Standard setting was part of the Enlightenment concern with uniformity and rationality, notions at the center of intellectual and practical debates in the eighteenth century and the absence of which contributed fuel for the French Revolution. The metric system was a tangible product of this concern, replacing hundreds or thousands of local systems to eliminate capricious measurements that were used to exploit the peasantry. It was also an integral part of the rise of the nation state in the nineteenth century, when centralized governments with strengthened fiscal capacity promoted shared symbolic systems—agreements on concepts and meanings—across integrated territories.Footnote 1 First accepted by the French National Assembly in 1790, the metric system was widely debated regarding its potential for global scientific and commercial exchange by 1855 and signed into international convention in 1875, complete with a global governing body to regulate the new standard. The path to 1875 was fraught with violence and upheaval in many of the nations that attempted to introduced the new system. In the words of J. L. Heilbron, “It is easy to change a country's government, not hard to change its currency, and all but impossible to change its weights and measures.”Footnote 2 How and why, then, did a country take on this Herculean task?
This article analyzes the Brazilian experience of adopting the metric system as it traveled the path from idea to advocacy to implementation and acceptance in the nineteenth century. It argues that Brazil's interest in standardization occurred early in its history as an independent nation and was very similar to standardization advocacy in Europe: Brazilian engineers, mathematicians, and scientists engaged with their foreign counterparts through international academies, learned societies, and conferences to promote the benefits of standards for international exchange of ideas and trade. They worked with government officials to promote standardization through state financial support, international diplomacy, and legislative action. For the government's part, standardization offered the promise of expanding and consolidating its governing capacity across a continent-sized nation by bringing its far-flung regions together under a single system of measurement to facilitate economic exchange and technological advancement.
When the metric system is discussed in Brazilian history, it is raised as an example of the ruling elite's desire to emulate European philosophies, policies, and practices that held little resonance with the Brazilian reality. This is the “idéias fora do lugar,” or “misplaced ideas,” thesis authored by Roberto Schwarz, in which Brazil's modernizing elite imported European political philosophy and cultural practices because of their perceived superiority.Footnote 3 For Schwarz, the inherent contradiction between the rights of man and the reality of slavery in Brazil rendered meaningless the European liberal ideals of individualism, modernization, and progress. Favor and reciprocity between master, slave, and a dependent class of free poor, not individual industry or merit, shaped Brazilian society. For Schwarz, this ideological subordination left society disoriented by a cynical and uneasy combination of adoption and maladaptation, ashamed of its inferiority in European eyes. The remedy for inferiority was emulation. Scholars such as José Murilo de Carvalho, Mara Loveman, and Roderick Barman argue that this importation of European institutions revealed the state's limited capacity to govern its continent-sized territory; their scholarship casts the modernizing state as barely formed and seriously disconnected from the reality of the nation it governed.Footnote 4
These works on misplaced ideas and weak administrative capacity certainly reflect the expressed concerns of European-facing elites who worried about Brazil's backwardness, yet these interpretations miss something important and fundamental about modernizing reforms like standardization: these reforms came out of professional relationships within the science and engineering community of the nineteenth century. My research complicates the misplaced ideas thesis by delving into the motives and actions of practitioners who were behind the introduction of the metric system from the start. Their motives originated not from the internalized shame of Francophile political elites but from Brazilian scientists and engineers who, through their interactions with European counterparts, grasped the power of standardization for their research and work. Their experience was similar to that of other nations: first science, and then agriculture, commerce, and industry, realized real gains from establishing, promoting, sharing, and adopting standards. In influencing political allies to take up the metric system, they were advocating adoption of the lingua franca of science and technology, statistics and trade.Footnote 5
In this article, I show that standardization practices for engineering and scientific advancement in Brazil were promoted through social networks of Brazilian men of science and standards. Scholars of mathematics and physical sciences, they studied at polytechnic institutes in Europe and Brazil and trained engineers, mathematicians, and scientists in Rio de Janeiro. These practitioners were involved in two simultaneous movements. In the first, they were part of an evolving international network of scientists and engineers interested in setting standards necessary for scientific, and eventually technological and industrial, progress. In the second, they coordinated with allies in the government who actively professed a belief that more and better data opened the possibility for better governance and improved socioeconomic outcomes. These parties became intertwined through international scientific congresses, international diplomacy, and domestic legislative wrangling, culminating in national implementation of the metric system on the eve of the 1875 International Convention of the Meter, to which Brazil was signatory.
Ironically, the convention that signaled Brazil's embrace of the new system occurred in the same year that Brazilian peasants erupted in violent protest across more than fifty towns and villages of the Northeast. These protests occurred in surprisingly similar ways, given the limited means of communication of the era. Protesters confronted local officials, destroyed local tax rolls, invaded notarial offices and city council headquarters to burn public records, and smashed the newly introduced metric scales in the public market. The proximate cause was the introduction of new taxes on the sale of goods in the public marketplace. The deeper catalyst for Quebra Quilos (Break the scales) revolts, named for the newly mandated metric system, was a series of government reforms that extended the reach of a modernizing state into realms previously safe from intrusion, or in ways that threatened to alter the social relationships that characterized daily life.Footnote 6
Just a few years before, in 1871, a new cabinet led by the Viscount of Rio Branco came into power with sweeping reforms to modernize Brazil, or more to the point, to modernize the government's administration of Brazilians. A nation barely fifty years old, Brazil had declared independence from Portugal in 1822. The Portuguese court fled approaching Napoleonic forces in late 1807 to sail to Brazil, where it established a “tropical Versailles” in Rio de Janeiro and invested in institutions of higher learning, art, and culture.Footnote 7 The royal family grew so enamored of Brazil that it declined to return to Lisbon at the conclusion of the Napoleonic War. It was only when the Portuguese Cortes (parliament) threatened to remove King João from the throne and establish a parliamentary democracy that he sailed back to the continent in 1821. The parliament then attempted to reassert Portuguese dominance over colonial Brazil, prompting João's son Pedro to declare independence in 1822. Pedro I, Emperor of Brazil, was an autocratic ruler whose heavy hand shaped a constitution that gave him great power over the parliament. Rising discontent with his reign forced him out in 1831. He returned to Portugal, leaving his young son, Pedro II, on the Brazilian throne.
The crisis of Pedro I's abdication and Pedro II's youth—he was just five years old—unleashed more than a decade of political struggles and regional revolts that threatened to rend the nation. A semblance of calm returned only after Pedro II was declared of age in 1840, in spite of being just fourteen. The rival parties coalesced around the young emperor and brokered a political peace. By 1850, political elites had passed an ambitious legislative agenda that included a Judicial Code, Commercial Code, and Land Law. Taken together, these created the institutional frame for expanded internal security, economic opportunity, and agricultural development. Under intense diplomatic and military pressure from the British, the transatlantic slave trade ended that same year, although the institution of slavery was not abolished until 1888. Brazil's 1850 agreement to end the slave trade preserved relations with Britain at a time when economic trade was rapidly expanding.Footnote 8
By the 1860s, steam navigation had increased Brazil's contact with Europe, railroads were connecting hinterland to port, and Brazil was exporting coffee and cotton by the tons. The country had consolidated politically, had established its legal and economic institutions, and was constructing major public works projects to connect government to hinterland and hinterland to port. In spite of these developments, the capacity of the Rio-based government to effectively rule beyond its municipal borders was questionable, and de facto power throughout Brazil rested in the hands of local patriarchs. A protracted and deadly war with Paraguay from 1864 to 1870 interrupted attempts by the central government to extend its reach, and many projects, the metric system included, went unattended until the war's conclusion.
With the war at an end, the reformist cabinet came to power headed by José Maria da Silva Paranhos, the Visconde de Rio Branco. Rio Branco was a highly decorated member of the Brazilian state—senator, military officer, diplomat, counselor to the emperor—who served as Minister of Empire (Interior) and president of the Council of Ministers from 1871 to 1875. His cabinet introduced a number of major reforms that rocked traditional Brazilian society. An urgent matter was modernization of the army in the wake of war. A new system of military service based on lists of eligible men replaced press-gang recruitment of the poor, prisoners, and others unprotected by patronage. An abolitionist, Rio Branco advocated for the 1871 Law of Free Womb that declared all children born to slave mothers “shall be considered free.”Footnote 9 A slave registry was introduced in response to this policy of gradual abolition, to distinguish between enslaved and free. The cabinet waded into church territory by mandating a civil registry of baptisms, marriages, and deaths to capture vital records of all Brazilians, Catholic and non-Catholic alike—something tried and abandoned in 1851.Footnote 10 The cabinet oversaw a national census, the first of its kind. And it enforced the introduction of the metric system of weights and measures to replace regional variations with international standards.
The northeastern peasantry, a hardscrabble free population that bore the traits of centuries of race mixing between Portuguese, African, and Indigenous peoples, lived in a patriarchal world where strong patrons protected them from military service and vouched for their status as free or freed persons. With the state in control, rather than the local patriarch, poor Brazilians feared these reforms might send them into war or categorize them as unfree. The new scientific census made them known to the government. The civil registry of marriages, births, and deaths intruded into relationships between parishioner and priest. On top of this, the introduction of the metric system, by reducing the size of standard units of weight and creating new taxes to pay for the changeover, threatened their personal economy.Footnote 11 The introduction of so many reforms in such a short period was disorienting to a tradition-bound society.
By the time the violent protests turned the nation's eyes to the metric system, it had already been the topic of advocacy, debate, exchange, and promotion for decades. This article examines the long process that began in 1824 by first examining the profiles of the men of science and standards who advocated for it through institutions of higher learning, domestic professional organizations, engagement in international conferences, and exploration of the Brazil in which they lived. It then turns to their advocacy for the introduction of the metric system, followed by a consideration of the political debates, including tussles over the requirements of modernization and impediments to such a major institutional change, leading up to 1862 legislation adopting the system and the rollout led by the Ministry of Agriculture. It concludes by assessing the significance of the new system for development and state administrative capacity, the two threads that bound the scientific and engineering community and the modernizing political elites in nineteenth-century Brazil.
The Metric System and Men of Science and Standards
We know from the better-studied cases of nineteenth-century standardization that the impetus for adopting standards like the metric system came from transnational communities of scientists and then was joined by engineers and diplomats.Footnote 12 Professional relationships developed through international congresses and engineering societies that shared inventions and innovations in heady pursuit of scientific exchange. The appeal of the metric system was in its derivation from nature and its supervision by scientists, not governments, although scholars have shown that this seemingly objective system was fraught with political meddling.Footnote 13 Ronald Crease likens the passion felt by scientists and engineers for the system and their promotion of it to a crusade. He writes, “The new system was advanced by its advocates as the most progressive, impartial way to measure nature in the Newtonian world of abstract space. Yet there was more than detached, scientific appreciation for it, there was zeal.”Footnote 14
The Brazilian experience with the metric system closely paralleled this process, although the story is not well known. Men of science and standards, mainly professors of math, science, and engineering, interacted with colleagues in schools and professional gatherings, formed societies for the promotion of Brazil's economic improvement, engaged in voyages of domestic exploration, promoted statistical analysis and technological advancement, and engaged politicians and diplomats in promoting standardization. Most if not all of the men in this story were connected through the institutions of higher education in Europe and Brazil. The sons of Brazilian elites were educated at the University of Coimbra in Portugal during the colonial period, before the arrival of the court in 1808 and the establishment of Brazilian institutions of higher education. These newly formed institutions were limited to three professions: the military, medicine, and law.Footnote 15 Science and engineering were taught at the military academy, which, according to Andrew Kirkendall, did not entertain the same level of prestige as law or medicine. Engineers eventually became important to Brazilian society and economy, by the end of the nineteenth century, but “received little acclaim in imperial Brazil's agrarian society” before the modernizing impulses after 1870.Footnote 16 For João Luciano Dias, the growing prestige of the engineering profession and the major impulse behind standardization were tied to those post-1870 public works such as railroads, bridges, and tunnels and the materials needed to maintain them.Footnote 17
The origins of math, science, and engineering education relate to the late colonial era when the Real Academia de Artilharia, Fortificação e Desenho (Royal Academy of Artillery, Fortification, and Design) was founded in Rio de Janeiro, a contemporary of the Real Academia in Lisbon and the École Politechnique in Paris. Later known by several names, including Academia Real Militar (1810), Academia Militar (1822), and then the Escola Central (1858), this institution trained officers for the military but was the place where math, science, and engineering were taught to civilians as well. In fact, reforms to the academy usually related to its dual identity—military training and engineering versus civilian engineering and science. Even during periodic shifts in favor of its military identity, the importance of the mathematics and natural sciences formed core curricular content.Footnote 18 In 1842 it created undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics and physical sciences for its civilian students.Footnote 19 In 1874, the civil engineering curriculum was taken out of the military school, was placed under the Secretaria do Império (Interior secretary), and became the Escola Politécnica, or Poli, as it is known today.Footnote 20 Men who were educated in this curriculum were at the fore of standardization.
Take Cândido Baptista de Oliveira. Trained at the University of Coimbra in Portugal and the École Polytechnique in Paris, he was professor of mechanics at the Academia Militar and, in 1830, a newly elected member of Brazil's general assembly. As legislator, on June 12, 1830, he proposed the immediate adoption of metric weights and measures to replace the old system of Portuguese Customary Units inherited from colonial times.Footnote 21 As in other newly independent Latin American nations, the responsibility to establish “the weight, value, inscription, type, and denomination of coinage and the pattern for weights and measures” had recently been enshrined in the 1824 constitution of the newly independent Brazil.Footnote 22 The Chamber of Deputies declined to debate the bill but did agree that Brazil's system be evaluated to see if it was compatible with “the exactitude and uniformity that are indispensable.”Footnote 23 One of the biggest concerns of the proponents of the metric system was that a system of weights and measures must be uniform, exact, and reproducible. Oliveira's call for a new system in Brazil focused on the chaos of the system Brazil had inherited at independence from Portugal in 1822. Not only was there no universal, precise definition or natural, unchanging standard for vara (yard) or braça (fathom), grão (grain) or pipa (barrel), but the terminology was about the only element of this system shared throughout the country. For the emergent mathematicians, scientists, and engineers, this was untenable.
Four societies devoted to standardization, including the introduction of the metric system, emerged from the professorial ranks of the Academia Militar/Escola Central. The first of these societies, the Sociedade Auxiliadora da Indústria Nacional, or National Society for Aid to Industry, was founded in 1827. Its statutes specified it should acquire “machines, models, and inventions that may contribute to the growth and prosperity of the national industry in this Empire.”Footnote 24 The meaning of the term “industry” was understood to be commercial export agriculture, and innovation was especially promoted in the area of agricultural engineering. Part scientific society, part lobbying group, it published a journal that advocated pro-modernization policies and offered awards for innovative work in agricultural and natural sciences.Footnote 25 While this was a quasi-private entity, it had close ties with the government, including receiving annual subventions from the treasury to support its activities beyond what initiation fees and member dues paid for. In exchange for patronage, the society reported to the Ministry of the Empire until 1860 and the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works thereafter.Footnote 26 Its members were socially and politically connected, comprising Rio de Janeiro's elite. Some members held elected and appointed positions in the government, including the Foreign Service where they engaged in international expositions, scientific exchange, and statistical congresses.
The Sociedade Auxiliadora sought to apply scientific knowledge gained by Brazilians in their studies at the University of Coimbra, the École Polytechnique, and the Escola Militar to the task of economic modernization and development.Footnote 27 Teresa Cribelli shows that this organization sought to adapt agricultural techniques and practices like extension agents and selected plant strains to the cultivation of Brazilian goods. As abolitionists, they viewed scientific agriculture and factory labor as a way to ease the transition from slavery to free labor in order to elevate the perceived value of manual and mechanized work and to ready Brazilians for “new definitions of labor and citizen as the nation developed.”Footnote 28 For her, these intellectuals, scientists, politicians, and businesspeople looked to identify, name, standardize, and export Brazil's natural resources to the world. With the scientific eye trained on Brazilian nature, the work of this and other scientific institutions viewed scientific discovery and economic development as intimately linked.Footnote 29 The society published a periodical from 1833 to 1892 to share research findings, scientific discoveries, and ideas about innovative technologies and practices in order to promote modernization of the national economy.Footnote 30
The Sociedade Auxiliadora and societies that ensued from it were important places of social and professional networking by the prominent men who advocated for the metric system in Brazil. Cândido Baptista de Oliveira, the young legislator who introduced the 1830 metric system bill, was a typical example. He studied math and philosophy at Coimbra and continued his education at the École Polytechnique in Paris. Upon his return to Brazil, he taught at the Academia Militar in Rio de Janeiro. He was one of the first members and the first vice president of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasilieiro (the Brazilian Historical and Geographic Institute, or IHGB), organized in 1838 by two members of the Sociedade Auxiliadora. One of them was Francisco Cordeiro da Silva Torres, of the 1833 measurement standards committee. Silva Torres also served as a professor at the Academia Militar. The IHGB was where elite men who enjoyed the patronage of the emperor gathered to learn about the new nation they led and to promote its interests at home and abroad.
If the Sociedade Auxiliadora was dedicated to promoting Brazilian industry, agriculture, and commerce in international trade, the IHGB received funding from the Brazilian state to undertake its projects of historical and geographical exploration of the country. The institute's purpose was to comprehend the nation to understand its natural resources and its place in the global context. It organized projects to map Brazil's contours and frontiers, study its flora and fauna, and understand its nature. The IHGB membership comprised scientists, scholars, military personnel, bureaucrats, and politicians.Footnote 31 Through “production of knowledge that required a great deal of crossing of data and methods,” its activities sought to promote the following: “geographic knowledge, [and a] greater understanding of the Nation's space, to which scientific expeditions would help” and “historiographical knowledge concerned with rescuing the genesis of the Nation, [through] greater understanding of the primitive inhabitants settled in this territory.”Footnote 32 These two efforts were related; deciphering the genesis of the nation meant understanding the history of its Indigenous past, which in turn required voyages of exploration of the geography of the nation's interior.
The third society engaged in the search for standards, whose members were proponents of the metric system, was the Statistical Society of Brazil, founded in 1855 “under the direct protection of his imperial highness, Dom Pedro II.” Like the IHGB, this organization also emerged from a proposal by the Sociedade Auxiliadora. Its objective was to “collect, systematize and publish the facts, that should constitute the general statistics of the Empire.” Like the Sociedade Auxiliadora, the Statistical Society of Brazil was financed by member fees and dues to pay for salaried employees, prizes, books, and the publication of a journal and compendia of “systematically organized works about the general statistic of the Empire.”Footnote 33 Oliveira, a founding member and president of the population committee, rose to become its president in 1865.
Within six years of the Statistical Society's creation, its members began attending international statistical congresses.Footnote 34 The nineteenth-century pursuit of exactitude and uniformity in measurement systems was driven in part by this new discipline of statistics. Statistics offered a powerful way to address the many ills of societies, as well as to harness the capabilities of nations roiled by revolutions of political, social, and economic natures. In 1838 the Statistical Society of London founded a journal to bring notice to this new science, “only recently actively pursued in this country,” through which it promoted the study of society's problems, and to propose solutions. Statistics was “to be the ascertaining and bringing together of facts calculated to illustrate the condition and prospects of society.”Footnote 35 Members gathered in international congresses beginning in the 1850s to debate ways statistics could improve diagnosis of social problems; standardize information gathered about national demographics, economics, and commerce; and utilize improved information to enhance international trade.
The 1860 statistical conference in London marked Brazil's first active participation in international conversations about the power of data and of a unified system of measurement to improve public administration and foster international exchange.Footnote 36 Brazil's representative at the conference was its minister in London, Francisco Ignacio Carvalho Moreira, one of the first members of the IHGB. Moreira later presided over Brazil's presence at the International Exhibition of 1862 in London, where Brazil displayed “some specimens of its nascent industry [that] clearly proved its aptitude for all of the mechanical arts” to great success: the English jury awarded prizes to forty-eight Brazilian exhibitors.Footnote 37
After the Sociedade Auxiliadora, the IHGB, and the Statistical Society of Brazil, a fourth scientific society that gathered men of science and standards was the Polytechnic Institute founded in 1862.Footnote 38 Its motto was Pro Brasilia Connitamur: Let us strive for Brazil. It was an association dedicated to technology, science, and engineering to develop Brazil, modeled on France's École Polytechnique. Headed by Conde d'Eu, the son-in-law of the emperor, it was full of positivists. These men adhered to Comtean positivism, which believed in the evolutionary nature of society. For positivists, societies began in a theological stage, where all understanding is faith based. With time and observation, societies move to a metaphysical stage, where we begin to observe phenomena and seek empirical bases to understand them. The final, or positive, stage is when science and reason replace faith and inkling in our understanding of the natural world. Brazilian positivists viewed “less progressive” populations such as Indigenous peoples not as inferior but rather as living in an earlier developmental stage. Therefore, positivists sought to locate, identify, shelter, and lead rather than exterminate or subdue Indigenous populations, and like the members of the Sociedade Auxiliadora they supported the abolition of slavery. Members of the Polytechnic Institute came from Brazil's military and engineering corps, trained in Rio and abroad. They were privileged, to be sure, but also curious about their country and anxious to apply science to improve it. Through their journals, they disseminated scientific, mathematical, historical, and literary work. These journals took pride in Brazilian knowledge production and stated their goals of publishing useful knowledge in addition to the theoretical work.Footnote 39
Contrary to what one might expect from this elite membership, these were no armchair scholars. They strapped on their boots and ventured into the interior. Some expeditions explored the country's borders in order to precisely know the extension of the national territory, while others set off to map and classify Brazil's interior or “lesser known” provinces.Footnote 40 Oliveira, for instance, was part of an expedition to conduct a topographic study of Brazil's southern borders in his home state of Rio Grande do Sul in 1848. A decade later, an expedition filled with members of the IHGB, known officially as the Brazilian Scientific Commission but familiarly or pejoratively as the Butterfly Expedition by contemporary critics, sent scientists and engineers to the interior to map and catalog the northeastern provinces. From 1858 to 1861, they explored the botany, geology, mineralogy, zoology, astronomy, geography, and ethnography of the Brazilian interior. This expedition produced a study of drought, the bane of the northeastern economy and society. More importantly for our purposes, three men on this expedition wrote a seminal treatise in 1860 advocating for the adoption of the metric system, fifteen years before the revolts.Footnote 41
Our Opinion on a New System of Weights and Measures
The three authors of the 1860 report offering their opinion on the metric system were, like Oliveira, scientists, engineers, and scholars intricately bound through these scientific societies in search of knowledge about Brazil and promoting measurement standards with the crusade-like zeal described for European proponents.Footnote 42 Guilherme Schüch de Capanema, Baron of Capanema, earned a PhD in math and physical science from the Academia Militar in Rio de Janeiro, where he later taught after returning from his engineering studies at the Imperial Polytechnic Institute of Vienna. He was a member of the IHGB, a vice president of the Brazilian Polytechnic Institute, and founder of the Statistical Society of Brazil. Capanema's colleague, Giacomo Raja Gabaglia, was a scientist and engineer and a member of the Sociedade Auxiliadora and the IHGB. He, too, earned a degree in math from the Academia Militar, before going to Paris to study hydraulics. In 1870 he served as interim president of the Brazilian Polytechnic Institute. Like the others, Antonio Gonçalves Dias also studied abroad, at the University of Coimbra in Portugal, and was a professor in Rio; also like the others, he was a member of the IHGB. His interest was in the historical and ethnographical roots of Brazil. These men had extensive international experience and contacts, and they understood the importance of universal measurements for their research.
The three were named by the emperor Pedro II to the Brazilian delegation to the 1855 International Exposition of Agriculture, Industry, and Fine Arts in Paris. As part of the international expo's agenda, a working group “composed of notables from all the European nations was organized to develop the propaganda for the adoption of a new single system of weights, measures and currency among various civilized countries of the globe.”Footnote 43 This followed on from the first international expo in London in 1851, which had brought to the forefront the difficulties of comparing the results of engineering and science produced by different systems of measurement and led to the recommendation that a uniform system be adopted throughout the world.Footnote 44 The conclusion of the 1855 deliberations among the attendees, according to Capanema, Gabaglia, and Dias, who attended as observers, was that “the system that was easiest and with a highest probability of success was the French modern or metric system.”Footnote 45
The Portuguese system that Brazil had inherited was known for its abundant flaws. An 1820 history of Portugal's metrological journey from Roman times to the nineteenth-century adoption of the metric system said as much.Footnote 46 Its author prefaced the work by noting that every country had its own system of weights and measures, sometimes with the same names but almost always with different values, and this diversity caused incalculable losses for commerce, agriculture, the arts, and science. The same was true in Portugal, where everyone spoke the same language and was subject to the same laws and the same government, yet each village had its own weights and measures. “If commerce is nothing more that the exchange of surplus for the necessary, is it not evident that the easiest means to facilitate this exchange would be the most advantageous for it?” Weights and measures should be standardized, he argued. “The more universal and well known the measures are, the less the difficulty of commercial exchange.”Footnote 47 The author was right. The lack of unified weights and measures was an anomaly in the era of unified nation-states that agreed on language and law. Brazil was no different from Portugal or all the other nations engaged in domestic and international economic exchange. The differences in weights and measures from town to town and province to province were well known, oft commented on, and generally accepted as a quirk or an inevitability. The only thing the towns and provinces shared was the language of weights and measures, the nomenclature. Much of the debate about how to proceed, from the 1830s to the metric law of 1862, revolved around the intersection of precision (standards) and culture (names).
Influenced by the 1855 Paris Expo, the Ministry of Empire dispatched Capanema, Gabaglia, and Dias in 1858 to take part in the Brazilian Scientific Commission—the Butterfly Expedition—to explore lesser known provinces of Brazil's vast interior, during which each man was tasked with a different concern. Capanema studied geology and mineralogy, Gabaglia worked on astronomy and geography, and Dias studied the ethnography of the regions. While on this extended tour of the northeastern provinces, which lasted until 1861, their conviction as to the vital importance of having precise standards for the advance of science, engineering, and international exchange grew and, in turn, they began advocating for the metric system. The preamble to their recommendation helps us understand their silence in the years after observing the debates and resolutions in Paris. They feared that without strong evidence, their voices would go unheard. “[Our] reservation and silence,” they wrote, “was only to gather the arguments, the evidence, and the facts” they needed to convince the government of the importance of this change. They knew their legislative history: “More than once the adoption of the metric system has been introduced, and faltering efforts have passed by without consequence; this was the result [we] feared.”Footnote 48 And so they gathered evidence. While in Europe, Gabaglia procured a set of French metric weights and measures to bring back to Brazil (the report assures its reader that these were authenticated by scientists), while Capanema and Dias engaged in collecting examples of the measurements used around Brazil in order to compare them. On expedition in the Northeast, Gabaglia conducted his work on astronomy and geography in both customary and metric units and used the results to document the variations in Brazilian measurements from place to place. This work “made the anomalies and the irregularities clear,” arming the three with the evidence they sought.Footnote 49
The report laid out a detailed defense of the French system as well as a proposal for how to implement it in Brazil. Capanema, Gabaglia, and Dias recommended that thousands of sets of the new weights and measures be purchased to distribute to Brazil's merchants and vendors, made of the same form and metal adopted in France. A trusted individual should be placed in France to guard over the construction of these standard sets and to learn all of the details of their manufacture to account for expenditures and root out fraud. Year by year, the use of the metric system should be expanded throughout Brazil's productive, commercial, and service sectors. All offices, public and private, should be required to adopt the new system in their titles, documents, and transactions by the second year; this included medical professionals in their prescriptions, engineers in their proposals, notaries in their contracts, and so forth. Edicts should be posted in all public places; priests, teachers, and police would be taught to use the new system and popularize it as much as possible in advance of the official adoption.
It is clear from the 1860 report, bold in its proposal and almost defensive in tone for being unsolicited, that the three expected to encounter official resistance to their proposal. After all, they note, earlier attempts had failed. They expressed concern that a new discussion about changing systems of measurement would once again fail to endorse the metric system. They urged the authorities to stand up for the metric system, not only because it would facilitate domestic transactions but also because it would facilitate international commerce: it was already accepted by various countries and regions with which Brazil had direct and sizable commerce, including France, Belgium, Piedmont, Sardinia, and Portugal. In closing they wrote, “the opinion of Brazilian members of the international society for the adoption of a unanimous system of weights and measures in all the civilized countries of the globe is that we adopt, purely and simply, the system of French nomenclature.” They left the door open for a hybrid option whereby the Brazilian system, “if you can call it a system of weights and measures where there are no standards,” could be calibrated to the metric system while maintaining the names identified in Oliveira's 1833 report.Footnote 50
The Metric System and the State
The ability to replace entrenched systems like measurement, according to Ronald Crease, “required pressing need, passionate leadership, and the right political climate.”Footnote 51 These came together in the 1860s for Brazil. The report by Capanema, Gabaglia, and Dias found a willing audience in the newly formed Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, representing a passing of the baton from the scientific societies dedicated to math, science, and engineering to the central government of the nation. This ministry, carved out of the Ministry of Empire in the first half of 1860, was created for the government to focus more intently on issues that impeded the economic development of the nation, the very issues studied by the scientific societies.Footnote 52 Proposing a bill to replace the old system with the metric system, which “deals with one of the greatest needs from which we suffer,” was one of the new ministry's first actions.Footnote 53
The periodic complaints about the irregular system in use in Brazil, and equally periodic calls for its reform, caused Brazilian newspapers to follow the debate surrounding the metric system abroad and at home. The Publicador Maranhense and the Diario de Pernambuco first reported on Portugal's desire to adopt the metric system in 1845 and followed the process through its adoption in 1852.Footnote 54 In 1847, the Diário do Rio de Janeiro reported on Spain's proposal to “introduce regularity, order” to its systems of money and measurement.Footnote 55 The Publicador Maranhense reported in 1848 that Chile's legislature had decreed the adoption of the metric system. In 1852, the same journal revealed that the municipal council of São Luis, the provincial capital, had drafted its own bill to adopt a uniform system of weights and measures, though it hoped a national bill would be passed to put an end to the “chaos and confusion that reigns all around.”Footnote 56 In 1854, the Jornal do Commercio published the text of the parliamentary debate in Rio de Janeiro over the 1851 (failed) bill to adopt the metric system.Footnote 57 In 1855, the same paper published a report from the Paris Expo expressing great hope that “soon, all the civilized countries will be served by a uniform system.”Footnote 58 And in January of 1860, the Correio Mercantil, e Instructivo, Politico Universal published “Memorial about the adoption of the metric system in Brazil . . .” by our very own Cândido Baptista de Oliveira, recapitulating the long efforts of scientific societies and legislators to bring order to Brazil's chaotic system.Footnote 59
When the Minister of Agriculture introduced the bill, he signaled these debates, proclaiming, “The Senate cannot help but recognize the great convenience if not the absolute necessity for regularity of the weights and measures of the Empire, these being linked by a rational system.”Footnote 60 The bill had six government sponsors with a great deal of on-the-ground experience in Brazilian governance. Because of their trusted reputations and the many positions all had held over their careers, the six men counted among themselves roles as the provincial presidency (governorship) of Ceará, Maranhão, Alagoas, São Paulo, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Sul, and Minas Gerais. They were senators from Bahia, Pernambuco, and São Paulo. They had served as Ministers of Navy, War, Justice, Finance, Empire, and State. They had direct experience with the vagaries of regional systems of weights and measures.
An important tenet of the misplaced ideas thesis is that elites regularly engaged in adoption of European liberal ideas and institutions that were clearly unsuited to Brazilian reality, yet parliamentary debates surrounding this bill push back against that argument. For Roberto Schwarz, “Faced with [liberal] ideas, Brazil, the outpost of slavery, was ashamed—for these were taken to be the ideas of the time—and resentful, for they served no purpose. But they were also adopted with pride, in an ornamental vein, as proof of modernity and distinction.” Brazilian elites contemplated “the inevitable ‘superiority’ of Europe” and embraced Europe's laws and practices as a remedy to, or disguise of, their own inferiority.Footnote 61 But the lawmakers engaged in considering the adoption of the metric system were acutely aware that European concepts could not be imported wholesale into Brazil, layered on top of a reality to which they were ill suited. Their debates over adoption of the metric system, first in the Senate and then in the Chamber of Deputies, raised concerns about this very point. With a mixture of nativist and practical concerns, Senate opponents questioned the adoption of the “French metric system,” arguing that its foreignness was out of touch with Brazilian identity and Brazilian pride.Footnote 62
Their leading voice, Viscount Bernardo de Souza Franco, senator from Pará, acknowledged that the absence of standards harmed domestic economic exchange. Brazilians barely used the system studied and ratified in the 1834 report! He stated, “We know the difficulties our country has had with measures of capacity, used in the interior of the provinces; even today, after many years, in the provincial interiors, flour and other goods do not always sell in alqueires [bushels] and half alqueires, they sell in cuias [gourds] and sacks, in measures that do not have a known relation with those that are authorized by law and used in the large markets.”Footnote 63 Yet he opposed the new system because he believed that adopting the metric names would further confuse the povo, or common folk. He argued that it would be socially and culturally difficult to implement. The Marquis of Olinda, a founding member of the Statistical Society of Brazil, also argued that the confusion in weights and measures called out for some sort of action but confessed he had difficulty converting one system to the other, implying that simpler folk would struggle even more.Footnote 64 The Viscount of Albuquerque, also in opposition, felt that the cultural and practical distance between idea and execution was too great for the new system to succeed. He questioned whether sufficient educational resources existed to teach the new system and to overcome the difficulties of its implementation.Footnote 65
The bill's sponsors and proponents replied that the confusion caused by the system in place was impeding commerce and technology. The agricultural minister testified that units of weight were generally the same, but units of length and volume varied greatly across the provinces and even within provinces. For example, he argued, eight separate length units were used on the Dom Pedro II Railway alone.Footnote 66 The province of Minas Gerais had no fewer than three different definitions of the length of a league, meaning that shipments incurred freight rates—charged by the league—that were higher or lower depending on the section of rail. On an even smaller scale,
Very close municipalities, contiguous neighbors, have very different units of capacity. One alqueire in Maceió, for example, is much smaller than that of Alagoas and all you need are three or four hours to go from one city to the next. . . . Given the grave inconvenience for internal and international commerce, would it not be best to fix the size of the units that will serve as the point of comparison for all the objects that enter into commerce? This seems to be of the highest need and the simplest intuition.Footnote 67
Herculano Ferreira Penna, senator from Amazonas, argued that this system was in the vein of “so many other improvements, like steam navigation, gas lighting, electric telegraph etc., improvements which we judged to be useful and opportune in our country.”Footnote 68 In supporting the law, Senator Penna explicitly pushed back against the charge levied at the bill's sponsors that they were importing the system simply because it was French by citing abundant examples of times when Brazilian legislators had considered but actively decided not to adopt foreign laws or ideas.Footnote 69
Lawmakers in the Chamber of Deputies echoed the senators’ reservations. The deputies discussed and debated the potential effect on Brazilian society. Why was this change necessary, and why now? Was there risk of violence? Should the government introduce distress to traditional society for the sake of commerce and technology? Were the proposed penalties for noncompliance too harsh? Arguments about how much should be budgeted to pay for the transition, including the acquisition of sets of the new metric standards, were also raised. Less concerned with the question of the system's “foreignness,” deputies affirmed that foreign models should serve as examples to consider, debate, and evaluate for their applicability to Brazilian society and economy, not as shining examples on a hill.Footnote 70 These were pragmatic questions rooted in concern about local reactions to national policies. As Richard Graham shows, the imperial politicians may have spent much of their life in Rio de Janeiro, but they had close ties to their home regions through patronage networks, which moved officeholders around the interior of the provinces as well as between provinces. Moreover, research in the provinces shows that provincial legislative assemblies had complete oversight of municipal councils.Footnote 71 The line from Rio de Janeiro to the local community passed through these assemblies and affected the rules that governed the daily life of all Brazilians. Politics, then, was a machine that generated greater familiarity with the nation, not an isolation tank that kept its practitioners out of touch. In the end, debate moved quickly, the bill passed both houses easily, and the period for implementation was set at ten years. By 1872, then, the metric system would have replaced the old systems.Footnote 72
Once passed into law, responsibility for adoption of the metric system fell under the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works. The minister's first concern was to ready the country for a peaceful transition to the new system. Unrest was not unusual during times of major institutional change, for systems of knowing have strong cultural associations that are challenged or disrupted by modernizing reforms. For Kenneth Alder, the resistance to change in measurement systems emerged from “the disruption caused to long-established community norms . . . plus the actual or feared pain of opening up local markets to outside competition.”Footnote 73 France struggled for almost fifty years to implement the metric system, at turns making the new system mandatory and reinstating the old one.Footnote 74 Unrest in the wake of the 1852 adoption in Portugal made Brazilian lawmakers well aware that tolerance for some use of the old system was essential to achieve long-term reform, and so provincial and local authorities were advised accordingly.Footnote 75 Soon after passage of the 1862 law, the minister asked the provincial presidents to gather up and remit existing standards of weights and measures to the capital so that equivalency tables could be drawn up to ease the transition from the old system to the new.Footnote 76 At the same time, he ordered all government agencies to begin using the metric system immediately, to help acclimatize the population to its presence. Advisory letters went out to the provincial presidents that included instructions and conversion tables, asking the provinces to confirm receipt of this order and that their provincial engineering corps were informed. From 1865 forward, the engineers responsible for public works projects were required to use the metric system. Instructions and conversion tables accompanied these letters.Footnote 77
The ability to meet the 1872 deadline was complicated by myriad problems and concerns, including provincial obstinacy, the Paraguayan War that raged from 1864 to 1870, and commercial logistics. The ministry relied on cooperation of provincial presidents to submit existing sets of weights and measures to create the equivalency tables, cooperation that was slow in coming. Transportation difficulties hampered the collection of the old standards and dissemination of the new. And the early sets of metric standards ordered from France had no place to be housed and therefore had gone uninspected. From 1866 to 1872, the minister formed committees of metric system proponents, the men of science and standards who had advocated for this end through the many science and engineering societies, to help the conversion process along.Footnote 78 The most prominent, Capanema, worked with international groups that debated the appropriate material for the standard meter and kilogram, and his committee chose the foundry to produce the municipal sets Brazil would need in order to effect the changeover. In the end, he decided on the sets used in the Germanic Confederation. Working with the Brazilian minister in Berlin, Conselheiro Cesar Sauvan Vianna de Lima, and Wilhelm Julius Förster, a prominent German astronomer who was head of the department of weights and measures of the German Empire and, later, chair of the International Committee of Weights and Measures, he executed the order.Footnote 79
Vianna de Lima expedited the execution of the contracts, but the first shipment from Germany did not arrive in Rio until May 1872, with a second shipment close on its heels, arriving one month later. These sets of metric standards and scales triggered a flurry of letters to provincial presidents to let them know the new standards were on their way.Footnote 80 The first shipment totaled 1,453 boxes of weights and measures and scales, the second shipment almost twice that, with 2,728 boxes. The agriculture ministry signed a contract with entrepreneur Antônio José Caiado to fetch sets of standards from the port city of Santos to deliver to Goiás via Minas Gerais, serving the municipalities of the latter that lay along his route. The contract stipulated that Caiado receive a receipt from each municipality declaring the sets in good shape upon delivery. (In a bit of unintended irony, the freight rate for transport of metric standards was quoted in the old weight, arroba.)Footnote 81 The government struck arrangements with shipping companies and railroads to carry the sets of measures and scales, by coastal route and then by riverboat, or via railways where they existed, delivered at stations into the hands of individuals who then carried them inland to the municipalities. In many cases, the government assumed the responsibility of delivering sets itself.Footnote 82 Each crate was numbered, each crate was specified by municipal destination, and each municipality received a set tailored to the size of its local economy. This was a complex logistical undertaking.Footnote 83
It is not surprising, given the task of delivering thousands of sets to hundreds of municipalities in a vast country with precarious roadways and an incipient rail system, that Brazil missed its own deadline. The government eased up, passing a decree permitting an additional year for the transition to the regular use of the metric system.Footnote 84 At the end of 1872, the agriculture ministry declared that at long last the metric system conversion was underway, “if slowly, without the aversion or antipathy of the population.” Sets of standards had been distributed to 580 of Brazil's 640 or so municipalities. The minister proclaimed full satisfaction with the sets received from Germany and commended the work of those who had made it possible.Footnote 85
The report of the metric conversion committee headed by Capanema, published in an annex to that same report, was less glowing.Footnote 86 It reported that sets of weights and measures arrived but could not be easily distributed because of rain, the limits of mule transport (complete sets were heavy!), and yellow fever in Rio. The number of municipalities had grown since the initial order was placed in Germany, so many were left without. Public offices that lacked official sets were buying them on the open market, in violation of the law. And municipalities did not always have well-trained officials to store and properly use the standards, leading to breakage and degradation of the materials, not to mention fraud. All weights and measures now had to be verified against the official sets, which incurred a fee that was passed on through prices to consumers, stressing the domestic economy. Finally, the law required municipal councils to pay for the acquisition of the sets, but municipal fees to calibrate merchant weights and measures did not generate enough money to cover their normal expenses, much less to repay the government. The concerns of the metric committee were borne out in reports for subsequent years. Every difficulty they highlighted, from transportation to remote location to cost to ability, surfaced in annual reports. New municipalities went without sets, new sets were ordered and delivered from Germany to keep up with this need, fees were waived, sets were stored with such carelessness that they quickly needed to be replaced, and so on.
Even though the conversion to the metric system was plagued by fits and starts, its implementation was peaceful enough to warrant surprise on the part of the minister. It did not immediately spark revolt throughout the nation, although the government had braced for this very possibility because of the upheavals in France and Portugal.Footnote 87 The response in most of the country was so peaceful, in fact, that when the Quebra Quilos revolts erupted across the Northeast two years later, the Ministry of Agriculture was taken aback. It wanted to understand what happened. How had the metric system been implemented on the ground?
The observer tapped for the mission, Luiz Joaquim de Oliveira, a member of the ministry's weights and measures commission, headed south. He wended his way through nineteen municipalities from Rio Grande do Sul, up to Santa Catarina and Paraná, and finally to São Paulo, from January 3 through May 1, 1875. His findings, based on questionnaires and interviews with the men responsible for implementation, confirmed Capanema's 1873 report: municipalities had not received sets of the new standards; inspectors were poorly trained or poorly remunerated; sets degraded through improper storage that exposed them to the elements; several municipalities mixed old systems and new. Indeed, the metric system was being irregularly employed.Footnote 88
Luiz Oliveira proposed several recommendations to improve adoption of the new system. First was to ensure all municipalities lacking official standards receive them immediately. Next, laws and regulations should be disseminated through broadsides and municipal newspapers to spread awareness of the new system. Third, inspectors needed better training about the new values, how to measure them, and proper storage. In addition, the government should organize fee tables that guarantee the inspectors sufficient pay for their task, to improve their performance. The lax or poor quality of inspection, he hypothesized, was due to their poor remuneration, not resistance; the professionalization of this work was of utmost importance to successful and widespread adoption.
For the longer term, Luiz Oliveira proposed that a permanent commission on weights and measures be formed that had sufficient personnel to inspect the practice of the metric system throughout the provinces. The government should adopt a policy of zero tolerance for the continued use of old weights and measures, but this had to begin with public offices like customs houses that, he had found through his travels, were not in compliance. The public offices must follow the practice and lead by example. Ideally, they would stop referring to the old measures entirely to uproot the habit of comparing the metric measurements to the old system, which had never been uniform. Finally, he recommended introducing change through public-school curricula, “to fix in the spirit of the children the idea of the greatness and of the legal shapes of the new measures.”Footnote 89 Establishing the metric system in the young mind, which is far more pliable than the grown mind, would naturally create the generational shift to ensure its successful implementation. These calls generated books on how to teach the metric system and even a patent application for a kit of school supplies that included metric weights and measures.Footnote 90
Brazil's scientists, mathematicians, and engineers believed that standardization of weights and measures would yield great benefits for the national economy by reducing regional variations and improving international exchange of knowledge and goods. Without standards, domestic exchange beyond the immediate locale was difficult. This was not the only impediment, of course, for Brazil's famously difficult transportation conditions were enough to limit the circulation of goods, people, and services. Standardization of the units of trade was a more easily remedied impediment to greater intra- and interprovincial exchange. Inventors and innovators jumped on the opportunity, introducing “improvements” for domestic trade in the new system, such as patents for mechanisms like the “kilogramétrico,” which weighed the cart as a whole, and the “molagrâmetro,” which weighed the metric load per axle of a cart.Footnote 91
Yet citizens experienced the benefits of the new system indirectly, if at all. We hear this acknowledged in the voice of the Minister of Agriculture, who accepted Oliveira's recommendations, passing them along to the Chamber of Deputies with the confident conclusion that the system was spreading satisfactorily in spite of the northeastern riots.
In some locales in the northern provinces, ignorance, exploited by unreliable interest groups, dragged a small part of the population into acts of excess and violence against the metric standards that had been distributed to the municipalities. Thankfully, these disturbances, which were promptly put down, were limited to a very small part of the national territory, and the metric system was received throughout the Empire if not as a benefit, which it effectively is, at least without opposition or ill will.Footnote 92
The governed did not have to embrace or celebrate the new system. Compliance, partial or complete, would do. Based on the information it gathered from its agents on the ground, the government introduced metric units into its school curricula, conducted occasional inspections, and trained local agents, reinforcing through personal contact and repeated edicts that this was the Brazilian system. It tolerated noncompliance, as bureaucrats came to recognize that the changeover had to follow an organic process of gradual adoption.
By the 1880s, the biggest challenge reported by the ministry was not resistance to the new system but the ability to keep up with the growing number of municipalities. In 1882, the ministry reported that “the new system of weights and measures is generally accepted and in use, though numerous locations of the interior cannot be said to be completely transformed from the old regime.” The next year it affirmed, “Every day the use of the new system cultivates the practices [costumes] of the people even though the old weights and measures still have not been completely abandoned in numerous locales.”Footnote 93 The last time the metric system merited a mention beyond a brief recapitulation of new orders of standards was in 1884, a little more than a decade after the hurried distribution of the German sets throughout the empire. In a reflective mood, the Minister of Agriculture wrote, “It has been little more than a year since we recognized the need to reiterate orders that [public] offices and functionaries abstain from the use of designations other than those of the new system. . . . In spite of the natural obstacles, . . . the use of the decimal metric system has become widespread.”Footnote 94
Conclusion
In the same year that the Quebra Quilos revolts destroyed scales, burned records, and ransacked government offices, Brazil was signatory to the Convention of the Meter, the international agreement to adopt the metric system.Footnote 95 The Brazilian congress later refused to ratify the 1875 agreement because of a diplomatic issue, but did this not impede implementation of the new system. As we saw above, the government persisted in distributing standards, issuing orders, and promoting adherence to the new system. Metrification introduced a common set of measurements intended to integrate local economies into regional ones, regional economies into a national one, and the national economy into the international one. It gave the government and its agents a universal language for designing public works projects like roads and rail systems and for measuring domestic production and foreign commercial exchange. It became the lingua franca in public offices throughout the country, gradually insinuating itself into daily life through bureaucratic transactions. It was both cause and benefit of expanding administrative capacity.
Brazil had an on-again, off-again relationship with the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM), and its own national-level standards organizations only emerged in the mid-twentieth century: the Associação Brasileira de Normas Técnicas in 1940, the Instituto Nacional de Pesos e Medidas in 1961, and the Instituto Nacional de Metrologia, Normalizacao e Qualidade Industrial, or Inmetro, in 1973. Like the path to adoption of the metric system, this too paralleled the experience in other parts of the world. The adoption of metrological standards through the 1862 law and 1872 actions was the important first step that implanted the standardization of weights and measures in Brazil.
Brazilians today sometimes scoff at my argument that measurements were standardized, pointing to the example of the alqueires, a measurement of surface area (alqueire was also a unit of capacity, just to confuse things). Everyone knows, they argue, that an alqueire mineiro (in the state of Minas Gerais, 4.84 hectares) is different from an alqueire paulista (São Paulo, 2.42 hectares) or an alqueire baiano (Bahia, 9.68 hectares), and they are correct. Those measurements differ by a factor of two or more. But no contract for the sale of a farm is quoted in alqueires, no contract for the sale of commodities is quoted in tons, no apartment is measured in square feet, and no distance from my town to yours is quoted in miles. No Brazilian can tell you what 85 degrees Fahrenheit feels like, or whether 55 miles per hour is fast or slow. Brazilians think and act in metric units—and have done, no matter the nomenclature, since the late nineteenth century.
The partnership between men of science, engineering, and standards and Brazil's legislators and diplomats was similar to the process by which measurement standardization unfolded in Europe. It set the stage for engagement in major public works and the promotion of statistical sciences for better governance into the twentieth century. The pursuit of standards served the needs of a state seeking to extend its governing capacity, but engineers, mathematicians, physicists, astronomers, geographers, ethnographers, and other scholars and practitioners were at the forefront of this pursuit. These scientists, who studied in European and Brazilian science and engineering academies, trained Brazil's corps of rising engineers. First science, then industry—whether agricultural or commercial—realized real gains from establishing, promoting, sharing, and adopting standards. Academic and private interests led the call for standardization that flowed into the general populace, sometimes working with public agencies, sometimes organizing professional societies for the advancement of their interests. They leveraged their scientific training with their political connections to introduce a major institutional change that had the potential to integrate the national economy and enterprise through shared measurement, with impacts on invention, innovation, commerce, and governance.
