| Description |
1 online resource (xi, 277 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates) : illustrations. |
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text file |
| Series |
Cultures of knowledge in the early modern world
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Cultures of knowledge in the early modern world.
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| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-268) and index. |
| Contents |
1. Between public and secret spheres : the case of Colbert -- 2. Colbert's cosmos : the expert and the rise of the modern state -- 3. The accountant and the coups d'etat -- 4. Royal accountability : Louis XIV and the golden notebooks -- 5. The rule of the informers -- 6. Managing the system : Colbert trains his son for the great intendancy -- 7. From universal library to state encyclopedia : Colbert's House of Solomon -- 8. Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Republic of Letters : the state control of knowledge -- 9. The information state in play : archives, erudition, and the affair of the regale -- 10. The system falls apart, but the state remains. |
| Summary |
"Colbert has long been celebrated as Louis XIV's minister of finance, trade, and industry. More recently, he has been viewed as his minister of culture and propaganda. In this lively and persuasive book, Jake Soll has given us a third Colbert, the information manager." --Peter Burke, University of Cambridge "Jacob Soll gives us a road map drawn from the French state under Colbert. With a stunning attention to detail Colbert used knowledge in the service of enhancing royal power. Jacob Soll's scholarship is impeccable and his story long overdue and compelling." --Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles "Nowadays we all know that information is the key to power, and that the masters of information rule the world. Jacob Soll teaches us that Jean-Baptiste Colbert had grasped this principle three and a half centuries ago, and used it to construct a new kind of state. This imaginative, erudite, and powerfully written book re-creates the history of libraries and archives in early modern Europe, and ties them in a novel and convincing way to the new statecraft of Europe's absolute monarchs." --Anthony Grafton, Princeton University "Brilliantly researched, superbly told, and timely, Soll's story is crucial for the history of the modern state." --Keith Baker, Stanford University When Louis XIV asked his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert--the man who was to oversee the building of Versailles and the Royal Academy of Sciences, as well as the navy, the Paris police force, and French industry--to build a large-scale administrative government, Colbert created an unprecedented information system for political power. 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 and was a precursor to industrial intelligence and Internet search engines. Soll's innovative look at Colbert's rise to power argues that his practice of collecting knowledge originated from techniques of church scholarship and from Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship, finance, and library science. With his connection of interdisciplinary approaches--regarding accounting, state administration, archives, libraries, merchant techniques, ecclesiastical culture, policing, and humanist pedagogy--Soll has written an innovative book that will redefine not only the history of the reign of Louis XIV and information science but also the study of political and economic history. Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan Press, 2005), and winner of the 2005 Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society and a 2009 Guggenheim Fellowship. Soll edited a special issue of Journal of the History of Ideas titled "The Uses of Historical Evidence in Early Modern Europe"; has cofounded the online journal Republics of Letters; and is editor, along with Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World. Jacket illustration: Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), Philippe de Champaigne, 1655, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Wildenstein Foundation, Inc., 1951 (51.34). Photograph © 2003 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. |
| Local Note |
eBooks on EBSCOhost EBSCO eBook Subscription Academic Collection - North America |
| Subject |
Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 1619-1683.
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Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 1619-1683. |
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Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 1619-1683 -- Political and social views.
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Political and social views. |
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Colbert, Jean Baptiste, 1619-1683 -- Political and social views. |
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Statesmen -- France -- Biography.
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Statesmen. |
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France. |
| Chronological Term |
1600 - 1715 |
| Genre/Form |
Electronic books.
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Biographies.
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Electronic books.
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History.
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Biographies.
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| Other Form: |
Print version: Soll, Jacob, 1968- Information master. Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, ©2009 (DLC) 2008051142 |
| ISBN |
0472116908 (cloth) |
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9780472116904 (cloth) |
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9780472025268 (electronic book) |
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0472025260 (electronic book) |
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1282591525 |
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9781282591523 |
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