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11 - Weights and Measures and State Formation

The View from the Early American Republic

from Part III - Agendas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2018

John L. Brooke
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Julia C. Strauss
Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Greg Anderson
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Summary

In recent years it has become fashionable to assail the “myth of statelessness”: the notion, promulgated by an earlier generation of historians that the American state was especially “weak” in this formative era. There is much to recommend these accounts. But there are also dangers in pushing this line of argument too far. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States, efforts to establish and enforce a uniform system of weights and measures--what one historian has described as a “constitutive element of state formation”--went nowhere. This troubled narrative calls into question the notion that the state was particularly powerful, effective, or pervasive in the early republic, never mind the longer nineteenth century. Much could get lost in translating the legal imperatives of the state into a practical reality, and the history of weights and measures in the United States offers an object lesson in how difficult it can be to make the one mirror the other. The American state could legislate, dictate, cajole, and threaten. But compared to more familiar forms of state power, from keeping the peace to collecting taxes, imposing standard weights and measures proved an extraordinarily vexing, perplexing challenge at this time.
Type
Chapter
Information
State Formations
Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood
, pp. 190 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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