| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Bruce Curtis. The Politics of Population: State Formation, Statistics, and the Census of Canada, 1840–1875. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press. 2001. Pp. x, 385. $60.00.

Even scholars who appreciate the charm of statistical representation and the quantitative impulse as topics of historical inquiry may feel that thirty-five years of the Canadian census makes a rather narrow topic for a book. Yet there are good reasons not to disdain this one. Excellent archival records survive from the mid-nineteenth-century Canadian censuses, and they enable Bruce Curtis to depict in unexampled detail the complex social process of surveying, compiling, and standardizing. The author draws two main conclusions from his story. First is a word to the wise to quantitative historians, who should never take official numbers for granted, without asking where they came from. It is tempting to say that a quantitative history must always be also a cultural history, involving not only patterns of numbers but also unstable categorizations of ethnicity, religion, disease, property, and occupation, and motives to conceal or to exaggerate whenever the results are associated with a public purpose. In the case at hand, the process of gathering data was hilariously unsystematic until 1871. This leads to Curtis's other main point: that a successful census is a striking institutional achievement, associated with ominous bureaucratic modes of rationalization and even domination. . . .

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