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Introduction
PRINCES, kings, and emperors have collected information about their populations in some form for millennia. Whether it is the biblical references to census taking, the Domesday Book, the Florentine Catasto (Herlihy, 1985), or the population counts of Chinese emperors (Spence, 1990), it is not hard to find examples of efforts by premodern rulers to determine the extent of their realms for the purpose of taxation and military conscription or to estimate of economic capacity. Yet the creation of a population data system-namely, a systematic collection of uniform, periodic information about a nation's population and its constituent elements-is largely an innovation of the modern state, since it required the development of modern administrative bureaucracy, technology, and professional expertise (Headrick, 2000).
There is a growing literature on this historical development of census taking, statistics, and on the development of the social sciences generally (Alonso and Starr, 1986; Beaud and Prevost, 2000; Desrosieres, 1998; Patriarca, 1996). The functions of such population data systems include the traditional premodern functions of taxation, military and economic planning, and analysis. But they also include new state functions, such as the allocation of representation in democratic assemblies according to population (M. Anderson, 1988), or the provision of public health and the prevention and control of epidemic disease (Szreter, 1996), and the more general provision of "welfare" to local populations. Population data systems, in other words, whether based on administrative-reporting systems of one kind or another or direct inquires such as household sample surveys or population censuses, have come to serve critically important social, political, and humanitarian functions.
Yet such functions do not exhaust the uses of the population data systems. As many commentators have indicated, particularly in the literature on the efforts of European colonialists to control of populations in their far-flung empires (B. Anderson, 1991; Scott, 1998), there is a darker side to the development of these systems. Population data systems also permit the identification of vulnerable subpopulations within the larger population, or even the definition of entire populations as "outcasts" and a threat to the overall health of the state.
Most elementary demographic or applied statistics textbooks provide information on the range of general uses that population data systems serve. These texts, or at least the more thorough ones among...
