The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World
504
The Power of Knowledge: How Information and Technology Made the Modern World
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300198546 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 504 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE
How Information and Technology Made the Modern World
By Jeremy Black
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Jeremy BlackAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-16795-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
How we understand the world is a measure and forcing-house of intellect, but also a definition of capability, and thus power – the power to know, to analyse, and to plan and act employing both knowledge and analysis. This book will take information as a cause, measure and product of power, and show how the relationships between information, modernity and power changed, and how these changes made the modern world. This book therefore discusses the relationship between information, and its use notably to affirm and strengthen power, and the making of a modern world in which Western analytical methods and concepts based on the acquisition, analysis and flow of information have played a central role.
Information, modernity and power are porous categories, necessarily so in the case of this book to allow it to encompass the variety of working definitions by period, area and topic. Thus information covers flows of information and the media of information exchanges, such as printing presses, telegraphs and the Internet, as well as categories and uses of information. The latter are frequently discussed in terms of 'know-how, technical knowledge and scientific knowledge. These differing forms of information overlap and interact, not least as information expands and changes with use.
In a historical context, the search for, acquisition and assessment of information, and the development of information systems, throw light on the interrelated categories, issues and questions of comparative capability, the rise of empires and the eventual success of the West (Christian European civilisation) in the nineteenth century in becoming the wielder of global power and, more significantly, the dominant source of concepts and practices used there and elsewhere. Today, there is an emphasis on the extent, quantity, speed and range of information as characteristics of the present state of humanity. Great powers are now in part defined by their unprecedented information reach, notably their ability to develop and deploy space-based systems that interact in real time with Earth-users; and this unprecedented capability adds a new definition to the understanding of imperial strength. The USA dominates current capability, but the attempts of other powers and would-be powers, notably Russia, China, Japan and the European Union, to aquire and/or develop these capabilities are notable.
The very definition of criteria and values of power was bound up in the rise of the West, as was that of the criteria and values of information and its classification. Existing and, even more, increasing knowledge of the outside world led to pressure on the existing typologies and analyses by which information was understood, acquired, organised, presented and utilised. A classic Western assessment took the form of cartography (mapmaking). In 1973, the International Cartographic Association defined a map as a representation, normally to scale and on a flat medium, of a selection of material or abstract features on, or in relation to, the surface of the earth or a celestial body'. Such a definition consigns non-scale maps to a second-class status, an approach that underrates non-Western cartographic traditions.
The World Question
Accounts of the rise of the West frequently offer teleology and, sometimes, triumphalism or, worse, determinism. In contrast, to take the 'realist' side, there is a need to understand the potential of non-Western empires into and in the eighteenth century, and, in the case of China and Burma, into the early nineteenth. This point leads to an assessment favouring the idea that (in information and power) the West gained a relative advantage that it was able to use successfully only relatively late and, then, with a sharp divergence from non-Western capability. This divergence was heavily dependent on contingent factors, notably those responsible for the rise of Britain's global power, as well as the particular political problems of China in the nineteenth century. Moreover, the very period of divergence saw an attempt by non-Western powers to close the gap, especially so in the case of Japan, which in 1904–5 was able to defeat Russia.
A focus on a relatively late divergence is different from the more conventional alternative of a process of steady divergence between West and non-West from the fifteenth century. The latter period was nevertheless significant as the age of the Western Renaissance, of mapping employing a rectangular grid, of the spread of printing using movable metal type and a press, of Western 'new monarchies', and of successful Western voyages of exploration to the Americas and South Asia.
Chronology is not the sole issue. In addition, as an instance of the presentism that is so potent in history, at once in the past and accounts of the past, any discussion of the causes of the rise of the West can lead to vexed controversy. The response to Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest (London, 2011), a somewhat congratulatory account of this rise, amply illustrated this point. Clear-cut accounts of Western proficiency invite critical debate, indeed hostile discussion, and notably in the present context. These accounts are held to reflect unwelcome and misleading ideas about Western cultural superiority.
Part of the problem in this debate is the belief that responsibility for the present and, separately, the prognosis for the future can be established by allocating blame for the past. In practice, linkages between past, present and future are more problematic and less clear-cut than such a practice suggests. However, interpretations emphasising cultural causes of developments do tend to place a stress on deep history, notably because of the tendency to take an essentialist view of culture.
Two recent issues have pushed this question of the validity of deep history to the fore. First is the relative (not absolute) decline of the West vis-à-vis East Asian societies, an issue that emerged with the rise of Japan from the 1960s and, more clearly, with that of China from the 1990s. Second is the supposed 'clash of civilisations' between the West and Islam, a theme of Samuel Huntington's problematic book of that name. Both issues are important in the modern world, although, despite assertions to the contrary, they are not necessarily the central themes of human development, and certainly not in comparison with the rapid and unprecedented rise in the world's population, which reached seven billion in late 2011 and is projected to rise by another billion in the next eleven years.
The extent to which topics of current concern can be profitably discussed in terms of developments centuries ago is unclear, and there is certainly no fixed relationship between past and present. For example, the modern, international, capitalist, democratic, widely trading character of Japan today was scarcely prefigured by the isolated Japanese state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, although values have been traced from one to the other, this process has also been contested. Nor does a largely rural Middle East, under Ottoman (Turkish) imperial rule from the 1510s to the 1910s, viewed in a context, from the late seventeenth century, of expanding rival empires, necessarily provide much guidance to the urban, overcrowded, self-determining and quasi-democratic region of today, although there are significant links in terms of the difficulties of establishing and sustaining a viable civil politics.
Similarly, to focus on the subject of information, linking the geocoding of the current GIS (Geographical Information System) used for surveillance and cruise missiles with the earlier assignment of formalised street addresses, allowing individuals to be located, is to join very differing contexts and purposes of information. At the same time, in both instances there is a common theme of power, and it is not automatically helpful to differentiate the uses of power between states from those within them.
Despite real or apparent discontinuities in these and other cases, there is nevertheless a chronological coherence to the issue of modern power thanks to the very theme of Western potency, albeit a coherence that is very rough at the chronological, geographical and thematic edges. This potency was scarcely a question for much of the world's population prior to the sixteenth century but, thereafter, there was a growing awareness of Western power and, in some circumstances, a need to react to it. If the history of China in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does not revolve around this impact, nevertheless there were Western traders in Macao from the 1520s and Western bases on Taiwan in the seventeenth century (until 1662). Although defeated there by the Chinese in the mid-1680s, the Russians had advanced into the Amur Valley, and they remained on the Sea of Okhotsk and in eastern Siberia.
More profoundly, Western developments in theoretical and applied science in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries were not matched elsewhere. These developments certainly owed much to origins in earlier non-Western achievements, notably Islamic mathematics and the major contributions of Islamic scientists between the ninth and eleventh centuries, especially under the patronage of the Baghdad-based Abbasid caliphs. The Islamic world proved important to the transmission of the intellectual world of Classical Greece. The closure of the School of Athens in 529 by the Byzantine emperor Justinian reflected a concern about the heretical consequences of Aristotelian thought. However, the tradition continued in Sasanid Persia (224–642), an empire that included Baghdad and much of modern Iran, before influencing the Muslim Abbasid empire after the Sasanids were overthrown by Arab invaders. Many of Aristotle's (384–322 BCE) works were translated into Arabic there in the early ninth century, as were other Classical works, such as those of the Greek medical writer Galen (c. 130–201). Moreover, there were important advances in science in Baghdad, including the development of experimental chemistry in the ninth century by Jabir Ibn Haiyan.
However, Muslim fundamentalism affected free thought in Baghdad from the mid-ninth century. Moreover, a similar tension was seen elsewhere: for example, in Morocco and al-Andalus (Andalusia) in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. At the same time, translations of Aristotle and other Classical writers helped ensure that the Arab world served as an important source of ideas for Western Christendom. Latin Arabists proved significant for this cultural transmission. Furthermore, influences continued. For example, Arab visual culture and optics affected the Renaissance, as in the work of Biagio Pelacani.
A focus on earlier advances in the Islamic world does not address the issue of the capabilities and human capital that the West acquired through subsequent developments and which non-Western societies failed to match. The origins of the scientific and information inputs for the current debate on global warming are notable in this context. Indeed, Western capabilities and human capital helped give shape to human history over the last half-millennium. Information was both a major aspect of these developments and the means by which knowledge of them was spread.
Moreover, information relates both to the realist discussion of what was happening, and to ideas of progress that helped shape the perception of developments and of relative capabilities. Access to material in the outside world, and to the 'news' – as category, means and content – contributed to the latter. The role of information in facilitating the spread of ideas of progress is significant for the understanding of the nature and causes of power. Information was cause and outcome, a form of knowledge, and also a social product shaped by demands, institutions and practices.
Space and Time
Recorded in a number of systems and variety of means, notably in calendrical, oral, numerical and pictorial systems, information occurred in large part in terms of a space-time matrix, which helps explain the attention in this book devoted to maps. Cartography reflected and presented both knowledge about the wider world and the way in which this information was understood. Maps therefore capture cultural assumptions about territory that were to be important to ideas and practices of appropriation, and to the shifting debates about information and power. In reflecting notions of cultural status and superiority, and resulting positionings, maps were of particular importance at a time when the West came to engage with non-Western societies across the world.
The axes of space and time were linked, not least in terms of the relationships between human and sacred space and time that for long played a major role in human assumptions, that shaped experience and that helped explain the linked significance of astronomical observation, astronomical record-keeping and calendrical systems. With similarities as well as differences, the development of history – in the modern sense of a narrative and analysis of change in human society (as opposed to an account of divine intervention) – rested in part on an understanding of the significance of time. In order to create the past as a subject, it was necessary to appreciate its separation from the present. Similarly, geography required the detachment of the human sphere from aspects of sacred space.
The separation of past from present did not have particular weight for societies that put an emphasis on cyclical theories of time, and thus on a return, in the future, to the present, and on a desire to re-create the past. This emphasis was especially the case for peoples who focused on the rhythms of the seasons which dominated agriculture, fishing and forestry, which were the activities that determined livelihoods in pre-industrial times. Even industry and trade were affected, as the water and wind energies that were crucial as power sources were changed by the turn of the seasons; as were the interplay of winds and currents, and the melting of the snows and the beginning of the growing of grass (for draught animals), which set the terms for the possibilities and timing of long-range trade by sea and land.
A materialist account, however, has its limitations. The varied interpretation of time is also a consequence of the diverse nature of creation and revival myths, and of ecclesiological accounts of time and of divine intervention. Religious accounts were of cultural weight (and remain so), and in societies that looked to the past for example and validation – societies that were reverential of, and referential to, history – this weight was of great significance. Astronomical movements of planets and of the Sun and Moon were considered in terms of journeys in the sky made by the celestial gods.
Furthermore, the interaction of human and sacred space did not generally encourage a sense of major development through human time. This interaction involved events – the works of divine providence, the actions of prophets and the activities of priests, or the malign doings of diabolical forces and their earthly intermediaries such as witches. However, this sort of 'news' was part of a religious world-view that linked past, present and future within a prospectus of essential stability.
In considering such a world-view, it is important not to counterpoint reason and religion, or human and providential history, as if these provided clear contrasts. For example, for many writers of the (Western) Classical period, such as the influential Roman historian Livy (c. 59 BCE–17 CE), in a work that ended on the upswing of the establishment of the Pax Augusta, a central problem was that of explaining failure. A common way to do so was to argue that omens, signs of divine intentions, had been ignored by humans. Conversely, success could be attributed to following the correct oracles: for example, in terms of delaying battle until the right sign was seen. However, as the Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 460–c. 400 BCE) pointed out, there were 'oracles of various kinds. Moreover, writers took different positions. The surviving sources indicate what one particular writer thought at one point in time and space, often in opposition (open or implied) to what other people at the time took for granted. Thus, Thucydides was sceptical of oracles and ironical about those who believed in them. The Greek historian Herodotus (c. 485–425 BCE), on the other hand, was a believer, and it is unclear which view was the majority one. The Old Testament's account of the history of Israel in the two Books of Kings provides another example of history explaining failures in terms of the ignoring of divine injunctions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE POWER OF KNOWLEDGE by Jeremy Black. Copyright © 2014 Jeremy Black. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Preface ix
Background
1 Introduction 3
2 A Global Perspective 28
The Early-Modern
3 The West and the Oceans 53
4 Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific Revolution 82
5 Government and Information 120
The Eighteenth Century
6 The West in the World 143
7 Enlightenment and Information 173
8 Enlightenment States? 201
The Nineteenth Century
9 Information and the New World Order 237
10 The Utilitarian View 261
11 The Bureaucratic Information State 290
To a Changing Present
12 Information and the World Question 315
13 Information Is All 337
14 A Scrutinised Society 367
Looking Ahead
15 Into the Future 397
16 Conclusions 407
Notes 413
Index 458