Readers of historical or analytical texts usually begin by asking themselves: what is the problem addressed here? Mary Poovey presents her book's problem to us in its title, for a 'history of the modern fact' immediately throws into question conventional understandings of the factual, of evidence and of historical narrative. For if facts are nothing but 'facts', how can they have a history, and how might we then distinguish between a 'modern fact' and any other sort of fact? Indeed, Poovey tells us in her introduction that while working on this book she was constantly asked 'What is the 'modern fact'? The preliminary explanation tentatively offered here turns upon a contrast between the neutrality of (statistical) numbers and the arguments that purport to be founded upon them. This problem is otherwise known as 'the problem of induction', a staple both of the philosophy of the sciences and of history, and so it is likely that there is more to it than this. The gulf which opens up between 'facts' and the manner in which facts are mobilized as 'evidence' for interpretation is glossed by Poovey's observation that 'facts' are not pre-interpretative after all, that even the most abstract statistical series presupposes a judgement of what should be counted and how. Numbers signify both neutrality and verifiable reference; if we say for example that the Jewish population of Jerusalem in 1900 was 25,000,1 we might need a definition of who counts as a Jew and what is meant by 'Jerusalem', but the number itself is either verifiably true or demonstrably false. According to Poovey, this quality epitomizes the 'modern fact', a mode of facticity in which the interpretative framework is folded into a numerical record whose neutrality contrives to underwrite an interpretative framework already there inscribed.2 Formally, therefore, the book is presented as a story of the manner in which numbers came to speak for themselves, a form of representation that appeared independent of all interpretation and beyond critical inspection. So stated, the ,modern fact' becomes '... the epistemological unit that organizes most of the knowledge projects of the past four centuries .. .', rendering the history of the modern fact an entirely unmanageable, even inconceivable, total history of modern knowledge. Instead, as a history this study restricts its account to British sciences of wealth and society, although it is not immediately evident that numerical signifiers have consistently played a central role in the literature of political economy. In fact, the idea that arguments about wealth and society primarily rest upon quantitative evidence is a very recent idea, and the attempt to impose this recent idea