Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet
Scottish politician, writer on finance and agriculture (1754–1835)
Colonel Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet, (10 May 1754 – 21 December 1835), was a British politician, military officer and writer who was one of the first people to use the word "statistics" in the English language in his pioneering work, Statistical Accounts of Scotland, which was published in 21 volumes.
Life
Sinclair was the eldest son of George Sinclair of Ulbster (d. 1770), a member of the family of the earls of Caithness, and his wife Lady Janet Sutherland. He was born at Thurso Castle, Caithness. He was educated at the High School in Edinburgh.
After studying law at the universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow and Trinity College, Oxford, he completed his legal studies at Lincoln's Inn in London in 1774. He was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in Scotland in 1775, and also called to the English bar, although he never practised. He had inherited his father's estates in 1770 and had no financial need to work.
In 1780, he was returned to the House of Commons for the Caithness constituency, and subsequently represented several English constituencies, his parliamentary career extending, with few interruptions, until 1811. Sinclair established at Edinburgh a society for the improvement of British wool, and was mainly instrumental in the creation of the Board of Agriculture, of which he was the first president.
“Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet” enters the record as scottish politician, writer on finance and agriculture (1754–1835). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what John, Sinclair and Baronet can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q337499. VIAF identifies the subject as 46750988. The Library of Congress control number is n50023563. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1754, 1835, 1770 and 1774.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sir John Sinclair, 1st Baronet” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.