Numbers
This chapter focuses on American mathematical schoolbooks from the age of revolutions, as well as associated genres such as manuals on bookkeeping, navigation, and insurance. Knowledge of these fields was crucial for the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century voyages of commerce and discovery that connected the Atlantic and Pacific, and these books introduced a wide variety of readers, including women, to the world of global trade. In their attention to the interrelated practices of calculation and speculation, these genres—in dialogue with literature on the lottery—taught readers the narrative dynamics of suspense that also informed the emerging genre of the novel. Like transoceanic travel narratives, novels were the textual companions to capitalism, offering readers regular practice in accommodating the sensations of expectation central to a world increasingly penetrated by global trade and its mechanisms of risk-taking and risk assessment. Novels emerged, in other words, as numberless representations of an increasingly number-driven world.