James C. Scott, State Simplification
Legibility and state centralisation, measuring, cadastral surveys, scientific forestry, social facts, land tenure, uniformity, resistance, surnames, official language, hardwired traffic
James C. Scott wrote:
Chapter 6
State Simplification
Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into very sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision far more legible and, hence, far more susceptible to careful measurement, calculation, and manipulation. …
1. The State and Scientific Forestry: A Parable
The early modern European state, even prior to the development of scientific forestry, viewed its forests primarily through the fiscal lens of revenue needs. To be sure, other concerns such as timber for masts, shipbuilding, state construction, and sufficient fuel wood for the economic security of its subjects were not entirely absent from official management. These concerns, too, had heavy implications for state revenue and security. Exaggerating only slightly, one might say that the crown’s interest in forests was resolved through its fiscal lens into a single number: that number being the revenue yield of the timber which might be extracted annually.
The best way to appreciate exactly how heroic this constriction of vision is, is to notice what was left out of its field of vision. Lurking behind the number indicating revenue yield were not so much trees as “commercial wood”, representing so many thousands of board feet of saleable timber and so many cords of firewood fetching a certain price. Missing, of course, were all those trees, bushes and plants holding little or no potential for state revenue. Missing as well, were all those parts of trees – even “revenue‐bearing” trees – which might have been useful to the population but whose value could not be converted into fiscal receipts. Here I have in mind the uses of foliage as fodder and thatch, fruits as food for domestic animals and people, twigs and branches as bedding, fencing, hop poles and kindling, bark and roots for medicine and tanning, sap for resins, and so forth. The actual tree with its vast number of possible uses was replaced by an “abstract” tree representing a volume of lumber or firewood. If the princely conception of the forest was utilitarian, it was surely a utilitarianism confined to the direct needs of the state.
From a naturalist’s perspective, nearly everything was missing from the state’s picture. Gone were the vast majority of flora, the grasses, flowers, lichen, ferns, mosses, shrubs, and vines. Gone, too, were reptiles, birds, amphibians, and innumerable species of insects. Gone was the vast majority of fauna except, perhaps, those of interest to the crown’s gamekeepers.
From an anthropologist’s perspective, nearly everything touching on human interaction with the forest was also missing from the state’s tunnel vision. Except for poaching, which did impinge on either the state’s claim to revenue in wood or to royal game, the state typically ignored the vast and complex negotiated social uses of the forest for hunting and gathering, pasturage, digging valuable minerals, fishing, charcoal‐making, trapping and food collection as well as its significance for magic, worship, refuge, etc.
If the utilitarian state could not see the real existing forest for the (commercial) trees, if its view of its forests was abstract and partial, it was hardly unique in this respect. A certain level of abstraction is necessary for certain forms of analysis and it is not at all surprising that the abstractions of state officials should have reflected the paramount fiscal interests of their employer. The vocabulary used to organize nature typically betrays the overriding interests of its human users. In fact, the term “nature” is, in utilitarian discourse, replaced by the term “natural resources” in which the focus is on those aspects of nature that can be appropriated for human use. A comparable logic extracts from a more generalized natural world those flora or fauna that are of utilitarian value (usually marketable commodities) and, in turn, reclassifies those species which compete with, prey on, or otherwise diminish the yields of the valued species. Thus, plants which are valued become crops; the species which compete with them are reclassified as weeds, and the insects which ingest them are reclassified as pests. Thus, trees which are valued become timber while species which compete with them become “trash” tree or underbrush. The same logic applies to fauna. Those animals which are highly valued become game or livestock, while those animals which compete with or prey upon them become predators or “varmints”.
The kind of abstracting, utilitarian logic which the state, through its officials, applied to the forest is thus not entirely distinctive. What is distinctive about it, however, is the narrowness of its field of vision, the degree of elaboration to which it can be subjected, and above all, as we shall see, the unique capacity of the state to impose (in part) its optic on the very reality it is observing. …
… The tendency was toward “regimentation” in the strict sense of the word.The forest trees were drawn up into serried ranks, as it were, to be measured, counted off, felled and replaced by a new rank‐and‐file of looka-like conscripts. At the limit, the forest itself would not have to be seen; it could be “read” accurately from the tables and maps in the foresters’ office.
This utopian dream of scientific forestry was, of course, only the immanent logic of its techniques. It was not, and could not, ever be realized in practice. Both nature and “the human factor” intervened. The existing topography of the landscape and the vagaries of fire, storms, blights, climatic changes, insect populations and disease conspired to thwart foresters and to shape the actual forest. Given the insurmountable difficulties of policing large forests, the adjacent human populations also typically continued to graze animals, poach firewood and kindling, make charcoal, and generally make use of the forest in ways that prevented the foresters’ management plan from being fully realized. Though, like all utopian schemes, it fell well short of attaining its goal, the critical fact is that it did partly succeed in stamping the actual forest with the imprint of its designs.
2. Social Facts, Raw and Cooked
The administrators’ forest cannot be the naturalists’ forest. Even if the ecological interactions at play in the forest were known, they would constitute a reality so complex and variegated as to defy easy shorthand description. The intellectual filter necessary to reduce the complexity to manageable dimensions was provided by the state’s interest in commercial timber and revenue.
If the natural world, however shaped by human use, is too unwieldy in its “raw” form for administrative manipulation, so too are the actual social patterns of human interaction with nature bureaucratically indigestible in their raw form. No administration system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification. It is not simply a question of capacity, though, like the forest, a human community is surely far too complicated and variable to yield its secrets easily to bureaucratic formulae. It is also a question of purpose. State agents have no interest – nor should they – in describing an entire social reality any more than the scientific forester has an interest in describing the ecology of a forest in detail. Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of objectives, the most prominent of which were, until the nineteenth century, typically: taxation, political control, and conscription. They needed only the techniques and understanding adequate to these tasks. Here, as we shall see, there are some instructive parallels between the development of modern “fiscal forestry” and modern forms of taxable property in land. Pre‐modern states were no less concerned with tax receipts than modern states. But, like pre‐modern state forestry, the techniques and reach of the state left much to be desired. …
… A reliable format for taxation of subjects … depended not just on discovering what their economic condition was, but also on trying to judge what exactions they would vigorously resist.
How were the agents of the state to begin measuring and codifying, throughout each region of an entire kingdom, its population, their land‐holdings, their harvests, their wealth, the volume of commerce, and so on? The obstacles in the path of even the most rudimentary knowledge of these matters were simply enormous.
The struggle to establish uniform weights and measures and to carry out a cadastral mapping of land‐holdings can serve as diagnostic examples. Each required a large, costly, long run campaign against determined resistance. Each undertaking also exemplified a pattern of relationships between local knowledge and practices on the one hand, and state administrative routines on the other that will find echoes throughout our subsequent analysis. In each case, local practices of measurement and land‐holding were illegible to the state in their “raw” form. They exhibited a diversity and intricacy that reflected a great variety of purely local, not state, interests. That is to say, they could not be assimilated directly into an administrative grid without either being transformed or else reduced to a convenient, if partly fictional, shorthand.
The logic behind the required shorthand was provided, as in scientific forestry, by the pressing material interests of rulers: fiscal receipts, military manpower, and state security. Finally, this shorthand functioned, in turn … not just as an (inadequate) description. Backed by state power through records, courts, and ultimately coercion, these state fictions transformed the reality they presumed to observe, though never so thoroughly as to precisely fit the grid. …
3. Popular Measures, State Measures
Non‐state forms of measurement grew from the logic of local practice. As such, they shared some generic features despite their bewildering variety – features which made them an impediment to administrative uniformity. Thanks to the synthesis of the medievalist Witold Kula, the reasoning that animated local practices of measurement may be set out fairly succinctly.
Most early measures were anthropomorphic. One sees this logic at work in surviving expressions such as “a stone’s throw” or “within earshot” for distances and in expressions such as “a cartload,” “a basketful,” “a handful” for volume. Given that the local cart or basket might vary from place to place and that local notions of “a stone’s throw” might not be precisely uniform, these units of measurement varied geographically and temporally. Even measures which were apparently fixed might be deceptive. …
Local measures were also relational or “commensurable”. Virtually any request for a judgment of measure allows a range of responses depending on the context of the request. A common response to the question, “How far is it to the next village?” in that part of Malaysia with which I am most familiar is, literally, “three rice‐cookings”. The answer assumes that the questioner is interested in how long it will take him to get there, not how many miles away it is. In varied terrain, of course, distance in miles is an utterly unreliable guide to travel time, especially when the traveler is on foot or bicycle. The answer also expresses time not in minutes – until recently wristwatches were rare – but in units that were locally meaningful. Everyone knows how long it takes to cook the local rice. Thus an Ethiopian response to a query about how much salt is required for a dish might be: “Half as much as to cook a chicken”. The reply refers back to a standard which everyone is expected to know. Such measurement practices are irreducibly local inasmuch as regional differences in, say, the rice eaten or in the preferred way of cooking chicken will give different results.
Many local units of measurement are tied very practically to a particular activity. … For many purposes, as well, an apparently vague measurement may communicate more valuable information than a statistically exact average. The cultivator who reports that his rice yield from a plot is anywhere between four and seven baskets is conveying more accurate information, if the focus of attention is on the variability of the yield, than if he reported a ten‐year statistical average of 5.6 baskets. There is, then, no single, all‐purpose, correct answer to a question implying measurement unless we specify the relevant local concerns that give rise to the question. Particular customs of measurement are thus situationally, temporally, and geographically bound. …
… To grasp the prodigious variety of customary ways of “measuring” land, we would have to imagine literally scores of “maps” constructed along very different lines than mere surface area. I have in mind the sorts of maps devised to capture our attention in which, say, the size of a country is made proportional to its population rather than its geographical size – a “fun house” effect for most viewers, in which China and India loom menacingly over Russia, Brazil and the USA, while Libya, Australia and Greenland virtually disappear. These customary maps (for there would be a great many) would construct the landscape according to units of work, yield, soil, accessibility and subsistence, none of which would necessarily accord with surface area. These measurements are decidedly local, interested, contextual and historically specific. … Factors such as local crop regimens, labor supply, agricultural technology, weather, etc. ensure that the standards of evaluation vary from place to place and over time. Directly apprehended by the state, they would represent a hopelessly bewildering welter of local standards. They decidedly would not lend themselves to aggregation into a single statistical series that would allow state officials to make meaningful comparisons.
Statecraft and the Hieroglyphics of Measurement:
… The illegibility of local measurement practice was more than an administrative headache for the monarchy. It compromised the most vital and sensitive aspects of state security. Food supply was the Achilles heel of the early modern state; nothing short of religious war so menaced the state as food shortages and the resulting social upheaval. 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. Obliged to grope its way on the basis of sketchy information, rumor and self‐interested local reports, the state often responded late and inappropriately. Equity in taxation, another very sensitive political issue, was beyond the reach of a state which found it difficult to know the basic comparative facts about harvests and prices. A vigorous effort to collect taxes, to requisition for military garrisons or to relieve urban shortages, or any number of other measures might, given the crudeness of state intelligence, actually provoke a political crisis. Short of jeopardizing state security, the Babel of measurement produced gross inefficiencies and a pattern of either “undershooting” or “overshooting” fiscal targets. No effective central monitoring or controlled comparisons were possible without standard, fixed units of measurement.
Simplification and Standardization of Measurement:
If scientific forestry’s project of creating a simplified and legible forest encountered opposition from villagers whose use of such rights was being challenged, the political opposition to standard and legible units of measurement was even more refractory. The power to establish and impose local measures was an important feudal prerogative with material consequence which the aristocracy and clergy would not willingly surrender. Testimony to their capacity to thwart standardization is evident in the long series of abortive initiatives by “absolutist” rulers to insist on some degree of uniformity. The very particularity of local feudal practices and their impenetrability to would‐be centralizers helped to underwrite the autonomy of local spheres of power. …
… For the Encyclopedists, the cacophony of measurement, of institutions, of inheritance laws, of taxation, of market regulations was the great obstacle to France becoming a single people. They envisioned a series of centralizing and rationalizing reforms that would transform France into a national community where, everywhere, the same codified laws, measures, customs and beliefs would prevail. It is worth noting that this project forcibly implies the concept of national citizenship – a national French citizen perambulating the kingdom and encountering exactly the same fair, equal conditions as the rest of his compatriots. In place of a welter of incommensurable small communities, familiar to its inhabitants but mystifying to outsiders, there would rise a single national society perfectly legible from the center. The proponent of this vision well understood that it was not mere administrative convenience that was at stake, but rather the transformation of a people: “The uniformity of customs, viewpoints, and principles of action will, inevitably, lead to a greater community of habits and predispositions”.
The abstract grid of equal citizenship would create a new reality: the French citizen.
The homogenization of measures was, then, part and parcel of a larger, emancipatory simplification. At one stroke the equality of all Frenchmen before the law was guaranteed by the state. All of the previous “natural” distinctions were now “denaturalized” and nullified, at least in law. In an unprecedented revolutionary context where an entirely new political system was being created from first principles, it was surely no great matter to legislate uniform weights and measures. As the revolutionary decree read: “The centuries old dream of the masses of only one just measure has come true! The Revolution has given the people the meter”.
Proclaiming the meter officially was far simpler than ensuring that it became the daily practice of French citizens. The state could insist on the exclusive use of its units in property deeds, legal contracts, tax codes, in the courts and in the state school system. Outside these official spheres the metric system made its way only very slowly. …
4. Land Tenure: Local Practice and Fiscal Shorthand
The revenue of the early modern state came mainly from levies on commerce and land, the major sources of wealth. For commerce, this implied an array of excise taxes, tolls and market duties, licensing fees and tariffs. For landed wealth, this meant somehow attaching every parcel of taxable property to an individual or an institution responsible for paying the tax on it. As straightforward as this procedure seems in the context of the modern state, its achievement was enormously difficult for at least two reasons. First, the actual social facts of customary land tenure were frequently so varied and intricate as to virtually defy any simple one‐to‐one equation of taxpayer and taxable property. Second, there were, as in the case of units of measurement, social forces whose interests could only be damaged by the unified and transparent set of property relations desired by the state’s fiscal agents. The centralizing state succeeded, in the end, in imposing a novel and legible (from the center) property system which, like the work of scientific foresters, not only radically abridged the actual tenure practices they described but, at the same time, transformed those practices to align them more closely with their shorthand, schematic reading. …
… Use of the term “simple” to describe modern property law, whose intricacies provide employment to armies of legal professionals, will seem grossly misplaced. It is surely the case that property law has in any respects become an impenetrable thicket for ordinary citizens. The use of the term “simple” in this context is thus both relative and perspectival. Modern freehold tenure is tenure that is mediated through the state and therefore readily legible only to those who have sufficient training and grasp of the state statutes to allow them to decipher it. Its relative simplicity is lost on those who cannot break the code, just as the relative clarity of customary tenure to the villagers who live it is lost on the mystified outsider.
The fiscal/administrative goal toward which all modern states aspire is to measure, codify and simplify land tenure in much the same way as scientific forestry reconceived the forest. In no way could the state begin to incorporate the luxuriant variety of customary land tenure. The historical solution, at least for the liberal state, has typically been the heroic simplification of individual, freehold tenure. Land is owned by a legal individual who disposes of wide powers of use, inheritance or sale and whose ownership is represented by a uniform title deed enforced through the judicial and police institutions of the state. … [The] complex tenure arrangements of customary practice reduced to freehold, transferrable title. In an agrarian setting, the administrative landscape was blanketed with a uniform grid of homogeneous land, each parcel of which has a legal person as owner and, hence, taxpayer. How much easier it then becomes to assess such property and its owner on the basis of its acreage, its soil class, the crops it normally bears and its assumed yield than to untangle the thicket of common property and mixed forms of tenure.
The crowning artifact of this mighty simplification is the cadastral map: a more or less complete and accurate survey of land‐holdings conducted by trained surveyors and mapped to a given scale. Since the driving logic behind the map is to create a manageable and reliable format for taxation, the map is associated with a property register in which each specified (usually numbered) lot on the map is linked to an “owner” who is responsible for paying its taxes.
The cadastral map and property register is to the taxation of land as the maps and tables of the scientific forester were to the fiscal exploitation of the forest. …
The Cadastral Map as Objective Information for Outsiders:
The value of the cadastral map to the state lies in its abstraction and universality. In principle, at least, the same objective standard can be applied throughout the kingdom, regardless of local context, to produce a complete and unambiguous map of all landed property. The completeness of the cadastral map depends, in a curious way, on its very thinness. For, taken alone, it is essentially a geometric representation of the borders or frontiers between parcels of land. What lies inside the parcel is left blank – unspecified – since it is not germane to the map plotting itself.
There are surely many other things far more important to know about a parcel of land than its surface area and the location of its boundaries. What kind of soil it has, what crops can be grown on it, how hard it is to work and how close it is to a market are the first kinds of questions a potential purchaser might ask. These are also questions a tax assessor would want to ask as well. From a capitalist perspective, the physical dimensions of land are beside the point. But these other qualities only become relevant (especially to the state) once the terrain to which they apply has been located and measured. They also, unlike location and dimension, involve judgments that are complex (hence more open to fraud) and easily overtaken by events. Crop rotations and yields may change, new tools or machines may transform cultivation and markets may shift.
The cadastral survey, by contrast, is precise, schematic, general and uniform. Whatever its other defects, it is the precondition of a tax regimen that comprehensively links every patch of land with its owner – and taxpayer. In this spirit, the survey for a 1807 Dutch land tax (inspired by Napoleonic France) stresses that all surveyors were to use the same measurements, their instruments were to be periodically inspected to ensure conformity, and all maps were to be drawn up on a uniform scale of 1:2,880.
Land maps in general and cadastral maps in particular are designed to make the local situation legible to an outsider. For purely local purposes, a cadastral map was redundant. Everyone knew who held, say, the meadow by the river and the feudal dues it carried; there was no need to know its precise dimensions. A substantial domain might have the kind of prose map, or terrier, one finds in old deeds (“from the large oak tree, north 120 feet to the river bank, thence …”) with a notation about the holder’s obligations to the domain. But a proper map seems to have come into use especially when a brisk market in land developed. …
What’s Missing in this Picture?:
Isaiah Berlin, in his study of Tolstoy, compared the hedgehog who knew “one big thing” to the fox who knew “many things.” The sharply focused foresters in commercial lumber and that of cadastral officials in land revenue constrain them, like the hedgehog, to find clear‐cut answers to one question. The naturalist and the farmer are like the fox; they know many things about forests and cultivable land respectively. Although the range of knowledge of the forester and cadastral official is far narrower, we should not forget that they know what they do know in a systematic and comprehensive way – a way that allows them to see and understand things a fox would not grasp. What we want to emphasize here, however, is how this knowledge is gained at the expense of rather static and myopic view of land tenure.
The cadastral map is very much like a still photograph of the current in a river. It represents the parcels of land as they were arranged and owned at the moment the survey was conducted. But the current is always moving and, in periods of major social upheaval and growth, a cadastral survey may freeze a scene of great turbulence. Changes are taking place on field boundaries; land is being sub‐divided or consolidated by inheritance or purchase, new canals, roads and railways are being cut; land use is changing, and so forth. Inasmuch as these particular changes directly affect tax assessments, there are provisions for recording them on the map or in a title register. The annotations and marginalia at some point, render the map illegible, whereupon a more up‐to‐date, but still static, map must be drawn up and the process is repeated.
No operating land revenue system can, however, stop at the mere identification of parcel and ownership. Other schematic facts, themselves static, must be created to arrive at some judgment of a sustainable tax burden. Land may be graded by “soil class,” how well watered it is, what crops are grown on it, and its presumed “average yield” – this last often checked by sample “crop‐cuttings.” These facts are themselves changing or they are averages that may mask great variation. Like the still photo of the cadastral map, they grow more unrealistic with time and must be re‐examined.
These state simplifications, like all state simplifications, are always far more static and schematic than the actual social phenomena they presume to typify. The farmer very rarely experiences an average crop, an average rainfall, or average price for his crops. Much of the long history of rural “tax revolts” in early modern Europe and elsewhere can be illuminated by the lack of fit between an unyielding fiscal claim on the one hand and the often wildly fluctuating capacity of the rural population to meet that claim, on the other. And yet, even the most equitable, well‐intentioned cadastral system cannot be uniformly administered except on the basis of stable units of measurement and calculation. It can no more reflect the actual complexity of a farmer’s experience than the scientific forester schemes can reflect the complexity of the naturalist’s forest.
Governed by a practical, concrete objective, the cadastral lens also ignored anything lying outside its sharply etched field of vision. This was reflected in a loss of detail in the survey itself. Surveyors, one recent Swedish study found, made the fields more “regular” geometrically than they in fact were. Ignoring small “jogs” and “squiggles” made their job easier and did not materially affect the outcome. Just as the commercial forester found it convenient to overlook minor forest products, so the cadastral official tended to ignore all but the major commercial use of a field (for example, wheat, hay). That the field might also be a significant source of bedding straw, gleaning, rabbits, birds, frogs, mushrooms, etc., was not so much unknown as ignored lest it needlessly complicate a straightforward administrative formula. The most significant myopia, of course, was that the cadastral map and assessment system considered only the dimensions of the land and its value as a productive asset or as a commodity for sale. Any value land might have for subsistence purposes or for the local ecology were bracketed as, of course, aesthetic, ritual or sentimental values. …
Transformation and Resistance:
… Freehold title and standard land measurement were to central taxation and the market in real estate what central bank currency was to the marketplace. By the same token, they threatened to destroy a great deal of local power and autonomy. No wonder then, that they should have been so vigorously resisted. In the eighteenth cen- tury European context, any general cadastral survey was, by definition, a gambit of centralization; the local clergy and nobility were bound to see both their own taxing powers and the exemptions they enjoyed menaced. Commoners were likely to see it as a pretext for an addi- tional local tax. Colbert proposed to conduct a national cadastral survey of France but was thwarted in 1679 by the combined opposition of the aristocracy and clergy. More than a century later, after the Revolution, Babeuf, in his “Projet de cadastre perpetuel,” dreamed of a perfectly egalitarian land reform in which everyone would get an equal parcel. He too was thwarted.
We must keep in mind not only the capacity of state simplifications to transform the world, but also the capacity of the society to modify, subvert, block and even overturn the categories imposed upon them. Here it is useful to distinguish what might be called “facts‐on‐ paper” from “facts‐on‐the‐ground”. As [many] have emphasized, the land office records may serve as the basis for taxation, but they may have little to do with the actual rights to the land. Paper owners may not be the effective owners. Russian peasants, as we saw, might register a “paper” consolidation while continuing to interstrip. Land invasions, squatting and poaching, if successful, represent the exercise of de facto property rights which are not represented on paper. Certain land taxes and tithes have been evaded or defied to the point where they have become a dead letter. The gulf between land tenure “facts‐on‐paper” and facts‐on‐the‐ground is probably greatest at moments of social turmoil and revolt. But even in more tranquil times there will always be a “shadow land tenure system” lurking beside and beneath the official account in the land records office. We must never assume that local practice conforms with state “theory.”
All central states recognized the value of a uniform, comprehensive cadastral map. Carrying it out, however, was another matter. As a rule of thumb, cadastral mapping was earlier and more comprehensive where a powerful central state could impose itself on a relatively weak civil society. Where, by contrast, civil society was well organized and the state relatively weak, cadastral mapping was late, often voluntary, and fragmentary. Thus, Napoleonic France was mapped much earlier than England where the legal profession managed for a long time to stymie this threat to their local, income‐earning function.
It followed from the same logic that conquered colonies ruled by fiat would often be cadastrally mapped before the metropolitan nation which ordered it. Ireland may have been the very first. After the Cromwellian con- quest, as Ian Hacking notes, “Ireland was completely surveyed for land, buildings, people, and cattle under the directorship of William Petty, in order to facilitate the rape of that nation by the English in 1679”.
Where the colony was a thinly populated settler‐colony, as in North America or Australia, the obstacles to a thoroughgoing, uniform cadastral grid were minimal. It was a question, in this context, less of mapping pre‐existing patterns of land use than of surveying parcels of land that would be given or sold to new arrivals from Europe and ignoring, of course, indigenous practices.
Thomas Jefferson, with his rational Enlightenment eye, imagined dividing the United States west of the Ohio River into “hundreds” – squares ten miles on a side – with settlers required to take an already designated parcel. The geometrical clarity of Jefferson’s proposal was not merely an aesthetic choice; he “argued that irregular lots inspired fraud, and could point to the experience of Massachusetts which discovered that holdings in the country typically yielded 10% more land, and often 100% more land, than had been granted.” Not only did the regularity of the grid create legibility for the taxing authority but it was a convenient and cheap way to package land and market it in homogeneous units. Jefferson’s plan was modified by Congress to provide for rectangular lots and townships that were 36 square miles and, in practice, land titling did not always follow the prescribed pattern.
The Torrens system of land titling, developed in Australia and New Zealand in the 1860s, provided a lithographed, pre‐surveyed grid of allotments which had only to be registered by settlers on a first‐come, first‐served basis. It was the quickest and most economical means yet devised to sell land and it was later adopted in many British colonies. The more homogeneous and rigid the geometric grid, however, the more likely it was to run afoul of the actual natural features of the non‐conforming landscape. …
Cadastral Surveys and the Utilitarian State:
The cadastral survey was but one technique in the growing armory of the modern, utilitarian state. Where the pre‐modern state was content with a level of intelligence sufficient to allow it to keep order, extract taxes and raise armies, the utilitarian state increasingly aspired to “take in charge” the physical and human resources of the nation and make them more productive. These more positive ends of statecraft required a much greater knowledge of the society. An inventory of land, people, incomes, occupations, resources and deviance was the logical place to begin. …
Although the purposes of the state were broadening, what the state wanted to know was still directly related to those purposes. The nineteenth century Prussian state was, for example, very much interested in the ages and sexes of immigrants and emigrants, but it was not interested in their religion or “race”. What mattered to the state was keeping track of possible draft‐dodgers and maintaining a supply of men of military age. The increasing concern of the state with productivity, health, sanitation, education, transportation, mineral resources, grain production and investment was less an abandonment of the older objectives of statecraft than a broadening and deepening of what those objectives entailed in the modern world.
5. Legibility and Centralization
Surnames:
… Until at least the fourteenth century, the great majority of Europeans did not have permanent patronymic. An individual’s name was typically an amalgam of his (if male) given name and his father’s given name. …
… The development of fixed surnames (literally, a name added to another) went hand‐in‐hand with the development of written official documents such as tithe records, marriage entries, censuses, tax records, land records, etc. One source suggests that last names were established by statute in the fourteenth century under Edward II. …
… [In] many British colonies with a substantial Chinese population, all school pupils were assigned an English given‐name at school which served both to make the class more legible to an English‐speaking instructor and to emphasize that the colonists’ school required a new identity. Those who came most frequently into contact with officials and documents were, one suspects, the most likely to take permanent surnames first. …
… Universal last names are a fairly recent historical phenomenon. They were a great step forward in the legibility of the entire population. The tracking of property ownership and inheritance, the collection of the title and other taxes, police work, conscription, court records, and the control of epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses. While the utilitarian state was committed to a complete inventory of its population, liberal ideas of citizenship, which implied voting rights and conscription, also contributed greatly to the standardization of naming practices. …
The Creation of a Standard Official Language:
The great cultural barrier posed by a separate and unintelligible language is perhaps the most effective guarantee that a social world, easily accessible to insiders, will remain opaque to outsiders. … A real language barrier is, however, a far more powerful basis for autonomy than a complex residence pattern. It is also the bearer of a distinct history, a cultural sensibility, a literature, a mythology, a musical past, etc. In this respect, a unique language represents a formidable obstacle to state knowledge, let alone colonization, control, manipulation, instruction and propaganda.
Of all state simplifications, then, the imposition of a single, official language may be the most powerful and the precondition of many other simplifications. …
The Centralization of Traffic Patterns:
The linguistic centralization impelled by the imposition of Parisian French as the official standard was replicated in a centralization of traffic. Just as the new dispensation in language made Paris the hub of communication, so the new road and rail systems increasingly favored movement to and from Paris over interregional or local traffic. State policy resembled, in computer parlance, a “hardwiring” pattern which made the provinces far more accessible – far more legible – to central authorities than even the absolutist kings had imagined.
Let us contrast, in an ideal‐typical fashion, a relatively uncentralized network of communication on the one hand, with a relatively centralized network on the other. The uncentralized pattern, if mapped, would be the physical image of the actual movements of goods and people along routes not created by administrative fiat. Such movements would not be random; they would necessarily reflect the ease of movement along valleys, by watercourses and defiles, and the location of important resources and ritual sites. …
… The modernizers of nineteenth century France, most notably Napoleon, superimposed on this pattern a carefully planned grid of administrative centralization. This grid of road and rail lines (for example, Gare du Nord, Gare de l’Est) radiated from the capital city like the spokes of a wheel.
The similarity between such a grid and the grids cleared in “well‐managed” state forests are not accidental. They were both built to maximize access and to facilitate central control. The kind of “simplification” involved is, again, entirely relative to location. For an official at the hub, it is now vastly easier to go to “A” or to “B” along the new routes. The layout was designed to serve the government and the cities and lacking a network of supporting thoroughfares had little to do with popular habit or need.
6. Conclusion
Officials of the modern state are, of necessity, at least one step – and often several steps – removed from the society they are charged with governing. They observe and assess the life of their society by a series of typifications that are always some distance from the full reality these abstractions are meant to capture. Thus the foresters’ charts and tables, despite their power to distill many individual facts into a larger pattern, do not quite capture (nor are they meant to) the real forest in its full diversity. Thus the cadastral survey and the title deed are a very rough, and sometimes misleading, representation of actual existing rights to land use and disposal. …
… The functionary of any large organization actually “sees” the human activity of interest to him largely through the simplified approximations of documents and statistics: for example, tax proceeds, lists of taxpayers, land records, average income, unemployment numbers, mortality rates, trade and productivity figures, the cases of cholera in a certain district. These typifications are indispensable to statecraft as well as being potentially valuable.
State simplifications such as maps, censuses, cadastral‐lists, and standard units of measurement represent techniques for grasping a large and complex reality that must be reduced to schematic categories of some kind to allow officials to comprehend aspects of the ensemble. …
… There is no other way of accomplishing this end than to reduce an infinite array of detail to a set of categories that will facilitate summary descriptions, comparisons, and aggregation. …
… The techniques devised to enhance the legibility of a society to its rulers have become vastly more sophisticated, but the political motives driving them are little changed. Appropriation, control, and manipulation remain the most prominent. If we imagine a state that has no reliable means of enumerating its population, gauging its wealth, mapping its land, resources and settlements, and locating specific individuals, we are imagining a state whose interventions in that society are necessarily crude and ineffective. A society which is relatively opaque to the state is thereby insulated from some forms of finely tuned state interventions (both benign – for example, universal vaccinations – and resented – for example, personal income taxes). The interventions it does experience will typically be mediated by “local trackers” who know the society from inside and who are likely to interpose their own particular interests. Without this mediation – and often with it – state action is liable to be inept, greatly overshooting or undershooting its objective.
An illegible society is, then, a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare. So long as the state’s interest was largely confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few conscripts, the state’s ignorance might not be fatal. When, however, the state’s interest required changing the daily habits (for example, sanitation practices) or work performance (for example, quality labor and machine maintenance), then such ignorance was frequently fatal.
Legibility implies a viewer whose place is central. State simplifications of the kind we have examined are designed to provide authorities with a schematic view of their society: a view not afforded to those without authority. Rather like the intimidating one‐way mirrored glasses of some US highway police, the authorities enjoy a quasi‐monopolistic picture of selected aspects of the whole society. This privileged vantage point is typical of all institutional settings where command and control of complex human activities is paramount. The monastery, the barracks, the factory floor, the administrative bureaucracy (private or public) exercise many state‐like functions and often mimic its information structure as well.
State simplifications can be considered part of an ongoing “project of legibility”: a project that is never fully realized. The actual data from which such simplifications arise are, to a varying degree, riddled with inaccuracies, missing data, faulty aggregation, fraud, negligence, political distortion, etc. A project of legibility is thus “immanent” in any statecraft that aims at manipulating society. But it is undermined by intra‐state rivalries, technical obstacles, and, above all, the active resistance of its subjects.
State simplifications, by their very nature, have a particular character. Most obviously, they are observations of those aspects, and only those aspects, of social life that are of official interest. They are interested, utilitarian facts. They are also, of course, nearly always written or numerical facts recorded in documents. Third, they are typically static facts. Even when they appear dynamic, they are typically the result of multiple static observations through time. Observation of, say, land records or income figures over two or more points in time may reveal a greater inequality in landownership or an increase in income, but it will not reveal how this new state‐of‐affairs came about or whether it will persist. …
… As [one review of] the literature on administrative coordination, concludes, “Central coordinating schemes do work effectively under conditions where the task environment is known and unchanging, where it can be treated as a closed system”. The more static, standardized and uniform a population or social space is, the more legible it is to the techniques of state officials. I am suggesting that many state activities aim at transforming the population, space and nature under their jurisdiction into the closed system without surprises that can best be observed and controlled. The reason that state officials can, to some considerable degree, make their categories stick and impose their simplifications, is because the state, of all institutions, is best equipped to insist on treating people according to its schema. If you want to defend your claim to real property you are normally obliged to defend it with a document called a property deed, and in the courts and tribunals created for that purpose. If you wish any standing in law, you must have the documents (for example, birth certificate, passport, identity card) that officials accept as a claim of citizenship. The categories used by state agents are not merely a means to make their environment legible; they are an authoritative tune to which much of the population must dance. [END]
The Source:
James C. Scott*, ‘State Simplification’, in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit**, Third Edition Wiley-Blackwell 2019 [Originally published in Journal of Political Philosophy, 3 (Sept. 1995)]
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