By What Authority - Accounting Empire

American Political History · Apr 30, 2022 · 20m

There was a man in London who knew more about America than almost anyone alive, and who never crossed the ocean to see it. William Blathwayt sat in the Plantation Office at Whitehall, where the English empire arrived as paper — customs returns from Barbados, militia counts from New York, the tobacco out of Virginia, all of it landing on one clerk's desk to be read, filed, and turned into the first complete picture England ever had of the colonies it owned. This is the story of how the empire learned to count itself, and of the king who wanted it counted so badly he thought it might set him…