Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Richard R. John, University of Illinois at Chicago

Daniel R. Headrick is an eminent historian of technology best known for his illuminating explorations of the technological preconditions for European imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. By highlighting the dependence of British and French imperialists on a panoply of technical advances such as quinine, steamboats, and electric telegraphy, he has recast European imperialism as a technological as well as a political project. In When Information Came of Age, Headrick shifts his focus to the transformation of information technology in Europe, British North America, and the United States between 1700 and 1850. The purpose of the book, as the author explains in his preface, is to introduce the concept of "information systems" (p. vii) as a tool of historical analysis. By information systems, he means the "methods and techniques by which people organize and manage information" as distinct from the "content of the information itself" (p. 4). Long before the "great push" to mechanize information during the mid-nineteenth century, statesmen, scientists, and learned men and women devised the "efficient information systems" (p. v) that today play such a major role in commerce, politics, and culture.	1
To illustrate his thesis, Headrick surveys technical developments in scientific classificatory schemes, statistics, maps and graphs, dictionaries and encyclopedias, and postal and telegraphic systems. He prefaces his argument with the deceptively simple proposition that the present-day "information revolution" has deep historical roots. How this revolution originated is not Headrick's concern: information ages, he believes, are as old as humankind. Yet not all information ages are alike. Not until the eighteenth century, he contends, did there emerge a constellation of information systems to organize, transform, display, store, and communicate data in a deliberate way. The initial impetus for these "technologies of knowledge" was the prior dawning in the seventeenth century of a "culture of information systems" (pp. 4, vii). Headrick's emphasis on cultural preconditions distinguishes his work from the many historians of technology who focus on the invention and diffusion of new technologies. Like recent students of consumer culture, Headrick regards the supply of a new technology as less significant than the demand for its use. Like Richard D. Brown—whose knowledge Is Power (1989) and The Strength of a People (1996) document a similar transformation—Headrick is mindful that widespread public interest in access to information is a relatively recent phenomenon. At bottom, Headrick's information revolution is a cultural shift that manifested itself in "increasing interest in information of all sorts" (p. 217). Yet to a greater extent than Brown, Headrick demonstrates how new attitudes toward information became embedded in systems that themselves became agents of change. Information systems persist, Headrick contends, echoing a conclusion that Thomas P. Hughes, in American Genesis: A Century of Innovation and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870–1970 (1989), has reached for technical systems of all kinds, long after the initial cultural impulse that set them in motion.	2
For Headrick, the most important cultural catalysts for the establishment of information systems were the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Both were spurred, in turn, by population increase and the American and French Revolutions. Of special importance was the novel idea that governments were supposed to be enlightened—that they had an obligation to protect and nurture, not just the sovereign, but the entire population. Once it became accepted that the inhabitants of a particular territory should be represented in the political process, public officials found it necessary to gather unprecedented amounts of information about them and to disseminate it broadly. In the process, statistics, new forms of visual representation, and modern communication networks were born.	. . .