she-philosopher.com: Looking forward (the LIBRARY section)

That is:

The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (1647)
A Declaration Concerning the Newly Invented Art of Double Writing (1648)

William Petty was a leading figure in 17th-century scientific circles. An early affiliate of the Cavendish circle in Paris ca. 1645–6, during which time he completed the technical illustrations for Hobbes’ First Draught of Optics, Petty returned to England in 1647. In 1648 he filed for patents on “his engine for corne-businesse” (an experimental seed-drill for sowing corn evenly and without waste) and his copy machine (which produced a duplicate copy of any formal document, as it was written). Petty also published two discourses from London that year: The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (London, 1647 and 1648), followed by A Declaration Concerning the Newly Invented Art of Double Writing (London, 1648).

Aubrey reports that Petty was “a person of an admirable inventive head, and practicall parts,” much given to “Discoveries and improvements.” To give just one example of this, after the Great Plague hit London and the Royal Society recessed on 28 June 1665, Petty, Hooke, and Wilkins all removed to Durdans, near Epsom (the seat of Lord Berkeley). Evelyn, who was a frequent visitor at Durdans, found the three of them

contriving Chariotts, new riggs for shipps, a Wheele for one to run races in, & other mechanical inventions.

At this time, the three also made plans for experiments on temperature, gravity, pressure, motions of the pendulum, sound, respiration, combustion, condensation, and more. It was Evelyn’s opinion that

perhaps three such persons together were not to be found elsewhere in Europe, for parts and ingenuity.

Certainly, their collaboration at Durdans laid out a much-needed experimental agenda for the Royal Society, and guided Society researches once meetings resumed in London.

As the founder of “political arithmetick” (the sciences of statistics and economics), Petty has become a controversial figure for historians, especially those who continue to question “the origin of capitalism” (a natural and inevitable outgrowth of ancient practices of trade and commerce? or something different in kind?). In privileging a statistical analysis of human affairs, Petty introduced economic rationality into daily life, beginning, as Ellen Meiksins Wood describes it,

a continuing process of social transformation — a social transformation that increasingly subjects human beings, their social relations and practices, to the imperatives of capital accumulation.

Wood roots capitalist logic in the 17th-century British mentality and cultural value of “improvement,” as first rationalized by Petty, who articulated the earliest “labour theory of value” (thus conflating labor with the production of profit, and making the logic of English domestic property relations more transparent) for the Cromwellian state, with Ireland serving as “a laboratory of improvement.” “The understanding of English agrarian capitalism was refracted through that imperial experience,” Wood tells us (and the American colonial experience, as well).

Petty certainly practiced what he preached while in Ireland, where he introduced new management efficiencies in the large-scale survey and precision mapping of the territory which he oversaw. Aubrey records that

Severall made offers to the Parliament to survey it (when the Parliament ordered to have it surveyed) for 4000 pounds, 5000 pounds, 6000 pounds; but Sir William (then Dr.) went lower then them all and gott it.... The Kingdome of Ireland he hath surveyed, and that with that exactnesse, that there is no Estate there to the value of threscore pounds per annum but he can shew, to the value, and those that he employed for the Geometricall part were ordinary fellowes, some (perhaps) foot-soldiers, that circumambulated with their box and needles, not knowing what they did, which Sir William knew right well how to make use of.

Petty’s Down survey, which Lisa Jardine has called “a model of large-scale organisation of manpower and technical resources,” was completed successfully, on schedule, and helped make Petty a rich man, since he was perfectly placed to exploit the information that his Irish survey gathered. In the process, Petty combined technical and administrative skills to effect, anticipating a Taylorist management style that was well-suited to industrial capitalism. As described by Masson and Youngson (and qtd. in Jardine), Petty

engaged about 1,000 persons, including 40 clerks at his Dublin headquarters. To prepare for the fieldwork he had one wiremaker to make nothing but the measuring-chains, one watchmaker solely for the compass-needles and their pivots, a turner for the boxes and the wooden tops of the tripods, of which a pipe-maker made the legs, a founder for all the brass-work, and another craftsman “of a more versatile head and hand” magnetized the needles, adjusted the sights and cards, and assembled the instruments. The scales, protractors and compass-cards were ordered from the ablest artists of London, as were the writing materials, ruled field-notebooks specially made to a uniform size, and squared and scaled paper, besides a whole range of articles, from tents to rulers, for the field-workers.... Most of [the surveyors] were soldiers who had been bred to trades and could write and read enough for the purpose, and were judged “headfull and steddy minded though not of the nimblest witts”; they had to learn not only the technique of their measurements but also to distinguish profitable land from unprofitable. Others, drafted from suitable occupations, translated the measurements into maps and brought these to prescribed scales; and some did the colouring. Over and above all these diverse people were put “a few of the most astute and sagacious persons” to inspect the field-records and calculations, to guard against inaccuracy, slackness and fraud, and to reckon the individual men’s work in terms of “linary content”, according to which Petty paid them. He himself was paid at £7 3s 4d per 1000 Irish acres (equal to 1600 English [ones]) of forfeited profitable land, and for Crown and Church land at £3 an acre; and out of these receipts he paid the whole expenses of the work, and cleared £9600 for himself. The total quantities measured, expressed linearly, equalled about five circuits of the world.

Petty would pass on the lessons of his early practice of scientific management to such friends and colleagues as Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, both of whom were adept at managing large building projects and workforces. One of Wren’s biographers has described his management style as a “combination of centralized overall supervision with parochial freedom,” honed to the point that by the time the rebuilding of St Paul’s cathedral was finally completed (the politically-charged project took about 30 years), “Wren could have claimed that he had sponsored a school of masonry second to none in Europe.”

England’s early-modern culture of “improvement” — with its close ties to the new science — was a complex phenomenon, and I’m not entirely happy with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s important, but summary discussion of it. Nonetheless, there’s no understanding the beginnings of English colonialism without it, and I think the culture of improvement, introduced to the Americas by those involved with the “planting” of Virginia, deserves much greater scrutiny than it has thus far received. To the extent that Petty is at the center of the scholarly maelstrom over 17th-century “Discoveries and improvements,” I think it’s important to take a closer look at just what he had to say on the subject.

RELATES TO: an ISSUES webessay on feminist economics; Petty’s IN BRIEF biography; the GALLERY exhibit on Chambers’ Cyclopædia, with its discussion of Petty’s reformed “Gymnasium Mechanicum or a Colledge of Trades-men”; the series of GALLERY exhibits pertaining to the history of graphic and information design; the PLAYERS pages on Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, and Virginia Ferrar


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	2 publications by William Petty That is: The Advice of W. P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (1647) A Declaration Concerning the Newly Invented Art of Double Writing (1648) William Petty was a leading figure in 17th-century scientific circles. An early affiliate of the Cavendish circle in Paris ca. 1645–6, during which time he completed the technical illustrations for Hobbes’ First Draught of Optics, Petty returned to England in 1647. In 1648 he filed for patents on “his engine for corne-businesse” (an experimental seed-drill for sowing corn evenly and without waste) and his copy machine (which produced a duplicate copy of any formal document, as it was written). Petty also published two discourses from London that year: The Advice of W.P. to Mr. Samuel Hartlib for the Advancement of Some Particular Parts of Learning (London, 1647 and 1648), followed by A Declaration Concerning the Newly Invented Art of Double Writing (London, 1648). Aubrey reports that Petty was “a person of an admirable inventive head, and practicall parts,” much given to “Discoveries and improvements.” To give just one example of this, after the Great Plague hit London and the Royal Society recessed on 28 June 1665, Petty, Hooke, and Wilkins all removed to Durdans, near Epsom (the seat of Lord Berkeley). Evelyn, who was a frequent visitor at Durdans, found the three of them contriving Chariotts, new riggs for shipps, a Wheele for one to run races in, & other mechanical inventions. At this time, the three also made plans for experiments on temperature, gravity, pressure, motions of the pendulum, sound, respiration, combustion, condensation, and more. It was Evelyn’s opinion that perhaps three such persons together were not to be found elsewhere in Europe, for parts and ingenuity. Certainly, their collaboration at Durdans laid out a much-needed experimental agenda for the Royal Society, and guided Society researches once meetings resumed in London. As the founder of “political arithmetick” (the sciences of statistics and economics), Petty has become a controversial figure for historians, especially those who continue to question “the origin of capitalism” (a natural and inevitable outgrowth of ancient practices of trade and commerce? or something different in kind?). In privileging a statistical analysis of human affairs, Petty introduced economic rationality into daily life, beginning, as Ellen Meiksins Wood describes it, a continuing process of social transformation — a social transformation that increasingly subjects human beings, their social relations and practices, to the imperatives of capital accumulation. Wood roots capitalist logic in the 17th-century British mentality and cultural value of “improvement,” as first rationalized by Petty, who articulated the earliest “labour theory of value” (thus conflating labor with the production of profit, and making the logic of English domestic property relations more transparent) for the Cromwellian state, with Ireland serving as “a laboratory of improvement.” “The understanding of English agrarian capitalism was refracted through that imperial experience,” Wood tells us (and the American colonial experience, as well). Petty certainly practiced what he preached while in Ireland, where he introduced new management efficiencies in the large-scale survey and precision mapping of the territory which he oversaw. Aubrey records that Severall made offers to the Parliament to survey it (when the Parliament ordered to have it surveyed) for 4000 pounds, 5000 pounds, 6000 pounds; but Sir William (then Dr.) went lower then them all and gott it.... The Kingdome of Ireland he hath surveyed, and that with that exactnesse, that there is no Estate there to the value of threscore pounds per annum but he can shew, to the value, and those that he employed for the Geometricall part were ordinary fellowes, some (perhaps) foot-soldiers, that circumambulated with their box and needles, not knowing what they did, which Sir William knew right well how to make use of. Petty’s Down survey, which Lisa Jardine has called “a model of large-scale organisation of manpower and technical resources,” was completed successfully, on schedule, and helped make Petty a rich man, since he was perfectly placed to exploit the information that his Irish survey gathered. In the process, Petty combined technical and administrative skills to effect, anticipating a Taylorist management style that was well-suited to industrial capitalism. As described by Masson and Youngson (and qtd. in Jardine), Petty engaged about 1,000 persons, including 40 clerks at his Dublin headquarters. To prepare for the fieldwork he had one wiremaker to make nothing but the measuring-chains, one watchmaker solely for the compass-needles and their pivots, a turner for the boxes and the wooden tops of the tripods, of which a pipe-maker made the legs, a founder for all the brass-work, and another craftsman “of a more versatile head and hand” magnetized the needles, adjusted the sights and cards, and assembled the instruments. The scales, protractors and compass-cards were ordered from the ablest artists of London, as were the writing materials, ruled field-notebooks specially made to a uniform size, and squared and scaled paper, besides a whole range of articles, from tents to rulers, for the field-workers.... Most of [the surveyors] were soldiers who had been bred to trades and could write and read enough for the purpose, and were judged “headfull and steddy minded though not of the nimblest witts”; they had to learn not only the technique of their measurements but also to distinguish profitable land from unprofitable. Others, drafted from suitable occupations, translated the measurements into maps and brought these to prescribed scales; and some did the colouring. Over and above all these diverse people were put “a few of the most astute and sagacious persons” to inspect the field-records and calculations, to guard against inaccuracy, slackness and fraud, and to reckon the individual men’s work in terms of “linary content”, according to which Petty paid them. He himself was paid at £7 3s 4d per 1000 Irish acres (equal to 1600 English [ones]) of forfeited profitable land, and for Crown and Church land at £3 an acre; and out of these receipts he paid the whole expenses of the work, and cleared £9600 for himself. The total quantities measured, expressed linearly, equalled about five circuits of the world. Petty would pass on the lessons of his early practice of scientific management to such friends and colleagues as Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke, both of whom were adept at managing large building projects and workforces. One of Wren’s biographers has described his management style as a “combination of centralized overall supervision with parochial freedom,” honed to the point that by the time the rebuilding of St Paul’s cathedral was finally completed (the politically-charged project took about 30 years), “Wren could have claimed that he had sponsored a school of masonry second to none in Europe.” England’s early-modern culture of “improvement” — with its close ties to the new science — was a complex phenomenon, and I’m not entirely happy with Ellen Meiksins Wood’s important, but summary discussion of it. Nonetheless, there’s no understanding the beginnings of English colonialism without it, and I think the culture of improvement, introduced to the Americas by those involved with the “planting” of Virginia, deserves much greater scrutiny than it has thus far received. To the extent that Petty is at the center of the scholarly maelstrom over 17th-century “Discoveries and improvements,” I think it’s important to take a closer look at just what he had to say on the subject. RELATES TO: an ISSUES webessay on feminist economics; Petty’s IN BRIEF biography; the GALLERY exhibit on Chambers’ Cyclopædia, with its discussion of Petty’s reformed “Gymnasium Mechanicum or a Colledge of Trades-men”; the series of GALLERY exhibits pertaining to the history of graphic and information design; the PLAYERS pages on Robert Hooke, Margaret Cavendish, and Virginia Ferrar
			ornament from the 1670 ed. of John Evelyn’s book of natural history, Pomona, or an appendix concerning fruit-trees ... the motto reads: THOU SHALT LABOR FOR PEACE & PLENTIE Pomona, the Roman goddess of gardens and fruit trees, was similarly used to symbolize a new- world culture of technologically based “improvement” in the 20th- century design of a seal for Los Angeles County.
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