ABSTRACT
Putting mathematical controls on work processes and goods had much appeal to eighteenth-century French administrators. Numerical information helped to extend the influence of the central government over the engine responsible for the state’s health. To know how the separate elements of agriculture and manufacture worked satisfied the century’s hunger for understanding of the natural world. But more than that, it collected essential data for an administration aimed at reforming the institutions responsible for the economy. How else could social activities be brought into conformity with the laws of nature? One had to learn the steps that led to manufacturing problems and distribution bottlenecks in order to set things right. By the same token, normative standards could only come from gathering information about work patterns all over the kingdom. For this reason, inspectors of manufacture paid close attention in their circuits around their regions to the average daily output, raw materials used, and wages earned by craft workers; the Paris Bureau of Commerce was collecting these statistics to create a mammoth table of information for all of France.
