legibility

The chapter examines the state's efforts to impose uniform systems of measurement and land tenure to enhance administrative centralization and economic rationalization, focusing on the metric system's adoption in France and the challenges of codifying customary land tenure. It highlights the resistance from local powers and the complexities of translating diverse, adaptable local customs into legible, standardized legal frameworks, as exemplified by the failed postrevolutionary rural code. The analysis underscores the tension between the state's drive for simplification and legibility and the inherent plasticity and inequalities of customary practices.

The chapter examines how states achieve legibility and control over rural populations by transforming complex, mobile, and dispersed social forms into simplified, concentrated, and administratively manageable units. It contrasts 'state spaces' of dense, sedentary settlements that facilitate resource extraction with 'nonstate spaces' characterized by mobility and inaccessibility, which states seek to convert through planned settlements and development schemes. These interventions often disrupt preexisting social cohesion, resulting in demobilized communities more susceptible to top-down control.

The chapter critically examines the Soviet collectivization of agriculture as an authoritarian high-modernist project that sought to replace traditional peasant structures and local knowledge with large-scale, mechanized, and centrally planned farms. This process dismantled the mir, imposed rigid labor regimes resembling serfdom, and created a dependent peasantry optimized for state appropriation, yet ultimately failed to achieve the promised agricultural efficiency due to the neglect of local conditions and the limits of centralized control. The analysis highlights the state's preference for legibility, appropriation, and centralization, contrasting the relative success of collectivization in mechanizable crops like wheat with its failure in knowledge-intensive crops like raspberries, underscoring the importance of local knowledge in effective governance.