Title:	Antecedents of Censuses from Medieval to Nation States
Authors:	Rebecca Jean Emigh , Dylan Riley , and Patricia Ahmed
Keywords:	Census Methodology
Issue Date:	2016
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	In the United States, the decennial census is a vibrant social institution. Even though the American Community Survey, which is conducted on an ongoing basis, has replaced many data collection functions that the census once served, the census is still conducted every ten years, the data are used for numerous purposes, and intense lobbying accompanies its execution. In fact, the census is, in part, an outdated high-modernist invention that could be replaced by registers and surveys (e.g., in the Netherlands). The obvious reason for the survival of the US census is seemingly the constitutional requirement for enumeration that apportions representation in the House of Representatives. This answer, pointing to state influences on the census, however, is much too simple. The US Constitution can be, and has been, amended over much more substantial issues. Instead, we will argue that the survival of the census is tied to its broad social support, thereby pointing to social influences on the census. Thus, we strive to make a broader point: knowledge is created not when information is compiled and maintained by experts (i.e., the frequent call for the census or science to be insulated from politics) but when this information is widely used and contested by many actors in both state and society. We ask then the following question: how do states and societies shape censuses? Most conventional histories of censuses start with the redaction of the first national census, in a single state (usually coterminous with contemporary political borders). However, this methodology is not particularly helpful in specifying the different influences of the state and society on censuses. First, by starting temporally close to the redaction of the first census, it is easy to focus on the state actors’ explicit intentions and inadvertently overemphasize their influence. The role of social actors is usually considered only as they respond to the already existing census information. The social conditions that precondition how state actors can implement a census cannot be examined by starting with the first census. Second, these general social conditions are essentially held constant if a single national census—that is, by design the same throughout a state’s political boundaries—is examined. Thus, these social influences are impossible to specify without a comparative methodology. Here, therefore, we take a different approach. We examine information gathering that took place long before the first censuses and compare this across locations that eventually became the states of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Italy. This methodology allows us to examine the influences of states and societies on information gathering and, eventually, on censuses per se. In this volume, we trace the prehistory of censuses, starting with information gathering around the year 1000 in England and ending with censuses in the political units of the United Kingdom, the United States, and the regional states of Italy just before fully nominative censuses were introduced in the mid-nineteenth centuries. Our second volume traces the modern history of these national censuses to the present.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53801
ISBN:	978–1–137–48503–8
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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