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"there were defence reasons for wanting to know the number of seamen"."the number of men who were required for conscription to the militia in different areas should reflect the area's population"."an industrious population is the basic power and resource of any nation, and therefore its size needs to be known"."the intimate knowledge of any country must form the rational basis of legislation and diplomacy".
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Rickman's twelve reasons – set out in 1798 and repeated in parliamentary debates – for conducting a census of Great Britain included the following justifications: The censuses were initially conducted partly to ascertain the number of men able to fight in the Napoleonic Wars, and partly over population concerns stemming from the 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population by Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. for religious purposes), national decennial censuses of the general population started in 1801, championed by the statistician John Rickman. The first census in England was the Domesday Book, compiled in 1086 under William the Conqueror for tax purposes.ĭistinct from earlier, less inclusive censuses (e.g. In the 7th century AD, Dál Riata (parts of what is now Scotland and Northern Ireland) conducted a census, called the "Tradition of the Men of Alba" ( Scottish Gaelic: Senchus fer n-Alban). Tax assessments (known in the later Empire as the indiction) were made in Britain in Roman times, but detailed records have not survived.