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SUMMARY:The political anatomy of natural history: on Petty's contrivance o
 f the Down Survey (1655–1659) - Svit Komel (University of Ljubljana)
DTSTART:20220307T130000Z
DTEND:20220307T140000Z
UID:TALK168224@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Olin Moctezuma
DESCRIPTION:The Down Survey was a cadastral survey\, initiated in 1655 dur
 ing the Cromwellian occupation of Ireland to redistribute confiscated Cath
 olic lands among Protestant soldiers. Charged with this colonial catalogui
 ng was William Petty\, principally known today as a political-economist an
 d statistician. This talk will examine the Down Survey as an exercise in n
 atural history. Petty not only used the Survey to amass natural-historical
  information\, but conceived surveying itself as an object of natural hist
 ory. Following Bacon\, the history of trades or the systematic description
  of mechanical arts became a privileged sub-domain of natural history. The
  Hartlib Circle and Royal Society produced histories that codified the cra
 ft knowledge of such diverse arts as bog-draining\, iron-working\, husband
 ry\, mining\, etc. An affiliate of both these associations\, Petty likewis
 e managed the Survey by breaking down the art of surveying into individual
  operations\, tools\, materials and their costs. Thus implementing a metic
 ulous division of labour\, he composed hundreds of specialized laborers in
 to a hierarchical surveying apparatus. In Petty's administration of the Su
 rvey\, natural history emerged as a self-referential method for overseeing
  the process of observing Irish geography. I will argue that Petty's contr
 ivance illustrates a broader contemporary shift in natural knowledge which
  displaced questions of method from _logic_\, aimed at disciplining indivi
 dual reasoning\, to _logistics_\, concerned with managing a collective bod
 y of workers. Petty's Irish stint further demonstrates that his later stat
 istical writings were not simply an epistemological break in how he viewed
  data\, but rather stemmed from the techniques he applied as a natural his
 torian for organising surveying work and its intellectual products.\n\n"Bo
 ok to attend in person":https://bit.ly/CabinetLent2022
LOCATION:Zoom and Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of
  Science
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