Age, like landholding, meant something different to the state than in local practice. People used approximate ages or birth order; the state required exact years for taxes and conscription.
Strict chronological age, like surnames, was a state project.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
Set up by the #Stolypin reform agricultural property system had not become legible to central tax officials as was demonstrated by the immensely damaging procurement policies pursued by the czarist government during World War I.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
The cadastral map and property register are to the taxation of land as the maps and tables of the scientific forester were to the fiscal exploitation of the forest.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
“So all these examples are ways that #states simplify and impose order on their environment and the people, in order to better control them. It’s a story about mechanisms of domination.” fivebooks.com/best-books/t... #politicalscience #books #SeeingLikeAState
The very concept of the modern state presupposes a vastly simplified and uniform property regime that is legible and hence manipulable from the center.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
Without comparable units of measurement, it was difficult if not impossible to monitor markets, to compare regional prices for basic commodities, or to regulate food supplies effectively.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
#HowCertainSchemesToImproveTheHumanConditionHaveFailed
Because local standards of #measurement were tied to practical needs, reflected particular cropping patterns, varied with climate, were “an attribute of power and an instrument of asserting class privilege,” they represented a mind-boggling problem for #statecraft.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
Seeing Like a State How Certain Schemes to improve the Human Condition Have Failed James C. Scott
#TheState is the vexed institution that is the ground of both our #freedoms and our #unfreedoms. [Our task is] to weigh judiciously the benefits of certain state interventions against their costs.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
#HowCertainSchemesToImproveTheHumanConditionHaveFailed
Designed or planned #SocialOrder is necessarily schematic; it always ignores essential features of any real, functioning social order.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
#Nomads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, #Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states.
#JamesCScott
#SeeingLikeAState
