Why did the British invent the imperial system and then abandon it?
In: Economics
The Imperial system arose organically out of necessity, which is why a lot of the units have weird conversions, or otherwise don’t fit perfectly together. Basically as standard units for different values- weight, volume, length, area, etc. became necessary, they were adopted. Some are independent, others derived from other units, and some technically measure the same thing (acres and square feet both measure area for instance). The SI (metric) system was intentionally constructed from the ground up with all of these types of units already considered, and with a rule that everything has to scale in powers of 10, and everything has to derive back to the same base units (meter, kilogram, second). Britain has shifted away from imperial units for a number of reasons, but mainly for trading purposes with countries that had already adopted SI.
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