Averages, indexes and national income: accounting for progress in colonial Australia

ABSTRACT

Economic statistics are now such an ingrained feature of everyday political discourse that they have recently become ripe as topics of historical scrutiny. This study contributes to this scholarship by shifting attention from what has been a largely American-Anglo discussion to the innovations of prominent Australian statists in the colonial and early Federation periods. In contrast to recent approaches that have treated economic statistics as emerging during the twentieth century as a discrete body of knowledge distinct from nineteenth-century ‘moral statistics’, this history is approached as an exercise in ‘accounting in history’. It highlights both patterns and discontinuities in governmental deliberations that facilitated statistical innovation, historicising and complicating the relationship between economics and statistics as domains of knowledge. By drawing attention to the tensions and overlaps of successive intellectual projects engaged by Australian government statisticians – described here in terms of transparency and control; the average man and colonial progress; the breadwinner and national wealth; the human unit and the social organism; and the consumer and ‘the economy’ – it develops new perspectives on why calculations of economic averages, indexes and national income emerged as devices of government. As major producers and consumers of contemporary economic statistics, such perspectives might provide fresh epistemological and interdisciplinary grounding for business and management scholars.

KEYWORDS:

• Statistics
• economics
• government
• expertise
• Timothy Coghlan

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank two anonymous referees, the editors of this special issue, Greg Patmore and Mark Wescott, and the editor of AHR, Cheryl McWatters, for their suggestions and advice in the preparation of this article. I also thank the participants at the 2018 Australian Historical Association Conference, Canberra; the 2018 World Economic History Congress (especially to Cheryl McWatters), Boston; and the 2018 AAHANZBS Conference, Sydney, where these ideas were first presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Ben Huf http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0472-4933

Notes

1 See at length: SANSW: NRS 1287, 4/7582.5; and, SANSW, Colonial Secretary, NRS 906, Colonial Secretary’s Special Bundles, [4/722.2], ‘Blue Books, Preparation and Returns’.

2 For example, see: SANSW, NRS 1287, [4-7258.5], Magistrate at Dungong to Colonial Secretary, 23 June 1852; SANSW, NRS 906 [4-7488], Port Phillip Superintendent’s Office to Colonial Secretary, 23 April 1844. A magistrate at Murrurundi complained that ‘parties’ in his district had sent their returns both to him and Tamworth, making it impossible to obtain the necessary information’. SANSW, NRS 906 [4-722.2].

3 In 1846, Thomson forwarded to the Secretary of State ‘A Comprehensive View in a Tabular Form of the Statistics of New South Wales’, which on a single sheet detailed all the head of the Blue Books from 1836 to 1844. See: Drafts and final version in SANSW, NRS 1287, [4-6288]; (Watson 1914–26, 24: 707).

4 He also rearranged the NSW Statistical Register, which Rolleston had not changed in format between the early 1860s and 1885 and had included chapters on Religion, Education and Crime; Trade and Commerce; Mills and Manufactures; Monetary and Financial; Production; Miscellaneous. Coghlan initially expanded to eight chapters and expanded in 1889 to 14. The same statistics were to be found in the Statistical Register and Wealth and Progress, only the latter made a much greater interpretative effort.