Clash of civilizations

[Guest]

Speaking of caste systems, I am certain many of you have come across this in the past;



[url="http://www.britishempire.co.uk/article/castesystem.htm"]The Indian caste system and the British[/url]



Ethnographic Mapping and the Construction

of the British Census in India





Contributed by Kevin Hobson



The first few paragraphs

When the British first gained a foothold on the Indian subcontinent in the 18th century their concern was profit. The men who administered the territory for the East India company were more inclined to profiteering than to attempting to establish an effective government. By the beginning of the 19th century this type of attitude had begun to change. A series of conquests expanded the territory held by the British and the idea of responsible trusteeship began to creep into the thinking of the individuals charged with governing British India. The freebooters of the 18th century were giving way to the bureaucrats of the 19th century. Ironically, it is highly debateable which of the two, freebooters or bureaucrats, were the most dangerous to the people of India. Treasure can be replaced. Cultures, once tampered with, are nearly impossible to reclaim.



The men charged with the governing of British India in the 19th century were creations of the society that they had left behind in Britain. That society had become increasingly intrigued with methods of social management and improvement. Moreover, as the 19th century progressed, it progressively appeared that the British were destined to lead the world. Victorious in the Napoleonic wars and with an empire growing at an unprecedented rate, the British became ever more confident that their destiny was to lead the way to civilization and raise up the lesser races. The British Empire was believed to be the natural heir to the classical Roman Empire. From this mix of belief in their superiority and fascination with methods of social management and improvement, came a variety of so called sciences. These included such things as phrenology and eugenics but at the heart of any of the movements to study either man or society was statistics.



The term statistics can be traced to the 1797 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and was defined as a "word lately introduced to express a view or survey of any kingdom, county, or parish." This definition gives no indication of any kind of methodological approach being used as would be evident at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Rather, the word statistics seems to have been used to indicate a simple compilation of raw numbers used to describe the demographics of a given geographic area. However, while a strict methodological model would not develop for many years, it did not take as long for individuals and groups to begin to collect data on a wide variety of interest areas. By the 1830s statistics were being gathered on everything from crime and occupations to sewage systems.



None of this work, however, was done by individuals who were professional statisticians. Indeed, statistics was not recognized as a science and was not taught in any of the universities in Britain. Rather, these figures were collected by politicians, economists, government officials, physicians, and a few mathematicians. The object of all of this data collecting was to obtain information about the society that would be politically useful and would indicate new means of social improvement and control. Within this framework developed the London Statistical Society. This society had as its goal, the furtherance of statistics as a science and among its many endeavours it gave advice to the government on the types of information that the society felt should be collected as part of the various censuses that were done periodically in the British Isles. ..