Sir William Petty, political arithmetic, and the transmutation of the Irish, 1652--1687

This dissertation reexamines the origins of "political arithmetic", an early strand of political economy, in the intellectual and political context of late Stuart Britain and Ireland. It is based on a close study of the printed work and more especially of the manuscripts of Sir William Petty (1623--1687), the inventor of political arithmetic, and on a reconstruction of his strategy of manuscript circulation. By looking at Petty's work in light of his personal history and the broader politics of the period, the dissertation suggests that political arithmetic should be understood as a contribution to the English colonial project in Ireland. Although it came, from the 1690s onward, to signify a quantitative mode of analysis peculiarly applicable to economic questions, political arithmetic began as a specific and positive political program. In Petty's words, it was part of "the Political Medicine" of Ireland; one of its guiding aims, between 1670 and 1687, was what he called "the transmutation of the Irish into English."; Petty's problematic challenged contemporary writing on national wealth, but had its origins in late Tudor and early Stuart writing on Irish plantation; Petty's personal interest arose from his involvement in Ireland, as the director of a major survey following Cromwell's reconquest of the country in the 1650s, and as a landowner thereafter. The alchemical idiom Petty used to describe his program, meanwhile, was essential to his conception of it, and owed much to his background in medicine and experimental philosophy. Intellectually and politically, Petty's political arithmetic was a distinctly late-seventeenth-century phenomenon, addressed to contemporary but longstanding political problems---first in Ireland, and later across the Atlantic and the Irish Sea.; Lastly, the study follows the reception of Petty's work in the new political context of the 1690s. Writers like Gregory King and Charles Davenant embraced Petty's method while dissociating their use of it from his overtly political practice. In so doing they laid the groundwork for the modern disciplinary history of economics as a putatively neutral, scientific enterprise.