Disciplining Statistics: Demography and Vital Statistics in France and England, 1830–1885 (review)

This comparative history seeks to explain the how and why of population statistics in France and England in the middle of the nineteenth century. I use "population statistics" as an umbrella term, since it is clear from the title and content of Libby Schweber's book that there were two distinct pathways: demography belonged to France, vital statistics to England. While the two national styles overlapped, Schweber argues convincingly that they should be treated as separate intellectual enterprises, with distinct histories. While demography took some time to strengthen its position in France as an institutionalized practice, in England vital statistics was woven into the fabric of social administration from the outset.

The chapters of the book are organized into four parts that alternate between the national stories. Schweber contrasts unsuccessful attempts to "invent" the discipline of demography in France with the establishment of English vital statistics in the General Register Office (GRO) and in talking-shops like the Statistical Society of London. She then distinguishes eventual, if limited, institutionalization in France in the late 1870s and early 1880s from a period of consolidation in England. Schweber eschews simplistic explanations for these different experiences, but her argument can be distilled to two key points. First, the accommodation of liberal political economy into the national polity was crucial because it determined the extent to which statistical knowledge was thought of as political. Second, the scientific work that population statistics was made to do differed radically. In England, a probabilistic approach invited the instrumentalization of vital statistics, whereas in France, administrators deployed demography mainly as a descriptive device, reflecting a resistance to the abstraction of statistics. Thus in France, attempts to use demography in the service of public hygiene fell on deaf ears. Demography existed as more of an intellectual than a practical enterprise and struggled to establish a meaningful role until the depopulation debate reared its head in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war.

Claiming to steer a middle way between a Latourian pursuit of the scientist on the one hand and hagiography on the other, Schweber's focus on key protagonists such as Achille Guillard and Louis Adolphe Bertillon in France and William Farr in England certainly benefits from looking beyond government institutions to the wider intellectual milieu. Nevertheless, it is around these individuals that Schweber's account almost exclusively revolves. Seeking to secure their position with varying degrees of success, these well-known figures negotiate a terrain of multiple societies that traversed statistics, medicine, anthropology, and the social sciences. It is these sorts of organizations (as well as their associated conferences and journals), universities, and various Académies that constitute the bread and butter of discipline formation. Many of them already have their own perfectly serviceable histories, so it is to be welcomed that Schweber gives due attention to one that does not (as far as I am aware): the International Congress of Demography, first held in 1878 and subsequently incorporated into the International Congresses of Hygiene and Demography.

But this outward-looking approach does not fully compensate for Schweber's relatively thin consideration of the administrative institutions themselves or the adoption of statistical techniques beyond the center. Take the English case as an example. The GRO was set up to ensure the reliable transference of material assets (that is, tracing genealogical lineage). The alliance of vital statistics to public health was only made possible by the inclusion of a medical diagnosis on the death certificate, a move that had more to with the demands of the Poor Law and life insurance actuaries than it did with the needs of population statisticians. Furthermore, the GRO would have almost certainly collapsed in the early 1840s without the intervention of the then Registrar-General, George Graham, and it hardly acted independently of other branches of government afterwards. It might also be said that while very basic...