Vertical and horizontal approaches to the making of racial statistics in Britain

ABSTRACT: The release of data from the 2011 census fuelled a media storm over Britain's ethnic and immigrant composition, while at the same time a much less visible series of public debates developed over the scope, organization and purpose of government information-gathering centred on how the existing census could be replaced with ‘Big data’. It is therefore particularly timely to explore the political choices, ontological shifts and statistical challenges shaping the array of enumeration projects that have developed in contemporary Britain to identify, classify, and count immigrants and their descendants. This article analyses the relationships between holistic (horizontal) and single-purpose (vertical) approaches to racial statistics, and how these were affected by the standardizations of classification in 1962 and 1991. A range of state archives and contemporary accounts are used to examine the material practices and organizational tensions that fuelled the divergence, transfer and interaction of these attempts at racial legibility.