Europe And Its Colonial World:1400--1800:Power and Knowledge in the Age of State & Empire…

Catalog description

Informed by the age-old commonplace that knowledge is power, European states have for centuries collected extensive information about their polities, empires, and even rivals. This practice of information collection was born of the exigencies of the Renaissance city-states and later developed to aid the governance of empire in the age of conquest and colonization. The early modern period founded a number of the very archives that today still form the intellectual pillars of public policy. This course will retell the history of political modernity through the prism of the historical relationship between knowledge and power in the age of state and empire building. It will focus on the importance of information collection for the development European states and for their hallmark forms of global hegemony, while also considering the pitfalls, complexities, and unintended consequences of such a practice for the very centralization of power that they were supposed to effect.