| 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

Matthew G. Hannah. Governmentality and the Mastery of Territory in Nineteenth-Century America. (Cambridge Studies in Historical Geography, number 32.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2000. Pp. xiii, 245. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.95.

Matthew G. Hannah offers a contribution to the historical geography of American state formation in the Gilded Age by using some of Michel Foucault's analytic repertoire to treat the career, work, and publications of Francis Amasa Walker. Special attention is paid to the U.S. censuses of 1870 and 1880, and to Walker's writings on political economy, migration, and education. The book is busily suggestive and, at times, quite insightful. 1

Hannah begins by laying out an analytic framework drawn, oddly, less from Foucault's work on governmentality than from his writings on discursive formations, surveillance, and discipline. "Governmentality" is defined hastily as state-centred and statistically based observations of the social body, or as the practical use of statistics in governmental projects. Hannah sees governmentality as a way of extending his own primary interest in "the logic of social control" (p. 6) operative in the period. To follow Foucault in analyzing statistical discourse, claims Hannah, one must inquire into the places at which statistics emerge, the nature of authorities empowered to speak statistically, and the substance of the statistical determinations they make. Once addressed, such questions will lead us to the investigation of actual statistical practice. Here we will be concerned with the conditions of access to objects of observation ("abstraction"), the manner in which objects are specified ("assortment"), and the process through which observations generated in the field are concentrated at an authoritative central site ("centralization"). This "cycle of social control" will be completed by an analysis of the ways in which statistics are mobilized in regulatory projects. . . .

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