The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)

Asheesh Kapur Siddique

ISBN 10: 0300267711 / ISBN 13: 9780300267716

Published by Yale University Press 2024-10-22, 2024

About this Item

Brand new book, sourced directly from publisher. Dispatch time is 24-48 hours from our warehouse. Book will be sent in robust, secure packaging to ensure it reaches you securely.

Seller Inventory # 6666-GRD-9780300267716

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World (The Lewis Walpole Series in Eighteenth-Century Culture and History)
• Publisher: Yale University Press 2024-10-22
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0300267711
• ISBN 13: 9780300267716
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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.