Cultures globales de l’enquête: Transformation sociale et production de connaissances (XVIIIe-XXe siècles)

The contributions in this issue sketch the outlines of an interdisciplinary research program that emerged from a collective reflection initiated during two workshops at the Centre Marc Bloch in 2020 and 2022. At the heart of our questioning lies the desire to historicize the notion of Enquête/inquiry and the practices associated with it; a notion omnipresent as a marker of disciplinary identity for the social and historical sciences, but only recently interrogated as an object of study in its own right. By revisiting the term “culture of enquête” (coined by Dominique Kalifa), we aim to situate the techniques of observation that developed in the nineteenth century within a longer history, rooted in colonization and imperial history. This issue brings together a number of empirical studies on inquiries and surveys carried out from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, with the aim of contributing to a global history of survey knowledge.