Objects as Arbiters of Justice: Weights and Measures from the Madras Presidency, 1798 – 1856 42nd Scientific Instrument Symposium on Through Ages, Cultures, Concepts: Instruments in Collections, Books, Archives, 18 - 22 September 2023, Palermo, Italy
Résumé
In this paper, we will discuss the standardization of weights and measures in South India under the British East India Company as central to the transition of private property rights during the late 18th and early 19th century. In the late 18th century, the British East India Company started to administer revenue rights over the Madras Presidency. A Committee was established at Fort St George in 1798 to look into the local diversity in measurement units of length, capacity, weights and currencies. This committee worked for more than forty years, with protracted debates and long periods of silence. As part of its work, it collected physical samples of weights and measures, some of which can now be found at the Science Museum, London. Along with these, we find brass standards of the Indian weights, crafted by the London instrument maker Robert Bate, who was commissioned to make standards for the United Kingdom, following the 1824 Act of Parliament to standardize weights and measures.
In our project, which is work in progress, we want to bring the colonial archive and the objects together to explore a social history of standardization, where in instruments of measuring become arbiters of justice. Such arbitration, we argue, was mediated by abstraction, facilitated by both computation and the control over the instruments and standards for measurement.