The modern census’s innovation was quantifying populations into aggregate series

Evidence

The real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification. … But after 1850 colonial authorities were using increasingly sophisticated administrative means to enumerate populations, including the women and children (whom the ancient rulers had always ignored), according to a maze of grids which had no immediate financial or military purpose. … Given the exclusive nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself, a ‘Cochin-Chinese’ had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable ‘Cochin-Chinese’ – within, of course, the state’s domain. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 651

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lays out the mechanism by which colonial quantification — not just classification — turned subjects into interchangeable digits in a state-managed series.
• XREF: The aggregable, replicable series is the representational machinery behind biopolitics/necropolitics — the reader’s Module 2 scaffolding — where populations become governable data. — connects to: Eighteenth-century classification reduced heterogeneous peoples to orderable types; Population is a chaotic category that must be broken into internal relations of difference; Map and census mutually constitute each other to bound identities territorially. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 662

Related

• Quantifying censuses broke with precolonial counts that served only taxation and conscription (similarity 0.82)
• Map and census mutually constitute each other to bound identities territorially. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Eighteenth-century classification reduced heterogeneous peoples to orderable types #expands (0.85)
• Population is a chaotic category that must be broken into internal relations of difference #expands (0.75)
• Map and census mutually constitute each other to bound identities territorially. #expands (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 662