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The book explores the hotly disputed process by which the census was created and developed and examines how a wide cast of characters, including statisticians, novelists, national and local officials, political and social reformers, and journalists responded to and used the idea of a census.

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A National Undertaking´: Taking the Census The Census and Surplus The Census and Political Representation Urban Growth, Urban Problems, and the Census Marriage, the Family, and the Nation ´Sprung from Ourselves:" Counting Race at Home and in the Colonies´ Challenges and Alternatives to the Census

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´Kathrin Levitan´s A Cultural History of the British Census is a useful and engaging study about the meaning of the census in British society. In addition to shining new light on an old source and convincingly asserting its importance to British conceptions of themselves, it is also a well-crafted intellectual history that traces ideas about belonging identity in Britain through the transformations of nineteenth-century politics.´ Cercles

´If for Lord Macaulay, "figures are like mercenaries: they may be enlisted on both sides", in Levitan the census has found a historian who is even-handed and wide-ranging in her survey of these battlefields.´ - Robert Mayhew, TLS

"Provides an original approach, and the result will need to be engaged with by all historians working on modern Britain ... The book is well researched and clearly written, and scholars of literature as well as history will find important material here." - The American Historical Review

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KATHRIN LEVITAN Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA.

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