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"Summary", pp. 261-266 in Henrik Höjer, Svenska siffror. Nationell integration och identifikation genom statistik 1800-1870, Diss. (History, Uppsala University 2001), Gidlunds, Hedemora 2001. (Sweden by numbers. National integration and identification through statistics, c. 1800–1870)
Henrik Höjer
National consciousness and national community can never be taken for natural or eternal. Rather, the sense of belonging to a bigger national collective is realised through different pedagogic means. This study does not deal with nationalism as an ideology or nationalism in external affairs. It deals with the construction of national identity and how people who don’t know each other become part of the same national public sphere. Therefore, one main concern is the communicative aspects of the nation building process. The aim of this thesis is to study the nation building process in Sweden. How was a national identity constructed? One answer to this question is that statistical representations of the nation played a major role when shaping a visual image of Sweden. A national self-representation was made possible by statistics. Statistical books also became a popular genre during the nineteenth century. The main concern and goal for the new science statistics was to describe a nation, its population, geography, history, climate and interior condition. Through statistics a general picture of Sweden was formed. This was mainly an image made of both words and numbers.
The concept of “statistics” originally referred to a description of a state in words. But during the early decades of the nineteenth century the shift in the use of the concept is visible. The word statistics more and more referred to numerical descriptions of the nation. At the same time, statistical information became a public matter. The history of collecting information of the society goes back further through. During the eighteenth century the Tabellverket (founded 1749) collected numerical information – and therefore not “statistics” in contemporary language – of the Swedish population. These numbers were at first secret. During the 1760’s the total sum of inhabitants in Sweden were made public for the first time. In the 1770’s a small number of mainly local descriptions was published in the Vetenskapsakademiens Handlingar. After 1809 – when Sweden got a new constitution and lost Finland to Russia – a new and significant interest for statistics takes form. Members of the Swedish parliament (Riksdagen) as well as many publishers asked for detailed information about the Swedish society. This statistical information, were also to be made public and not anymore secret any more. During the 1810’s, a lot of the statistics compiled by the Tabellverket was published and created a source of information for debate about the Swedish society.
During the first half of the nineteenth century a lot of new branches of society was put under numerical analyse and made public. The common interest for statistics – numerical information about Sweden – was huge and statistical journals and books gained a great deal of attention. In the 1850’s a new statistical bureau – Statistiska Centralbyrån –replaced the old Tabellverket. The new bureau compiled and published statistics, which were collected by different departments.
Public, national statistics shaped a national community and a national “us”. A lot of the statistics over Sweden that was compiled and published in the nineteenth century answered questions such as “what is Sweden?”, “what is the condition of Sweden like?”, “what is Sweden like compared other nations?” and “how is the Swedish society changing?”. These questions, and of course the answers delivered, were part of the growing interest in knowledge and rational explanations associated with the nineteenth century. A rational and national narrative of Sweden was made through statistics. This interest in a scientific image of Sweden was partly an inheritance from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but the larger public sphere and the growing amount of printed numbers was a product of the nineteenth century.
Still, statistics as a mode for national self-representation was a concern for the emerging middle class, and so was the sense of national togetherness and national community.
In the 1810’s and 1820’s, statistics was made public and read in order to shape a new “national spirit”. This way of thinking was expressed by many publishers during this time. In order to like and love the nation, knowledge about it was an essential element. Since statistics was a branch of science that dealt with a whole nation, the science became a perfect tool to get to know the state of the nation. The statistical narrative of Sweden became a genre that in words and numbers described things, such as the population, geography, climate, history, commerce, towns, taxes, army and justice of the nation. Statistics represented the recourses and potential of a nation.
The national spirit was also closely connected to the construction of the modern citizen. Gained political influence of the common classes went hand in hand with increased political knowledge and liberal demands for political reforms coincided with demands for public statistics of the development of the nation. Therefore this national spirit was connected with the statistical “opening” of the society for the public. The emergence of the public sphere was therefore a precondition for the diffusion of national statistics.
One reason for the popularity of statistics was that the progress and condition of a whole nation could be complied and printed in a single book. The tabular form vas effective for visualisation of a big number of facts and figures. The tables were also well fit for all types of comparisons. The concepts of “order”, “gather”, “compile” and “compare” were common in the discourse of statistics. In the early part of the nineteenth century, internal comparisons were demanded, while in the middle of the nineteenth century national comparisons were demanded, in the numbers as well as in how specialised and scientific the statistical methods themselves were. In the discourse on statistics most publishers saw the growing amount of numbers as symbols of truth and scientific objectivity. Statistics was considered as a method to gain correct information about society in a time of societal change. In a time of secularisation and rationalisation, statistics was seen as a new tool to control and even foresee the development of the society.
Statistical representations of Sweden created a national integration since they were popular and widely spread literature. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, statistical descriptions of Sweden were widely read, discussed and reviewed. They therefore became part of the public debate and shaped a discourse about Sweden. This discourse partly constructed an “imagined community”, as Benedict Anderson has described the modern nation.
Ian Hacking has written about “the avalanche of printed numbers” during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The main concern of this avalanche of statistics, was the state of Sweden. During the 1810’s, statistics was described as one of the most popular types of literature of the nation. Besides the official numbers – printed for the first time in the 1810’s – a lot of journals, papers and books dealt with statistics as a part of a public debate over Swedish internal affairs. During this early period there were also discussions whether the term statistics referred to national descriptions in word or numbers. After the 1810’s, it became clear that statistics meant numbers over a nation. In the 1830’s a very popular statistical work, Carl af Forsells Statistik öfver Sverige, was printed in four sold-out and debated editions and the official numbers gained a lot of public interest.
When the Swedish state took a bigger interest in the compiling and publishing of statistics in the 1850’s by founding a new bureau, the official statistics became more complicated and lost some public interest due to the big volumes which attracted less readers. This meant that the integrative aspects mostly appeared during the earlier period. The Swedish era of the biggest enthusiasm for statistics occurred in the 1810’s and the following decades.
National statistics shaped a national identification due to the repeated representations of Sweden as a nation. As national statistics became a part of the public sphere during the beginning of the nineteenth century, Sweden as a country became symbolised by the statistical image of the land itself and no longer only by the royal family or ancient history. As a statistical representation of the nation became common, statistical comparisons between countries also became part of shaping a national identification in contrast to others. Statistics – one of the most popular sciences of the nineteenth century – became a tool for visualising Sweden and its development as a nation to its population. The group of readers who seemed to be most interested in statistics was the middleclass. Statistical journals were also spread and read to a large number of towns all over Sweden in the early eighteenth century, when the press in general was almost only local.
When the old statistics of the eighteenth century, with Alain Desrosièrers words, was supposed to be the mirror of the prince, statistics in the nineteenth was the mirror of the nation. Therefore, the public and popular visualisations of Sweden in numbers played a part in the process of internalising the nation as the main political concept. The repeated representations of the Swedish nation as a coherent and consistent object, visible and understandable probably played a part in the process of letting the citizens “know your nation”, as contemporary publishers and statisticians put it. National statistics also played a part in nationalising social issues. What happened in the north of Sweden became of interest to know to people of the once Danish population in the south of Sweden, and so on. A national self-image in numbers made the national community known and internalised. “To love your nation, you must know it”, one publisher put it. After the popular works in the 1830’s about Sweden in numbers, many other books in this genre – national, public statistics – were published around the middle of the nineteenth century.
A national self-image was also constructed by the after the 1830’s so popular moral statistics. Through numbers over criminality or rate of suicide a national moral identity was defined. These numbers were often compared to other nations moral statistics, and the degree of “civilisation” was measured in a national competition. The increasing social and moral statistics was part of a bigger interest for qualitative matters of the population. In the eighteenth century, the quantity of the population was the most important matter. A large number of inhabitants were considered as a resource for the state. After the 1830’s, a big population was rather seen as a threat, and a qualitative good population was the goal. Here moral statistics was a method for measuring the level of civilisation and good moral among the Swedes. A bigger statistical interest for ethnic groups – for example Finns and Jews – became significant, as well as an interest for measuring the numbers of the disabled and poor. Also this was part of an attitude of bigger interest for qualitative issues among the Swedish population. During the 1830’s and 1840’s debates over Sweden’s internal affairs and development over the last thirty years took place, and numbers over the population and economics played a important part of the argumentation.
The biggest difference between the numbers of the eighteenth century and the nineteenth century concerns the issue of secret or hardly spread number and than public and popular numbers. Another big change is that the early numbers mainly was an instrument for the state, but later statistics was considered as a mirror of the nation for the citizens. The general context for the statistics also changed. During the eighteenth century the numbers aimed at an enlightened universal and static explanation of man. During the nineteenth century the aim was to reach conclusions changes and progressions of the nation. Social and historical contexts were considered in a larger degree. During the nineteenth century a qualitative view of the population replaced the old and mainly quantitative view. During the nineteenth century statistics also focused on studies over the changes of society, and not on samplings of a static picture. In addition, national comparisons also became popular, especially around the 1850’s. The international statistical congresses, which started at this time, had as one of their ambitions to make statistical comparisons easier by standardisation of different national statistical categories.
As a whole, the main shift from the often local, and hardly read, numbers of the eighteenth century to the national, public statistics of the nineteenth century – and the impact the latter had on national consciousness and the sense of national community – is the most important result of this thesis.
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