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Big Data for the Leviathan

In early modern England, numbers were something you could touch. On tally-sticks and abacuses, counting boards and...

‘Without nomberynge a man can do almost nothynge,’ he wrote, but ‘with the helpe of it, you maye attayne to all thyng.’ In many respects, what Otis describes was a documentary transformation: in these two centuries, cheap printed materials, technical education and Arabic numerals combined to flatten the hands-on world of object-based reckoning into the abstract arithmetic of pen and paper. Ambrose Bennett was interrogated by the Court of Wards in 1628 to determine whether he was an ‘idiot’: prompted by the assessors, he correctly deducted his living expenses of £120 from his yearly annuity of £200, and showed that he knew how much interest his fortune would generate (a rate of 8 per cent). The stationer Thomas Rooks reissued Hodder’s Arithmetick in 1667, explaining that ‘in this bad time of trade of Books, in less than ten months, I sold of them 1550 … now I present you with a 4th Edition.’ They were inexpensive – about 4s new or 6d secondhand – and a good investment: they could, after all, help you put your finances in order.

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