Dissertation_A Bick_May 25 - DataSpace at Princeton University

eports from America and elsewhere that literally covered his desk. 171 In France, Colbert
assembled and meticulously organized a library of documents relating to population, geography,
trade, noble titles, and French law, and used this information to plan state policy, impose Royal
authority, and advance France's diplomatic interests. 172 In Rome, the Jesuits employed an
elaborate system of letters and questionnaires to centrally administer a vast network of missions.
In England, where gentlemen preparing for the Grand Tour were educated to gather intelligence
for the use of the Crown, the story is similar: early modern state craft demanded the effective
accumulation, organization, and use of information. 173
During the first half of the seventeenth century the States General had devised new
methods for collecting and storing information, as well, and its offices in The Hague filled with
papers and a professional staff of functionaries who managed them. 174 But the States General no
more could claim a monopoly on information than it could a monopoly on power itself.
In the absence of a single figure or central institution to which information flowed and
from which decisions emanated—the King in Spain, England, or France; the Council in Venice
and the Jesuit Curia in Rome—in the Dutch Republic the central nodes for information were the
companies themselves. 175 In the case of the VOC, information from abroad flowed back to an
army of clerks at home who organized correspondence and other records in a manner that would,
in time, permit predictions concerning the movement of prices. 176 In the case of the WIC and
171
Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice; Friedrich, “Government and Information-Management in Early
Modern Europe: The Case of the Society of Jesus (1540-1773).”
172
Soll, The information master; See also Erik Thomson, “Commerce, Law, and Erudite Culture: The Mechanics of
Theodore Godefroy’s Service to Cardinal Richelieu,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 3 (July 2007): 407–428.
173
Nicholas Popper, “Cultivating Experience in Elizabethan England: Expertise in Travel Observation, Exploration
and Political Authority,” 2009. Unpublished paper, cited with permission of the author.
174
Knevel, Het Haagse bureau.
175
Siegfried Huigen, Jan L. de Jong, and Elmer Kolfin, eds., The Dutch Trading Companies as Knowledge Networks
(Leiden: Brill, 2011).
176
Smith, “The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an
Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century,” 999–1003.
91