Nico Randeraad

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. In this fascinating study, Nico Randeraad vividly describes the turbulent history of statistics in nineteenth century Europe. The book deals not only with developments in the large states of Western Europe, but gives equal attention to small states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary) and to the declining Habsburg Empire and Tsarist Russia. Then, unlike today, statistics constituted a comprehensive science, which stemmed from the idea that society, just like nature, was governed by laws. In order to discover these laws, everything had to be counted. What could be counted, could be solved: crime, poverty, suicide, prostitution, illness, and many other threats to bourgeois society. The statisticians, often trained as jurists, economists and doctors, saw themselves as pioneers of a better future. Offering an original perspective on the tensions between universalism and the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century, this book will appeal to historians, statisticians, and social scientists in general.

Europe by numbers

States and statistics in the nineteenth century

Harriet Jones

Kjell Ostberg

Since the end of the Cold War, a series of heated and politicized debates across Europe have questioned the "truth" about painful episodes in the twentieth century. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica, inquiries and fact-finding commissions have become a common device employed by governments to deal with the pressure of public opinion. State sponsored programs of education and research attempt to encourage a common moral understanding of the lessons we learn from these painful memories. Contemporary historians have increasingly been drawn into these efforts since 1989 - in the courtroom, in the media, on commissions, as advisers.

Nico Randeraad

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