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Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-Century Italy
Author(s): Silvana Patriarca (Author)
- Publisher: Cambridge University Press
- Publication Date: December 18, 2003
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 296 pages
- ISBN-10: 0521522609
- ISBN-13: 9780521522601
Book Description
Numbers and Nationhood explores the rise of statistics as a mode of representation in Italian society during the nineteenth century. Silvana Patriarca examines the ideologies that informed numerical productions, and the role that statistics played in generating a national image of Italy that nevertheless accentuated its internal territorial divisions. This innovative study provides a fresh reading of the historiography of Risorgimento Italy, bringing issues of science, ideology and representation to the fore.
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Patriarca's book makes a fine and useful contribution to scholarly understanding of the development of statistics in the political world of unifying and unified Italy." Carl Ipsen, American Historical Review
"...impressive integration of intellectual, administrative, and political history..." Libby Schweber, Jrnl of Interdisciplinary History
"Silvan Patriarca's Numbers and Nationhood is an important contribution to a dynamic and growing literature on the history of European statistical writings in the modern period. The great virtue of Patriarca's work is thus to illustrate the variety of ideological positions that oriented themselves around statistical portraits of the Italian nation in the nineteenth century, remaining ever attentive to the complexity of that elusive nexus between knowledge and power in the modern world." Joshua Cole, Journal of Modern History
Book Description
An innovative 1996 study of statistics in Risorgimento Italy, and their contribution to the national identity.
