Antecedents of Censuses from Medieval to Nation States. How Societies and States Count by Rebecca Jean Emigh, Dylan Riley, and Patricia Ahmed (review)

Here is a book that describes information-gathering practices used before the development of official censuses in modern states. As the authors explain, their choice to study the historical antecedents of censuses distinguishes the work from “more conventional histories of censuses” in that it allows for determining the “different influences of the state and society”. Therein lies their research problematic and goal. Focusing on the practices used in the earliest counts and how the first censuses were developed facilitates the study of institutional actors and their roles. Meanwhile, to understand the role of social actors requires a comparative methodology. The authors thus adopt a composite approach, attending to both fiscal and demographic information gathering in the United Kingdom, the United States and Italy. Their essential aim in this first of two volumes is to retrace “the prehistory of censuses”, beginning around 1000 in England and ending with the harbingers of Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth century. The second volume will concentrate on the history of official censuses.

In the first and second chapters, the authors specify the guiding principles of their methodology and the reasons they chose this particular corpus. Applying Weber’s distinction between social science and common sense, they posit that census categories are second-order concepts deduced from common sense. Moreover, while official censuses gather information on a society of which they are an integral part, they also conceptualize that society by way of categories derived from perceptions of ordinary individuals (sex, age, occupation, etc.). This means that information-gathering techniques are largely dependent on the political and policy context in a given state and the degree of confidence in the data collected. This in turn explains the authors’ decision to adopt a “state centered” perspective attentive to the influence of social and political conditions on fiscal and demographic information gathering. The main methodological pillar is what they call “macro-Weberianism”, that is, the understanding that a dialectical relationship obtains between bureaucratic practices and democracy, a perspective inspired by the thought not only of Max Weber but also Michel Foucault.

These methodological considerations, which generate references to a vast array of philosophers, sociologists and historians, are the subject of the heavily documented Part I, somewhat difficult to read but essential for understanding what follows. Though the review of sociology of sciences does not contribute anything new methodologically, it is useful in explaining and grounding the authors’ chosen “prehistorical” perspective.

The other two parts are more descriptive. The two chapters of Part II offer a comparison of fiscal information gathering in England/Great Britain and in Italy before national reunification. In England, the information thus produced was used in place of census data. England was a powerful state, but it had little strictly demographic data; for the authors, this is explained mostly by the fact that two separate processes were used to collect fiscal information on people and land. The data obtained by the state was gathered by information intellectuals and local notables, mainly jurists – social actors who furnished relatively little demographic data to institutional actors. The next chapter, on Italy, presents a different situation: all the Italian states requested integrated data on people, property, wealth and income. That information was of course presented separately, but processed in connection with an overarching political and policy aim. Sophisticated methods were used to gather and describe it; here the authors cite the Catasto in fifteenth-century Tuscany and the Censimento in eighteenth-century Lombardy.

The three chapters of Part III discuss practices that led to developing official censuses. The first counts in Great Britain were associated with a consolidated state founded on a strong parliament and an effective constitutional monarchy, illustrating the author’s arguments that “strong states should collect extensive information” and that “states have administrative needs that they meet by establishing information gathering bureaucracies” (pp. 142...