Rebuilding villages made colonial populations legible as enumerable statistics

Evidence

In any case, rebuilding made the village itself something legible, in the sense of the lists of households, livelihoods and livestock that were drawn up. This information could then be compiled into statistics revealing the country’s ‘productive powers’, at the same time as it was being inscribed in the unambiguous architecture of its new villages. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 164

Categorization

• XREF: Directly builds on James C. Scott’s ‘Seeing Like a State’ concept of legibility; the village-to-statistics pipeline is a textbook case of state simplifications. — connects to: Colonial management required objectifying territories through maps and data-gathering surveys. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 311