The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World

by Jeremy Black

Information is power. For more than five hundred years the success or failure of nations has been determined by a country’s ability to acquire knowledge and technical skill and transform them into strength and prosperity. Leading historian Jeremy Black approaches global history from a distinctive perspective, focusing on the relationship between information and society and demonstrating how the understanding and use of information have been the primary factors in the development and character of the modern age.   Black suggests that the West’s ascension was a direct result of its institutions and social practices for acquiring, employing, and retaining information and the technology that was ultimately produced. His cogent and well-reasoned analysis looks at cartography and the hardware of communication, armaments and sea power, mercantilism and imperialism, science and astronomy, as well as bureaucracy and the management of information, linking the history of technology with the history of global power while providing important indicators for the future of our world.

Genres: History, Science, Nonfiction

504 pages, Hardcover

First published January 7, 2014

About the author

Jeremy Black is an English historian, who was formerly a professor of history at the University of Exeter. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of America and the West at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US.
Black is the author of over 180 books, principally but not exclusively on 18th-century British politics and international relations, and has been described by one commentator as "the most prolific historical scholar of our age". He has published on military and political history, including Warfare in the Western World, 1882–1975 (2001) and The World in the Twentieth Century (2002).

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s difficult to place this book in terms of its expected audience and thus what its expected function is. As it is, it’s fine as an overview of technology and information from year dot to the present, but as I see it, it suffers from a number of weaknesses.

(i) The definitions of technology and knowledge are both very “common sense” (i.e., underdeveloped), without sign-posting or drawing out the cross-overs between these two terms, or how they might differ in profound theoretical ways. This is probably a corollary of a another of this book’s shortcomings, namely...

(ii) As per a Kirkus review of the book, there’s something of the forest-for-the-trees syndrome, in that as a recitation of facts and examples, there isn’t a sufficient narrative thread, or threads plural. It's as though there is still some kind of fear of an overarching meta-narrative, but I tend to read big texts like this for the author’s ability to pull the various strands together, and to highlight trends.To avoid doing this is a disservice to the reader, given that at 400+ pages, there is a hope/expectation that the author has reflected on the (admittedly vast) materials collected, and has provided the reader with a tool, such as a cohering idea or set of ideas, to make sense of the book’s litany of facts.

(iii) There are also some other points, which come out of the author’s background and previous research, such that there is perhaps too great an emphasis on cartography and map-making as information technology. Perhaps if this had been used as the idea-spine of the book, this would not be a failing, but it seems that a trick was missed here in not using one of the author’s scholarly strengths as a way to give this work greater coherence.

Ultimately, I feel that other works have taken this overview approach to either information/knowledge or technology, with greater success (though they may have dealt with shorter periods of time, or sets of technologies). It is more a dictionary than a grammar of information and technology. I had truly hoped that this book would do what it appears to set out to do, but in the end I don't regard it think it was successful.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Burn this!

[Frank · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is in need of an editor.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 2012, the OECD predicted that by 2060 China & India would have 46% of world GDP, with China's economy far greater than that of the US, although its per capita GDP was predicted as just 59% of that in the US.

The capacity of information-linked surveillance to deal with social problems was suggested in March 2012 in a report from Coriolano Moraes, education secretary of the Brazilian city of Vitoria da Conquista, 20,000 schoolchildren began wearing uniforms embedded with computer chips designed to send a text message to the cellphones of parents when their children entered the school, or to alert then if they had not arrived 20 minutes after classes had begun. By 2013, it was planned that all of the city's 43,000 state-school students would be using those uniforms.

[sillypunk · Rating 4 out of 5]

Long but good: https://blogendorff.ghost.io/book-rev...