An epic attempt at data gathering

Using data to control people is nothing new. A digital humanities professor attempts to show how data has been used from pre-history to modern times to control empires

Data Empire: How Information Shaped Human History

By Roopika Risam

Published by Penguin Random House

341 pages ₹1,299 

Roopika Risam’s book is an ambitious attempt to put together the entire history of data gathering and record keeping, detailing the information the data reveals, and then explain how this data and information was used to control and build empires, plan trade, build businesses, travel the world — but most often to control and organise societies and kingdoms. 

It is a sweeping account, beginning with how early humans used cave paintings and incisions on animal bones to record data and information for deducing the best times to hunt, seasons, and possibly even women’s menstrual cycles. It moves through accounts of the earliest known civilisations in Sumer and Akkad, crosses the seas to study China’s Qin era, meanders through the Hellenistic city-states of Greece and the Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt, examines ancient India and keeps jumping from geography to geography, kingdom to kingdom, era to era. It examines the medieval and modern eras across the globe before reaching the present-day data generation and developments in the final section of the book. She looks at record keeping as it evolved from etchings on bones to fabric and clay tablets, papyrus reeds until it reached the modern era of Bits and Bytes.

The author, a professor of digital humanities and social engagement at Dartmouth, almost pulls it off but unfortunately fails for a few reasons. 

One issue is that the author chose to cover a timeline from pre-history to 2026. Her secondary research is impressive, as seen from the references at the end of the volume. But a time span so vast is impossible to cover properly in a mere 341 pages — it would have required a multi-part encyclopedia to do proper justice. The current volume skims the surface of each era and then jumps to the next. 

Another problem is the writing style — using vivid imagination and imagery to start chapters and build a narration more suited for historical fiction than a serious book for scholars or even general readers. The narrative style is novel initially but soon starts grating. 

More problematic is the fact that, despite her impressive research, she sometimes passes off apocryphal stories and myths as factual statements. Early in the book, Dr Risam infers that the turning point in evolutionary history came only when the earliest humans learnt to create, collect, store, and transmit information and data through generations. She states that not even the Neanderthals knew how to do so. Yet, way back in 2021, archaeological finds suggested that Neanderthals used etchings on bones to keep a record. Recent archaeological research has shown that Neanderthals were far more intelligent than originally assumed and that our evolutionary history is more complicated than initially thought. 

Then, examining Kautilya’s insights and the systems he pioneered while helping Chandragupta overthrow the Nanda kingdom, Dr Risam narrates stories for which there is no authentic historical record, though the apocryphal story of Kautilya realising how the mighty Nanda kingdom could be attacked through its peripheral territories after observing a boy eating rotis has been passed down over generations as lore. But then, Dr Risam does express admiration for how ancient Indian scholars passed down knowledge through generations via chants that were painstakingly memorised. 

The final section — the modern development and usage of data — is perhaps the weakest. Dr Risam rushes through a topic that requires serious thinking and analysis. This section is perhaps best described as a synopsis of data development, transmission, analysis and usage in the past five or six decades. The final chapter — the future as Dr Risam envisages it as the world moves from 2026 to 2126 — is almost like something out of the Terminator and Matrix franchises. 

Dr Risam does try to balance things by also looking at how data aided progress but, by and large, one gets the feeling that she has not gone out of her way to examine the progress to which data and analysis have led. Data has been used for many bad outcomes (by bad governments and businessmen) but it has also helped us achieve great things in many ways, especially in research on medicine, agricultural, industrial productivity and other areas. Some of these are mentioned in the book but take a back seat to the main narrative thread. 

There are glimpses where one genuinely grasps what the author is trying to convey. For example, an anecdote where she discovered that she was not seen as a US citizen in one database because it had not yet talked to (and reconciled with) a regional database. That some effort (and money) was required before the databases matched is something most of us in India will immediately visualise after the Special Intensive Revision exercise conducted by the Election Commission left many people wondering how to reconcile data or prove that they have been voting for several decades. 

Eventually, the book ends up as a disappointment because it promises a lot more than it fulfils.

The reviewer, former editor of Businessworld and Business Today magazines, is author of Will India Get Rich Before It Turns 100? A Reality Check, Aleph, 2024