Is it right for historians to serve as 'expert witnesses' to past events? Since the end of the Cold War, a series of heated and politicised debates across Europe have questioned the 'truth' about painful episodes in the twentieth century. From the Holocaust to Srebrenica, inquiries and fact-finding commissions have become a common device employed by governments to deal with the pressure of public opinion. State-sponsored programmes of education and research attempt to encourage a common moral understanding of the lessons we learn from these painful memories. Contemporary historians have...

In this fascinating study, Nico Randeraad vividly describes the turbulent history of statistics in nineteenth century Europe. The book deals not only with developments in the large states of Western Europe, but gives equal attention to small states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Hungary) and to the declining Habsburg Empire and Tsarist Russia.
Then, unlike today, statistics constituted a comprehensive science, which stemmed from the idea that society, just like nature, was governed by laws. In order to discover these laws, everything had to be counted. What could be counted, could be solved:...