Collecties
Aanwinsten 2010
November
- [Isaac SAHLMOON], Hollands Stats-och Commercie-Spegel Föreställande, under wisse Anmärkningar, de förente Nederländers Republique ... (Stockholm : Schneider, 1731) Two volumes bound in one, pp. [xvi], 398, [2]; [ii], 88, 1-48, 65-80, 1-80, 79- 90, 72; (some mispagination in vol. II: 49-64 omitted, 79-80 duplicated, text complete)
- Extensive Swedish 'survey of Dutch commercial affairs, with considerable emphasis on its overseas companies and alliances'. The sections on Dutch trade begin in the last part of the first volume and occupy a large part of the second, and include the examination of the activity of the Dutch East and West India Companies in Africa, south-east Asia, India and America.
In his foreword, Sahlmoon likens the economic activity of the Dutch to the bees' incessant strife to acquire goods from near and distant places 'for the benefit of the public good' ('det allmänna bästa til nytta', p. [x]). A short prospectus in the final paragraph of volume I announces an engraved frontispiece to the second volume, which was, according to the National Library of Sweden, never produced (collations of extant copies record no engraved material).
- Bernard Quaritch, London
August 2010
- Abstract of the answers and returns made pursuant to an act, passed in the forty-first year of his majesty King George III. Intituled 'An act for taking an account of the population of Great Britain, and the increase or diminution
thereof'. [Vol. I:] Parish Registers [-Vol. II:] Enumeration (London, ordered to be printed 21 December 1801; 9th June 1802 (Luke Hansard, printer)) 1801-2. Two volumes
- First edition of the first British census, the first detailed census of any country ever undertaken. The first American census of 1790 recorded only colour (free or slave for blacks) and gender (for whites only, and adulthood for males only). The British census, on the other hand, was drawn up to give a complete economic picture of the nation, together with a demographic history of the previous century from the Parish Registers. The published returns tabulate houses, giving the number of families in each and the number uninhabited, gender, and occupations. The tabulations from the Parish Registers give baptisms, burials and marriages from 1700 to 1800.
- The principle of the census had been proposed by John Rickman (1771-1840) in an article in the Commercial, Agricultural, and Manufacturer’s Magazine in 1796. The Secretary to the Treasury, George Rose, noticed the article, and in 1800 the Census Act, drafted by Rickman, was presented to parliament. Rickman then directed the census and was responsible for digesting and annotating the data presented in these volumes. He also oversaw the next three censuses, in 1811, 1821 and 1831, and was employed on the bill for the 1841 census before his death. The first census came at a crucial point in the population debate. Malthus' Essay on population, the publication which had stirred discussions in the years immediately preceding the census, was first published in 1798. After the results of the first census were known, Malthus extensively re-wrote the Essay, incorporating insights gained from the census and other sources, and published it in 1803. The census showed that he was substantially in error both as to the size of the population at the time and as to its rate of growth. He supposed the population of Britain to be about 7 millions when it was in fact 56 per cent larger at 10.9 millions, and he believed it safe to assume that it had increased only modestly since the revolution of 1688. In fact the English population had been increasing rapidly since the 1740s and the rate of growth was accelerating steadily, reaching the highest level it was ever to attain in the quarter century following the publication of the first Essay. The evidence of the first and subsequent censuses obliged Malthus to rethink his initial assumptions extensively.
[Source: Catalogue Counting Statistics and Econometrics Human sciences List 2010/15 (Bernard Quaritch : London 2010).]
- Bernard Quaritch, London
April 2010
- Antoine, baron GUERARD DE ROUILLY, Théorie des évaluations des terres labourables, ou méthode pour parvenir à déterminer leur produit net (Troyes, Veuve Gobelet, 1789) pp. 37, [1]; with 5 folding tables
- Treatise of a quantitative method for the assessment of land productivity in France published immediately after the beginning of the Revolution. Countering the prevailing persuasion that pronounced French land production as considerably inferior to that of England, and its techniques backwards, the author contends that the impoverished and worsening condition of farmers and peasants in the country did not spring from insufficient agricultural output, per se satisfactory, rather from a flawed taxation policy based on a blanket estimate applied indiscriminately across the country. Administrative failure, not the failure of fundamental economic dynamics, drives the people of France to famine and jeopardise the outcome of the Revolution. Piecemeal reforms enforced by the Monarchy between 1760s and 1780s had begun to address the crisis, but their failure to adopt a quantitative method had fatally hampered proportionality in taxation, and instead created a policy of systematic and unsustainable unfairness.
- Five tables transform the issue of land output into the crucially relative and diverse issue of land productivity. In them the author quantifies the variations of seed yield in relation to the type of land, the type of crop, the number of horses available for labour, the costs (rent paid to the landlord, livestock upkeep, seed supplies, salaries of cutters, harvesters and threshers, farmer's livelihood). Guerard shows that the existing policy (the exaction of a third of the harvest calculated on a national basis, on the assumption that another third goes to the landlord and the final third constitutes the farmer's net income) fails to reflect the diverse rates of land productivity.
- Bernard Quaritch, London
March 2010
- Elie MONNEREAU, Le parfait indigotier ou Description de l'indigo, contenant un détail circonstancié de cette plante, sa coupe, pourriture & battage, plusieurs remarques curieuses & utiles pour la fabrication de cette marchandise, avec une formule d'économie convenable à un Indigotier, qui contient en abregé comment on doit gérer une habitation & les Negres (...), ensemble un traité sur la culture du café (...). Nouvelle édition, revûe, corrigée & augmentée par l'auteur (Amsterdam, sold at Marseille, Jean Mossy, 1765) 238 pp.
February 2010
- Edmond DESGRANGES, Nouveau traité complet du change et de la banque, renfermant un cours d'opérations et d'arbitrages de banque, un Traité du pair du change, et de la valeur intrinsèque et numéraire des monnaies de tous les peuples; suivi du Dictionnaire des places de changes [...] Ouvrage entièrement nouveau, tenant lieu de la cinquième édition de l'ancien Traité du change [...] (Paris : Aimé-André, 1840) viii, 8, 328 pp.
- Edmond DESGRANGES, Nouveau traité complet du change, contenant un cours complet d'opérations et d'arbitrages de banque, un Traité du pair des changes étrabngères, et de la valeur intrinsèque et numéraire des monnaies de tous les peuples [...] (Paris : Hocquart etc, 1802) viii, 404 pp.
- A.F. BRUAND, Annuaire de la préfecture du département du Jura pour l'an 1814, contenant des détails historiques et statistiques (A Lons-le-Saunier : Gauthier neveu, s.a.) 278 pp.
- Pierre LABOULINIERE, Manuel statistique du département des hautes-Pyrénées, avec un répertoire municipal [...] (Tarbes : Imprimerie de F. lavigne, 1813) pp. 25-411, 14, 39 pp.
January 2010
- Michael George MULHALL, Balance-Sheet of the World for Ten Years 1870-1880 ... (London, Edward Stanford, 1881) pp. viii, 143, [1] blank; with 12 coloured diagrams
- First edition, detailing the commercial progress of nearly every European nation plus the United States, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa, and South America.
- Born in Dublin, Michael G. Mulhall (1836-1900), an obsessive collector of statistics, was educated at the Irish School in Rome before going to Argentina, where in 1861 he founded the Buenos Aires Standard, the first English daily newspaper to be printed in South America. He went on to publish the first English book in Argentina (Handbook of the River Plate, 1869), which went through six editions, and the first ever Dictionary of Statistics (1884), which became a standard reference work and received three further editions.
- Bernard Quaritch, London
- TABLES de comparaison entre les mesures anciennes et celles qui les remplacent dans le nouveau système métrique, avec leur explication et leur usage ; nouvelle édition rendue conforme à la détermination définitive du Mètre et du Kilogramme, et à la nomenclature fixée par l'Arrêté des Consuls du 13 brumaire an 9 ; publiée par ordre du Ministre de l'Intérieur (Paris, Imprimerie de la République, an IX [novembre 1800]) pp. 40.
- Includes: INSTRUCTION sur la manière de rectifier les Tables de comparaison entre les anciennes et les nouvelles Mesures, calculées d'après le Mètre et le Kilogramme provisoires, pour les rendre conformes à la determination définitive du Mètre et du Kilogramme ; Suivie de l'Arrêté des Consuls du 13 brumaire an 9 (Paris, Imprimerie de la République, Germinal an IX [1801]) pp. 12.
- Librairie Hatchuel, Paris