“Most early measures were human in scale. One sees this logic at work in such surviving expressions as a “stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and a “cartload,” a “basketful,” or a “handful” for volume. Given that the size of a cart or basket might vary from place to place… these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally.” - James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State.
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James C. Scott’s magnum opus, Seeing Like a State is a truly phenomenal read and is a book I am keen to do a reading group on at some point. It is one of those “few and far between” books that all agrarians ought to be familiar with for Scott sheds a perceptive light on why traditional societies and agrarian lands have suffered under the influence of high-modernity, and also what we need to be on guard against in the future if we are to restore and protect what remains of the agrarian life.
In his first chapter which is all about ways of seeing, reading, and managing nature, Scott discusses an integral feature of agrarian societies that many of us overlook or dismiss as mundane: the importance of units of measurement. Specifically, Scott explores how most of the units of measurement that peasants and agrarians in traditional societies used were both highly localised and imprecise/unfixed. Needless to say, this suited locals just fine, but caused no end of frustration to centralised states, their leaders, and their bureaucrats…
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