STATISTICS

STATISTICS. The word statistics comes from the German Statistik and was coined by Gottfried Achenwall (1719–1772) in 1749. This term referred to a thorough, generally nonquantitative description of features of the state—its geography, peoples, customs, trade, administration, and so on. Hermann Conring (1606–1681) introduced this field of inquiry under the name Staatenkunde in the seventeenth century, and it became a standard part of the university curriculum in Germany and in the Netherlands. Recent histories of statistics in France, Italy, and the Netherlands have documented the strength of this descriptive approach. The descriptive sense of statistics continued throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century.

The numerical origins of statistics are found in distinct national traditions of quantification. In England, self-styled political and medical arithmeticians working outside government promoted numerical approaches to the understanding of the health and wealth of society. In Germany, the science of cameralism provided training and rationale for government administrators to count population and economic resources for local communities. In France, royal ministers, including the duke of Sully (1560–1641) and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683), initiated statistical inquiries into state finance and population that were continued through the eighteenth century.

Alongside these quantitative studies of society, mathematicians developed probability theory, which made use of small sets of numerical data. The emergence of probability has been the subject of several recent histories and its development was largely independent of statistics. The two traditions of collecting numbers and analyzing them using the calculus of probabilities did not merge until the nineteenth century, thus creating the modern discipline of statistics.

The early modern field of inquiry that most closely resembles modern statistics was political arithmetic, created in the 1660s and 1670s by two Englishman, John Graunt (1620–1674) and William Petty (1623–1687). Graunt's Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) launched quantitative studies of population and society, which Petty labeled political arithmetic. In their work, they showed how numerical accounts of population could be used to answer medical and political questions such as the comparative mortality of specific diseases and the number of men of fighting age. Graunt developed new methods to calculate population from the numbers of christenings and burials. He created the first life table, a numerical table that showed how many individuals out of a given population survived at each year of life. Petty created sample tables to be used in Ireland to collect vital statistics and urged that governments collect regular and accurate accounts of the numbers of christenings, burials, and total population. Such accounts, Petty argued, would put government policy on a firm foundation.

Political arithmetic was originally associated with strengthening monarchical authority, but several other streams of inquiry flowed from Graunt's and Petty's early work. One tradition was medical statistics, which developed most fully in England during the eighteenth century. Physicians such as James Jurin (1684–1750) and William Black (1749–1829) advocated the collection and evaluation of numerical information about the incidence and mortality of diseases. Jurin pioneered the use of statistics in the 1720s to evaluate medical practice in his studies of the risks associated with smallpox inoculation. William Black coined the term medical arithmetic to refer to the tradition of using numbers to analyze the comparative mortality of different diseases. New hospitals and dispensaries such as the London Smallpox and Inoculation Hospital, established in the eighteenth century, provided institutional support for the collection of medical statistics; some treatments were evaluated numerically.

Theology provided another context for the development of statistics. Graunt had identified a constant birth ratio between male and females (14 to 13) and had used this as an argument against polygamy. The physician John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) argued in a 1710 article that this regularity was "an Argument for Divine Providence." Later writers, including William Derham (1657–1735), author of Physico-Theology (1713), and Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707–1767), author of Die Göttliche Ordnung (1741), made the stability of this statistical ratio a part of the larger argument about the existence of God.

One final area of statistics that flowed from Graunt's work and was the most closely associated with probability theory was the development of life (or mortality) tables. Immediately following the publication of Graunt's book, several mathematicians, including Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695), Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), and Edmund Halley (1656–1742) refined Graunt's table. Halley, for example, based his life table on numerical data from the town of Breslau that listed ages of death. (Graunt had to estimate ages of death.) In the eighteenth century, further modifications were introduced by the Dutchmen Willem Kersseboom (1690–1771) and Nicolaas Struyck (1686–1769), the Frenchman Antoine Deparcieux (1703–1768), the German Leonard Euler (1707–1783), and the Swede Pehr Wargentin (1717–1783). A French historian has recently argued that the creation of life tables was one of the leading achievements of the scientific revolution. Life tables were used to predict life expectancy and aimed to improve the financial soundness of annuities and tontines.

The administrative demands brought about by state centralization in early modern Europe also fostered the collection and analysis of numerical information about births, deaths, marriages, trade, and so on. In France, for example, Sébastien le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707), adviser to Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), provided a model for the collection of this data in his census of Vézelay (1696), a small town in Burgundy. Although his recommendations were not adopted, a similar approach was pursued decades later by the Controller-General Joseph Marie Terray (1715–1778), who requested in 1772 that the provincial intendants collect accounts of births and deaths from parish clergy and forward them to Paris. Sweden created the most consistent system for the collection of vital statistics through parish clerks in 1749. Efforts in other countries failed. In England, two bills were put before Parliament in the 1750s to institute a census and to insure the collection of vital statistics. Both bills were defeated because of issues concerning personal liberty. While these initiatives enjoyed mixed success, they all spoke to the desire to secure numerical information about the population. Regular censuses, which would provide data for statistical analysis, were not instituted until the nineteenth century.

Secondary Sources

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Patriarca, Silvana. Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy. Cambridge, U.K., 1996.

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Porter, Theodore M. The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900. Princeton, 1986.

Rusnock, Andrea. Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France. Cambridge, U.K., 2002.

STATISTICS

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Secondary Sources