Liberation Statistics: Making Data for Alternative Worlds in India and West Africa

This talk explores the role of statistical practices in decolonizing the world. It follows the work of Pandurang Sukhatme at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Amílcar Cabral as surveyor for the Portuguese colonial government and guerrilla leader in Guinea Bissau. Their engagement with statistics, namely with sampling and randomization, enables the historical weaving of projects of world governance at the UN, Indian independence, and West African liberation movements. In this connected history of decolonization, statistical methods are central to denounce the injustices of the colonial order, but also to unveil forms of agency from below for worldmaking after empire.

Tiago Saraiva is Professor of History at Drexel University, author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (MIT Press, 2016), which was awarded the Pfizer Prize for best scholarly book by the History of Science Society in 2017, and co-author of Moving Crops and the Scales of History (Yale University Press, 2023), also awarded best book in 2024 by the Society for the History of Technology and the World History Association. He is an historian of science and technology interested in the connections between science, technology, crops, and politics at the global scale. After revisiting the history of European fascism through stories of technoscientific organisms such as wheat, pigs, and sheep, he has recently completed a transnational study on the history of cloning oranges and cultivating whiteness in California, South Africa, Algeria, Palestine, and Brazil. His new project explores the connected histories of statistical methods and liberation movements in the global south, from India to West Africa, from Brazil to the South of the US. Saraiva is now finishing coediting the three volumes of the Cambridge History of Technology to be published in 2026/2027.