It is no surprise that development institutions and actors have taken to indicators with such enthusiasm. Where indicators are both a form of knowledge production and simultaneously a technology of governance, they are a form of soft powers that allow such actors to set the standards for what it is to be developed in the twenty-first century. Such measures of civilisation have been dominant throughout a history of Global North–South encounters: measurement was central to the many forms of colonial control, from map-making to craniometry, to the global ‘discovery’ of poverty in the 1940s. This paper seeks to place development indicators in this colonial context by focusing on the issue of comparability or the global claim that underpins global development indicators.

中文翻译：

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数字的贫困：对全球发展指标合法性的思考

毫不奇怪，发展机构和参与者如此热情地采用指标。指标既是一种知识生产形式，又是一种治理技术，它们是一种软实力，允许这些行为者为 21 世纪的发展制定标准。这种文明测量在全球南北相遇的历史中一直占主导地位：测量是多种形式的殖民控制的核心，从地图制作到颅骨测量，再到 1940 年代全球“发现”贫困。本文旨在通过关注可比性问题或支撑全球发展指标的全球主张，将发展指标置于这种殖民背景下。