The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System (Cultures Of Knowledge In The Early Modern World)

"Soll tells this story in wonderfully lucid prose, and with a great gift for concision. Colbert emerges from his pages not only as the patron saint of modern bureaucrats, but as a forceful--if somewhat repellent--personality, and as another of the great early modern figures who sought to gain unprecedented knowledge of, and mastery over, the material world."
--New Republic
"With great verve, Soll recreates Colbert's institutional and intellectual ecology, his habits, and the practices he imposed upon his network of informants and analysts, his family, and even Louis XIV."
--Sophus Reinert, Harvard Business School
"The Information Master makes a major contribution to our understanding of the uses of knowledge and the mechanisms by which knowledge was harnessed by the early modern state."
--Paul Nelles, Carleton University
"The Information Master is an excellent book on a fascinating subject that is bound to attract readers from a range of historical and information-related fields: historians of early modern Europe will find in it an innovative redescription of Colbert's career, those interested in the history of libraries and archives will learn much about the political and cultural forces that shaped these information institutions in early modern Europe, and information
historians will derive profit from Soll's many insights into the workings of Colbert's information-saturated administrative régime."
--Thomas Dousa, University of Illinois