ABSTRACT
The seventeenth-century Caribbean was a space of fierce interimperial contestation, as religious wars in Europe spilled into the American Mediterranean. Spain, with its claims to the Americas legitimized by Papal Bulls and the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494, “conquered” the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, and in doing so perfected their model of colonization—displacing the indigenous inhabitants and taking possession of the territory through ceremonial acts. The ideology behind colonial counting was most specifically articulated in Ireland where policies connecting numeracy and the management of the body politic became part of theimperial vision for the island. In the 1650s William Petty created the “Down Survey,” an assessment of the island that distinguished between “profitable” and “unprofitable” lands and mapped the population of the country according to political and religious factions in order to improve the island. In the early decades of English Caribbean colonization accounting for the people who inhabited the islands was an impressionistic affair, more art than science.
