“Reckoning the nation: 19th century statistics, probability theory and nation-building.”

Statistics are frequently viewed as straightforward and technical tools – applicable to the study of literally anything - capable of revealing ‘natural truths’ that are apolitical, objective and universally accepted by experts. However, the universal and unquestioned application of statistics is remarkable when one considers that some historical iterations of statistics used hardly any mathematics at all (see Porter, 1986; Hacking, 1991; Behrisch, 2016). Even the most cursory review of internal and external histories of statistics and probability shows that techniques like averages and correlations are historically contingent concepts that were developed not at the abstract level but rather through considerable discussion about specific natural and social problems. Statistical techniques and their interpretations changed over time as a result of debates over specific problems and fields of application as they became increasingly universal (Hacking, 1975/2006; Gigerenzer, Swijtink, Porter, Daston, Beatty, Krüger, 1989; Desrosières, 1998; Chatterjee, 2007).

This dissertation opens the ‘black box’ of statistics through an examination of an early phase of social statistical history: the national statistics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. My research question asks: how were statistical techniques - including list-making, social category standardization and quantitative metrics - justified and developed by statisticians for the study and management of 19th century national populations? In this work, I analyze the discussions held by one of the premier groups of early statisticians – Pierre Simon de Laplace, Adolphe Quetelet and the members of the International Statistical Institute - as they justify the application of mathematical techniques to the study and management of national populations. My first argument suggests statistics should be included and theorized as a technique of nation-building- similar to literacy and the standardization of national vernaculars - that furnished a very compelling quantitative administrative vernacular of 19th century nation-states boasting “privileged access to ontological truth[s]” (Anderson, 2006, 36). I argue that this vernacular promoted a very literal form of methodological nationalism through the epistemology used to justify the application of probabilistic techniques to the study of human national populations. My second argument provides further empirical support for Lampland (2010) and Porter’s (2008) thesis that the precision of quantitative approaches is often mistaken for accuracy, giving the impression that through list-making, numbers and metrics, social reality has been simply translated to the page. However, following these thinkers, I demonstrate that precision is a feature of quantitative language itself and not the phenomena being studied. Instead, I contend that the use of statistics to describe social reality reifies the social processes, institutions and epistemological assumptions used to generate these numbers, rendering the numbers both scientifically and politically ‘objective’. As Lampland (2010) points out, “assuming that the effective use of numbers depends upon their veracity obscures crucial social processes at the heart of modernizing practices” (378). Numbers formalize and objectify social practice.