Parliamentarians in Westminster were initially sceptical, rejecting a headcount in 1753 as “totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty”
to get excited about a census. As the latest decennial wave rolls through many countries in 2020 and 2021, people who fill out the forms, often urged by a knock on the door, will generally find it tedious. In Britain, nearly 400,000 pranksters tried to liven up the process in 2001 by listing their religion as “Jedi”. In America, the latest count might even cause fear.
Mr Whitby’s book, however, is anything but drab. The first half races from Emperor Yu arranging the first Chinese headcount around 2100to the advent of tabulation machines in 1890. These chapters are really a potted history of the relationship between state and people, interspersed with tales of great thinkers and intrepid data-gatherers . Originally, the census was an imposition by an all-powerful executive, undertaken to muster armies and collect taxes.
Britain at last introduced one in 1801, after Thomas Malthus claimed that population growth would outstrip productivity, causing famine. Other countries followed. But America remained the crucible of modern census-taking. The edition of 1880 contained a billion data points—so Herman Hollerith, an engineer, designed a machine that could process individual records using punch cards, based on Charles Babbage’s uncompleted computers.
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