GOVERNMENTALITY AND TERRITORIALITY - THE STATISTICAL MANUFACTURE OF BRITAIN NATIONAL FARM

This paper examines some of the ways in which state power is extended and consolidated. In particular, Foucault's notion of 'governmentality ' is employed to investigate some of the rationalities and technologie s used by the modern liberal state to 'govern at a distance'. Governme ntality allows us to explain how the state is able to regulate spheres of civil society that are not under its direct control. In order to u ndertake this task successfully a host of indirect mechanisms must be employed to ensure that civil domains are governable. Statistics are c ited as one good example of how government at a distance is achieved, for the collection of numbers about various populations allows those p opulations to be acted upon as they are made increasingly visible and calculable. The example of British agriculture during the 19th and 20t h centuries is explored. It illustrates how the collection of statisti cs gradually rendered agriculture visible and permitted its characteri zation as an economic sector. The development of a national policy-for the 'national farm'-followed ed, which sought to rationalize agricult ure in line with statistical representations. Thus a consolidation of the agricultural territory was achieved during the post-war years. In the process, farms and farmers were disembedded from their immediate s ocio-spatial contexts as they were integrated into a discrete economic sector. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.