Comments by "Harry Stoddard" (@HarryS77) on "The argument for cooking with volume measurements, rather than weight" video.

  1. "Because local standards of measurement were tied to practical needs, because they reflected particular cropping patterns and agricultural technology, because they varied with climate and ecology, because they were "an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege,” and because they were “at the center of bitter class struggle," they represented a mind-boggling problem for statecraft. "...Even when it did not jeopardize state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either undershooting or overshooting fiscal targets.50 No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement. "...For centralizing elites, the universal meter was to older, particularistic measurement practices as a national language was to the existing welter of dialects. Such quaint idioms would be replaced by a new universal gold standard, just as the central banking of absolutism had swept away the local currencies of feudalism. The metric system was at once a means of administrative centralization, commercial reform, and cultural progress. The academicians of the revolutionary republic, like the royal academicians before them, saw the meter as one of the intellectual instruments that would make France "revenue-rich, militarily potent, and easily administered."53 Common measures, it was supposed, would spur the grain trade, make land more productive (by permitting easier comparisons of price and productivity), and, not incidentally, lay the groundwork for a national tax code.54 But the reformers also had in mind a genuine cultural revolution."
    1