Though difficult to imagine today, the English language had no word “population” to refer to a quantity before the seventeenth century. The idea that masses of humans could be counted—and that counting them all would not be an offense against God—grew fitfully and unevenly at the same time European powers expanded their empires. In this talk, I argue that colonialism spurred the desire to enumerate groups of people, questioning a trajectory that assumes that techniques like censuses, vital statistics, and population science were exported to the Americas as tools of colonial power. Writing from Anglo-America shows how the colonies served as creative testing grounds for imagining communities through numbers. Thomas Malthus quoted Benjamin Franklin’s work on colonial demography when looking for an example of “unchecked” population, and Franklin fostered popular interest in vital statistics by printing and analyzing colonial bills of mortality in his newspapers and almanacs. Regular enumerated lists of deaths in a city, whether it be Boston, New York, Charleston, or Philadelphia, gave colonial readers one of the first representations of themselves as a distinctive group. In communities defined by migration, territorial conflicts with Native Americans, and economic dependence on slavery, tabulated accounts of local deaths applied the coherence of numerical systems to a rapidly changing creole population seeking to envision its future.
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