Stanley H. Palmer - Economic Arithmetic: A Guide to the Statistical Sources of English Commerce, Industry, and Finance, 1700-1850

From J . Savary des Bruslons, Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, tr. M. Postlethwayt, 1751-55

The materials, therefore, had to be collected and arranged by degrees, and to be drawn from original sources; and in this manner, the data sought for became the nucleus which has gradually expanded into the substance and capacity of a considerable volume. Of the incompleteness, the multifold imperfections of such a work, especially in its first edition; the tendency to error; the innumerable gaps and blanks that remain to be filled up, no one can be so well aware, probably, as its author. An unequal acquisition of statistical details is the inevitable result of all such undertakings. It will not, we admit, be difficult to point out these deficiencies, and critics may suggest abundant omissions and emendations, in this volume. However, as there must be some limit to the accumulative process and some cessation from the collectors toil, it has now become necessary to bring it to a close, and to commit it to the indulgence of the public.

R. Taylor, Statistics of Coal (1848),
preface, p. iii

And here I may be permitted to observe, that, though I possessed the greatest elegance of stile, to which I make no pretension, the nature of the work presents but few opportunities, of which our most brilliant writers could avail themselves to display the captivating graces of their composition. If I have merely put proper words in proper places, I seek no further embellishments, content with humble praise, if it shall be allowed me, of having given the compressed commercial substance of many thousands of books, official papers, and accounts, and having collected a great thesaurus of solid materials, out of which a skilful architect may, with comparative ease, erect a very magnificent edifice.

D. Macpherson, Annals of Commerce (4 v., 1805), I,
preface, p. xvii

Economic history has always been the most quantitative branch of history, reflecting the interests and profiting from the techniques and concepts of economics. This emphasis on numerical data and their manipulation has increased markedly in recent years as a new generation of economic historians, trained as economists, has attacked old problems with new methods and posed questions unanswerable before. The so-called new economic history has thus enhanced more than ever the importance of numerical information, and it is no coincidence that recent years have seen the appearance of important compendia of historical statistics, in particular the revised edition of the Historical Statistics of the United States and Mitchell and Deanes Abstract of British Historical Statistics.

The essay that follows is a contribution to the swelling stream of quantitative historiography. It deals with that aspect of the sources that we know least and need most help with: the numerical data of the period that antedates the appearance of official statistical bureaus and systematic publication. In this regard, students of British history are more richly furnished than those of most other nations, for characteristically British reasons. It was not that the British government of the eighteenth century, like the cameralist regimes of central Europe, was especially curious about the performance of the economy; the one area where it made an effort to inform itself and keep records was that of tax revenues. It was the intellectual curiosity and personal initiative of private citizenssome of them, to be sure, employed in government servicethat led to the collection and preservation of some of our most valuable series. Much of this initiative, moreover, was the direct outgrowth of the relative political freedom that Britain enjoyed: this was a nation whose precocious parliamentary development encouraged legislative curiosity and public debate, which in turn put a premium on supporting evidence. The contrast is particularly striking with France, where an inefficient monarchy feared the embarrassment and withdrawal of confidence that might ensue from a publication of facts and a debate on their meaning. Whereas those Frenchmen who sought to learn and analyze the facts were discouraged, to the point of personal disgrace, and their books were published, if at all, abroad, the British developed a school of political arithmeticians who invented the questions and methods of economic statistics for future generations and anticipated the techniques of national accounting.