This line of continuity rested primarily on those intellectuals and bureaucrats who did research for the Empire and later performed similar tasks in the nascent republic. I argue that the colonial experience was crucial, but not determinant for the production of statistics in the early republican period. The purpose of this chronology is to place the first republican scientific efforts in a broad time horizon, linking them with the proto-statistical researches ordered by the Spanish Crown during the second half of the eighteenth century. This article studies the formation of the Chilean statistical service in a period that ranges from the last decades of colonial rule to the 1870’s.
