"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.
Author
Jacob 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 a Dream (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. Soll 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.
