Wow! eBook
The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System Reprint Edition
Author(s): Jacob Soll (Author)
- Publisher: University of Michigan Press
- Publication Date: August 8, 2011
- Edition: Reprint
- Language: English
- Print length: 299 pages
- ISBN-10: 0472034642
- ISBN-13: 9780472034642
Book Description
—New Republic
“With great verve, Soll recreates Colbert’s institutional and intellectual ecology, his habits, and the practices he imposed upon his network of informants and analysts, his family, and even Louis XIV.”
—Sophus Reinert, Harvard Business School
“The Information Master makes a major contribution to our understanding of the uses of knowledge and the mechanisms by which knowledge was harnessed by the early modern state.”
–Paul Nelles, Carleton University
“The Information Master is an excellent book on a fascinating subject that is bound to attract readers from a range of historical and information-related fields: historians of early modern Europe will find in it an innovative redescription of Colbert’s career, those interested in the history of libraries and archives will learn much about the political and cultural forces that shaped these information institutions in early modern Europe, and information
historians will derive profit from Soll’s many insights into the workings of Colbert’s information-saturated administrative régime.”
–Thomas Dousa, University of Illinois
Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw governance of the state not as the inherent ability of the king, but as a form of mechanical mastery of subjects such as medieval legal history, physics, navigation, and the price lists of nails, sails, and gunpowder. In The Information Master, Jacob Soll shows how the legacy of Colbert’s encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state.
This innovative book argues that Colbert’s practice of collecting knowledge originated in Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship and trade. By connecting historical literatures–archives, libraries, merchant techniques, and humanist pedagogy–that have usually remained separate, Soll has created an imaginative and refreshing work.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“The Information Master is well researched and an intriguing read, and by bringing together diverse strands of research from humanism to enlightened despotism adds much to the ongoing debates about the nature of royal absolutism in early modern France.”
–Jonathan Spangler, Renaissance Quarterly
–Jonathan Spangler, Manchester Metropolitan University “Renaissance Quarterly” (7/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)
“Soll’s study is a major piece of scholarship, based on a wide knowledge of primary archival and contemporary printed material and secondary literature…and I commend Soll for his fascinating investigation of Colbert’s mastery over information.”
–Christopher J. Napier, Business History
–Christopher J. Napier, University of London “Business History” (4/1/2010 12:00:00 AM)
“…essential reading for historians of scholarship and collecting, but it will perhaps be of most interest to those political and administrative historians of seventeenth-century Europe for whom Colbert has so long been a neglected figure and for whom questions of communication and information are now increasingly important.”
–Nicholas Dew, ISIS: An International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences–Nicholas Dew “ISIS” (2/20/2013 12:00:00 AM)
“…this slender volume is an engaging case study of the interactions between information and government in early-modern Europe.”
–Toby Osborne, French History–Toby Osborne “French History” (11/27/2012 12:00:00 AM)
