Asheesh Kapur Siddique—
We live in a moment of massive transformation in the nature of information. In 2020, according to one report, users of the Internet created 64.2 zetabytes of data, a quantity greater than the “number of detectable stars in the cosmos,” a colossal increase whose origins can be traced to the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1993.1 Facilitated by technologies like satellites, smartphones, and artificial intelligence, the scale and speed of data creation seems like it may only balloon over the rest of our lifetimes—and with it, the problem of how to govern ourselves in relation to the inequalities and opportunities that the explosion of data creates.
But while much about our era of big data is indeed revolutionary, the political questions that it raises—How should information be used? Who should control it? And how should it be preserved?—are ones with which societies have long grappled. These questions attained a particular importance in Europe from the eleventh century due to a technological change no less significant than the ones we are witnessing today: the introduction of paper into Europe. Initially invented in China, paper travelled to Europe via the conduit of Islam around the eleventh century after the Moors conquered Spain. Over the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, paper emerged as the fundamental substrate which politicians, merchants, and scholars relied on to record and circulate information in governance, commerce, and learning. At the same time, governing institutions sought to preserve and control the spread of written information through the creation of archives: repositories where they collected, organized, and stored documents.
The expansion of European polities overseas from the late fifteenth century onward saw governments massively scale up their use of paper—and confront the challenge of controlling its dissemination across thousands of miles of ocean and land. These pressures were felt particularly acutely in what eventually became the largest empire in world history, the British empire. As people from the British isles from the early seventeenth century fought, traded, and settled their way to power in the Atlantic world and South Asia, administrators faced the problem of how to govern both their emigrating subjects and the non-British peoples with whom they interacted. This meant collecting information about their behavior through the technology of paper. Just as we struggle to organize, search, and control our email boxes, text messages, and app notifications, so too did these early moderns confront the attendant challenges of developing practices of collection and storage to manage the resulting information overload. And despite the best efforts of states and companies to control information, it constantly escaped their grasp, falling into the hands of their opponents and rivals who deployed it to challenge and contest ruling powers.
The history of the early modern information state offers no simple or straightforward answers to the questions that data raises for us today. But it does remind us of a crucial truth, all too readily obscured by the deluge of popular narratives glorifying technological innovation: that questions of data are inherently questions about politics—about who gets to collect, control, and use information, and the ends to which information should be put. We should resist any effort to insulate data governance from democratic processes—and having an informed perspective on the politics of data requires that we attend not just to its present, but also to its past.
As I have written elsewhere, “According to what rules should this information be gathered? How should it be used? Who should have access to it? These questions continue to preoccupy our world, much as they did the strange and remote world of the early modern British Empire. The past is at once more distant and more proximate than we may think.”2
1. “Breaking Down the Numbers: How Much Data Does the World Create Daily in 2024?,” Edge Delta, March 11, 2024, https://edgedelta.com/company/blog/how-much-data-is-created-per-day
2. Asheesh Kapur Siddique, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World, Yale University Press, 2024. p180.
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.