Broadly speaking, I am interested in how arithmetic reasoning allowed eighteenth-century writers and thinkers to lend abstractions like “population” or “environment” a historical shape in print. “How to Read by Numbers: Plague, Political Arithmetic, and the Production of History,” an article on plague, political arithmetic, and the imaginative and affective dimensions of quantitative writing, appears in a recent issue of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
I am at work on a book project, The Measure of Humanity: Quantification and the Dream of Amelioration in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic, which argues that quantitative attempts to represent and reform plantation agriculture—and the colonial societies it supported—generated novel paradigms for thinking about the governance of populations, management of land, and the reproduction and allocation of labor power throughout the British Empire. As eighteenth-century travelers, planters, merchants, novelists, and abolitionists recruited numerical techniques to register the realities of the plantation at a textual level, they lent literary form to a worldview predicated on aggregating land, labor, and capital into systems whose historical contours could be tracked over time and adjusted through technocratic intervention. Reading James Grainger’s colonial georgic poem The Sugar-Cane (1764) against Samuel Martin’s Essay Upon Plantership (1750), for example, shows us how Grainger’s panoramic, prospect-oriented verse reproduces a mode of totalizing vision that depends upon quantitative surveillance.
Because this style of thought—on the one hand, a literary-imaginative approach to the representation of abstractions, and on the other, a mode of governance that develops as the architects of social domination deploy texts as instruments of practice—naturalizes the givens of production and relations of force as features of observable historical systems, it also circumscribes the terms of conservative and radical politics within a narrow mode of incremental reform. The Measure of Humanity theorizes this political problem under the heading of ameliorationism—a politic and philosophical disposition that finds its clearest expression in gradualist approaches to the abolition of slavery, but which both antedates and exceeds the abolition debates of the mid- to late eighteenth century. I situate “amelioration” as a way of seeing and acting upon the world that takes shape in exchanges between metropolitan and colonial arguments about the regulation of persons, things, and labor. By locating ameliorationism in this more expansive and extensive historical backdrop, I show how it evolves as a discourse of capture that contours political life under liberalism and the rule of capital.
Currently, I am developing articles that explore, respectively, the relationship between quantification, slavery, and environmental writing in the colonial Caribbean; and the pitfalls of reformism across eighteenth-century and contemporary abolition debates.