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The Empire of Information

Published: 09/02/2026, 12:15 PM

Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate by Roopika Risam. HarperCollins, 2026. 480 pages.Buy on Bookshop.org LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today! “DATA” LITERALLY MEANS “the givens,” and Roopika Risam’s ambitious new book Data Empire, detailing the history of how information has been (and will be) used to govern human societies from 9000 BCE to 2126 CE, argues that data has indeed supplied the givens of how we live. Her subtitle is also her thesis: “The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate.” What data has been giving us is, on Risam’s account, usually pretty nasty. But there’s apparently no way of doing without the stuff. Risam begins her 11,000-year survey with prehistoric cave paintings and entertains speculations that they may have represented animal breeding cycles. Way back when, Homo sapiens was already observing, recording, and passing on useful information. “We are the data species,” Risam writes. From clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to today’s biometric databases, cultures everywhere and always have been keeping track of people and things. The earliest surviving written texts are not great epics but lists of sheep, barley, wine, and other wares to be taxed or shipped in exchange for other goods, also duly listed. The fundamental cultural technologies—reading, writing, and arithmetic—originated first as mercantile and then as legal and administrative tools. The great ancient engineering projects, such as irrigation systems to make arid land verdant, walls to protect and roads to connect, pyramids to honor the dead and ziggurats to awe the living, all were made possible by the accounting methods that tallied labor and materials. In the grand sweep of her narrative, Risam pays tribute to the scribal cultures that used their data-driven skills to create and sustain sprawling ancient empires, whether in Egypt, Peru, or China. Risam is impressed by the achievements of these civilizations but also ambivalent. Where there are empires, there is extraction and coercion. Taxes must be paid, labor conscripted, debts settled. Although ordinary people might have been grateful for the security that legal contracts and property deeds provided, security came at a price. The same deed that guaranteed land ownership might also serve as the basis for property taxes, whether in ancient Egypt or colonial New England. The land surveys made by 17th-century Dutch colonists in Suriname made the territory navigable but also earmarked which areas could turn a profit in sugar or timber. The censuses that served as the basis for allotting elected representatives to the US Congress and the rosters of citizens compiled by the Social Security Administration to grant benefits could also be used for racial categorization and invasive surveillance. Even the apparently innocuous Dewey Decimal classification of library books comes under Risam’s gimlet-eyed scrutiny: yes, it helps readers find books on the shelves, but it also smuggles in ethnocentric prejudices (more numbers assigned to Christianity than to other world religions) and subtly molds the categories that mentally parse not only books but also the world in general. Risam is a vivid writer, and she has a gift for recasting her impressive bibliography on everything from ancient Roman surveying to Soviet flirtations with cybernetics into colorful human stories. An 11,000-year history of Sumerian tables and Excel spreadsheets, Indian sampling techniques and Stalinist production quotas could easily have turned into a mind-numbing march of, well, data. Risam instead zooms in on a named person rescued from the records to show how various data regimes shaped lives, which is another example of the ambivalence of data: t