The Specter of the State: Archives and Political Practice in Early Modern Britain

FAIN: FEL-262384-19

Nicholas Popper
College of William and Mary (Williamsburg, VA 23186-0002)

Preparation of a book on the creation of government archives in 16th-century Britain and their transformative influence on the development of the state in the 17th and 18th centuries.

My project investigates the emergence of collecting and manipulating texts as the dominant method of creating political expertise in Britain from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. I argue that the practices public and private figures used to amass and mobilize their collections created an environment flooded by tides of paper, and that efforts to navigate this context spurred significant transformations in statecraft, the relationship between state and subjects, and the ways that individuals viewed their distance from political configurations in the past. The archive thus emerges as a privileged space of knowledge formation in early modernity, one whose rise heralded epochal transformations in both political and intellectual spheres.