Figuring the past: statistics as cultural artefacts in British agriculture from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century

The chapter explores the relationship of twentieth and nineteenth-century data as culture within political rhetoric and concepts of “the Land”, via a focus on British sheep production. The emergence of a demand for a UK census for livestock (where statistics were an emergent agricultural technology for husbandry) was initially a product of an immediate need to assess the extent of animal deaths from disease, and source of empirical knowledge that was supposed to be of direct practical value in animal husbandry. Yet, in political discourse the value of ‘counting sheep’, as for other livestock, lay more clearly in the demonstration at a national level, rhetorically that British agriculture was productive. The Annual Returns therefore became useful when it came to comparing head of livestock internationally, as a form of conspicuous production, and that rhetorical utility had a reach into the mid-twentieth century in which, sheep can be traced as political commodities.