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During the second half of the 19th century, the level of international scientific transactions increased when the European nation-states became stronger and more involved in imperial strategies combining military and economic means. This article analyzes the process by which statisticians have since the 1850s shaped a stable body of scientific and administrative knowledge. An intense circulation of persons and goods together with the success of free trade ideology in many European countries under neo-absolutist rule, facilitated the building of a specialized network that met in international congresses and universal exhibitions. Between 1850 and 1870, this network acquired a transnational form of social authority. The next generation renationalized this capital and reconsidered the forms of their international exchanges. The material circulation of books, their keeping and their cataloguing are clues to such a long-term, complex and locally differentiated process.