Regimes of value, and, even more, encounters between different regimes divided by cultural space and time, presume mediation, translation, and communication among particular species of value. And, therefore, currencies, at once verbal and material, that objectify them. Which, in turn, depends on one thing above all else: on mechanisms of commensuration, mechanisms that render negotiable otherwise inimical, apparently intransitive, orders of signs and practices. Without such mechanisms, which have often been the object of conflict and contestation, large scale projects of world-making, like colonialism, for instance would have made no sense, neither as a world-historical undertaking on the part of colonizers nor as a lived reality to those upon whose worlds it was wrought. Jane Guyer (2004: 13), in an acute reading of the West African archive, warns against the assumption that commensuration B especially that attributed to the >alchemy of money=B necessarily dissolves all distinctions between disparate scales and measures of worth. In Africa, she insists, nonequivalent exchange has been pervasive. If anything, it has been facilitated by the spread of quantifiable currencies: as people became adept at deploying monetary scales, they frequently used them for “negotiating intervals Y exchanging goods and services that were explicitly not the match of each otherY” (Guyer 2004:47). In similar spirit, the following essay interrogates the role of the commensuration in the colonial encounter; how might the management of value conversion, both efforts to facilitate and to impede it, play into large processes of political contestation and incorporation at the edges of empire?