La construction sociale du chiffre

The article raises the question of the possibility of historicizing quantification, which starts from a reflection on the categories used for this quantification. Beginning with an analysis of two specific examples from pre-or proto-industrial economies at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the article points out that quantification methods applied at the time used very different principles than would be used today in the same context. One case highlighted in the paper focuses on the definition of production costs around 1820 in one of the first fully mechanized textile mills in Waltham, Massachusetts. The other example from circa 1755 analyzes how Abraham Gradis, an important Bordeaux merchant, used the category of currency in his accounting. The article concludes that a truly historical approach to numbers should always start by studying the mindsets of the actors who generated these numbers in order to guarantee a historical understanding of the categories that governed this process.