Introduction; Part I. Commercial Arithmetic and Practical Dynamics: 2. Reckoning on death and chance with the Merchant's Rule; 3. Commercial currents and first differences; 4. The interplay of deception and accountability in the index numbers and moving averages of the Bank of England; 5. Seasons, tides and structures in cycle time; Part II. Subject Context and Statistical Theory: Introduction to subject context and statistical theory; 6. Laws of chance and error in the observation process games of chance; 7. Laws of deviation and the capacity for shifting means in early statistical models of processes; 8. A funny thing happened on the way to equilibrium: economics and statistical ways of thinking around the turn of the century; 9. Decomposition and functions of time; 10. Autoregression, random disturbances, dangerous series and stationary stochastic processes; Epilogue; Appendix 1: Techniques of time series analysis; Appendix 2: Frequency analysis of worldwide studies in time series and stochastic processes, 1847-1938.