empirically the likely non-linear trajectory of women’s empowerment initiatives, for example, or political and legal reform, and the manner in which they are influenced by scale and context, may not be tasks for which one would immediately hire an academic historian, but it is the absence of a serious historical _sensibility_ among development policy administrators that contributes to normative expectations strongly favoring development projects whose impacts are large, immediate, knowable, predictable and positive, and (preferably) independent of scale, duration and context (i.e., they should be social technologies).<sup>39</sup> If methods, context and processes are the key analytical contributions that historians can make to development research and policy, then it is instructive to consider concrete examples of research by historians that exemplify these characteristics and that can, in conjunction with the deeper wellspring of research by historians over the centuries, be the basis for a more specific articulation of principles that historians can contribute to development policy deliberations. A central challenge of social science and development policy—measurement—provides one such instructive example.

_Lessons from a Brief History of Measurement_ History repeatedly reminds us that policy interventions can lead to significant change in ways intended by the policymaker, but can sometimes have thoroughly unexpected consequences. Take the imperative to count and measure human beings. In 16<sup>th</sup> century Britain, Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s vicar-general, introduced a system of identity registration that required all births, deaths and marriages to be recorded in parish registers. He said that this was “for the avoiding of sundry strifes and processes and contentions arising from age, lineal descent, title of inheritance, legitimation of bastardy, and for knowledge, whether any person is our subject or no” (cited in Elton 1972: 259-60). As Szreter (2007) shows, this resulted, for the first time in Britain’s history, in citizens having an enforceable right over their identity. It was used by individual citizens to verify their property and inheritance rights and by local communities to verify social security claims. This facilitated the effective functioning of a nationwide social security system and a mobile market in both labor and capital, contributing to Britain’s pioneering process of economic development. Seemingly small-scale institutional change, in short, can have significant unintended consequences that can contribute to shifting a country’s destiny.

Another example of this is a recent paper by Vincent (2009), which shows how measurement mattered in generating improvements in literacy in Victorian England.<sup>40</sup> The idea that literacy could be measured came from the realization by a man of letters (who had been appointed Registrar-General) that simply counting the number of people in the population who could sign their name was an effective measure of the ability to write. Since all marriage registers required signatures, this data was immediately available and utilized to measure spatial

> celebrated interventions, and has little knowledge of how these impacts are influenced by scale and (different types of) context (on this point see Woolcock 2009).

> 39 These pressures, solidly reinforced by campaigns such as the Millennium Development Goals, manifest themselves in calls to “scale up” and “replicate” putatively successful interventions.

> 40 See also Clemens (2004) for a historical perspective on the feasibility of attaining the education Millennium Development Goal.

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