ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the importance of population knowledge for discussing, managing, governing, and controlling population. It provides an overview of the history of population statistics and the historiography of population statistics and the ways in which it has changed in recent decades. The chapter also discusses the practices of population statistics and census-taking, the importance of population statistics for state and governing bodies, and the relationship between population statistics, nationhood, nation building, and the state. Population statistics played a major role in historical demography, which presented population as a scientific and socio-political entity. The cultural history of population was particularly influenced by the works of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault in the 1970s offered an influential analysis of the political implications of population statistics in his work on biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality. An increase in the population would lead to higher tax income, which produced an understanding of population as the basis of a prospering national economy.
