The Information Master

"Soll tells this story in wonderfully lucid prose, and with a great gift for concision. Colbert emerges from his pages not only as the patron saint of modern bureaucrats, but as a forceful--if somewhat repellent--personality, and as another of the great early modern figures who sought to gain unprecedented knowledge of, and mastery over, the material world."

--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.