 During the Napoleonic era, some of the German states moved to reform their systems of measurement using the prototype metre and kilogram as the basis of the new units.Baden, in 1810, for example, redefined the "Ruthe" (rods) as being 3.0 m exactly and defined the subunits of the "Ruthe" as 1 "Ruthe" = 10 "Fuß" (feet) = 100 "Zoll" (inches) = 1,000 "Linie" (lines) = 10,000 "Punkt" (points) while the "Pfund" was defined as being 500 g, divided into 30 Loth, each of 16.67 g. Bavaria, in its reform of 1811, trimmed the Bavarian "Pfund" from 561.288 g to 560 g exactly, consisting of 32 "Loth", each of 17.5 g while the Prussian "Pfund" remained at 467.711 g.

After the Congress of Vienna there was a degree of commercial cooperation between the various German states resulting in the German Customs Union ("Zollverein").There were, however, still many barriers to trade until Bavaria took the lead in establishing the General German Commercial Code in 1856.