success as published authors. They are indebted to the efforts undertaken by earlier women whose writerly ambition and published work too often were undermined B as Dagg has documented powerfully and accessibly in her innovative work. (RUTH PANOFSKY) Bruce Curtis. The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840B1875 University of Toronto Press. xii, 386. $60.00 A decade ago, George Emery=s Facts of Life (1993) convinced me that statistics are chimerical, that >[w]hat they contain and omit reflects the concerns of their collectors. ... Their meaning also varies according to the social conditions in which they are collected and the purposes for which scholars use them. Because statistics are cultural phenomena, they require social interpretation, not merely technical correction.= Earlier, Anthony Giddens=s The Nation-State and Violence (1987) had advised me that official statistics are >not just Aabout@ an independently given universe of social objects and events, they are in part constitutive of it. The administrative power generated by the nation-state could not exist without the information base that is the means of its reflexive self-regulation.= And even earlier, Benedict Anderson=s Imagined Communities (1983 [1991]), commenting on the role of censuses, proclaimed, >The new demographic topography put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions.= So, is there anything more to be said about the role of census-taking in 434 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 state-making? Bruce Curtis=s magisterial study of the >politics of population= demonstrates that there is, and especially so for Canada. His central argument is that censuses were not >taken,= they were >made,= and the >construction= of a >population= through the orchestration of censuses was crucial to >state-formation.= And while, thankfully, he does not advance a simplistic model of hegemonic state control through a Foucauldian system of surveillance, Curtis does assert that censuses are the >eyes of politics= effecting a politicized gaze on the >subject= population (in both senses of the term!). That is, census-making, together with a national currency, a unified system of weights and measures, inspectorial systems, and national police powers asserted sovereignty, discipline, and regulation throughout statebound territory. By 1871, this process was associated with several contemporaneous developments: mass schooling, improved literacy and numeracy rates, an increased >metrological discipline= that accompanied a burgeoning market economy, and a popular acceptance of the benefits of scientific thinking. Moreover, the census helped construct what Curtis calls a >national imaginary= as Canada invented itself. That is, an array of disaggregated people, economies, and social practices were moulded into a national population and polity by those who >made= the census. To this end, Curtis places census-making in its >changing political-economic context,= profiles the census managers, locates statistical production and census-making amid other government projects, and elucidates the various practices of translating >visions of social relations in Canada into authoritative numerical accounts.= Tellingly, Curtis critiques...