Weights, measures, and money, which I collectively call the units of exchange, underwent a series of global transformations between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth. What catalyzed these transformations was the elaboration of a problem and sense of urgency to resolve it. The problem was the regional and international diversity in the units of exchange. The transformations entailed the bureaucratization and centralization of state control over the units of exchange as well as epistemological shifts in conceptions about their definitions and value. Why, how, and with what consequences this happened are the main questions this dissertation considers. The changes were global but this dissertation pursues them through a study of the Russian empire and its international entanglements. Based on archival research in Russia, Georgia, Latvia, and France, this dissertation engages with scholarship in social and intellectual history, the histories of political economy and science, and with themes of state formation, empire, and internationalism. I argue that autocratic politics and a tension between imperial and international integration shaped how the global transformations in the units of exchange reverberated throughout the Russian empire and, consequently, around the world. The officials and members of educated society that pushed for standardization did so to facilitate domestic and international commerce, secure taxes, and integrate territories, resources, and peoples into a system of exchange. The Tsarist political-economic order—rooted in obligatory state service, unfree labor, and socio-legal hierarchy—departed from those in Europe and the Americas, the settings of most studies of nineteenth-century standardization. This dissertation thus challenges scholarship that presents a fundamental connection between standardization and the development of capitalism’s ideologies and practices. It also explores a paradox in Tsarist standardization policy: the ministries dispatched academicians abroad to spearhead the internationalization of metrological and monetary standards but obstructed the implementation of those international standards within the empire until 1897-99. Only at the very end of the nineteenth century did imperial Russia put the ruble on the gold standard and legalized voluntary use of the metric system.