What do you think?
Rate this book
Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System
"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.
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.
---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.
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.
277 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2009
3 people are currently reading
138 people want to read
About the author
Jacob Soll
10 books25 followersJacob Soll is professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California.
He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa, a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge University. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship.
Soll’s first book, Publishing The Prince (2005), examines how Machiavelli's work was popularized and influenced modern political thought. It won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In his second book, The Information Master (2009), Soll investigates how Louis XIV's famous finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert fused financial management and library sciences to create one of the first modern information states.
His most recent book, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014), presents a sweeping history of accounting and politics, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting can used to both build kingdoms, empires and entire civilizations, but also to undermine them. It explains the origins of our own financial crisis as deeply rooted in a long disconnect between human beings and their attempts to manage financial numbers. The Reckoning, reviewed in major newspapers and publications around the world, has sold more than 60,000 copies worldwide, and has been translated into five languages.
His new books include Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books), an analysis of classical philosophy, natural law, history and contemporary economic culture; a history of libraries and Enlightenment (Yale University Press); and the first English edition of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s economic writings (Anthem).
Soll has been a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Politico, the New Republic, PBS, Salon.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
He is currently meeting with political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency.
Recent journal and chapter publications include:
• “Jean Baptiste Colbert: Accounting and the Genesis of a State Archive in Early
Modern France,” Proceedings of the British Society, forthcoming 2017.
• “From Virtue to Surplus: Jacques Necker’s Compte Rendu (1781) and the
Origins of Modern Political Discourse,” Representations 134 (216), pp. 29-63.
• “The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition,” in Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia
Goeing, eds., For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, 2
vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 2, pp. 1019-1032.
• “Intellectual History and the History of the Book,” in Richard Whatmore and
Brian Young, eds. A Companion to Intellectual History, (Chichester: John Wiley
And Sons/Blackwell, 2016), pp. 72-82.
He received a B.A. from the University of Iowa, a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France, and a Ph.D. from Magdalene College, Cambridge University. He has been awarded numerous prestigious prizes including two NEH Fellowships, the Jacques Barzun Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in 2011, the MacArthur Fellowship.
Soll’s first book, Publishing The Prince (2005), examines how Machiavelli's work was popularized and influenced modern political thought. It won the Jacques Barzun Prize from the American Philosophical Society. In his second book, The Information Master (2009), Soll investigates how Louis XIV's famous finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert fused financial management and library sciences to create one of the first modern information states.
His most recent book, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations (2014), presents a sweeping history of accounting and politics, drawing on a wealth of examples from over a millennia of human history to reveal how accounting can used to both build kingdoms, empires and entire civilizations, but also to undermine them. It explains the origins of our own financial crisis as deeply rooted in a long disconnect between human beings and their attempts to manage financial numbers. The Reckoning, reviewed in major newspapers and publications around the world, has sold more than 60,000 copies worldwide, and has been translated into five languages.
His new books include Free Market: The History of an Idea (Basic Books), an analysis of classical philosophy, natural law, history and contemporary economic culture; a history of libraries and Enlightenment (Yale University Press); and the first English edition of Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s economic writings (Anthem).
Soll has been a correspondent for the Boston Globe, and a regular contributor to the New York Times, Politico, the New Republic, PBS, Salon.com and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
He is currently meeting with political and financial leaders across the globe to promote accounting standards and financial transparency.
Recent journal and chapter publications include:
• “Jean Baptiste Colbert: Accounting and the Genesis of a State Archive in Early
Modern France,” Proceedings of the British Society, forthcoming 2017.
• “From Virtue to Surplus: Jacques Necker’s Compte Rendu (1781) and the
Origins of Modern Political Discourse,” Representations 134 (216), pp. 29-63.
• “The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition,” in Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia
Goeing, eds., For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, 2
vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 2, pp. 1019-1032.
• “Intellectual History and the History of the Book,” in Richard Whatmore and
Brian Young, eds. A Companion to Intellectual History, (Chichester: John Wiley
And Sons/Blackwell, 2016), pp. 72-82.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 2, 2012
This was the second book by Soll that I read to follow up on his MacArthur Genius Award. The book is a professional biography on Colbert, who was Louis XIV's finance minister - and his principal overall minister, although not really a Prime Minister. The premise of the book was that Colbert's impact is best understood as getting Louis XIV to institute a modern "information state" under Colbert's guidance. This makes Colbert a predecessor of modern state ministers as well as modern senior managers. Colbert did this by drawing was had been semi independent scholars and nobles into the service of the state and then to focus there work on enhancing state power in its conflicts with the parlements inside France and in diplomacy with other European states. Soll generally makes the case, although I am not sure what this adds to what we already knew about Colbert. The picture that Soll paints is filled with tensions and contradictions, most glaringly between the independent scholar and the state employee. Granting the argument, Soll shows that Colbert's achievement was unsustainable and when he died suddenly in 1683, Louis did not want to replicate Colbert's power in a single replacement. A very interesting line of thought would be to show how the collapse of the Colbert system set the state for the conflicts behind the Revolution -- which Soll starts to do. The book also has some interesting asides, such as how he tried to teach his son his system so he could take his place - which provides a model for managerial education. His discussions of the origins and adoption of double entry accounting are also very engaging.
Warning - this is an academic monograph that is thick going with lots of footnotes. It is worth the effort and was very rewarding.
Warning - this is an academic monograph that is thick going with lots of footnotes. It is worth the effort and was very rewarding.
May 30, 2015
Most of this material is WAY over my head, but the parts that I did understand appealed to the perfectionist, organizer, collector and information gatherer in me. If I had read the digital format instead, it would have been easier to look up words and follow endnotes. Some terms were so obscure that I couldn't find them on the internet such as "Ludovician" Louvre -- I know what/where the Louvre is, but what the heck does Ludovician refer to?
September 11, 2011
Biography of a coniving bureaucrat morphed into a history of data retrieval.
February 2, 2016
Well researched and organized, though I found the author repeated himself just a bit more than he needed to for clarity. A great subject nonetheless and admirably treated.
March 28, 2017
It's always so hard to review books like this because you don't really read them for enjoyment and fun. (Well, I do, but most normal people don't). It's well-written and comprehensive, and I now know more about the French state in the seventeeth century than I could possibly ever need to know.
I think one drawback of these specialized books (and this is not in anyway related to the actual quality of the book) is that you really don't appreciate them without the historical background and larger context. I was fortunate enough to have Dr. Soll as an undergraduate at Rutgers, which meant I got his version of French history from the Renaissance through the Revolution. But I'm reading this for a graduate class in which I know many of my colleagues did not have French history as undergraduates and a lot of the nuance is going to be lost of them which is a shame.
This is a really rich history of this period but it's even better when you know the entire European context. Dr. Soll does do a good job at talking about the French state before and after Colbert, but there's so much more context that just isn't appropriate for this book but important to get. Again, you're probably not picking this up without a lot of that context, but I can't be the only one who is reading the book based on it being assigned in a graduate setting. I am looking forward to giving a presentation about it. Finally all those undergraduate history classes are paying off ;)
I think one drawback of these specialized books (and this is not in anyway related to the actual quality of the book) is that you really don't appreciate them without the historical background and larger context. I was fortunate enough to have Dr. Soll as an undergraduate at Rutgers, which meant I got his version of French history from the Renaissance through the Revolution. But I'm reading this for a graduate class in which I know many of my colleagues did not have French history as undergraduates and a lot of the nuance is going to be lost of them which is a shame.
This is a really rich history of this period but it's even better when you know the entire European context. Dr. Soll does do a good job at talking about the French state before and after Colbert, but there's so much more context that just isn't appropriate for this book but important to get. Again, you're probably not picking this up without a lot of that context, but I can't be the only one who is reading the book based on it being assigned in a graduate setting. I am looking forward to giving a presentation about it. Finally all those undergraduate history classes are paying off ;)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews