The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean: the Danish acre of St Croix
Identifieur interne : 003493 ( Main/Exploration ); précédent : 003492; suivant : 003494The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean: the Danish acre of St Croix
Auteurs : RBID : ISTEX:68AE4697EEAFD144B22B4965448A788FD3CCB78CAbstract
Plantations in the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, were for a century or more registered and taxed in Danish acres, a unit of measure not used in Denmark itself. This “acre” was derived from the round arithmetic subdivision of the uniform rectangular plantation lots into which the island of St Croix was laid out in the 1730s and '40s. The measure was a cultural compromise between Danish administrative practices and the customs of the predominantly English planter class on the island. Its derivation from the locally unprecedented grid survey system of St Croix is directly comparable to Thomas Jefferson's unrealized proposals in the 1790s for the incorporation of a geodetic decimal system of measures into the legislation for the survey of the public lands of the United States. Both of these New World cases exemplify the developing faith—naive, tentative, and demonstrably misplaced, given the technical and administrative limitations of the age—in rational ideals of measurement that at the end of the century produced the revolutionary French metric system.
Url:
DOI: 10.1016/0305-7488(92)90129-W
Links toward previous steps (curation, corpus...)
- to stream Istex, to step Corpus: 001129
- to stream Istex, to step Curation: 001129
- to stream Istex, to step Checkpoint: 002935
- to stream Main, to step Merge: 003493
Le document en format XML
<record><TEI><teiHeader><fileDesc><titleStmt><title>The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean: the Danish acre of St Croix</title><author><name sortKey="Hopkins, Daniel" uniqKey="Hopkins D">Daniel Hopkins</name><affiliation wicri:level="2"><mods:affiliation>Department of Geosciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110-2499, U.S.A.</mods:affiliation><country xml:lang="fr">États-Unis</country><wicri:regionArea>Department of Geosciences, University of Missouri-Kansas City, Kansas City, MO 64110-2499</wicri:regionArea><placeName><region type="state">Missouri (État)</region></placeName></affiliation></author></titleStmt><publicationStmt><idno type="RBID">ISTEX:68AE4697EEAFD144B22B4965448A788FD3CCB78C</idno><date when="1992">1992</date><idno type="doi">10.1016/0305-7488(92)90129-W</idno><idno type="url">https://api.istex.fr/document/68AE4697EEAFD144B22B4965448A788FD3CCB78C/fulltext/pdf</idno><idno type="wicri:Area/Istex/Corpus">001129</idno><idno type="wicri:Area/Istex/Curation">001129</idno><idno type="wicri:Area/Istex/Checkpoint">002935</idno><idno type="MainMerge">002935</idno><idno type="wicri:Area/Main/Merge">003493</idno></publicationStmt><seriesStmt><idno type="ISSN">0305-7488</idno></seriesStmt></fileDesc><profileDesc><textClass></textClass></profileDesc></teiHeader><front><div type="abstract" xml:lang="eng">Plantations in the Danish West Indies, now the United States Virgin Islands, were for a century or more registered and taxed in Danish acres, a unit of measure not used in Denmark itself. This “acre” was derived from the round arithmetic subdivision of the uniform rectangular plantation lots into which the island of St Croix was laid out in the 1730s and '40s. The measure was a cultural compromise between Danish administrative practices and the customs of the predominantly English planter class on the island. Its derivation from the locally unprecedented grid survey system of St Croix is directly comparable to Thomas Jefferson's unrealized proposals in the 1790s for the incorporation of a geodetic decimal system of measures into the legislation for the survey of the public lands of the United States. Both of these New World cases exemplify the developing faith—naive, tentative, and demonstrably misplaced, given the technical and administrative limitations of the age—in rational ideals of measurement that at the end of the century produced the revolutionary French metric system. </div></front></TEI></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
EXPLOR_STEP=$WICRI_ROOT/Wicri/Linguistique/explor/CharterV3/Data/Main/Exploration
HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_STEP/biblio.hfd -nk 003493 | SxmlIndent | more
Ou
HfdSelect -h $EXPLOR_AREA/Data/Main/Exploration/biblio.hfd -nk 003493 | SxmlIndent | more
Pour mettre un lien sur cette page dans le réseau Wicri
{{Explor lien
|wiki= Wicri/Linguistique
|area= CharterV3
|flux= Main
|étape= Exploration
|type= RBID
|clé= ISTEX:68AE4697EEAFD144B22B4965448A788FD3CCB78C
|texte= The eighteenth-century invention of a measure in the Caribbean: the Danish acre of St Croix
}}
| This area was generated with Dilib version V0.6.07. |  |