To quantify certain human characteristics as features of governed populations is one of the ways of “seeing like a state” and of imagining national community. Thus, the legibility of “populations” to states has become a theme in histories of the modern state and its statistical capacities.Footnote 1 An important question for such a research program is whether there has been continuity in the significance of population knowledge to the authorities that have gone to the trouble of compiling it. We have been warned not to suppose that “political arithmetick” had any intrinsic political origin or purpose in the “long eighteenth” century of its origin. McCormick writes that “political arithmetick” was “Sometimes about economic relations, sometimes not, sometimes written by people we might label “economic thinkers,” sometimes not; sometimes concerned to expand state power, sometimes critical of that power, and sometimes pursued along lines orthogonal to those of bureaucratic rationalization or party politics.”Footnote 2
He then speculates that it would be rewarding to study the colonial applications of the modern state’s capacity to quantify colonised people. Such a program of study might hypothesise that all programs of governmental enumeration of the colonised have been projects of epistemic violence—or at least epistemic substitution—in which the processes of colonial knowledge production have contested, overlaid and displaced the social processes by which the colonised people had produced and consumed knowledge. The notion that certain humans within colonial oversight can be constituted as a “population” may have an underlying generalizable significance: if colonised peoples had no means and no reason to conceive of themselves as a “population,” then the colonists’ representation of them as “populations” was surely, in itself, an act of power. The very notion “native population” enacted the territorial authority of those who wielded it.
Since 2004, I have been studying the history of the enumeration of colonised indigenous peoples by colonial authorities in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States of America in the period 1763 to 1960s. Certain themes have emerged. First, examining the work of pioneer enumerators of native peoples in Western Australia, New Zealand, and the United States brings one to the conclusion that British settler colonial states developed their capacity to enumerate colonised indigenous people as part of their self-imposed mission of colonial guardianship.Footnote 3 Colonial authorities constituted a “native population” through administrative practices that were simultaneously controlling, enumerative, and, in certain respects, protective. These enumerating protectors took seriously the idea that native peoples were at risk of dying out, and their work helped to undermine the assumption that native extinction was inevitable. Brandishing statistical proofs that they had arrested or could arrest population decline, these enumerators encouraged advocates of humanitarian intervention to believe in the effectiveness of protective control.
Second, when we examine such undermining of belief in the “dying Native” scenario, we find that the dying Native story is a resilient settler colonial narrative because it has had three versions: physical, genetic, and cultural. Quantifying the effectiveness of state and mission interventions refuted the dying Native story in its physical sense, while leaving open to intellectual contest and political mobilisation the issue of whether such populations survived in their peoplehood—construed in terms of the racial and cultural continuity of the survivors. Contradicting the assertion that miscegenation and/or cultural adaptations amounted to “dying” in genetic and civilizational senses, native intellectuals could assert continuity of peoplehood—defined in terms on which they insisted. Such intellectuals could project further actions—by colonising authority and by the colonised themselves—that would assure their survival as peoples. We see such intellectual and political projects in the early twentieth-century careers of certain Māori and Native American authors and leaders who found racial and cultural terms in which to affirm continuity of peoplehood.Footnote 4
Third, indigenous intellectuals have used official population data not only to refute the dying Native story and to affirm that they have futures as peoples, but also, in the late twentieth century, to promote an ideal of social justice expressed in statistical terms: highlighting the injustice of statistical (dis)parity between indigenous and non-indigenous populations.Footnote 5
In this paper, I will build on these studies of the political resonance of demographic representations of colonised people. I will highlight a particular idiom in which the colonised have been rendered as “populations”: the table. By contextual analysis of four tables I will illustrate a conceptual affinity between the emergence of such tabulations and the receding practical significance of the idea that the colonised are sovereign peoples. That is, within colonial authority there has been more than a practical link between the measurement and the management of colonised populations; there has also been an epistemic affinity between knowing the colonised as a “population” and the idea that colonial authority is not a transaction between a superior and an inferior sovereign, but a project of “guardianship” by one sovereign over a vulnerable native population.
“Population” implies an ontology of the social that is in tension with conceptions of the colonised as “peoples.” In this emergent ontology, a conception of the colonised as an aggregation of individuals and households (a “population”) powerfully challenges self-understanding by the colonized of their own practical collectivity: their being as “tribes” and as “peoples,” the persistence of their customary estates. Theodore Porter has described the revolutionary context in which statistical reasoning gained purchase in eighteenth-century France.
It makes no sense to count people if their common personhood is not seen as somehow more significant than their differences. The Old Regime saw not autonomous persons, but members of estates. They possessed not individual rights, but a maze of privileges, given by history, identified with nature, and inherited through birth. The social world was too intricately differentiated for a mere census to tell much about what really mattered.Footnote 6
The fading significance of “estates” in European polities is similar, I suggest, to the fading significance of customary native political and jural entities, as colonial authority increasingly declared itself responsible for the salvation of a threatened native population through schemes for the improvement of individuals and households. My paper is suggestive and illustrative of this convergence between the representation of “population” and those practices of colonial authority that efface the customary institutions through which the colonised experienced and enacted (what would later be called) their sovereign peoplehood.
I wish to position this thesis alongside a parallel research program on the legal history of European colonisation that has focused on the instrumentality of colonial legal reasoning in the reconfiguring (sometimes, the annihilation) of native property and self-government. The theme of this research program is that colonial authority, in its lawmaking, has been experimental rather than obedient to models, theories, or doctrines, and that colonial legal reasoning has been not so much principled as resourceful and flexible in its rhetorical deployment of law and principle. A repertoire of legal devices and doctrines has emerged contingently, as practical necessities of the underlying trend towards the colonial power’s geopolitical ascendancy, its massive settler migration, its exhaustive territorial occupation and its conversion of natural resources to new uses. This program of legal history depicts law
in its instrumental role, as a flexible tool of colonialism, which lends itself to the mutations required to justify the dispossession process. By locating the analysis outside of the normative framework of law, the line of questioning shifts from why (which assumed the existence of a structuring standard that would have set guidelines for actions and decisions) to how (toward an analysis of the mechanisms by which a new order and the dispossession process were legitimized).Footnote 7
Putting legal norms in their place—“norms served as instruments to legitimize implementing a new colonial order”—this research program has postulated as inexorable and determinant the colonial will to power and its assembly of a “new colonial order.”Footnote 8
While I am sympathetic to this perspective, I suggest that our sense of the ingenuity and plasticity of colonial legal reason must be complemented by our attention to the administrative practice of colonial authority: its increasing ability to determine where and how the colonised lived once military power and legal codes had effected their political subordination. The growth of this administrative mastery of territory and people enabled (and was enabled by) the quantification of the colonised as a population. To consider this development brings us to a new appreciation of the word “norm,” adding to its meaning in the phrase “legal norm.” One of the ways that a population is an object of knowledge is that statements about it are “normative” in a statistical sense. Measures of central tendency (average, mean, median, standard deviation) have developed as ways to make population aggregates meaningful. Population data permit and encourage descriptive statements about what is “normal” for that population. Such statements need not be evaluative and prescriptive, but they may be. The relationship between the cognitive and the practical mastery of a “people” as a “population” is a matter for empirical study.
Besides Porter, two writers on the history of statistics have encouraged my exploration of the idea that the concept “population” is both an achievement and an instrument of colonial authority. Ian Hacking has documented the increasingly prolific “making up” of populations in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe—the accelerated development of a “style of reasoning” called “statistical analysis of regularities of populations.”Footnote 9 Alain Desrosières invites attention to the history of “mean,” “correlation,” “regression,” and “representative sampling.” He argues that by using these devices we have learned to equate phenomena, that is, to construct classes of things. These categories become “social facts” that actors must take into account in their behaviour. (Hacking refers to the “historical ontology” of representations.) The categories (assemblages of equivalence) “hold together” through cognitive effort (data collection and analysis) that informs social administration. The most important technology in the making of such social facts is statistics.Footnote 10
The use of statistics has helped the colonial imagination to emphasise what it is about the colonised that is “like,” “equatable,” “commensurable,” “legible.” If we think of colonial knowledge as an endless conjugation of like and unlike, sameness and difference, then the significance of statistics as an idiom is that it tends to convert what is qualitatively different into what is qualitatively the same, so that difference is made as real as that which is quantitatively distinct. It is not that statistics eliminated all senses of the colonised as different. Rather statistics has contributed to changing understandings of what differences matter: with statistics, it is quantifiable differences that become relatively salient, visible, and operationally meaningful.
Adopting this perspective on knowledge that is both colonial and statistical, I have become interested in the occasional appearance of tables within texts purporting to represent governmentally-relevant characteristics of the colonised. In what follows, I contextualise four tables that I have found in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documentary records of colonial authority in North America and the Antipodes. A table is a representational device that arranges symbols (whether words or numbers) in a matrix defined by two axes. Those symbols do not signify by virtue of their position in single linear sequence (one letter after another, making words, one word after another, making sentences, from the top left to the bottom right of the page). Rather, in a table, each symbol (word/number) gets its significance from its position in the matrix, that is, from its presentation at the intersection of a row (running across the page) and a column (running up and down the page). These rows and columns are named categories in some scheme of classification; the intersection of a row with a column makes a cell in which a word or a number appears, and the reader of the table understands the significance of this word or number by reference to the column and row in which it appears.
I will proceed illustratively by contextualizing four tables that I have found in the archives of Anglophone colonization. No doubt there are others that I could add to the analysis were I to review more papers by British authorities. My account can be only suggestive, not exhaustive. I will suggest that the statistical table is a genre of representation that came to express the affinity between colonial guardianship and population statistics. In describing some episodes in the emergence of the table as a way of representing colonised people in the British Empire in the period 1763 to 1850, I do not argue that the table, as a representational device, originated in that period. However, I will start my paper with what I believe to be a relatively early tabulation of the North American Indian population—presented by Sir William Johnson in 1763 to the Lords of Trade, as part of his advice to the government of Great Britain about its future conduct towards Indians. I will follow Johnson’s with another from North America, dated 1828, deployed by Major H. G. Darling when describing Canadian Indians as a charge on government expenditure. My attention then turns to New Zealand, to a table deployed in 1848 by Walter Mantell, describing Māori landowners with whom the British government had been negotiating land sales. My final table is from New South Wales, and its author is Edward Stone Parker, a former assistant protector of Aboriginals who summarised in 1850 his efforts to protect Aboriginal people in a recently occupied region of New South Wales by sedentarising them. On average, his table implied, they were becoming residents of a particular place, Parker’s station, on their ancestral country.
William Johnson’s table, 1763
Days after Great Britain defeated France at Montreal in September 1760, the British ratified the Oswegatchie Neutrality Treaty, in which Native peoples from the Saint Lawrence River valley, grouped as the Seven Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, would have lands and rights protected by Britain. William Johnson, the British superintendent of Indian affairs, had conducted the negotiations. The surrender of the French in 1760 did not bring peace to the region, however. The post-war diplomacy of Jeffrey Amherst was an experiment in fiscal retrenchment: Why spend money on keeping Britain in the Indians’ favour now that there was no longer a French rival? Indian insurgency soon showed that it would pay Britain to be more generous than Amherst allowed.
In February 1763, the Treaty of Paris divided North America south of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s domain into three territories: Britain’s North American colonies, Spain’s domain (west of the Mississippi), and between them a zone that the British Royal Proclamation of October 1763 termed “Indian Territory.” By then the British were forcefully suppressing a rebellion that had emanated from Indian Territory in the spring of 1763, encouraged by the visionary prophecies of Indian sages. This rising posed a question to British authority: By what methods could Britain secure relations with this Indian hinterland? The answer was diplomacy by gifts .
In making the case for gift diplomacy in November 1763, William Johnson described to the Lords of Trade the political situation in the Great Lakes region. His letter seems to be the first systematic British attempt to count the number of Indians living within a specified North American territory: it included a summary population table in which Johnson estimated about 12,000 Indians, admitting that he could not even guess at numbers to the west of the Great Lakes.Footnote 11 These figures have since been cited as the pioneering enumeration of Canada’s Indians, as if they were a precursor to the census of Canada.Footnote 12
For the “Six Nation Confederacy (comprehending that of Canada, Ohio, ettc),” the “Indians of Canada in Alliance with the Six Nations” and the “Indians of Ohio” Johnson gave a total of 3,960 “men.” The point of Johnson’s demographic curiosity was to assess a security risk and to advocate a strategy. His table surveyed “the strength, Interest, Claims and sentiments of the Indians” whom the British Crown should henceforth placate with gifts. “I heartily wish this expence was unnecessary,” he apologised. However, if the British Crown did not issue gifts, it would find even more costly the deployment of troops to quell Indian discontent.Footnote 13
Johnson’s table comprised four columns and twenty-one rows, in two parts. The first column “Names” listed twenty-one entities, one to each row, in some cases adding place information to the name, as in “Powtewatamis: in the neighbourhood of Detroit” (150 men) and “Powtewatamis: in the neighbourhood of St. Joseph” (200 men). For each of these entities, Johnson gave a brief description of their “scituation” (that is, physical setting), such as “Mohocks” (160 men): “Two villages on the Mohawk River, with a few Emigrants at Scohare about 16 miles from Fort Hunter.” The term “Emigrant” conveyed Johnson’s understanding that the total population was made up of a series of place-based units—such as “Mohocks”—each with its own sites of habitation (“Villages”) at which its members could be either resident or “emigrant” at another place.
Having disaggregated the Indian population into a series of place-based communities in the first three columns, Johnson wrote in the fourth “remarks” column a brief political assessment of each. Thus, after describing where the Seneca “Villages” were, he remarked: “two villages are still in our interest, viz: Kanadasero and Kanaderagey, the rest have joined the Western Nations.”
The remainder of his tabulated Northern district population—8,020 “men”—he placed under the heading “Ottawa Confederacy, comprehending the Twightwees ettc”—again using four columns. Within this confederacy Johnson distinguished twenty-one units (“Names”/places) each with its “number of men” and its “scituation,” and in ten cases he wrote political characterisations in the “remarks” column. He admitted the territorial limits of his knowledge: specifically the “Ottawas, Chipeweighs, ettc,” the Illinois and the Sioux.Footnote 14
Johnson’s November 1763 table described a strategic situation that demanded diplomatic calculation of a viable pattern of colonial occupation. His scheme to preserve the British settlers from Indian attack and to secure a trading system went beyond plying the Indians with gifts. He also urged that a line be drawn beyond which British settlement could not venture. This entailed a policy of consolidated settlement and the regulation of land sales. Johnson described the staff he would need to maintain a continuing dialogue with the Indians, and he asked that missionaries be sent to reside with Indians in their villages.
Johnson then had to cost his scheme to satisfy the Lords of Trade that it could be paid for. In a subsequent (October 1764) letter to the Lords he included a new estimate of the numbers of recipient Indians in the northern portion of the Indian Territory: ten thousand, two thousand fewer than in his November 1763 table. Johnson was here addressing the wish of the Lords of Trade that the money required to keep the peace with the Indians (including not only the cost of gifts but also the running costs of the trading posts) must be recovered fully by the Crown’s taxes on trade. Johnson admitted that he did not know the value of the trade in goods and peltry, so his ability to estimate the Crown’s revenue was limited to his estimating the value of the goods that Indians would buy if they could. He claimed to know the number of Indians and what European goods they liked. Estimating ten thousand “hunters” he attributed to each an average quantity of European goods consumed in a year. Johnson’s October 1764 letter thus evoked Indians as not only warriors but also as consumers, anticipating the economic transition that Indians were to experience in the Lakes region over the next eighty years: from hunting to agriculture, with increasing demand for manufactures imported from Britain.Footnote 15
The British maintained forts within Indian Territory and buttressed with Indian agents’ presents the British sovereign’s show of arms. According to Richard White, the strategy affected the distribution of Indians: “Insofar as the attempt to restrict the trade to the posts succeeded, it increased the numbers of Indians who visited the forts. The greater the number of Indians present, the greater the number of provisions and gifts necessary to keep them content.”Footnote 16 While this policy purchased Indian allegiance or Indian neutrality in Britain’s two subsequent military campaigns—against the thirteen rebellious colonies 1776–83 and against the United States of America 1812–14—its financial cost was a persistent concern.Footnote 17
Major H. G. Darling’s table, 1827
Great Britain established the Province of Canada in 1790, consisting of Upper Canada (now Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec). Within that reformed structure, the Indian Department enjoyed a degree of autonomy secured by its significance as the mediator between the Crown and potentially insubordinate Indians. That this way of conciliating Indians continued to be considered a fiscal problem can be seen in Lieutenant Governor Simcoe’s attempt to reform the Indian Department in March 1795. He explained to Governor General Guy Carleton, Lord Dorchester, that people in Upper Canada thought the Indian Department under the Johnson dynasty to be corrupt in its administration of money and gifts; he added that the department’s officers fomented tensions between Indians and the United States in order to keep alive the security problem and thus their claim on publicly funded gifts. Without necessarily endorsing that perception, Simcoe nonetheless proposed a way to make “a regular system” of the custom of a Crown donation to Indians. He wanted the legislature to have more power to regulate the Indian Department, and he wanted the power to negotiate a new land settlement policy and political framework for annual consultation with the Indians. In addition, he wanted the gift process to be “regulated by a List, and delivered to them as annual donations,”Footnote 18
The flow of goods into Indian hands—initiated as gift diplomacy—strengthened as Upper Canada experienced mass migration and land settlement. Migrants came at first from the United States and then from the British Isles. From 1791 to 1812, the population of Upper Canada increased from 14,000 to 75,000, with most migrants from the USA. The flow from the USA stopped in the 1812–14 war, and when it resumed in 1820s, it was dwarfed by migration from Britain: the non-Indian population rose to 237,000 in 1831, and more than doubled to 487,000 by 1842.Footnote 19 In the first half of the nineteenth century, Upper Canada became an economy of family farms. From 1818, Britain changed its land-purchase policy; hitherto a lump sum payment in goods had effected the purchase from the Indians; from that date the administration paid Indian sellers an annuity, still in the form of goods. The settlers made a 10 percent down payment and became the Crown’s mortgagees; their interest payments to the Crown became the fund from which the Crown paid for the Indians’ in-kind annuities. This process enabled a rapid transformation in the land use and social composition of Upper Canada. For Indians, annuities resembled an older tradition of Crown gifts that had secured their goodwill towards the British.
However, the Crown’s ideas about its responsibilities towards Indians were changing, and this put in question the assumption that—for one reason or another—it was the duty of British authorities to pay goods or to make gifts to Indians. With the apparent success of projects to transform certain Indians into Christian farming communities, some observers argued in the 1820s that the predictable flow of gifts into Indian hands had allowed many of them to remain dependent, glorying in their warrior memories rather than moving on to what the British considered the next stage of human development: agriculture.Footnote 20 Was it not the humanitarian duty of settler colonisation to change Indians into self-supporting farmers? Those who posed that question suspected the Indian Department of being complicit with Indians’ stasis. In July 1827, the colonial secretary, Lord Goderich, asked Earl Dalhousie, governor-in-chief of British North America, whether money, instead of goods, could be distributed to Indians in quarterly, half-yearly, and annual instalments; this would allow the government to disband the Indian Department, “a necessary measure of public economy and improvement.”Footnote 21
The suggestion appalled Dalhousie. He replied that to commute gifts to cash would antagonise the chiefs and the missionaries, as both worried that young Indians were showing an inordinate taste for alcohol: cash in their hands would further promote their inebriation. He hoped that the proposal never reached the ears of the chiefs who, Dalhousie added, remained “warlike in their ideas and recollections,” even those “civilised and accustomed to social life.” The Indian Department should not be abolished but “remodelled.”Footnote 22 He attached documents that showed that his administration had continued, in the 1820s, to regard gift diplomacy towards tribes west of the Great Lakes as essential to securing the border with the United States.Footnote 23 Nonetheless, to oblige Goderich, Dalhousie ordered his military secretary Major H. C. Darling to review the operations of the Indian Department in Upper and Lower Canada and to advise whether its “total suppression” were feasible.Footnote 24
Darling’s review included a table titled “A general return of the Indians who have received Presents in Upper and Lower Canada, including Drummond Island, during the year 1827.” There were fifty-one rows, each showing data about a named tribe. In this respect Darling’s 1828 table was in conceptual continuity with William Johnson’s 1763 table, which had also devoted a row to each named Indian residential/political unit. However, the point of Darling’s columns was not to identify the numbers, place, and political disposition of each tribe, as Johnson had in 1763; rather, Darling’s twenty columns made visible a differentiated array of types of individuals and their entitlements. The two main kinds of entitlement were “full equipments” and “common equipments.” Those entitled to “full equipments” were “Chiefs wounded in action with the enemy” and their wives or widows. Those entitled to “common equipments” were differentiated into “Chiefs,” “Warriors,” “Wives of warriors,” and boys and girls disaggregated into three age groups: 1 to 4, 5 to 9, and 10 to 15. Within each cell, the number signified how many of that category of person, from that tribe had received either “full” or “common” equipment. These numbers could be summed in their rows and in their columns to give the total numbers of recipients, according to tribe (row) or type of entitlement (column). According to this table, 3,395 Indians in Lower Canada and 12,919 Indians in Upper Canada were receiving “presents.” As well, the second column from the right enumerated not a type of recipient, but a repeated action by the Indian Department, the administration of a “ration”: a total of just under 43,000 rations had been administered in 1827.Footnote 25
Darling’s table can be understood as an artefact of a transition in thinking about colonial responsibility; it highlighted two aspects of the Indian Department’s issue of goods that had to be acknowledged. From the fiscal perspective, it quantified recipients and rations, two quanta that could, in principle, be expressed as a cost to the Crown (though this particular table did not show this monetary cost). From the older, security perspective, the table gave the recipients of rations what we might call a social personality or political identity: that is, the table rendered individuals as members of tribes and in terms of their historically-derived entitlement as warrior-allies of the Crown. These Indians had fought alongside the British, the table said; some of them had been wounded and some women were their wives or their widows. The number of these “full equipment” persons was relatively small: forty-four wounded chiefs, sixty-four wives, and a hundred widows of wounded chiefs. But the labelling represented them as the living bearers of a history of warrior service, to be acknowledged by the Crown as an entitlement. From the columns showing recipients of “common equipments,” we learn that there were 318 “chiefs” and 3,421 warriors, a relatively high warrior/population ratio of more than one in four.
Darling accompanied his table with a prose commentary that devoted a few hundred words to each tribal group. Of the Hurons, Algonquins, Abenaquais, Iroquoi, Algonquins, Nipissings (“2922 souls”), he remarked that their possession of their lands must be protected, or they would need to be supported entirely by the government. Without land, they would starve in towns and villages and crowd the gaols, or they might accept whatever the United States offered them and become vengeful enemies of the Crown.Footnote 26 Darling did not estimate the Indian population of Upper Canada, as it was still difficult to differentiate Indians of the United States from those of Canada. Thus he reported that of the 5,906 Indians who received presents at Amherstburg, only 1,500 were “permanently inhabiting our territory.”Footnote 27 And he noted 3,536 at Drummond Island, a region recently conceded to the United States.
Although Darling could present security reasons for continuing the issue of goods, in line with British policy since 1763, and although annuity payments to Indians had become necessary, pursuant to recent land cessions, he acknowledged that the government must now reconsider the presentation of goods. The work of the Indian Department had become too routinized since the war of 1812–14. “The officers of the Department have done little more than superintend the issue of presents,” he wrote, “while the more important object of keeping alive the affections of the Indians to the Government, by a vigilant protection of their interests, and by encouraging their disposition to settle into useful subjects, has been altogether overlooked.”Footnote 28
Darling’s phrase “encouraging their disposition to settle into useful subjects” expressed the strengthening humanitarian argument that it was the duty of colonial authority to “civilise” Indians, not only to conciliate them. In Sir William Johnson’s day, Indians had been significant to the British government as allies or as neutral parties in testing military encounters with the French and later the Americans. The Indians had also been economically significant as trappers who traded furs for goods of British manufacture. When Indians had been significant as warriors and hunters, it had then been neither in Britain’s interest nor within the Indian Department’s capacity and aspiration to “civilise” them. Now, in the 1820s, the fur-hunting economy was being eclipsed by an economy of settled agriculture, and the risk of armed hostilities with the United States had abated. Darling pointed out that, through longer exposure to European influence, the Indians in Lower Canada had been more acculturated than those in Upper Canada. In Upper Canada, the goods distributed by the Indian Department—blankets, gunpowder, shot, tobacco, cloth—enabled the hunting economy to endure. Darling insisted that the Indians in Upper Canada were owed these goods for war service and for their continuing to sell land to the Crown or to deed land for sale by the Crown to colonists. However, he conceded that if Britain were to continue to honour its obligations to Indians, some payments to Indians should be in the form of agricultural implements so that they could begin to join the new colonial economy as farmers. The Indian Department, he argued, should embrace a program of acculturation and promote a system of model farms and villages in which Indians would become civilized.
Darling’s 1828 table was a transitional document in that it continued the representation of Indians in terms of their entitlement as former allies and as current “warriors” and “chiefs” who belonged to nations even as it began to quantify the monetary burden of their continuing dependency. The labelling of Darling’s rows and columns drew on the language of Indians’ self-conception and acknowledged their entitlements as nations. The table was thus a gesture of respect between martial cultures. However, the table was also the artefact of a strengthening fiscal and humanitarian discourse in which the dependency of Indians could be understood as both a fiscal and a moral problem. Quantifying the burden/indulgence of the Indians and the Indian Department, Darling’s table added a fiscal point to the humanitarian question: Were these goods conducive to the improvement of Indians? In 1830, the British government transferred the Indian Department from military to civilian control, in order better to monitor its expenditure of revenue from land sales on the new civilising programs. In 1834, the budget for payments and gifts to Indians was divided. The imperial treasury would continue to pay for war service, but money owed to Indians in exchange for ceding title to their lands would now have to be found from the budget of each province. This focused the minds of settler elites on Indian sustenance as a financial problem, and on Indians as dependent peoples. A series of systematic surveys of the Indian population of Canada from 1837 to 1850 included tables in which the Indians were no longer classified according to their war pension entitlements but according to the degree to which they had become self-sufficient Christian farmers. It was in these later quantifications of Indians that the Canadian Indian population was originated as a modern administrative artefact.Footnote 29 Darling’s 1828 table was an important step towards that sense of Indian “population.”
Mantell’s table and McCleverty’s average, “Middle Island,” 1848
Equitable dealing in land was a prominent concern of those colonising New Zealand in the 1840s. Many Māori were willing to sell land to the Crown, but in protecting Māori rights in accordance with the Treaty of Waitangi (1840), a prudent Crown would try to discover and respect Māori ideas of fair dealing. Māori were numerous and capable of violence against those who offended them; and if Māori turned against the idea of selling land, the colonial project would be inhibited. The Crown also pledged to continue a New Zealand Company policy that one-tenth of all land sold by Māori would be set aside as Māori reserves, where (it was hoped) Māori could learn to farm like the colonists.
One role of the Crown’s small team of protectors in the years 1840 to 1846 was to advise the governor about how Māori understood rights in land—both among themselves and in the context of sales to non-Māori. A militarily weak colony required such ethnographic intelligence. As Mark Hickford has explained, “confidence in disciplining Anglophone settlement by privileging the governmental collection and control of information concerning procedures for negotiating with Māori could be used to unlock locations for settlement.”Footnote 30 However, the need for such ethnographic intelligence varied according to the Māori/settler population ratios. As Protector George Clarke, Snr, pointed out in 1846, settlers living thinly scattered among Māori “are necessarily living in subjection to native custom, and are compelled to conform all their dealings with the natives to that rule. Excepting those who reside in the immediate vicinity of the towns, or rather within reach of our guns, the settlers are at all times liable to the penalties attached to a breach of native custom.”Footnote 31
However, in regions where Māori were few, ethnographic ignorance mattered less, and other ways of knowing the social setting had a better chance of being relevant and useful to colonial authority. I will illustrate this possibility with a very simple population table that officials produced in correspondence about the east coast of the South Island.
It must have been good news to New Zealand’s colonists when Edward Shortland’s 1843–44 censuses of the South (“Middle”) Island revealed a tiny and evidently mobile native population.Footnote 32 On the basis of this report, the Colonial Office’s James Stephen suggested that “there will be little or no embarrassment about native claims to land in the Middle Island.”Footnote 33 Perhaps a few well-executed transactions would open much land to colonial occupation. Though Governor George Grey abolished the protectorate in 1846, he retained some of its officers and appointed them Commissioners for the Extinguishment of Native Claims. In Grey’s approach, “Aboriginal tenure was to be avoided if possible, or unlocked in areas where intelligence on local Māori was strongest.”Footnote 34 The relatively lightly populated South Island was his opportunity, and the British government—concerned that settlement had stalled in the early 1840s—was ready with purchase funds.Footnote 35
Grey visited the Otago region (Port Chalmers) early in 1848, finding Māori willing to sell. He sent Henry Kemp to negotiate terms with forty chiefs in June. The result was the acquisition of a large land portion that included 280 miles (451 kilometres) of coast line, known as Kemp’s Purchase. In keeping with Grey’s continuing commitment to “reserves,” Kemp reserved pās (fortified villages) and cultivations, in lots whose size was yet to be decided. In July 1848, Lieutenant Governor Eyre, in formal terms responsible for colonial affairs on the South Island, was aware that the Māori parties to the sale wanted these reserve portions to be determined as soon as possible and according to their own ideas about what they needed. To complete this aspect of Kemp’s Purchase, Eyre sent Walter Mantell to tour the block from August 1848 to January 1849, when he visited Māori communities and identified the reserves. Mantell’s work was intended to reassure the Crown; but on his own report his decisions about reserves did not satisfy the Māori, whose response to his boundary marking he described with words such as “sullen,” “furious,” “gloomy civility,” “insolent,” and “dishonest clamour.”Footnote 36 Nonetheless, Grey could use Mantell’s report to persuade the colonial secretary on 10 February 1849 that, through equitable transactions, the Crown was managing the alienation of Māori lands on the South Island.Footnote 37
However, on 7 February 1849 the New Zealand Spectator and Cook Strait Guardian published a critique of Kemp’s Purchase by a literate Ngāi Tahu chief, Matiaha Tiramorehu. One part of Tiramorehu’s open letter to Governor-in-Chief (Grey) was about which Māori tribes should have been compensated for certain areas within Kemp’s Purchase; the other part complained about the allocation of reserves. He repeated this second complaint in an October 1849 letter to Lieutenant Governor Eyre. Tiramorehu told Eyre that the Ngāi Tahu aspired to cultivate wheat and potatoes and to raise stock and would thus need more land than Mantell had reserved for them. A block for a white man, Tiramorehu complained, was the same size as the block for all Māori in Moeraki.Footnote 38 Mantell’s response to this objection to his determination of the reserves was to provide the following population/land table for Kaiapoi and Moeraki.
The table shows that, when lands and populations of both places were totalled, there were approximately eleven acres per individual Māori. Presenting this average did not directly answer Tiramorehu’s accusation. However, as the historian Harry Evison points out, it would have satisfied Eyre, Grey, and the Colonial Office. The Grey administration was acting on behalf of the New Zealand Company when it negotiated with Māori for the extinguishment of native title. The New Zealand Company was advised on Māori lands by Lieutenant Colonel McCleverty, whose career in the British Colonial Service had taught him to strike a balance between two possible futures when deciding how much land should be set aside for native use. In Evison’s words: “Too much [land], and the “natives” would not work for wages and might even compete with European settlers. Too little and they might starve and become a charge upon charity and an embarrassment to the state.”Footnote 39 In the case of Kemp’s Purchase, McCleverty advised that ten acres (four hectares) per head of population was the right amount. Receiving Mantell’s table, Eyre instructed Kemp that he considered the Moeraki reserve sufficient, and that such questions would not be reopened.Footnote 40
Mantell’s table has been criticized for underestimating the Māori population at Kaiapoi and at Waikouaiti.Footnote 41 That criticism may be justified. However, had Mantell’s estimates been higher, his allocations would still have applied McCleverty’s average, a formula whose intellectual authority was not questioned by Eyre and Grey. McCleverty’s postulation of what land “average Māori” needed did not completely ignore the stated agricultural aspirations of the Ngāi Tahu, but it was consistent with the understanding that Māori were “crude agriculturalists.” Hickford has pointed out that, in writing to Governor George Grey in December 1846, Colonial Secretary Earl Grey had conceded that Māori were an agricultural people and thus were proprietors of the soil they worked; however, “the extent of land so occupied by them was absolutely insignificant when compared with that of the country they inhabited; . . . [and] the cultivated grounds [were] far less than [a one-hundredth] part of the available land.”Footnote 42
In addition to writing down Māori agricultural capacity, McCleverty’s average performed another ideological service: it evoked the Māori not as a polity but as a population that could be known in terms of its average needs. This displacement of ethnographic particularity with an impersonal figure, the average Māori, was the confident postulate of epistemic power.
Edward Stone Parker’s Loddon River table, 1842
The cognitive and political authority of averaging is one of the greatest benefits that tabular representation can confer. In eastern Australia, one assiduous enumerator of Aborigines, Assistant Protector Edward Stone Parker, used averages as a way to represent the changing territoriality of people native to the Port Phillip District in the 1840s.
In 1838, through instructions to a sceptical and economizing Governor George Gipps, the Colonial Secretary Lord Glenelg initiated the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate in the southern region of New South Wales. The chief protector, appointed in 1838, was George Augustus Robinson; he supervised four assistants, deployed in four regions from March 1839. Governor Charles Augustus Fitzroy advised in 1848 that the protectorate be abolished, and so it was at the end of 1849. This was a victory for colonists who had doubted that Aborigines could be “domesticated” and who persistently objected to the protectorate’s limiting effects on the occupation of grazing land.Footnote 43
As a new practice of government, “protection” faced an issue: should protectors roam with the Aborigines of their region (and thus maximize their opportunities to communicate with Aborigines about adjusting to the requirements of the colonial order) or should they model the sedentary life (and so have contact with Aborigines only when the latter chose to visit)? Throughout his career Robinson favoured itineracy as a way to enter into a trusting and conciliatory relationship with Aborigines. In August 1839, he asked each protector to report twice a year on “the number of journeys you have made, the number of cases you have enquired into, with the results of such inquiry, the number of days spent at any fixed station, the number of days in traveling or elsewhere.”Footnote 44 In December 1839, his report to Superintendent Charles La Trobe conceded that the time would come when each protector’s civilizing influence would induce in the Aborigines a desire to settle in one place and to accumulate property; at that point “and not until then, shall I feel it my duty to recommend to the Government the immediate formation for the Assistant Protectors of fixed establishments.”Footnote 45 In the event, each of the four assistant protectors did establish a base, and each had effective discretion about dividing their time between developing that base as an attractive place for Aborigines to reside and moving around with Aborigines who roamed their country.
After finding his first site unsatisfactory, Assistant Protector Edward Stone Parker, a former Wesleyan schoolmaster and lay preacher, established his station at Franklinford (Lanneebarramul, or home of the emu) near Daylesford. Parker’s station, which lasted from 1841 until December 1849, was of mud-brick construction and included a schoolroom and a dining hall.Footnote 46 Parker had less opportunity for Christian evangelism than he would have liked, but he conscientiously enumerated Aborigines, and his reports scrupulously acknowledged the limitations of knowing an itinerant and scattered people from one fixed point of observation. The Daungwurrung people that he was responsible for came to his station, stayed for a while and left to roam their country. He reported average daily attendances at his station, and he distinguished between people whose numbers he knew by direct observation and those about whom he was reliably informed. He refused to count those reported but not seen by his informants “for many months.”Footnote 47 He thus distinguished between those Aborigines who were close and relatively well known from those with whom he had less contact.
Parker’s census for 1842 (compiled 5 January 1843) was both detailed and encouraging. He reported an average daily attendance of 114 at his station and he gave figures on daily attendances at the station and at Sunday services (disaggregated into men, women, boys, and girls), and the number of days in 1842 spent at the station by individuals most constantly present. He estimated 670 individuals: 445 at his homestead, 119 whom he had seen on his travels in the district, and 106 reliably reported to him by other Aborigines. These were classified “male/female” and “Aged/adult/Youth and girls/Young children.”Footnote 48 His careful approach to reporting numbers is indicated by such words as these:
I cannot estimate the Aboriginal population of my District at less than one thousand; and in this estimate I do not include any of the tribes on the River Murray, whose numbers are unquestionably very considerable. Nor have I included in my present census the Mapean bulluk, the Marinbulluk, or the Konong-William sections, of whom I before had the honour of remitting you returns, as these people have not yet visited the stations on the Lodden, and appear to confine themselves mostly to the country south of Mount Macedon and Buninyong.Footnote 49
Endorsed as credible by La Trobe, Parker’s figures may have dissuaded Gipps from abolishing the protectorate in 1843.Footnote 50
Parker’s attention to averages in his tabulation of population data represented a degree of constancy in a mobile population. Parker believed that settling people down was the key to their protection, and he sought to refute the self-interested pessimism of colonists who thought that Aborigines, as incorrigible nomads, were doomed to die out. After the protectorate was abolished at the end of 1849, Parker continued to live at his station and to uphold “protection” as a colonial responsibility. He did not waver in his belief that Aborigines’ survival depended on their ceasing to wander and settling down to farming. In 1854, he presented and published a lecture on “The Aborigines of Australia” in which he distinguished between the fates of those Aborigines who adopted “the manners and rules of civilised life” and those who alternated between “the comforts and appliances of civilization” and “the exposure and occasional privations of their original mode of life.” The latter were “more highly susceptible to disease” such as “pulmonary and other inflammatory affections.”Footnote 51
Parker’s statistical work as a protector is summarized in a table that he submitted with his final report (7 January 1850) showing the Aboriginal attendance at his Station.Footnote 52
Parker intended to reply to assertions that his station had failed to attract natives.Footnote 53 His remarks on this table argued that he was now competing with other colonists in inducing a more settled life and that his superiors’ decisions about his access to goods determined his power to attract native residents.
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1. The foregoing return shows that the only lengthened period during nine years when the Station was abandoned by the natives was from the middle of November 1847 to the middle of May 1848 an event mainly occasioned by the heavy Afflictions which [illegible] the officer in charge and his family and the frequent deaths which occurred. At the other period during the same term nearly all the natives withdrew, but for only a few weeks interval.
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2. From the end of the year 1843, great reductions took place in the supplies furnished to the Station and the supplies of the provisions to the Nations were necessarily restricted. From that time the numbers daily present became [reduced?].
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3. The Station has been generally frequented since 1845 (with the exception referred to in Paragraph 1) by as many natives as the sum allowed for it would supply.
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4. From the years 1841–1844 the Station was frequented by several tribes from the North and North Westward whose country was then unoccupied by stock. In 1845 this country was rapidly taken up, and many of the natives previously connected with the Station became more associated with the Settlers.Footnote 54
Parker’s table is striking in its commitment to representing a mobile and opportunistic population with a number—an average presence at a place. Over 103 consecutive months, the table displays the number visiting Parker’s station in each month and their average daily attendance. As well, he calculated an average daily attendance for each calendar year (by summing the monthly averages and dividing by twelve). The native people in his district were in transition from a hunting and gathering economy that required seasonal mobility within a familiar range of country, to a new economy characterized by opportunist recourse to and increasing dependence on the goods issued by Parker and the incoming colonial farmers and graziers to his north. By his averaging of a fluctuating value, Parker managed to evoke in arithmetical terms an entity that did not necessarily exist: a resident Aboriginal population. His averages of daily presence mask mobility because they do not distinguish the frequently from the infrequently mobile nor the mobile from the sedentary. His average is a kind of fantasy, a projection of what he hoped an Aboriginal population could be: persons attributable to a place.
Conclusion
The four tables that I have presented in context can be considered together in a wider temporal and spatial context that they share: from the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth in certain arable regions of North America and the Antipodes. There is much scholarship to demonstrate that the administrative capacities of states to represent “the social” in quantitative terms emerged in this era.Footnote 55 In North America and the Antipodes, Britain was developing the theory and practice of a new kind of colonial authority: the colonist as guardian, protector, and improver of peoples considered more backward and more vulnerable. I suggest that there was an epistemic affinity between the emergence of the quantitative representation of the social and a theory of colonial subjection in which the colonised are understood not as subject peoples/polities but as subject populations whose improvement and survival should and could be measured as features of individuals and households aggregated as populations.
If the “arithmetick” of populations is political, it is likely to be so in many ways, as Ted McCormick has argued in his account of the eighteenth-century pertinence(s) of “political arithmetick.” A research program on the history of population knowledge does well to heed his anti-essentialism. Nonetheless, I suggest that the colonial drive to attain administrative mastery of a territory constitutes a new object of government—the population—with an essential feature that can best be appreciated by considering the difference between “population,” as an aggregation of individuals and households constructed by administratively standardised observation, and a “people,” as a collective with a capacity to be a self-conscious agent and whose capacities are experienced as customary and ongoing estates, polities, jural zones, and shared memories. Talal Asad offered terms for considering this difference, it seems to me, when he evoked statistical knowledge as a configuration of the commensurable and the incommensurable:
“Statistics converts the question of incommensurable cultures into one of commensurable social arrangements without rendering them homogeneous. . . . I do not say statistical thinking solves the philosophical problem of incommensurability; I say that statistical practices can afford to ignore it. And they can afford to ignore it because they are part of the great process of conversion we know as ‘modernisation’”.Footnote 56
The table is an example of “statistical practice.” I have presented four tables contrived by colonial authorities in order to suggest that the table is emblematic of an epistemic power that proceeds by rendering difference in quantitative terms, representing peoples as if they were populations amenable/knowable to observing/managing authority.
