Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

Examines "human accounting" in works by William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, Richard Ligon, Mary Rowlandson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and others
Acknowledges multiple practices of population recording, not only those made by political leaders but also by Native Americans, African slaves, and settler colonial women, in early America
Emphasizes how these differences are related to the idea of community and the process of colonization
Highlights how reproduction, particularly through maternity, is or is not treated by each respective writer

Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

Description

Quantifiable citizenship in the form of birth certificates, census forms, and immigration quotas is so ubiquitous that today it appears ahistorical. Yet before the modern colonial era, there was neither a word for "population" in the sense of numbers of people, nor agreement that monarchs should count their subjects. Much of the work of naturalizing the view that people can be represented as populations took place far outside government institutions and philosophical treatises. It occurred instead in the work of colonial writers who found in the act of counting the "vast numbers" of Indians who held her captive a way to imagine fixed boundaries between intermingling groups.

Counting Bodies explores the imaginative, personal, and narrative writings that performed the cultural work of normalizing the enumeration of bodies. By repositioning and unearthing a literary pre-history of population science, the book shows that representing individuals as numbers was a central element of colonial projects. Early colonial writings that describe routine and even intimate interactions offer a window into the way people wove the quantifiable forms of subjectivity made available by population counts into everyday life. Whether trying to make sense of plantation slavery, frontier warfare, rapid migration, or global commerce, writers framed questions about human relationships across different cultures and generations in terms of population.

Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

Author Information

Molly Farrell, Assistant Professor of English, The Ohio State University

Molly Farrell is Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University.

Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

Reviews and Awards

"Farrell's Counting Bodies examines ways of counting people in the British Colonial Atlantic using forms of literature such as poetry, captivity narratives and travel writing and mortality bills. Farrell makes the claim that such texts, disparate as they may be, nonetheless offer insight into what she terms human accounting in the seventeenth and eighteenth century colonial context." - Philippa Chun (Cornell University), British Society for Literature and Science

"I was continually excited by this book, and was especially struck by the way that Farrell's focus on the literary representation of population, and particularly on bodies that are difficult to count, might open up new possibilities for thinking about the complexity and variability of colonial American ideas of community. I'm persuaded, for example, that her book can help us think about colonial understandings of disability, another form of human categorization that was just beginning to emerge during this period. ... Just as important, however, is her careful attention to how writers in early America obstructed, disallowed, and resisted this kind of counting. Farrell's book is worth thinking with, and I'm eager to see how her methods and conclusions might further expand and enliven our understanding of what it meant to count and be counted in colonial communities." - Nicholas Junkerman, Common Place

"Counting Bodies takes a very stimulating approach to its subject matter, and as an alternative route to understanding the emergence of population ideas it is to be welcomed." - Robert J. Mayhew, Journal of Historical Geography

Counting Bodies

Population in Colonial American Writing

Molly Farrell

From Our Blog

Population will hit eight billion. Here's why it scares people

Any day now, global population will hit 7.5 billion. Experts predict that we humans will reach eight billion in number sometime around the year 2024. Does that fact fill you with trepidation? Chances are that it does, even though it's only a number, after all. "Eight billion" says nothing about innovations in agriculture or renewable energy technologies, and certainly nothing about global social justice.

Posted on February 5, 2017

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