How data gathered from national conscriptions in pre-World War I
Europe influenced understandings of population fitness and redefined
society as a collective body.
In pre-World War I Europe, individual fitness was increasingly related
to building and preserving collective society. Army recruitment offered
the most important opportunity to screen male citizens' fitness, raising
questions of how to define fitness for soldiers and how to translate
this criteria outside the military context. In this book, Heinrich
Hartmann explores the historical circumstances that shaped collective
understandings of fitness in Europe before World War I and how these
were intertwined with a fear of demographic decline and degeneration.
This dynamic gained momentum through the circulation of knowledge among
European nations, but also through the scenarios of military
confrontations.
Hartmann provides a science history of military statistics in Germany,
France, and Switzerland in the decades preceding World War I,
considering how information gathered during national conscriptions
generated data about the health and fitness of the population. Defined
by masculine concepts, conscription examinations went far beyond the
individuals they tested and measured. Scholars of the time aspired to
pin down the "nation" in concrete numerical terms, drawing on data from
examinations to redefine society as a "collective body" that could be
counted, measured, and examined. The Body Populace explores the
historical specificity and contingency of data-gathering techniques,
recounts their uses and abuses, and provides a timely contribution to
the growing historiography of Big Data. It sheds light on a crucial
moment in nineteenth and early twentieth century European history--when
statistical data and demographical knowledge shaped new notions of
masculinity, fostered fears of degeneration, and gave rise to eugenic
thinking.
