The Prehistory of Population Censuses in the Italian Regional States

• In Event: 548 - Theory Section Paper Session. Theorizing the Social: Studies of Science and Technology

Abstract

In contrast to conventional histories of censuses that start with the redaction of the first census of a nation state (such as the US in 1790, Britain in 1801, or Italy in 1861), this paper considers the prehistory of the Italian censuses starting in the 1500s. Using a comparative methodology, the paper shows how the political economies of the Italian regional states strongly affected the information collected. In particular, population censuses (as separate from fiscal information gathering) started earlier in the more commercialized, marketized northern Italian regions. In addition, the political structure of the regional states also affected the specific categories used to collect information (e.g., class categories in the Venetian oligarchy; moral categories in the theocratic Papal States). Finally, most of the regional states shared an intense concern with categories of residence that arose out of their political economies that were largely based on citizenship rooted in city states. Thus, in contrast to much of the current “state-centered” thrust of the sociology of statistics, this the paper shows how social influences strongly affected information gathering.

Authors

• Rebecca Jean Emigh, University of California-Los Angeles

• Dylan John Riley, University of California-Berkeley

• Patricia Ahmed, Sourth Dakota State University--University Center