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.

""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""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 UniversityJacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism. He is a 2009 winner of a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.



Keywords: Information, State, Secrecy, Colbert, library science, archives, coup d’état, Louis XIV, Accounting, Finance