This chapter lays the foundation for the book by providing a brief overview of colonization, racialization, and coercive labor mechanisms in British Guiana. The entangled histories of dispossession, enslavement, and indenture frame this chapter’s exploration of how difference was produced, how “divide and rule” operated, and how the sugar industry came to dominate the political life of the colony. The chapter closes with a discussion of the 1928 decision to adopt Crown Colony government. A small white elite, fearing the expansion of a tiny but growing electorate of color, opted out of the then barely representative system of government and placed decision-making firmly in the hands of the Crown. Through an examination of colonial correspondence, the politics of the census, legal documents, newspaper articles, and missionary records, this chapter provides an analysis of the nature of British colonialism in the first third of the twentieth century, which contends that the racialization of the laboring population developed from governance built on dispossession, captive labor, segregation, taxonomy, and law.

Starting from three main passages, the censuses, the priestly blessing, and the prophecies of Balaam, this chapter analyzes how blessing is brought forward at key junctures in the book, making blessing a key theological end in Numbers.

Starting from Dennis T. Olson’s suggestion of the theme of the change of generations as the key to a theological interpretation, this chapter deepens the analysis of this theme and considers how Numbers addresses questions of sin, God’s “visiting the iniquity” on the third to fourth generation, and the possibility of forgiveness of sin.

Union veterans faced significant challenges returning to civilian life. The war had removed them from civil society, collected them into vast armies where new social norms prevailed, subjected them to hardship, introduced them to different geographies and climates, and often exposed them to combat trauma. Readjusting to civilian norms was difficult in a society that expected them to quietly resume their prewar lives. As a result, many veterans left their antebellum communities and moved west. Those who reinvented themselves on the frontier differed from the overall Union veteran population. They were more mobile both before and after the war, served longer enlistments, were more likely to have been wounded or have encountered wartime trauma, and often either consciously or unconsciously compensated for their exposure to trauma when choosing where to settle and with whom to interact. The frontier provided the mechanism they needed to reclaim their lives. The nuances of veteran migration to the frontier cannot be fully understood without accounting for both the war and its aftermath, blurring the line between “military history” and “war and society” as paradigms of analysis.

This chapter examines the enumeration of ethnic populations in the census, where ‘the tribe question’ has been included since 1948. I trace its evolution – from its origins as self-evidently important with a self-evident list of groups – through numerous changes up to 2019. The powerful social imaginary of ‘42+ tribes’ comes from the 1969 census, despite the numerous changes since then. I show how changes in classifications over time, as well as the way they have been used and narrated by the state, reveal the multiple political purposes of classifying and counting ethnicity. In the colonial period, this centred on ethnic population distribution to support indirect rule via ethnicity, as well as tax collection and labour control. In the postcolonial period, ethnic demographic posturing for electoral purposes or ‘the tyranny of numbers’ became a major driver of interest in ‘the tribe question’. However, since 2009, the census has also been a site of recognition for minorities and of the painting of a portrait of a nation defined by its diversity. In this chapter, I also show how the quintessentially unambiguous nature of ethnic census codes has been rendered ambiguous in useful ways.

This concluding chapter offers some final reflections on the nature of knowledge about ethnicity in Kenya. I argue that if the nature of this knowledge is purposefully vague and makes ethnic categories polyvalent, then the best way to protect against problematic uses of ethnic knowledge is vigilance. This is far less satisfying and reassuring than law or rights as a framework for governing the risks of diversity, but it is far more appropriate, and I briefly consider what this might look like. Finally, I look forward to the digitisation of Kenya’s population register and aspirations to establish a population knowledge architecture so sophisticated that it could render numerous registers interoperable and ultimately replace even the census. I reflect on the nature of ethnic classification in such an architecture and argue that it would lose all the qualities that have made it amenable to solidaristic and pluralistic purposes thus far, while amplifying all its dangers.

This chapter examines the presence of women in the Roman census and its socio-economic and political implications during the Republic. In the professio, citizens sui iuris had to declare their name, age, offspring, place of residence, occupation and properties. Viduae (a term including not only widows but also women who were no longer married) and women sui iuris also submitted census declarations. Special lists existed, for instance, of viduae and female wards, who were subject to specific taxes, namely, the aes equestre et hordiarium. This study explores the nature of the information recorded about female citizens in the census and the ways in which they were categorized. In sum, it argues that Roman female citizens should be included into a history of the census and taxation during the Roman Republic, rather than being treated as a marginal or overlooked group.

At this point, the discussion turns to the calendar’s role in regulating the internal operations of the polity. The year was an essential administrative and legal unit. From the end of the fourth century, one can detect a persistent tendency to subordinate crucial operations to the calendar itself, which often had a shifting relationship to the solar cycle and the cycle of the seasons, and to construct cycles of years which were to operate with great regularity. The chapter examines in greatest detail the consular year, the census, and the saeculum or century. The same tension between ideal and practice can also be detected here. The third and early-second centuries represented the high point of this effort, although it would long remain an ideal.

This introduction presents the historical and social context of Argentina in the nineteenth century, as it relates to the local Afro-descendant population. It explains the building-nation conceived by the dominant groups toward the end of the century. The project sought to create a national imaginary founded on the notion of a culturally and racially homogeneous country of white European descent. This project necessarily entailed the disappearance of the population of African (and Indigenous) descent as part of the nation. The strategies used to achieve this project (census, cultural appropriation, official history) are mentioned. In this sense, it is proposed that the construction and recurrent use of visual stereotypes throughout the nineteenth century (concentrated in specific iconographic nuclei) was one of the strategies used in the process of invisibilization of the descendants of enslaved Africans in Argentina. It also explains the state of the art on the subject, the theoretical framework, and the methodology used in the research.

Chapter 3 considers the nature of provincial government, the role and legal responsibilities of governors, both legati Augusti and proconsuls, the management of Rome’s assets through the census and by direct intervention, for example, in managing the benefits and dangers of rivers. We look at the constitutions of municipia, and the nature of their laws and regulations, and Rome’s supervision of the infrastructure of local towns, and the consequences for local people. In the administration of justice there was a melding of local legal practice and Roman law. Did the Romans have an idea of what constituted fair and efficient government and how far did they achieve it? The evidence shows good intentions on the part of emperors and governors, but also many abuses, especially from the presence of soldiers, and problems in obtaining legal redress.

This chapter focuses the entangled relationship between the beginnings of Michael Field scholarship in the 1990s and the rise of queer studies in the same period. The chapter connects Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s queerness not only to their lesbian partnership but also to the incestual dimension of their relationship. The chapter then focuses on what Michael Field can teach us about queer friendships, especially through their relations with Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, about queer marriage, domesticity, and concepts of the queer ordinary/queer normalcy.