The “Juridist” Fallacy. Methodological Aspects of the Study of Weights and Measures in Romanian Historiography

The article takes at task the Romanian historiography of metrology for positing the notion of standard measures before demonstrating their existence and before discussing the process of standardization. Contrary to such an approach, a contextual reading of the available evidence shows that the first efforts to standardize measures were late and that several variants of the same measure – I chose for exemplification the bushel – persisted long after the decreeing of the standard. In the end it is suggested that the study of weights and measures from the perspective of state- and market-formation is more profitable than the search for metric equivalents.

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