Accounting and Spatial Practices

This chapter explores how the intervention of detailed accounting calculations into spatial configurations and the intertwining of accounting and spatial practices provide discipline in the factory by yielding calculable spaces and accountable subjects. The chapter focuses on the case of the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville (RTF), which changed its premises from the Old to the New Factories in 1758. The spaces produced by architects in the New Factories were subsequently mediated through administrative arrangements that reconfigured factory space into cost centers which had the capacity to function as time-space ordering devices and rendered enclosure and partitioning more disciplinary.