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Petty's instruments : the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics
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Komel, Svit
(
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)
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https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0007087423001097
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Abstract
William Petty's work has usually been regarded as an epistemic break in the history of statistical and politico-economic thought. In this paper, I argue that Petty's statistical notions stemmed from the natural-historical techniques he originally implemented to manage the Down Survey. Following Bacon, who viewed the description of trades as a paramount branch of natural history, Petty approached the art of surveying itself as an object of natural-historical analysis. He partitioned the surveying work into individual tasks and implemented a meticulous division of labour, employing hundreds of disbanded soldiers as surveyors and using questionnaires to calibrate the responses of his ‘instruments’, as he called his specialized workers. By borrowing these methods from natural history to organize surveying work, Petty was able to conceptualize Ireland as a political body defined by tables of aggregate data. I then compare the Down Survey with John Graunt's observations on the bills of mortality to show that both are representative of a particular style of natural history, aimed at describing the natural and political state of a circumscribed territory. I close by considering other manifestations of ‘territorial natural history’, indicating a continuity between this research tradition and the appearance of statistics in the British Isles.
Language:
English
Keywords:
Down Survey
,
William Petty
,
territorial natural history
,
statistics
,
history of trades
,
questionnaires
Work type:
Article
Typology:
1.01 - Original Scientific Article
Organization:
PF - Faculty of Law
Publication status:
Published
Publication version:
Version of Record
Publication date:
16.01.2024
Year:
2024
Number of pages:
1-22 str.
PID:
20.500.12556/RUL-153974
eISSN:
1474-001X
DOI:
10.1017/S0007087423001097
COBISS.SI-ID:
181134851
Publication date in RUL:
17.01.2024
Views:
614
Downloads:
43
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Record is a part of a journal
Title:
The British journal for the history of science
Shortened title:
BJHS
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
ISSN:
1474-001X
COBISS.SI-ID:
518404633
Licences
License:
CC BY 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
Link:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Description:
This is the standard Creative Commons license that gives others maximum freedom to do what they want with the work as long as they credit the author.
Secondary language
Language:
Slovenian
Keywords:
popis Irske
,
teritorialna naravna zgodovina
,
statistika
,
zgodovina obrti
,
zgodovina rokodelstva
,
vprašalniki
Projects
Funder:
ARRS - Slovenian Research Agency
Project number:
P5-0217
Name:
Vključevanje pravnega izrazja evropskega prava v slovenski pravni sistem
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