This article investigates the construction of urban/rural binary distinctions in 18th - and 19th-century social scientific literature, and in particular in the writings of the statistical societies in England. The 18th-century writers were primarily concerned with the spread of luxury, vice and effeminacy among the upper social strata in large cities. Later on, statisticians began to focus on moral hazards among the urban working poor. These writings are significant in several respects: they contributed to the spatial mapping of moral character, (...) played a role in the development of quantitative social scientific techniques, and foreshadowed later sociological debates over the nature and consequences of social evolution from simpler to more complex societies. (shrink)