This title offers a fascinating inquiry into Jean-Baptiste Colbert's collection of knowledge. Jean-Baptiste Colbert saw governance of the state not as the inherent ability of the king, but as a form of mechanical mastery of subjects such as medieval legal history, physics, navigation, and the price lists of nails, sails, and gunpowder. His actions at the French Royal Library managed to create a revolution in the content of civic learning. In "The Information Master", Jacob Soll explores Colbert's accomplishments, showing how the legacy of Colbert's encyclopedic tradition lies at the very center of the rise of the modern state.Soll's innovative book argues that Colbert's practice of collecting knowledge originated in Renaissance Italy, where merchants recognized the power to be gained from merging scholarship and trade. With his connection of historical literatures - regarding archives, libraries, merchant techniques, and humanist pedagogy - that have usually remained separate, Soll has created an imaginative and refreshing work.

Jacob Soll is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University and the author of Publishing The Prince: Reading and the Birth of Political Criticism, 1513-1789 (Michigan 2005). He is editor, along with Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair, of the series Cultures of Knowledge in the Early Modern World.