The Sum of the People: How the Census has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age

Abstract

When I first received a gracious invitation to examine The Sum of the People: How the Census has Shaped Nations, from the Ancient World to the Modern Age, I have to admit I was a bit skeptical as to author Andrew Whitby’s intent to talk about the census as both a concept and an historical narrative spanning a timeline, as the subtitle indicates, “from the Ancient World to the Modern age.” Would the work be just another brief commentary on our current US 2020 Census, or would it digress into a study of enumeration as a tool used by statisticians to merely count human bodies and their geographic location—lacking a human narrative or historic context?