How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms by Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones.
Chris is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton in theoretical physics, and in addition, is a founding member of the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and of the Department of Systems Biology. Chris is also co-founder and co-organizer of hackNY.
Matthew Jones is a professor of History at Princeton. He holds a Master in philosophy from Cambridge University and Ph.D. from Harvard. While at Columbia, Matthew and Chris taught a class regarding data. Their work is tracing the history of data back to the 18th century. At that time European states began manipulating physical resources.
They see the rise of data and early statistical methods were indeed used to justify eugenics. In fact, this misled some in the late 1800s to believe data could quantify race differences. Unsurprisingly those same European countries used data to develop military and industrial applications.