The Consumer Revolution, 1650–1800 by Michael Kwass

landscape, or, as Dover frequently calls it (following Desiderius Erasmus), the copia. The “worlds of paper,” in the opening chapter, provided access to information, resulting in a deluge of new devices and practices— including print, accounting, science, and communications systems, such as the post office—that ignited similarly explosive cycles. Dover’s powerful account offers a broad and intriguingly unifying analysis of Early Modern Europe as well as an incentive for research farther afield. After all, as Dover acknowledges, the origins of paper, print, and accounting were not European. Just as Dover juxtaposes past and present, drawing comparisons based on a similar analytical (in this case, informational) lens between Europe and elsewhere should also reap rewards. But as we deploy that lens, it will also be useful to subject it to analysis. A quick scan of Dover’s bibliography indicates how information has become a keyword for contemporary history. Eisenstein’s 1979 book deploys the term 50 times in 800 pages; Dover’s does the same in the first 8 pages. Between the two, the field of history seems to have undergone its own “information revolution.” Yet, central though it may be to many contemporary studies, analysis of the concept of “information” is rare in histories, which are also not always consistent in their use. Dover sometimes elides it with and sometimes distinguishes it from “data,” “facts,” “news,” “gossip,” “observation,” “knowledge,” and “wisdom,” all of which are assumed to proliferate on paper. Dover explores the concept via metaphors of distilling, cooking, aggregation, production, commodification, abstraction, distinction, and morselization. Sometimes information seems autonomous, independent of both medium and source, and sometimes it is dependent on one or both of them. It is regularly subject to quantification, though never precisely counted. Trying to present a unified picture of information is a challenge that stretches across multiple disciplines, often as members of those disciplines pursue interdisciplinary coherence. But such coherence may never be found unless each discipline more explicitly analyzes its own assumptions.