Overview

How modern data-driven government originated in the creation and use of administrative archives in the British Empire Over the span of two hundred years, Great Britain established, governed, lost, and reconstructed an empire that embraced three continents and two oceanic worlds. The British ruled this empire by correlating incoming information about the conduct of subjects and aliens in imperial spaces with norms of good governance developed in London. Officials derived these norms by studying the histories of government contained in the official records of both the state and corporations and located in repositories known as archives. As the empire expanded in both the Americas and India, however, this system of political knowledge came to be regarded as inadequate in governing the non-English people who inhabited the lands over which the British asserted sovereignty. This posed a key problem for imperial officials: What kind of knowledge was required to govern an empire populated by a growing number of culturally different people? Using files, pens, and paper, the British defined the information order of the modern state as they debated answers to this question. In tracing the rise and deployment of archives in early modern British imperial rule, Asheesh Kapur Siddique uncovers the origins of our data-driven present.

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Reviews

"""This provocative and wide-ranging study shows how the early British Empire used its archives to control its diverse populations, and how the gaps and tensions this practice raised ultimately ruptured the empire and spawned an alternative, modern logic of political power.""--Nicholas Popper, author of The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain"

“This provocative and wide-ranging study shows how the early British Empire used its archives to control its diverse populations, and how the gaps and tensions this practice raised ultimately ruptured the empire and spawned an alternative, modern logic of political power.”—Nicholas Popper, author of The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain    

“This provocative and wide-ranging study shows how the early British Empire used its archives to control its diverse populations and how the gaps and tensions this practice raised ultimately ruptured the empire and spawned an alternative, modern logic of political power.”—Nicholas Popper, author of The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain “This brilliant, erudite, and pathbreaking study of imperial information management shows that the Enlightenment of knowledge was a powerful force that worked to free the mind, but was also a potent tool of repression. Siddique has emerged as one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation, and this book is essential to understanding our own challenges with information, public discourse, and the state and their origins in the colonial enterprise. Anyone interested in the history of economics, politics, and the often bewildering modern age must read Siddique’s masterwork.”—Jacob Soll, author of Free Market: The History of an Idea “Equally intricate and erudite, Siddique’s must-read account reveals the colonial archive to be far from merely a repository of historical sources and to have its own complex and contested history, one which is at the foundations of the modern British Empire, not to mention the modern information state.”—Philip J. Stern, author of Incorporated: The Corporations That Built British Colonialism

“This provocative and wide-ranging study shows how the early British Empire used its archives to control its diverse populations, and how the gaps and tensions this practice raised ultimately ruptured the empire and spawned an alternative, modern logic of political power.”—Nicholas Popper, author of The Specter of the Archive: Political Practice and the Information State in Early Modern Britain “This brilliant, erudite, and pathbreaking study of imperial information management shows that the Enlightenment of knowledge was a powerful force that worked to free the mind, but was also a potent tool of repression. Siddique has emerged as one of the most brilliant scholars of his generation, and this book is essential to understanding the origins of our own challenges with information, public discourse, the state, and its roots in the colonial enterprise. Anyone interested in the history of economics, politics, and the often bewildering modern age must read Siddique’s masterwork.”— Jacob Soll, author of Free Market: The History of an Idea   “Archives aren’t piles of paper in musty rooms. They are the physical remains of ideas and actions, providing stuff for debate and the means for decision making. By bringing the archives of imperial governance in North America and India into a single frame, Asheesh Siddique shows how practices of inscription, storage, and retrieval in such divergent places depended on the same epistemological principle: that one must make arguments and policies based on precedents. In doing so, The Archives of Empire marks a major contribution to recent scholarship on archives as a novel and ultimately defining feature of early modern governance.”—Paul Halliday, author of Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire

Author Information

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is a historian of early America, early modern Europe, and the British Empire. He lives in Northampton, MA.

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