5 - Counting: Political Arithmetic in the Parish ofCramond

Summary

Regional mapping projects and large-scale statisticalsurveys were forms of what Charles Withers hascalled ‘political surgery’, or ‘purposive politicalarithmetic designed to reflect and benefit thestructure of society in Scotland’. But thoseinvolved at the early stages of such surveyingprojects had to consider: how to reckon with all thedetail? How could the complexity of rural spaces berendered shareable and comparable? The ‘politicalsurgery’ could not proceed before the salientdetails had been highlighted and the ‘politicalarithmetic’ had been conducted.

One of the first attempts at ‘purposive politicalarithmetic’ was focused on the parish of Cramond,some five miles north-west of Edinburgh. The authorof the survey left a rich archive of notes,correspondence, data and drafts. By focusing on thisarchive and on the process by which the Cramondparish survey was produced, this chapter sheds lighton the kinds of epistemological and methodologicalchallenges faced by Scottish Enlightenmentsurveyors. In particular, behind the publishedCramond survey was a tension between an antiquariancuriosity for detail – lingering on place names,mining words for their rich etymological evidence –and the more generalising attitude of a statisticianseeking countable data on which to basesocial-scientific conclusions. In collecting figuresand attempting to measure the effects ofdepopulation and enclosure, parish surveyors had tobe creative in their counting, sometimes omittingwhat they saw as inaccuracies or anomalies andflattening unnecessary or inconvenient details whenmoving from the particular to the general.Flattening and selectivity were important elementsof parish mapping, too, as this and subsequentchapters demonstrate.

The story behind the account of Cramond, whichfunctioned as a model for subsequent iterations of awider statistical surveying project, reveals themotivations and methodologies that drove this keyprocess of generating geographical knowledge in andfrom Enlightenment Edinburgh. The Cramond examplealso demonstrates how surveyors ‘in the field’relied on a chain of communication and publicationthat stretched back to Edinburgh, how the authorscounted on specialist materials and informants inthe city, and how the parish was to a large extentdefined and understood in terms of its connectionsto and relationship with the city.