History has offered much to the discipline of law: validation, explanation, counterfactual suggestion, opportunities for revisionist retelling. In the book Information: A Historical Companion, history is offered instead in companionship. That is, legal scholars – perhaps especially legal scholars interested in intellectual property and media law, bureaucracy, globalisation, governmental administration, evidence, technologies of imperial and colonial rule, and/or information capitalism – are offered a range of historical entry points and historically inflected exegeses with which to engage in fruitful digression from the ordinary course of their work. Reading through its pages is something like sitting with a friendly, learned uncle or aunt with deep knowledge on all sorts of topics that one did not realise one wanted or needed to know about until the conversation began. It is hard to predict what new resources for investigation such a book might afford legal scholarly readers beyond speculating that they may be many; much will depend on readers’ particular curiosities and affinities.
In its over 900 pages (comprised of thirteen historical essays; 101 shorter, alphabetized entries; a seven-page glossary; and a detailed index), this book does not present a singular, streamlined account of what information means or how history might explain the informational present. (Indeed, the editors take appreciative note of Chaim Zins’ 2007 cataloguing of 130 distinct notions of the term ‘information’ in their introduction (p. x)). Rather, this book’s 107 contributors offer legal scholars a composite ‘history through the lens of information’ and multiple apertures through which to view ‘information through the lens of history’ (p. vii). They do so with an initial focus on the early modern period in Europe, East Asia and the Islamic World and attention to various manifestations and iterations of globalisation from the ninth to the twenty-first centuries.
Its richness notwithstanding, one direction in which the book could encourage legal researchers is towards fuller investigation of the material conditions and media of governance. In devoting relatively little space (only two of the thirteen long essays and a minority of the alphabetized entries) to information and communication technologies of computation, the book reminds readers of the significance for legality and regulation of technologies of paper, printing, and standardized documentation (such as passports and migration application forms) as developed or taken up in different parts of the world at various times. Also, while the book abounds in studies of paperwork, Randolph C. Head, in his chapter on ‘Records, Secretaries, and the European Information State, Circa 1400–1700’, stresses (p. 122) the importance of ‘nontextual informational processes’ including visual and ceremonial media. Khipus are illustrative: multi-coloured threads recording information that ‘represent one of the longest-lasting Native American forms of inscription’ used to encode economic and accounting data, historical narratives and poetry (p. 534).
One exemplary story of information media shaping governance is of the London bills of mortality in which monarchical and city authorities tallied christenings and burials in each parish on a weekly basis. In the chapter ‘Periodicals and the Commercialization of Information in the Early Modern Era’, Will Slauter recounts (p. 133) how the leaking of these bills to the public from the late sixteenth century onwards prompted the monarchy to confer a royal charter on the Worshipful Company of Parish Clerks in the early seventeenth century. This charged them with delivering mortality bills to the authorities on a weekly basis and afforded them exclusive right to sell such bills to the public. The clerks in turn relied on members of the community known as searchers – ‘usually elderly women supported by the parish’ – to determine the cause of death of each person whose demise was recorded. In this instance, public and commercial appetites for proto-actuarial data were stoked by the material capacity for its collection and dissemination in periodical form which in turn created new agencies, rights and responsibilities in and around the institutions of the church.
A second line of potentially fruitful legal scholarly investigation suggested by this book concerns successive iterations of concern about disinformation, information overload, and/or fragmentation and associated practices of ranking and authentication. This book suggests that what appear to contemporary scholars as novel legal dilemmas (those associated with the advent of social media, ‘fake news’, the blockchain, or recent recourse to governance-by-indicator for instance) may have recurred in some form across many iterations of governance ‘crisis’. For example, Devin Fitzgerald and Carla Nappi, co-authors of the chapter on ‘Information in Early Modern East Asia’ quote the sixteenth century Ming official Lu Kun worrying that ‘[m]ethods of governance are in decline because of the flood of written text; the disaster has come from the overabundance of registers’ (p. 48). Later, Fitzgerald and Nappi describe government officials of the Qing dynasty ascribing different ‘importance ratings’ to counties throughout the empire on the basis of their governability ‘for the sake of good government’ and ‘to the benefit of local administration’ (p. 51).
These are just some of the many challenges that this book poses to historical stories commonly told in legal scholarship about when and where certain disruptions or dilemmas first appeared and by whom or what they have been driven. These challenges suggestively reshape the presumed geography and timescale of ‘progress’ and ‘globalization’ with which many legal scholars work. For instance, contrary to the line taken in much legal scholarship, Heidi J. S. Tworek and Richard R. John, co-authors of a chapter on ‘Publicity, Propaganda, and Public Opinion: From the Titanic Disaster to the Hungarian Uprising’, argue that the ‘novelty of the [Atlantic] cable network is easily exaggerated’. Because of cables’ mimicry of Cunard steamships’ routes used by the British post office since 1840, and most merchants’ continued reliance on mail well into the twentieth century, telegraphic cables effected ‘really more of an incremental change than a fundamental rupture’ they argue (p. 213). Another, fascinating, retelling of the standard story of international telegraphy is offered by Thomas S. Mullaney and Lisa Gitelman in their chapter on ‘Nineteenth-Century Media Technologies’. They note that the Chinese telegraph code of 1871 (developed by a Danish professor of astronomy and a French harbourmaster) ‘plac[ed] Chinese script in a position of structurally embedded inequality’ within telegraphic transmission protocols relative to alphabetic and syllabic scripts (p. 180). These, and other micro and macro re-orderings staged in the book throw off centre many familiar narratives of global convergence, hierarchy, innovation and change that legal scholars are often inclined to reproduce.
Most obviously of interest for legal scholars may be the alphabetised entries on bureaucracy, cases (that is, the history of ‘thinking in cases’ at p. 358), censorship, documentary authority, forgery, governance, government documents, intellectual property and privacy. For example, the entry on documentary authority (p. 413), written by Emily Mokros, a historian of late imperial and modern China, is intriguing for the way it supplements the Weberian identification of standardised official documents with the rise of modern bureaucracy in Western capitalist states that is commonly reproduced in legal scholarship. Mokros does not refute this account so much as place it in a much longer time frame, or rather multiple frames. She also extends analysis of ‘documents’ into a greater range of formats than typically feature in legal studies. The latter includes, for instance, official texts cast in bronze or inscribed on bamboo strips; these helped to consolidate and extend the power of the Qin state in premodern China, she argues. Mokros’s entry shows a concern with forgery, and consequential reliance on ‘authenticating markers’ (p. 415), to have been recurrent throughout the various historical periods and jurisdictions that she canvasses. Interestingly, she contends that early modern efforts to safeguard state documents against forgery and misuse underpinned their use of ‘patterned language and bureaucratic jargon’ as well as seals, signatures and dates – measures of which she sees echoes in the encryption of digital documents (p. 415). This emphasis on documents’ ‘multivalen[ce]’ (p. 415) as key to rendering documents secure and communicable among authorised recipients runs somewhat against the grain of legal scholars’ and practitioners’ longstanding emphasis on classifying and interpreting documents to try to prevent them from ‘telling a lie’ about authorship (as in a 1948 article by the influential British scholar of criminal law, Glanville Williams, entitled ‘What is a document?’, referenced below). The rather counter-intuitive observation that communicative practices with polyvalent significance might be more authority-preserving than those generative of an impression of univalence could be interesting for legal scholars to explore given how often centralisation and fixity are presumed to be authority-consolidating in legal analysis.
In truth, though, the book’s entries on manuals, memos and notebooks contain just as much material salient for legal scholarly readers as those highlighted above. Interestingly, the book’s index contains no entry for law, rights, courts, or property (except intellectual property). It does, however, index references to copyright (and to the US and UK Copyright Acts) as well as to governance; government documents; land ownership; notaries and passports. Also indexed are references to the United Nations; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; the US Constitution; the United States Information Agency; the US Federal Communications Commission; the Licensing Act (of the UK); ‘plagiarism—Licensing Act’ and ‘plagiarism—Copyright Act’ (both referencing UK legislation) and to ‘registers—judicial’, and ‘registers—tax’. And there are glossary entries for code, copyright, fair use, libel, notary and public domain.
At a time when a new research handbook in law seems to be published every month, some legal scholarly readers might be inclined to greet another weighty, multi-author guide with indifference or exhaustion. That would, however, be a mistake. In refracting early modern transformations in governance through the lens of information, this book offers legal scholars the prospect of hugely generative research companionship.
