RHN 108/2023 | Publication
Histoire & Mesure XXXVIII-1, 2023
Themed Section “Global Figures” edited by Federico D’Onofrio and Niccolò Mignemi
https://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.18963
Moving from the standardized contracts and grading system of the London Corn Trade Association to the International Institute of Agriculture’s statistical unification project and then to the surveys of the United States Department of Agriculture, the present issue furthers the debate on the various forms of market governance. It shows that the rise of global figures following the crises of the 1870s-1880s brought about a fundamental change not only in the quantity but also in the quality of the information available on agricultural markets. If the grading system described by William Cronon had allowed to “buy and sell grain as commodity almost independently from grain as crop”, global information provided the infrastructure through which this new language of commensurability could rapidly connect and ultimately shape increasingly distant markets. Agriculture was, in fact, at the forefront of a world information economy that developed well before the advent of information technologies and big data at the eve of the twenty-first century.
Federico D’Onofrio and Niccolò Mignemi
Global Figures: Tools for Observing and Governing Agricultural Markets (1880s-1940s). Introduction
https://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.18973
Federico D’Onofrio and Niccolò Mignemi
The International Institute of Agriculture and the Information Infrastructure of World Trade (1905-1946)
https://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.19003
Hannah Tyler
In Numbers We Trust? A History of the US Department of Agriculture and its Agricultural Surveys during the 1920shttps://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.19023
Aashish Velkar
Measurement Standards and Market Governance: London Corn Trade Association and International Grain Markets (1880-1914)
https://doi.org/10.4000/histoiremesure.19043