4 - Official numbers

Summary

There is a question that we have not asked so far, but that needs to be asked: where did the numbers come from, the numbers published in the descriptive works whose logics and rationale we have tried to account for in the previous two chapters? They came to a large extent from the very administrations that were criticized implicitly or explicitly by liberal commentators for their alleged unwillingness or reluctance to promote statistics and make them fully public. In fact, in most pre-unification states the 1830s and 1840s marked the beginning of the official era of statistics. This was not the first time statistics entered the “public sphere”: as we have mentioned, already in the Napoleonic period official and non-official statistical publications had flourished with the aim of enlightening a diverse audience of administrators and private individuals. But now the enterprise took place in distinctive forms and modes, and, in spite of its ambiguities and hesitations, it showed that it belonged to a new, and, in the long run, irreversible trend common to all European countries.

The first to start this trend among the Italian states was the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which established a Direzione Centrale di Statistica in Palermo in 1832 with the purpose of coordinating the collection of statistical information on the island.