William Playfair (1759–1823) is not usually included among the illustrious figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. A prolific writer in his day, by the twentieth century he was obscure. This was an affront to the mathematician H. Gray Funkhouser and statistician Helen M. Walker, who, in a 1935 article in the journal Economic History, huffed, ‘the man who invented outright the graphical method of representing statistical data has had so little recognition that his name is not even to be found in the Encyclopædia Britannica’ (p. 103). Rectifying this oversight, Funkhouser and Walker placed Playfair at the centre of the history of statistical graphics.
The rather dry name of this subfield may not inspire the historical imagination. But think of the role of these graphics in our present. How many economic or policy decisions are justified based on time-series charts? As in Playfair's time, these charts are, for instance, used to make geopolitical arguments in an emerging neo-mercantilist environment – with concerns about China's balance of trade tending to replace Playfair's focus on colonized India. Beyond the economic sphere, issues from a changing climate to the spread of pandemics are expressed in the visual language of statistical graphics. Where did this language come from?
It was not always obvious that Playfair would be the answer to this question. To be sure, he has had admirers in high places over the years. But Playfair has come into his own in the twenty-first century. His Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, previously available only in rare-book libraries, was reissued by Cambridge University Press in 2005, some two hundred years after the original. In 2018 he was the subject of a biography by Bruce D. Berkowitz, with the Hollywood-ready title Playfair: The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World (2018), followed in 2023 by the book under review, by David R. Bellhouse, professor emeritus in the Department of Statistical and Actuarial Sciences at Western University.
Bellhouse gently dispenses with some of the more outlandish claims that have been made about Playfair over the years. His mastery of the primary material available on Playfair's life and careful reconstruction of the political controversies into which Playfair threw himself will place future historians on much surer footing. Bellhouse does not attempt the impossible: sanitizing or sanctifying Playfair; the word ‘flawed’ in his title is probably an understatement. But as his life was tossed in the powerful historical currents of the Industrial and French Revolutions, Playfair's irrepressible spirit, his genius in the ‘eighteenth-century sense [of] natural ability’ invoked by Bellhouse (p. 7), illuminates both his own times and points toward our contemporary visual fascination with data.
Playfair's first professional experience was as a draughtsman in Matthew Boulton and James Watt's Birmingham steam engine workshop. At this time, the parts of the engine were produced in Birmingham and elsewhere and later assembled on the site where the engine would be used – based in part on Playfair's technical drawings. As an engineer, Playfair gained an appreciation for how visual materials could be used to convey knowledge.
At the beginning of the 1780s Playfair decided to start his own manufacturing business. He soon ran into money problems that would follow him for the rest of his life. These problems led Playfair to seek a literary career, not only for the proceeds from the works themselves, which were often meagre, but also for the doors that published works could open for future business ventures. Between the lines of the biography, one also gets the sense that Playfair was the type of person who simply could not help but express his many opinions publicly.
Playfair's published output revolved around the themes of politics and economics. His political works, like his 1787 publication Joseph and Benjamin, which features a fictionalized dialogue between the Holy Roman Emperor and Benjamin Franklin, tend to have been forgotten, whereas his statistical economic works have now entered the historical record. Playfair's masterpiece, The Commercial and Political Atlas, was published in 1786 and features forty graphs, mostly of time-series data relating to international trade – themes that Playfair developed from Scottish Enlightenment figures like Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson. Its many contemporary admirers included the French King Louis XVI, who granted Playfair a patent to set up a manufacturing operation in Paris.
Bellhouse is an even-handed guide through the many twists and turns of Playfair's life, which include a failed scheme to settle French immigrants in the United States, an escape from the French Revolution, the founding and failure of a commercial bank, later desperate attempts at extortion, and ultimately imprisonment as a debtor. In comparison to the sometimes overwhelming detail of these tribulations, Bellhouse's commentary on Playfair's graphs themselves, reproduced handsomely in the volume, is restrained, often deferring to contemporary reviews. While this is understandable given the sensationalism that has elsewhere surrounded Playfair, when they do appear, these commentaries, such as the discussion of techniques Playfair used to smooth his data (pp. 59–60), are informative.
One theme that comes across implicitly in this fine biography is the polemical nature of the print culture of Playfair's day. Might this hold clues as to why Playfair's work fascinates us today? Bellhouse shows that Playfair's graphs were almost always designed to make a political point – about the national debt, the balance of trade or even the rise and fall of nations. Our polarized age of social media has a similarly contentious atmosphere, and the types of chart that Playfair invented not only make numerical relationships easier to perceive and comprehend but also readily inspire political interpretations. Time-series charts, rightly or wrongly, invite causal speculation about events and future trends. Historians and social scientists interested in pursuing these larger questions will find much of value in The Flawed Genius of William Playfair.
