Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

in the company’s financial history. 12 But their texts can also tell us a great deal about how
lobbying was conducted and the way in which mathematics came to inhabit a central place in
mercantile rhetoric of the Dutch Republic.
Numeracy in early modern political and economic debates is often associated with the
work of the Englishman William Petty, who coined the term “political arithmetic” in the early
1670s, but recent scholarship has traced a longer evolution. Paul Slack places the growing use of
numbers within the context of a more general development of the use of statistics in the
formulation of government policy. 13 Drawing on both medieval practices of information
gathering and Bacon's emphasis on “number, weight, and measure,” he argues that European
states increasingly consulted quantitative sources to facilitate centralization and empire building.
By 1660, even if conventional political considerations sometimes trumped the logic of
quantitative analysis, calculation had become a “fashion” in political rhetoric. 14 The trend
reached its mature form in Petty's work on Ireland and in British debates about population, trade,
and finance in the early eighteenth century. 15
Looking more closely at language, Mary Poovey has argued that this period represented a
critical moment in the development of a new kind of mercantile rhetoric in which the language of
accounting emerged as a powerful tool with which to enhance the credibility of arguments in
favor of specific policies and political priorities. 16 Her book traces the diffusion of double-entry
12 The most important of these are the subscription book for the Amsterdam chamber from 1623-26, NA 1.05.01.01,
inv.nr. 18*; a list of investors and their capital from February 10, 1656, NA 1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 18*; and subscription
books for the verhoging in Middelburg, Vlissingen, and Veere in 1636-37 discussed in the previous chapter, NA.
1.05.01.01, inv.nr. 77-79. Assorted bills of lading, calculations of subsidy payments, and other isolated records can
be found throughout the company's archive. To my knowledge no record books of income or expenses survived the
fire and sale to rag merchants in the nineteenth century.
13 Slack, “Government and Information in Seventeenth-Century England.”
14 Ibid., 65.
15 McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic.
16 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
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