ABSTRACT
The collection of global religious statistics may be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.4 The ‘Compton census’ of 1676, for England and Wales, was an early attempt to quantify church affiliation, but was subject to pitfalls which have plagued religious counting ever since.5A fresh impetus came when trade, colonial expansion and religion intersected in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Adam Smith, progenitor of classical economics, in the 1760s and 1770s pronounced that societies pass through progressive stages of civilising development, the ultimate being a Christian civilisation based on commerce. In his Wealth of Nations (1776) Smith emphasised that the real wealth of a country consisted not in its silver mines but in the produce of its land and people’s labour, and that manufacturing was more profitable than agriculture.6 Smith’s disciples, interested in both civilisation and commerce, kept a statistical eye on the natural and human resources and civilising progress of Britain’s colonies.7 Initially ‘counting the people’ contravened the Old Testament taboo on censuses motivated by pride.8 Clerics from both Church and Nonconformity participated on all sides of the population controversy, which protagonists won without disastrous effect after the first British Census of population was conducted in 1801.9 Additional interest in the collection of statistics grew in the early nineteenth century with the emergence of modern Christian missions and the associated concern to measure missionary progress.10
