"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."--Jacket.
"Jake Soll’s work is focused on the information management system set up by Louis XIV’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, in late 17th century France. Soll studies Colbert’s accumulation of archival documents and manuscripts, and how Colbert managed the paperwork of an increasing bureaucracy, as well as the royal library passed down to him by the previous chief minister Jules Mazarin. Colbert integrated multiple kinds of information – manuscripts, letters and books. He created this trove to serve the interests of the state. So when Louis XIV wanted to take possession of a city on France’s northern border, for example, he could ask Colbert to find medieval documentation or precedents that supported the monarch’s claim to the piece of territory he coveted. It was a secret information system for the use of the king yet it was elaborate and well maintained and integrated books with archival material. This grand information system was a great innovation but when Colbert died no one took up the challenge of maintaining and perpetuating it. Information systems can be fragile that way. One of Soll’s most interesting points is how much movement there was between different areas of information management. He attributes Colbert’s aptitude for information management to his mercantile background. Merchants used bookkeeping to keep their accounts in order. Colbert drew on his background in mercantile note-taking but also hired scholars trained by Maurist historians, members of a French Benedictine order, who were expert at managing libraries and medieval manuscripts. So Colbert drew on both mercantile and scholarly traditions of note-taking to help him devise his information management system. History develops as a discipline by asking new questions of sources that were well known and by drawing attention to new sources. Soll does both of those things. Historians have long used archives – since the early modern period, in fact – but they have mostly worried about what they can get from the archives rather than about how archives were formed, maintained, classified and made available. But Soll’s work is part of a new kind of history that focuses on how the archives were consciously formed as a source of argumentation for state action. Early modern archiving was very sophisticated and also respectful of the sources. Although they tightly controlled access to the archives, early modern archivists kept all kinds of potentially incriminating documents that they didn’t tamper with or destroy. So these early archives are astounding troves of history. I hope the history of archives gets a lot more attention. Jacob Soll is doing cutting-edge work in this area. Another colleague, Randolph Head, is working on a comparative history of archives in early modern Europe that promises to show us how church archives, state archives, family archives and commercial archives all developed techniques to deal with similar problems."
