It has been convincingly argued that ‘statistics in its oldest, eighteenth-century sense was a description of the state, by and for itself ’, and that ‘during the early nineteenth century in France, England, and in Prussia, an administrative practice took shape around the word statistics, as did techniques of formalization centred on numbers’. This statement must, however, be qualified with regard to areas where, in contrast with the above-mentioned countries, the administrative and bureaucratic state was for all purposes absent during that period and where, as a consequence, political authorities had to content themselves with ‘meagre and unsatisfactory’ knowledge of the territory and its inhabitants. This was the case, namely, of British possessions and, during a half-century or so, from New South Wales to Upper Canada. In the absence of any regular census-taking activity on the part of colonial government, it fell on individual ‘gentlemen-statisticians’ to disseminate all information they could collect on the topography, history, population, economy, crafts and industry of the land. Techniques of formalization such as summing, averages, percentages and tables were introduced there in the writings of authors who practised a specific, now-defunct literary genre known as the statistical account.

The prototype that launched this kind of writing was Sir John Sinclair's twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland, published from 1790 to 1799.