Franziska (LMRG) and Sayori (KSCL) would like to bring together those of us interested in histories of quantification and statistics in the modern period. Through this reading group, we hope to start a conversation around the multiple lives of quantification in the modern world. We will explore how quantification, especially statistical reasoning, shaped scientific disciplines and came to be transformed through these varied applications, how it operated as an instrument of modern governance and state-building, how it has been challenged, resisted and reappropriated, and how these dynamics have unfolded across diverse geographic and political contexts both within and beyond the Anglo-American context that dominates the historiography.