ABSTRACT
Thomas Chalmers’s use of surveillance as a technique of both knowledge production and social policy finds an illuminating parallel in Alexander Bailey Richmond’s 1824 Narrative of the Condition of the Manufacturing Population. This chapter considers the work of the Church of Scotland Minister Thomas Chalmers perhaps the most committed and prolific adherent to Malthusian political economy. The injection of moral and religious concerns into political economy is couched in a rhetoric of objectivity, authorized largely by Malthus and the putative status of the principle of population as a natural law. Like Richmond, Chalmers perceived the need for new ways to read and intervene in the complex moral systems of an antagonistic and fractured social field. Returning again to Wallmann’s essay in the present collection, the above emphasis on character as “one of the data,” appears to upturn the physiocratic understanding of populations as necessarily bodily, rather than moral in their composition.
