Sussman goes on to examine the various “colonial afterlives” of political arithmetic in her article, one of which is “the idea that biological reproduction could be aligned with national productivity” (113). This practice reappears in the theories of Thomas Malthus and concerns over “redundant ” or “surplus” populations after the eighteenth century. According to Charlotte Sussman, political arithmetic is “the process of calculating the financial worth of a population” (96) that was practiced in the eighteenth century. However, it is also a perverse example of the political arithmetic that was applied to poor or abandoned children during the eighteenth century. Ī Modest Proposal is a satirical essay directed at mercantilist policies that were harming Ireland’s peasant population during the eighteenth century. Title page of the 1729 publication of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
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