William Petty (1623–1687) was a founding figure in the history of social science, an architect of English colonial power in Ireland, and a champion of the new empirical and mechanical philosophy at the heart of the Scientific Revolution. This book explores Petty's intellectual biography and examines in particular the origins, ambitions, and significance of his greatest work, ‘political arithmetic’. It argues that Petty's invention was less an early form of economics than a program of social engineering that applied the methods and concepts of seventeenth‐century natural philosophy to the chall ... More

William Petty (1623–1687) was a founding figure in the history of social science, an architect of English colonial power in Ireland, and a champion of the new empirical and mechanical philosophy at the heart of the Scientific Revolution. This book explores Petty's intellectual biography and examines in particular the origins, ambitions, and significance of his greatest work, ‘political arithmetic’. It argues that Petty's invention was less an early form of economics than a program of social engineering that applied the methods and concepts of seventeenth‐century natural philosophy to the challenges of governing a multiple monarchy and a colonial empire. Addressing the problems of English rule in Restoration Ireland, colonization in the Americas, and the politics of religion in the Three Kingdoms, and drawing on contemporary developments in economic and political as well as scientific thought, Petty reduced political, religious, and ethnic differences to matters of demography and proposed removing these differences by ‘transmuting’ troublesome populations into loyal and industrious subjects. Only after Petty's death and the Glorious Revolution was his ‘instrument of government’ through demographic engineering rearticulated as a mode of statistical analysis — an early social science. Drawing on a wide range of printed and manuscript sources this book revises our understanding of political arithmetic and offers the first fully integrated, contextualized, and archivally researched account of Petty's intellectual work in over a century.