William Deringer's Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age is an ambitious work that links two well-known developments in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain and brings them forward to the present. The birth of rational financial and political calculation and the irrational rage of party are, in Deringer's account, revealed as intimately connected. Moreover, he argues, this is our age as well: data has never been bigger, but numbers have never been more contested and distrusted.

Deringer's argument is twofold. He first argues that the modern “quantitative age,” defined as the “special authority that quantitative thinking holds in modern culture, especially in the political domain,” originated in Britain in the half century following the revolution of 1688 (x). His second and more intriguing argument has to do with the nature of that quantitative culture. It was not and is not, contrary to the self-presentation of many who generate numbers, a culture in which data and calculation provide objective truths. It was and is a culture in which quantitative methods are deployed to make arguments, often for highly subjective political purposes. Deringer's analysis centers on the tension between the ideal of a calculation that represents objective truth and the reality that individuals use calculations to advance their own interests and objectives.

Much of Calculated Values is concerned with explaining the origins of that tension in post-revolutionary Britain. Why did Britons come to accept the authority of quantitative thinking while simultaneously challenging the validity of specific calculations? The key element, Deringer argues, was partisanship and especially partisan political economy. Each chapter highlights a debate, such as those about the creation of the Commission of Public Accounts in 1691, the Treaty of Commerce with France in 1713, or the true value of South Sea Company stock during the bubble of 1720. Deringer shows how partisans used statistics and calculations to advance their agenda and to critique the quantitative arguments of their rivals. In earlier debates, such as the one concerning the value of the Equivalent meant to compensate Scotland for taking on a share of England's debts in the Union of 1707, the presentation was “not just a calculation,” but also “an argument for calculation as a mode of political reasoning” (81). This process accustomed Britons to calculation as a tool of political argumentation, created the expectation that the true numbers could be arrived at, but rarely if ever produced a universally accepted version of that truth. A critical part of his argument is that this methodology was instigated by those outside the government or state apparatus. The quantitative age was not, therefore, the result of the bureaucratic state producing objective and rational data, but of outsiders using calculation as a way of challenging official narratives.

Deringer deploys an impressive array of sources to sustain this argument. The warring newspapers and pamphlets of the period feature prominently. But true to his commitment to treating calculation as a practice rather than merely a rhetoric, Deringer also delves into the manuscripts of calculators to explore how they calculated. This includes well-known individuals such as William Paterson and Sir Robert Walpole as well as numerous more obscure practitioners. He also reconstructs the lives of several calculators, most notably in a chapter devoted to John Crookshanks and Archibald Hutcheson.

There are a few areas where further investigation might be warranted. Deringer amply documents the growing influence and authority of calculation in published works, but it is more difficult to establish how deeply this culture penetrated into society. Were readers as avidly engaged in the intricacies of the quantitative debates as the rival authors or did they gloss over the calculations? Deringer also argues for distinctly partisan ways of understanding calculations, but the evidence of continuity is thin, and the epistemological differences might be better explained by which side held power at the time. For example, Deringer classifies both Whig criticisms of Tory policy in 1713 and William Pulteney's Country attacks on Walpolean Whigs in the late 1720s as stubbornly empirical, with the Tories of 1713 and the Whigs of the 1720s tending to argue the “facts” were not so simple. The attempt to elucidate a Tory epistemology in 1713 is also hampered by heavy reliance on “Tory polemicist” Daniel Defoe, a characterization that is at minimum oversimplified (132).

But these are very minor quibbles with a thoroughly impressive work. Because the book brings together several important elements of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain, students and scholars of that period would certainly benefit from its perspective. But Deringer's work deserves a wider audience due to the connections he draws to contemporary Anglo-American quantitative culture. He recontextualizes the skepticism about numbers and suspicion of “experts” in our time as something that has existed from the beginning rather than a recent disillusionment. Further, he suggests that those of us who care about quantitative reasoning embrace its political nature, especially as a tool to protest and challenge authority, just as it originated in Britain. A book this insightful about the past and with such a trenchant analysis of the present is a rare pleasure indeed.