Through three distinct case studies, the panelists explore diverse practices of quantification in France, Malaysia, and China, where numbers play a significant role in (re)-shaping the relationship between public and private actors in the Malayan colonial context, in the French water industry (1922-2017), and in everyday commercial calculations in 20th-Century China.
In his presentation, Siddharth Sridhar will trace the role of two performance indicators, yield per acre and costs of production, for Malayan rubber, in the interwar period. Rubber market volatility and growing competitive pressures by the Dutch and the French led British rubber companies to develop a closer control of their industry with the help of those two indicators. He shows that after the 1929 crisis which hit the whole industry, both indicators became objects of scientific management, public knowledge, and state intervention, in the interest of profit and imperial security. Thoe two indicators circulated between public and private actors at different levels of rubber industry: planters, rubber companies, the Rubber Growers’ Association, the British Malayan state, and the International Rubber Regulation Committee. This dynamic of a management tool is rarely studied at those different levels, especially in a colonial and imperial context, in business history.
In his presentation, Laurent Béduneau-Wang examines the unexpected role taken by nitrate as a parameter, later as a performance indicator, in the management of water in Paris’ region from 1922 to 2017. Apparently neutral, the parameter of nitrate, despite its surprising stability at 50 mg/L over a century, has become an object of increasing concern from very diverse part of society: scientific community, military industrials, agro-industrial players, environmentalists, medical world, etc. This analysis highlights the plurality of interpretations which emerges over time around a single figure, a single management and regulatory tool. By contrast, even if nitrate has been an object of intense negotiations, as it was the case with the two previous indicators in rubber industry, it remains stable. The number remains unchanged, but the perceptions of public and private players did.
Adding a further view into the dynamic legacy of quantification processes, Boyao Zhang describes how the adoption of the international system of units (SI) radically transformed the use of the abacus in everyday commercial calculations in 20th-Century China. This state-led process made emerge a new generation of accountant and managers who had to acquire new arithmetic knowledge. It changed the way how abacus was used: more as a calculative aid than an instrument of numeracy. Formal arithmetic has become an essential knowledge to master. Whereas the history of large statistical devices or institutions have been made (Desrosières, 2008; Tooze, 2001; Porter, 1986, etc.), those multi-level processes of quantification affecting merchants are largely understudied in business history.
In the three papers, state-led processes of quantification often unintentionally invite a radical rethinking of the meanings of numbers in business, and more broadly, within society at large, and, by extension, the status of number and the very rules of numeracy and calculation.