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We are delighted to announce that A World of Paper, by Ben S. Trotter and the late John C. Rule, has won the 2015 David H. Pinkney Prize!
The David Pinkney Prize is awarded annually by the Society for French Historical Studies for the best book on French history published by a North American scholar.
The prize was announced at the Society’s 61st Annual Conference in Colorado Springs on Friday, April 17th.
“A World of Paper is a complex investigation of the administrative reality of the foreign office under Louis XIV showing how Colbert de Torcy wielded his own authority diplomatically, politically and administratively for the sake of his monarch.” – Society for French Historical Studies 2015 David H. Pinkney Prize committee
From a recent review by Katherine McDonough in the Canadian Journal of History:
A welcome addition to the growing corpus of books on the history of information in early modern Europe, A World of Paper by the late John Rule and his former student Ben Trotter elegantly expands our under-standing of diplomacy during the reign of the Sun King. The authors ask new questions of documents in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and draw on a vast amount of scholarship on bureaucracy. Rule and Trotter use the methods of scholars like Eric Ash, James Cortada, Jacob Soll, and Cornelia Vismann to bring the study of information within the purview of diplomacy.
Questioning just what is ‘‘modern’’ about bureaucracy with the help of contingency theory, the authors analyze Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy’s foreign affairs department during the latter part of Louis XIV’s reign to show both that this ministry was highly specialized and organized by 1715 and that this system is not so different from bureaucracies of our time.
(…)
A World of Paper belongs to a new kind of political history that contextualizes leaders in their institutional contexts. If Torcy was the ‘‘information master’’ of foreign affairs, his clerks, ‘‘brain trust,’’ and countless contacts were the men who kept the flow of information moving. Combining the study of Torcy himself with his department is an approach opening up new avenues of inquiry for diplomacy scholars.
While the book has the heft of a long thesis, for teaching purposes, chapters could fairly easily be assigned in small sets. Even with two authors, it has a unified tone and clear style. From a historiographical perspective, it is intriguing as a work that brings together research questions of two generations — the post-war historian whose career began with a traditional ‘‘great man’’ topic and a younger scholar with a more technological approach. Together, John Rule and Ben Trotter have written a book that humanizes the world of administration behind the blazing figure of the king. They bring into the light the monarch’s delegation of responsibility as well as Torcy’s reliance on clerks.
A WORLD OF PAPER: Louis XIV, Colbert de Torcy, and the Rise of the Information State
By John C. Rule and Ben S. Trotter
How the administrative personnel in Louis XIV’s foreign office developed innovative structures and procedures for managing the flow of information.
Historians and social scientists have long identified bureaucracy as the modern state’s foundation and the reign of France’s Louis XIV as a model for its development. A World of Paper offers a fresh interpretation of bureaucracy through a close examination of the department of the Sun King’s last foreign secretary, Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy.
Torcy, who served as foreign secretary from 1696-1715, is widely regarded as one of the most brilliant foreign ministers of the ancien régime. Building on the work of his predecessors, he fashioned a skilled team of collaborators as he managed the complex issues of war and peace during the turbulent final decades of Louis XIV’s reign. John Rule and Ben Trotter examine Torcy’s department to depict administrative structures as they emerged through the circulating stream of paper that connected his office with provincial administrators and diplomats abroad.
A remarkable reconstruction of the department of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy, this book demystifies bureaucracy and explores the ways in which the modern information state developed from his labours.
To learn more about this book, click here.
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