Statistics and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Introduction: Numbers and the people in modern British history (Tom Crook and Glen O'Hara, Oxford Brookes University) 1. Statistics and the career of public reason, 1820-1960: Engagement and detachment in a quantified society (Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles) PART ONE: Rethinking statistics and the public sphere 2. The state and statistics in Victorian and Edwardian Britain: Promotion of the public sphere or boundary maintenance? (Edward Higgs, University of Essex) 3. Suspect figures: Statistics and public trust in Victorian England (Tom Crook, Oxford Brookes University) 4. Numbers and narratives: Statistical realism, bureaucratic fiction and affective aggregation, 1830-1880 (Maeve Adams, New York University) PART TWO: The business of public numbers 5. The politics of statistics in late eighteenth-century Britain: From Richard Price to Henry Beeke (Richard Sheldon, University of Bristol) 6. 'In these you may trust': Statistics and the economics of overseeing, c. 1790-c. 1840 (Steven King, Oxford Brookes University) 7. Gentlemen capitalists? The Independent West Middlesex Fire and Life Assurance Company fraud (James Taylor, Lancaster University) PART THREE: Statistics, political numeracy and public debate 8. Population statistics and the 1832 Reform Act (S.J. Thompson, University of Cambridge) 9. Printed statistics and the public sphere: Numeracy, party politics and the visual culture of numbers, 1880-1914 (James Thompson, University of Bristol) 10. A 'naked strength and beauty': Statistics in the British tariff debate, 1880-1914 (Edmund Rogers, University of Cambridge) PART FOUR: Twentieth-century innovations 11. Polling public opinion before opinion polling: The Conservative Party and electoral prediction between the wars (Laura Beers, University of Cambridge) 12. Power to 'consumers' or 'the people'? Market research and the conceptualization of affluence and the 'good society' in Britain, 1920-1960 (Stefan Schwarzkopf, Queen Mary, University of London) 13. Foreign exemplars and national statistics: The French model of economic data-collection in Britain, c.1951-1973 (Glen O'Hara, Oxford Brookes University) Conclusion: New histories of an enumerated people (Tom Crook and Glen O'Hara, Oxford Brookes University)