Knowledge for What?

It is so common these days to proclaim knowledge a defining element of modernity that it is hard to know how one might go about writing its history. Was there ever a time when knowledge was not vitally important? If not, how can we explain its rise? For historians, questions of this kind are a mixed blessing. On the positive side, it is now professionally respectable, and even au courant, to write about a host of knowledge-related topics that historians once derided as unimportant or uninteresting. On the negative side, it has become relatively easy for historians to cobble together—and to find publishers for—books of varying quality that purport to chart the genealogy of the information age.

Jeremy Black’s Power of Knowledge is one of several books published by prestigious presses in the last few years that take the history of knowledge as its theme. It is not focused primarily on North America—the specific focus of this journal—though it does include in its later chapters a fair amount of material about knowledge-related innovations that have originated in the United States, mostly since the Second World War. Rather, it is intended as a survey of notable innovations in information technology (with a special focus on cartography) that have proved influential primarily in the West (albeit with some reference to East Asia) since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century.

Perhaps the best way to approach Power of Knowledge is to clarify what it is not. To begin with, it is not—and from this reviewer’s point of view, thankfully so—yet another neo-Foucauldian disquisition on “capillary power.” If you are looking for a Foucauldian history of knowledge, Power of Knowledge is not going to be your cup of tea. Power of Knowledge is also not a social history of the social practices that have shaped knowledge-making. Readers interested in these social practices would be well advised to consult Peter Burke’s two-volume Social History of Knowledge, a wide-ranging, erudite, and at times encyclopedic social history of knowledge from the invention of the printing press to the present.¹ And if you are interested specifically in knowledge-related social practices in early America, a topic mostly ignored by Black (which is, of course, not really surprising in a book of this scope), you might want to dust off your library’s copy of Richard D. Brown’s Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989).

Black’s Power of Knowledge will prove equally disappointing to historians with a social-scientific bent. To be specific, it is not an analytical history of the rise of the “knowledge economy.” It this is what you seek, and you can stomach social-scientific prose, you can find much that is rewarding in Joel Mokyr’s Gift of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002). Black’s book is also, and for similar reason, likely to disappoint readers whose primary interest lies at the intersection of knowledge and social reform, a topic that Americanists in recent years have written about with great elan.²

Some RAH readers may well guess that Power of Knowledge is precisely the kind of book they can safely assign to undergraduates before they read it themselves, since it is written by a prolific and well-respected author and that, whatever its shortcomings, it is certain, by virtue of the sheer magnitude of its ambition, to be full of ideas that students will find intriguing. It is my burden to try to convince these readers to resist this temptation—until, at least, you have read the book yourself.

If you don’t have the time to read over the summer every new book that you plan to assign in the upcoming year and are looking for a brief, stimulating, and highly engaging survey of the history of knowledge in the West (and other parts of the...