{"id":{"repo_id":"buffalo","oai_identifier":"oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/86715"},"canonical_url":"https://search.dev.ndltd.org/etd/buffalo/oai:ubir.buffalo.edu:10477/86715","repository":{"repo_id":"buffalo","name":"Buffalo","base_url":"https://ubir.buffalo.edu/oai/request"},"display":{"title":"The Measure of Humanity: Literary Quantification and the Routes of Accumulation in British Atlantic Writing, 1650-1800","abstract":"Ph.D.","abstract_html":"Ph.D.","abstract_has_math":false,"creators":["Sheldon, Ryan; 0000-0001-6631-5791"],"institution":"State University of New York at Buffalo","degree_name":null,"degree_level":null,"degree_discipline":null,"degree_department":null,"school":null,"contributors":["Mack, Ruth","English"],"advisors":[],"committee_chairs":[],"committee_members":[],"year":2025,"date_issued":"2025-02-21T21:36:46Z","date_published":"2025-02-21T21:36:46Z","updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:34Z","subjects":["English literature"],"languages":["eng"],"rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"rights_urls":[],"identifier_entries":[]},"links":{"outbound_url":"http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86715","outbound_label":"Handle","outbound_source":"dc:identifier"},"metadata_groups":[{"id":"people","label":"People","entries":[{"key":"dc:contributor","label":"Contributor","values":["Mack, Ruth","English"]},{"key":"dc:creator","label":"Author","values":["Sheldon, Ryan; 0000-0001-6631-5791"]}]},{"id":"academic_context","label":"Academic Context","entries":[{"key":"dc:date","label":"Dc Date","values":["2025-02-21T21:36:46Z","2020"]},{"key":"dc:publisher","label":"Institution","values":["State University of New York at Buffalo"]},{"key":"dc:type","label":"Dc Type","values":["Text","Dissertation"]}]},{"id":"subjects_keywords","label":"Subjects and Keywords","entries":[{"key":"dc:subject","label":"Dc Subject","values":["English literature"]}]},{"id":"language_rights","label":"Language and Rights","entries":[{"key":"dc:language","label":"Dc Language","values":["eng"]},{"key":"dc:rights","label":"Dc Rights","values":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."]}]},{"id":"identifiers","label":"Identifiers","entries":[{"key":"dc:identifier","label":"Identifier","values":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86715"]}]},{"id":"additional","label":"Additional Metadata","entries":[{"key":"dc:description","label":"Description","values":["Ph.D.","\"The Measure of Humanity\" wagers that we can only grasp how numbers became integral to social and political thought in long eighteenth-century Britain when we shift our attention from the metropole to the colonial theater. Historians of science and epistemology have long observed the importance of commercial practices like double-entry bookkeeping to the development of numerical abstraction as a tool of political philosophy. To better understand the relays between quantitative theory and practice, my dissertation concentrates on the spaces in which numerical reasoning and representation most acutely directed the maintenance of territory and the governance of persons—the colonial plantation, as well as the broader networks of exchange and extraction of which it formed a crucial cornerstone. I invert Srinivas Aravamudan's injunction to read literature as colonial archive, and instead, read the archive of West Indian settlement and plantation—travel histories, agricultural tracts, plantation manuals, and political pamphlets—alongside canonically \"Literary\" materials like James Grainger's 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane and Sarah Scott's novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). This strategy reveals a body of imaginative writing that mobilizes enumeration, measurement, and speculative calculation—in brief, the repertoire of early quantitative reasoning—to represent and maintain the extractive site of the plantation, as well as the colonial societies it upheld. I argue that as travelers, planters, merchants, and abolitionists recruited numerical techniques to register the material realities of the plantation at a textual level, they lent literary form to a worldview predicated on aggregating land, labor, and capital into systems whose historical contours could be tracked over time and modified through political intervention. In this way, my project illuminates the significance of literary and cultural production in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean to the emergence of biopolitics in the metropole.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"]},{"key":"dc:format","label":"Dc Format","values":["application/pdf"]},{"key":"dc:title","label":"Title","values":["The Measure of Humanity: Literary Quantification and the Routes of Accumulation in British Atlantic Writing, 1650-1800"]}]}],"canonical_facts":{"dc:contributor":["Mack, Ruth","English"],"dc:creator":["Sheldon, Ryan; 0000-0001-6631-5791"],"dc:date":["2025-02-21T21:36:46Z","2020"],"dc:description":["Ph.D.","\"The Measure of Humanity\" wagers that we can only grasp how numbers became integral to social and political thought in long eighteenth-century Britain when we shift our attention from the metropole to the colonial theater. Historians of science and epistemology have long observed the importance of commercial practices like double-entry bookkeeping to the development of numerical abstraction as a tool of political philosophy. To better understand the relays between quantitative theory and practice, my dissertation concentrates on the spaces in which numerical reasoning and representation most acutely directed the maintenance of territory and the governance of persons—the colonial plantation, as well as the broader networks of exchange and extraction of which it formed a crucial cornerstone. I invert Srinivas Aravamudan's injunction to read literature as colonial archive, and instead, read the archive of West Indian settlement and plantation—travel histories, agricultural tracts, plantation manuals, and political pamphlets—alongside canonically \"Literary\" materials like James Grainger's 1764 georgic poem The Sugar-Cane and Sarah Scott's novel The History of Sir George Ellison (1766). This strategy reveals a body of imaginative writing that mobilizes enumeration, measurement, and speculative calculation—in brief, the repertoire of early quantitative reasoning—to represent and maintain the extractive site of the plantation, as well as the colonial societies it upheld. I argue that as travelers, planters, merchants, and abolitionists recruited numerical techniques to register the material realities of the plantation at a textual level, they lent literary form to a worldview predicated on aggregating land, labor, and capital into systems whose historical contours could be tracked over time and modified through political intervention. In this way, my project illuminates the significance of literary and cultural production in the eighteenth-century Anglophone Caribbean to the emergence of biopolitics in the metropole.","**To request an accessible version of the file(s) associated with this item, contact library@buffalo.edu. Please include the item's persistent URL [http://hdl.handle.net/. . .] in your request.**"],"dc:format":["application/pdf"],"dc:identifier":["http://hdl.handle.net/10477/86715"],"dc:language":["eng"],"dc:publisher":["State University of New York at Buffalo"],"dc:rights":["Users of works found in University at Buffalo Institutional Repository (UBIR) are responsible for identifying and contacting the copyright owner for permission to reuse. University at Buffalo Libraries do not manage rights for copyright-protected works and cannot assist with permissions.","Copyright retained by author."],"dc:subject":["English literature"],"dc:title":["The Measure of Humanity: Literary Quantification and the Routes of Accumulation in British Atlantic Writing, 1650-1800"],"dc:type":["Text","Dissertation"]},"updated_at":"2026-07-27T19:05:34Z"}