However, just because measurement can be regulated without centralised authority doesn’t mean rulers have ignored the potential of these systems. As the historian Emanuele Lugli has noted, units of measurement are, for the powerful, ‘sly tools of subjugation’. Each time they’re deployed, they turn the world ‘into a place that continues to make sense as long as the power that legitimises the measurements rests in place’.5 In other words: measurement does not only benefit from authority – it creates it too.
