Statistics paired with case studies measured gradations of moral unfreedom.

Evidence

Like statistics, commissions were common tools of statecraft forged by social reform–conscious nineteenth-century states. As instruments of moral science, statistics used deviations from the mean to identify deviations from the norm. Commissions joined those numbers with prototypic cases to measure gradations of morality and the gradations of unfreedom that went along with them. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 184

Categorization

• DEFINE: Spells out the operating logic of ‘moral science’ statistics — mean-deviation mapping onto norm-deviation.