Search

We have seen how Italian patriotic statisticians, in order to escape the stereotyped images of the peninsula which stressed the torpor and misery of its inhabitants, highlighted by means of numbers and “facts” the signs of progress, the dynamic elements that made the Italian people worthy of the place they were claiming among the industrious and civilized countries of Europe. Yet there were statistics that could be used to support exactly the kind of stereotyping that Italian patriots were trying to avoid; this was particularly the case of “moral statistics”, namely the counting of crimes, suicides, foundlings, and all sorts of signs of disorderly, “immoral” lives, in order to evaluate the morality of a society. From the time of their emergence in the late 1820s moral statistics promised to be a powerful new instrument for ranking peoples and states, or for drawing boundaries within established ones. Lower or higher percentages of violent crimes or of suicides seemed to represent the moral fabric of a society in a way which was both evocative and authoritative, and spoke to the concern about the nature of modern society that gripped the nineteenth-century elites. Although crime was monitored and counted both in the pre-unification states and then in the Kingdom of Italy, the first extended essay on moral statistics bearing on the Italians was published as late as 1865–1866, in Venice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think about modern states we often envision statistical aggregates. Area, population, size of the gross national product, the level of the national debt, these are identifying features that we take for granted, as an obvious way of representing territorial entities. Yet numbers have not always enjoyed this position, and in fact their rise as a fundamental mode of representation is a relatively recent process. Although the first systematic attempts to provide numerical evaluation of the population and wealth of states can be traced back to the consolidation of modern states in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is particularly when the form of the nation-state imposed itself in Europe and America, in the late eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, that statistics became a widespread practice and attracted the solicitous attention of ruling elites and reformers alike. Since Harald Westergaard's studies on the history of statistics, historians have been aware of the “enthusiasm” for social counting that gripped several European countries in the 1830s–1840s. This enthusiasm led to the launching of specialized journals, the formation of statistical societies for the purpose of collecting numerical information on the most diverse social facts and phenomena, and the establishment and consolidation of state bureaus for the collection, classification, and analysis of increasing quantities of data which administrators and political leaders deemed essential for the guidance of political decisions and for the governing of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]