Petty's instruments : the Down Survey, territorial natural history and the birth of statistics

Komel, Svit (author)

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

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