Censuses
"The total process of collecting, compiling, analysing, and publishing or otherwise disseminating demographic, economic and social data pertaining to all persons in a country or in a well-delineated part of a country at a specified time."
Censuses have been used for thousands of years. Initially, their prime purpose was for levying taxes or raising armies. Egypt, 5000 years ago, sought to produce a list of households and household members every second year. Imperial Rome, around the beginning of the Christian era, sought to count the population every five years, largely for taxation. The modern census, however, evolved in Europe in the 1600s as an aspect of 'political arithmetic' whereby countries sought to quantify the military and fiscal power of the state. Sweden’s first complete census occurred in 1749, with other European countries following soon in the next hundred years. The first census in the United States occurred in 1790, and the constitution mandates a census to be held every ten years; the results are fundamental to the allocation of seats in the (lower) House of Representatives.
The box to the right hand side contains the definition of a census according to the United Nations. The following page will highlight some of the aspects of this definition and consider them in more detail. It should be noted that there are many types of census, including censuses of business, agriculture and animals, but throughout this session the term census refers to population and housing censuses.