Bookworm #73 – Author Conversation with Asheesh Kapur Siddique “The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World”

Asheesh Kapur Siddique is an assistant professor in the Department of History at UMass Amherst. He is a historian of early America, early modern Europe, and the British Empire whose research and pedagogy explore the role of collecting, managing, and using knowledge of the history of state formation and governance.  Professor Siddique’s first book, The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World explores how modern data-driven government emerged out of the information order of the early modern state. It examines the central role of archives in the construction of the early modern British empire across the world in the 17th and 18th centuries, and how encounters with cultural differences transformed the relationship between power and information.