Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

120 Anos De Produção Mundial De Açúcar: Comentários Sobre Séries Estatísticas Tradicionais (1820-1940), Heitor Moura

Heitor Moura Filho

Whatever the historiographic attitude adopted, there are certain precautions pre-liminary to the use of statistics, which cannot be abandoned. To extract readymade series from apparently trust-worthy secondary sources may turn out to be a dangerous procedure. This text compares series of world sugar production commonly found in bibliographies on the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It identifies generic difficulties in sugar statistics and exposes the discrepancies and convergences of 8 series, covering the period from 1820 to 1840. Reference is made to problems created by different measurement units, by the existence of various types of sugar and by series with …