How do we come to know the facts that frame our understanding of the modern economy? In 1900 virtually none of the data that we today take for granted were available. By 1945 the entire repertoire of modern economic statistics was established and increasingly generic across the world. The result was to change the way in which the economy was viewed as an object of government. Statistics and the German State is a pioneering investigation of this remarkable development in Germany, one of the leading countries of the statistical revolution. It traces not only how the key data series were constructed, but the way in which different types of statistics were associated with different visions of the state and economic government across the tumultuous decades from the Kaiserreich, to the Weimar Republic and the Nazi Third Reich.