Transmutation, Inclusion, and Exclusion: Political Arithmetic from Charles II to William III¹

Abstract

Political arithmetic, generally understood as an early form of political economy, was originally designed by Sir William Petty in the 1670s less as a method of quantitative analysis than as a program of government through the direct manipulation of demographic processes. In the context of the English colonization of Ireland, its goal was "the transmutation of Irish into English"; under the Catholic James II it briefly became a program for the catholicization of the three Stuart kingdoms. Both projects undermined the national and religious categories associated with traditional exclusionist policy and fostered a radical inclusionism. Only after 1688 did Petty's successors decisively rearticulate political arithmetic as a putatively apolitical analytical tool.

Personalization: a new political arithmetic?

“…16. William Petty's infamous recommendations of transmutation to make the Irish more (like the) English was initially fitted to a Protestant and subsequently to a Catholic English sovereign (McCormick 2007). The proposed transmutation was designed to travel first in one direction and then in another: first, it was imagined that Catholic women would become Protestant if they married English men; then, with a change in monarch, Protestant men would become Catholic if they married Irish women.…”

Review of periodical literature published in 2007

“…Matthews adds a twist to this discussion, by highlighting Welsh contributions to pre‐classical political economy, notably the early work on coinage by the lawyer, Rice Vaughan, who anticipated North in suggesting relationships between the volume of coinage in circulation and the general level of prices. McCormick returns to Petty, to argue that ‘political arithmetic before 1688 was not social science but social engineering’. He asserts that the content of Petty's ‘projects’ of large‐scale migration to and from Ireland were influenced directly by political imperatives, in which Petty treated confessional and national identities as mutable, because he was blithely unconcerned about the nature of those identities himself.…”

Sir William Petty, Ireland, and the making of a political economist, 1653–871

“…On Petty's proposals for the transplantation of people, see Reungoat, William Petty , pp. 177–203; and McCormick, ‘Transmutation, inclusion, and exclusion’, pp. 260–7, which points out their changing emphasis between the reigns of Charles II and James II.…”