Sir John Sinclair (1754–1835)

"In 1790, as an elder in the general assembly of the Church of Scotland,Sir John Sinclair (1754-1835) launched the idea of a survey of the state of the country, which was to become the twenty-one volumes of the Statistical Account of Scotland. It is a detailed account of the geography, history, economy, and society of every parish. He had gathered the word 'statistical' from Germany on his northern tour. He used it to mean information which was desirable for legislative purposes, though not necessarily numerical in form. 'Statistics', he said, 'should reveal the quantum of happiness in a population', as well as 'the means of further improvement'. He saw the proper function of government as intervention or legislative action to promote welfare and economic growth, and recognized that detailed information was necessary for such intervention to be effective. He was not the first to move towards the collecting of detailed local information. In particular, for Scotland Sir Robert Sibbald had made various county reports; Sir James Steuart had recommended such action. Alexander Webster's Scottish census of 1755 was an interpretation of the same idea, as were Macfarlane's Geographical Collections of the early eighteenth century. There were the various parish studies made by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and published in 1782. The survey idea was taken further in the census of 1801. The important features of Sinclair's survey were its comprehensive range of topics and the fact that it was fully carried through. All 936 parishes were reported on in the following nine years, and the book as a whole is the most frequently quoted of all Scottish historical sources." (ODNB). The work was highly innovative and influenced Sir FredericK Eden when he was writing The State of the Poor. "… (mais)