Information

A Historical Companion

Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony Grafton, Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Anthony Grafton

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691209746
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A landmark history that traces the creation, management, and sharing of information through six centuries Thanks to modern technological advances, we now enjoy seemingly unlimited access to information. Yet how did information become so central to our everyday lives, and how did its processing and storage make our data-driven era possible? This volume is the first to consider these questions in comprehensive detail, tracing the global emergence of information practices, technologies, and more, from the premodern era to the present. With entries spanning archivists to algorithms and scribes to surveilling, this is the ultimate reference on how information has shaped and been shaped by societies.Written by an international team of experts, the book's inspired and original long- and short-form contributions reconstruct the rise of human approaches to creating, managing, and sharing facts and knowledge. Thirteen full-length chapters discuss the role of information in pivotal epochs and regions, with chief emphasis on Europe and North America, but also substantive treatment of other parts of the world as well as current global interconnections. More than 100 alphabetical entries follow, focusing on specific tools, methods, and concepts—from ancient coins to the office memo, and censorship to plagiarism. The result is a wide-ranging, deeply immersive collection that will appeal to anyone drawn to the story behind our modern mania for an informed existence.

• Tells the story of information's rise from 1450 through to today
• Covers a range of eras and regions, including the medieval Islamic world, late imperial East Asia, early modern and modern Europe, and modern North America
• Includes 100 concise articles on wide-ranging topics:

• Concepts: data, intellectual property, privacy
• Formats and genres: books, databases, maps, newspapers, scrolls and rolls, social media
• People: archivists, diplomats and spies, readers, secretaries, teachers
• Practices: censorship, forecasting, learning, political reporting, translating
• Processes: digitization, quantification, storage and search
• Systems: bureaucracy, platforms, telecommunications
• Technologies: cameras, computers, lithography

• Provides an informative glossary, suggested further reading (a short bibliography accompanies each entry), and a detailed index
• Written by an international team of notable contributors, including Jeremy Adelman, Lorraine Daston, Devin Fitzgerald, John-Paul Ghobrial, Lisa Gitelman, Earle Havens, Randolph C. Head, Niv Horesh, Sarah Igo, Richard R. John, Lauren Kassell, Pamela Long, Erin McGuirl, David McKitterick, Elias Muhanna, Thomas S. Mullaney, Carla Nappi, Craig Robertson, Daniel Rosenberg, Neil Safier, Haun Saussy, Will Slauter, Jacob Soll, Heidi Tworek, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alexandra Walsham, and many more.

PART ONE

1

PREMODERN REGIMES AND PRACTICES

On the sixth of November 1492, Christopher Columbus was exploring Cuba. In his journal, he recorded what the native inhabitants told him: information that filled him with excitement. They “said, by signs,” that he could find plenty of cinnamon and pepper—samples of which he had brought and showed them—nearby. A couple of days before, old men had reported that locals wore gold “on their necks, ears, arms, and legs, as well as pearls.” True, he also learned that “far away, there were men with one eye, and others with dogs’ noses who were cannibals, and that when they captured an enemy, they beheaded him and drank his blood, and cut off his private parts.” Even this unpromising report did not dismay Columbus. On the contrary, it confirmed what he had believed and hoped since he reached land in October: that he had arrived, by traveling west across the Atlantic, at the Indies, near China, “the land of the great Cham.”

Columbus knew where he was: at or near the eastern sources of the two great sets of trade routes that brought luxuries from the East to Latin Christendom and trade goods and money from Latin Christendom to the East: the Silk Road and the Spice Route. Both had functioned, more or less regularly, since the early centuries of the Common Era. Both had generated wealth for those who created silk and harvested spices to sell and for the numerous intermediaries who brought them to market. And both had been the sources of information of many kinds, about everything from distant lands to the properties of foods and spices. But both routes had been disrupted, in the thirteenth century and after, by the rise of Mongol power in the steppes of central Asia. In Columbus’s day, both were dominated by Muslim merchants and powers, whom most Christians regarded as enemies—but from whom they bought, indirectly or directly, glossy consumer goods. When he heard tales of gold, pearls, and monsters in his vicinity, he knew he had arrived at the source of luxuries of many kinds. Immediately he inferred that he could enrich his masters, the Catholic Kings, both by eliminating middlemen and by domesticating the natives and putting them to productive work.

Columbus was wrong, of course, about the geographical facts. He was in the Caribbean, not the Pacific, the very existence of which was unknown to him and all other Europeans. And the local knowledge that he gleaned from the Cubans proved inaccurate as well. Accounts of gold, pearls, and spices in Cuba turned out to be greatly exaggerated. Investigation—as Columbus later informed the Catholic Kings—turned up no men of monstrous form. This comes as no great surprise, since Columbus seems to have extracted these reports from the signs made by Cubans with whom he shared no language. Yet he had some reason to think as he did. An imaginary map of the world and its resources had formed over the centuries, as sailors and travelers told, and later wrote, tales. Monsters appeared on it, at the far end—from a European perspective—of the world, next to the lands from which silks and pepper were imported to Europe. These ancient images hung before Columbus’s eyes and shaped and colored what he saw.

After Columbus, travel—and the collection of information about the world—underwent a transformation. The Catholic Kings established permanent colonies and trade networks. They sponsored continuing, systematic collection of information, recorded and transmitted by pilots with formal training and credentials and military commanders with royal commissions. They and their rivals worked with sailors, merchants, and soldiers to begin the process that historians refer to as globalization: the uniting of the globe by institutions, sometimes paper thin but still constructed for the long term (Ghobrial, chap. 5).

Information travels: it moves, often unpredictably, with the people or the mediums that carry it. Information matters: states need reliable ways to collect, store, and access information and to provide it to their subjects, and merchants and bankers need it to serve their customers and outwit their rivals. Information abides: so long as its owners also possess a medium that can store it. This chapter sketches three histories of information. It follows the trading routes that brought luxuries from China and India across the world. It re-creates the information regimes that were created to govern the Roman Empire. And it examines the history of paper, a single medium for writing that had a powerful impact. The result will not be a survey but a sketch map of some of the ways in which information was collected and stored, transmitted and accessed, before the full process of globalization began.

SILK ROAD AND SPICE ROUTE

Exchange of goods and ideas is as old as human settlement. By 3000 BCE, caravans connected cities and markets across the Fertile Crescent and beyond. But the forms of trade that took shape early in the Common Era—and that eventually connected two great but distant empires, China and Rome—differed in scale, as well as distance covered, from anything that had preceded them. In the third century BCE, the Qin dynasty, based in the wealthy state of the same name, conquered the other six Warring States and created a unified government with a powerful military and civil service. It and its successor, the Han dynasty, ruled from 221 BCE to 220 CE. Always confronted by the necessity of feeding their large population, China’s rulers had to encourage agriculture. To do so it was necessary to protect their farmers from the Xiongnu, horse-riding nomad archers who lived on the steppes to their north and defeated them in 200 CE. Early military expeditions were unsuccessful. Gradually, it became clear that the silk that the Chinese had learned to produce, in the Yangtze valley and elsewhere, was unique and desirable. The heavier and more complex brocades, produced by specialists for the imperial court, were reserved for the Chinese elite. But farming families also cultivated mulberry trees, grew silkworms, and produced thin, simple silks, with which they paid their taxes to the state. These silks, the Chinese found, could be traded to the nomads of the steppes in return for horses, which they needed for agriculture. The Han extended the walls that protected China from the nomads. But they also pierced them with gates, which in turn became the centers of trading stations. From these sprang the immense trade network conventionally called the Silk Road.

Across Eurasia, meanwhile, Rome developed great military power, which enabled it to defeat the trading power Carthage in the third and second centuries BCE. In the next century, Rome conquered Gaul and Britain, establishing farms and founding new cities, and took Egypt, which had been ruled since the time of Alexander by a Greek-speaking dynasty, the Ptolemies. Roman rule stretched from North Africa to Gaul and from Syria to Britain. New cities were founded, and older Greek cities prospered under imperial authority. As the elite of aristocrats and entrepreneurs who dominated Rome under the emperors became wealthier and wealthier, new luxuries, arriving from China and elsewhere in the East, found an eager market. Silk shocked Roman traditionalists, who complained that dresses made from it were immodest. But it became fashionable nonetheless. Roman merchants began to look for larger supplies. Fleets sailed from Alexandria to the eastern Mediterranean. Others traveled down the Nile and across land to the Red Sea coast, from where they could sail to India in search of silk and other goods.

Contacts between Rome and China were not direct. Intermediaries ruled the thousands of miles of territory between them. Alexander the Great’s expedition from Persia across Afghanistan and the Hindu Kush in the fourth century BCE did not extend his empire to the ends of the earth, as he may have hoped it would. But it transformed much of the world nonetheless. Alexander’s conquest of Persia and looting of the immense royal treasury spread precious materials through the known world, making possible the creation of more coined money than had ever existed before. His hard-fought journey to India and back proved in the most dramatic possible way that large numbers of people and animals could move from the Mediterranean to Asia. The Greek-speaking cities that he founded across central Asia and the spread of the Greek language and Greek styles in art and religion, finally, brought lands and peoples that had previously existed in separation into contact with one another—contact that became more intense and regular as his successors invested in massive port facilities that supported trade.

Other intermediaries, equally vital, worked on a more local level. In the first century BCE the Yuezhi, another nation of steppe-dwelling nomads, founded the Kushan Empire in Bactria and India. They created cities modeled, in their layout and architecture, on those of the Greek world. Trade generated new forms of settlement, and these, in turn, perpetuated the trade. Caravan routes developed, which came to dominate central Asian trade. They also sponsored the growth of what became a new brand of Buddhist religion: one centered on monasteries, gifts to which were strongly encouraged, and which soon collected massive endowments. Further west, the Nabateans—an Arab people who lived in northern Arabia and the Levant—engineered water systems that enabled them to settle in the desert. They built caravan cities, whose traders moved silk into Parthian and Roman territory, and ports. Though the Nabateans were conquered by the Romans, the wealth that trade generated for them enabled the creation of Petra, a city cut from the rocks of a gorge in Jordan. Sculpted façades deftly combined Greek and Roman architectural forms with local ones. By the third century the Sogdians—an Iranian people whose lands were centered on Samarkand, in modern Uzbekistan—were also actively trading along the Silk Route. They set up trading zones everywhere from the Byzantine Empire to China itself, where they settled in large numbers. These and other nations created the aggregate of trading routes that made up the Silk Road.

Meanwhile a second set of trade routes grew up—one that intersected with the first but involved maritime as well as overland trade. For centuries, the inhabitants of southern Arabia—Arabia Felix—had tapped trees that flourished in their desert habitat for aromatic resins like frankincense and myrrh—the gifts that the Magi, wise men from the East, bring to the baby Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew. Employed in incense, perfumes, and medicaments, the oil from these resins came to be valued from China to Greece. Traders who used camels as their beasts of burden (since they could cross the desert on their thickly padded feet and required far less water than horses) formed caravans to carry them to Parthia and Rome. The Nabateans and other intermediaries offered vital help and shelter. As Roman sailors based in Egypt mastered the prevailing winds of the Indian Ocean, they moved back and forth between East Africa and western India, where they could exchange these precious resins and other products for the even more precious spices made in India and beyond: pepper above all.

The silk and spice trades linked China, Rome, and many lands between in a complicated but effective system of exchanges, one that brought gold and silver, slaves, and other products from the lands to the west and exchanged them for pepper and incense as well as fine silks. These systems were supported more by self-interest and curiosity than government policy, more by traders cooperating than by formal institutions. Yet they proved flexible and resilient. As the western Roman Empire weakened after the fourth century, the new city founded by Constantine at the meeting point of Asia and Europe, New Rome (later Constantinople), turned into one of the great entrepôts for trade in luxury goods between the edges of the world. Even the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century and after did not cut these trade routes, though they changed them in important ways. While the techniques used by traders and the sailors who transported their goods changed over time, these long-distance trade routes proved strikingly durable.

Information and its transmission were woven into these trade routes from the start. The Han emperor Wudi (147–87 BCE) called for an official to undertake an embassy to the Yuezhi, in the hope of allying with them against the Xiongnu. Only Zhang Qian, a minor official, proved willing. His embassy turned into an epic. It lasted for thirteen years, most of which he spent in captivity. He failed to make the treaty Wudi had sought. But he succeeded in something of much greater import in the long run. His reports, preserved in later Chinese histories, show that he was a sharp observer with an eye and ear for detail, who used his time in outside lands to learn an immense amount. He drew up crisp ethnographies, informative about resources, crops, and potential trading conditions.

An-si [Parthia] may be several thousand li west of the Ta-yue-chi. The people live in fixed abodes and are given to agriculture; their fields yield rice and wheat; and they make wine of grapes. Their cities and towns are like those of Ta-yuan. Several hundred small and large cities belong to it. The territory is several thousand li square; it is a very large country and is close to the K’ui-shui [Oxus]. Their market folk and merchants travel in carts and boats to the neighboring countries, perhaps several thousand li distant. They make coins of silver; the coins resemble their king’s face. Upon the death of a king the coins are changed for others on which the new king’s face is represented. They paint [rows of characters] running sideways on [stiff] leather, to serve as records. West of this country is T’iau-chï; north is An-ts’ai.

One observation in particular reveals the quality of attention that Zhang Qian brought to watching everyday life: “When I was in Ta-hia [Bactria],” he told the king, “I saw there a stick of bamboo of Kiung [Kiung-chóu in Ssï-ch’uan] and some cloth of Shu [Ssï-ch’uan]. When I asked the inhabitants of Ta-hia how they had obtained possession of these, they replied: ‘The inhabitants of our country buy them in Shon-tu [India].’ ” Wudi, impressed by the active trading systems and range of goods that Zhang Qian’s report described, tried to follow his recommendation and forge routes to India and Bactria that did not pass through the lands controlled by the steppe nomads. This enterprise failed, but Wudi extended the northern wall far to the west and founded garrisons and trading posts. As trade expanded, the Chinese obtained Indian spices and cloth, Roman glass, and other exotic trade goods—as well as further knowledge about the kingdoms that produced them. Information made the Silk Road.

It also traveled. Languages and knowledge of languages expanded. Chinese, for example, rapidly became a language of world trade. Trading centers became zones where several languages might be in use. Palmyra, for example, was a caravan oasis northeast of Damascus. Once Petra was conquered by Rome, Palmyra became a dominant node in the caravan routes that brought goods to and from the Persian Gulf. The city established garrisons and trading sites in other cities. Many Palmyrenes spoke Aramaic, the lingua franca of the eastern Mediterranean, and wrote it in a distinctive alphabet. Others used Arabic, and still others were conversant in Greek and the Iranian language of the Parthians. In Dunhuang, a city of some thirty thousand inhabitants near the border with Tibet, forty thousand surviving scrolls reveal that the languages used there included Tibetan, Sanskrit, Chinese, Sogdian—and, as attested by one scroll, Hebrew. In this small but cosmopolitan community, as Jacob Mikanowski has written, “Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Manicheans, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews, and Chinese scribes copied Tibetan prayers that had been translated from Sanskrit by Indian monks working for Turkish khans.”

Cultural practices and styles moved as far—and as erratically—as words, transmitted by the artisans who made them, by the products that embodied them, and, above all, by missionaries and other migrants. Palmyra was constructed as a magnificent Greek city. Its main trading street ran between immense colonnades built in three stages, more than a kilometer long, supported by several hundred Corinthian columns. At its core were an agora, a theater, and a senate house. The reliefs on the sarcophagi of its wealthy inhabitants showed them reclining, like Greeks, on couches and drinking from goblets. They were following the practices of the Greek symposium, a fundamental part of social life. Yet they dedicated their main temple to Bel, a Semitic god, and—unlike the cities of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt and Syria—never developed a local culture based on the Greek language; nor did they build the gymnasium that was as central to Greek cities as the agora was. Christianity was carried all the way to China by followers of Nestorius, a fifth-century theologian; fleeing condemnation by the church council of Ephesus in 431, they established a separate church in Persia. In 781, Nestorians described the history of their church in China in a long inscription on a stele in the inland ci...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Alphabetical List of Entries
• Thematic List of Entries
• Contributors
• Part One
• Part Two
• Glossary
• Index