Sir John Sinclair(1754–1835)

John Sinclair was born at Thurso Castle on the north coast of Caithness on 10 May 1754, the eldest son of George Sinclair of Ulbster and Janet Sutherland of the Earl of Sutherland's family. The Sinclairs of Ulbster held one of the larger Caithness estates and were the cadet branch of the Earls of Caithness; the family were Whig in politics, Presbyterian in religion, and the sort of large northern landowners who took the running of the county for granted as part of the rent. John was schooled at the Edinburgh High School, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Glasgow, Lincoln's Inn in London (where he ate his bar dinners without ever practising), and at Trinity College Dublin. He took no degree from any of them but came out with a command of Latin, French and the elements of political economy.

He inherited Ulbster on his father's death in 1770 at sixteen, and managed the estate from his early twenties through the improving agricultural literature of the 1770s: he drained the moss-lands at Ulbster, planted woodland on the bare braes, brought in Cheviot sheep, built the harbour at Thurso. He was elected MP for Caithness in 1780 at twenty-six and held the seat with one interval until 1811. In Parliament he was an awkward Whig of the Pitt persuasion; his loyalty was to specific reforms in agriculture, fisheries and statistical method rather than to either party. Pitt made him a baronet in 1786 in recognition of his pamphlet on the public revenue. The Sinclair baronetcy is the one his descendants still hold.

In May 1790, working from his Edinburgh house in George Street, Sinclair circulated to every parish minister in the Church of Scotland a printed questionnaire of one hundred and sixty queries on the geography, agriculture, population, economy, religion, language, customs and natural history of the parish. He paid for the printing, paid for the postage, and asked for a return within twelve months. The first returns came in by September; the last came in by 1799. He compiled and edited them in twenty-one quarto volumes published over the same eight years as The Statistical Account of Scotland. It was the first national social survey of its kind anywhere in the world. The Account became the template for the British census of 1801, for the agricultural surveys of the new Board of Agriculture, and for every social-statistical project of the next two centuries; the word statistics itself, in the modern sense, was Sinclair's coinage.

In June 1793 William Pitt created the Board of Agriculture, the first government department in any country charged with the systematic improvement of farming, and appointed Sinclair its first President at thirty-nine. He held the post until 1798 and again from 1806 to 1813. Under his direction the Board commissioned the county-by-county General View of the Agriculture surveys (eventually fifty volumes), brought Arthur Young in as secretary, championed the merino-sheep introduction that founded the modern fine-wool industry, and built the institutional framework on which Sir Robert Peel later founded the Royal Agricultural Society of England in 1838. He published his own three-volume Code of Agriculture in 1817; it ran to four English editions, a French translation, a German translation and a Russian translation by 1832.

He retired from Parliament in 1811, sat in Edinburgh through his last twenty-four years as the éminence grise of Scottish improving politics, and died at his house in 133 George Street, Edinburgh on 21 December 1835, aged eighty-one. He is buried at Holyrood Abbey. The Sinclair name today carries his memory as the surname of the first man who thought, in the 1780s, that a country could and should know itself by counting and describing itself parish by parish, and who proved over the next decade that this could be done. The Old Statistical Account he produced is one of the great working documents of the Scottish Enlightenment; the New Statistical Account of the 1830s, the Third Statistical Account of the 1950s, and the digitised modern Statistical Accounts run from the foundation he laid.