Burocracia y saberes de Estado: la producción de estadísticas en Chile (1750-1870)

Abstract

This article studies the formation of the Chilean statistical service in a period that ranges from the last decades of colonial rule to the 1870’s. The purpose of this chronology is to place the first republican scientific efforts in a broad time horizon, linking them with the proto-statistical researches ordered by the Spanish Crown during the second half of the eighteenth century. I argue that the colonial experience was crucial, but not determinant for the production of statistics in the early republican period. This line of continuity rested primarily on those intellectuals and bureaucrats who did research for the Empire and later performed similar tasks in the nascent republic. Such scientific heritage, however, started to change in parallel to the consolidation of the Chilean State, which brought about the development of a more robust and better anchored bureaucracy, the emergence of a specialized institution in charge of producing statistics, the increasingly national focus of the State research programs, and the inclusion of the local statistical production in global networks of knowledge exchange. By tracing the connections between scientific knowledge and State bureaucracy at provincial level, this article seeks to show the role statistics played in the forging of the Chilean State.