Standardizing the Brazilian Nation in the 19th Century

This paper uses two major events that took place in a single year in Brazil’s history—the 1872 implementation of the first national census and adoption of the metric system of weights and measures—to investigate the expanding reach of the Brazilian state in the nineteenth century. A continental-sized nation with poor infrastructure, Brazilian government agencies sought to improve their knowledge of and management of the vast country through systematic and extensive data collection and reporting. This interest in data collection was part of an international movement spearheaded by statistical societies and spread through international congresses that viewed statistical data as a means to improve exchange.

These two events, the conduct of the first census and the introduction of the metric system, are important to the history of Brazil because both had the potential to integrate the nation in a basic, functional manner. Prior to the adoption of the metric system, Brazilians used weights and measures derived from the English system in name but that had regional variations in their values making long-range domestic exchange difficult. Prior to the national census, Brazilian planners lacked much beyond a general understanding of the demographics of the internal market. Both institutions created closer contact between Brazilians working in the domestic economy and state officials whose policies had powerful effects on their lives. The paper investigates the institutional history of the census and adoption of the metric system in 1872, focusing on the politics and policies behind their conception and design and the logistics of their implementation. It analyzes these innovations to tell the story of how Brazilian statesmen came to see them as valuable endeavors and how they envisioned the utility of both.