Roopika Risam’s new book shows how various data regimes, from clay tablets in ancient Mesopotamia to today’s biometric databases, shaped human lives.

“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: the curse of burdensome officialdom becomes a blessing for historians. In the ancient Egyptian city of Thebes, a man named Khay confronts the treasury scribe Mose in court over a land dispute: Mose has the memory of generations of his family living on the land, but Khay has a deed. In Qin China, Emperor Qin Shi Huang commissions uniform weights and measures and commands all past records burned, lest they threaten the new order. In 18th-century Mexico City, the artist Juan Rodríguez Juárez paints a family portrait to illustrate the Spanish “casta” system, which categorized every conceivable combination of Spanish, Indigenous, and African ancestry. In an abandoned Coca-Cola factory during the Great Depression, Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve as a US cabinet secretary, assembles some 2,500 federal employees to start assigning every worker a Social Security number that will guarantee them a retirement pension based on their earnings. Risam is particularly good on the material form of data: baked clay tablets incised with wedge-like cuneiform script; papyrus scrolls made from the pith of the plant stem; parchment scraped from animal skin and sewn into codices; bamboo slips carved with knives; knotted string quipus of Andean civilizations; electricity- and water-guzzling Google server banks that are the humming, blinking physical incarnation of the ethereally named “cloud.”

Risam seems to reserve her warmest admiration for cultures that don’t write down what they know. She rhapsodizes over the Indigenous women of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands who preserve their knowledge of the landscape “not on scrolls but in song, for community not conquest.” She holds up the phenomenal mnemonic feats of the Brahmin sages taught from boyhood to memorize sacred Vedic texts, literally backward and forward, as a counterexample to the claim that writing transmits information more accurately than speech. In general, she is uneasy about the ways in which data has been used to rule, control, and oppress, from ancient Mesopotamian kings’ lists to Lavender, the AI-driven database used by the Israeli Defense Forces to identify bombing targets in Gaza. She dwells upon the ways that scribes in ancient Susa converted warm family ties into cold legal obligations, or how the Atlantic trade in enslaved persons kept ledgers and took out insurance policies on their human cargo, the violence of being treated as mere property used to legitimate the violence of chains and whips. Every now and then, there are heroic individuals who manage to turn the tools of the powerful to their own ends. William Still, an Underground Railroad conductor, wrote down all the names, aliases, departure dates, and family ties of people escaping slavery, creating an invaluable source for understanding how oppressed people could take their fates into their own hands. But these happier examples are few and far between.

For the most part, the annals of data as Risam narrates them are drearily repetitive: over and over again, here, there, and everywhere, ever more elaborate data apparatuses are devised and used by a minority to exert power over a majority. According to Risam, it is no accident that 17th- and 18th-century Europeans were among the most innovative in developing new forms and uses of data: their expanding commercial and imperial empires provided them with subject peoples to try out experiments that would not have been tolerated at home. Eventually, however, those same techniques returned to haunt the hearts of empires. Methods of monitoring the productivity of enslaved workers were retooled for use in factories employing so-called free labor.

In a book that covers eons of global history, the author must rely on secondary sources, and some of her claims will inevitably raise eyebrows among specialists. More nice-minded readers may also query Risam’s broad embrace of almost anything and everything as “data,” despite a few fainthearted attempts to distinguish data from “information” and “knowledge.” Probably everyone would agree that the lading lists of ships and the personal details hoovered up by the tracking cookies on our laptops count as data, but what about medieval heraldry and the insignias of the Chaco peoples of the Colorado Plateau? Confronted with this always fascinating but sometimes bewildering heaping-up of examples, the reader may well wonder whether this already capacious history aspires to a world history of all human culture. Yet even if Risam does not always succeed in mustering all of her material into an orderly formation marching in the same direction, her brave synthesis yields crosscutting connections and comparisons that no specialized monograph could.

What exactly Risam means by the “power of information” is seldom spelled out. Perhaps this is because her book is narrated from the present-day perspective, when the power of data is all too evident to us, whether we are Chinese citizens blocked from traveling on a high-speed train because of a regime-critical media post or office workers at a high-tech firm that monitors our productivity with every keystroke. But the information gathered so assiduously by earlier regimes was not automatically efficacious in fulfilling their aims. The aim of almost all of this collecting, classifying, and storing of data was to achieve action at a distance, whether in space or in time. Far-flung empires somehow had to extend their grasp to territories too far away to pressure or police when tribute or military conscripts were due; farsighted officials sought to divine lessons from the past in order to predict and prepare for the future, from Kautilya in ancient India, author of a guide to political stratagems who makes Machiavelli look naive, to P. C. Mahalanobis in modern India, a statistician who used the country’s first mainframe computer to develop predictive economic models.

Many of the surviving archives of these data-rich polities, however, reveal how impotent data alone was to control the faraway. The 600-year record of astrometeorological observations in ancient Mesopotamia has no equal in longevity and continuity; the scribes who so scrupulously noted the positions of objects in the sky discovered the Saros cycle of lunar and solar eclipses, and some of their observations are still being used in NASA’s Five Millennium Canon of Lunar Eclipses and its solar eclipse counterpart. Yet they also created an almost equally long-lived canon of celestial portents that asserted, among other correlations, that comets presaged the death of kings—useful for ensuring the succession if true but also an invitation to mayhem if not. Censuses, tax rolls, and property deeds do not enforce themselves. Risam does occasionally acknowledge that local knowledge trumps the most accurate maps, as in the case of the Portuguese and Ottomans’ failure to dominate the Indian Ocean in the 16th-century. But too often, she veers toward granting data a life of its own. Paragraphs are punctuated with punchy summaries such as “Geometry became governance” or “Data itself was beginning to govern.” Human agency—and culpability—disappears.

Risam reaffirms human agency and responsibility for what data we have and how we use it toward the end of the book, where she brings her story up to the present moment and beyond. The stories of hopeful beginnings of benevolent data regimes crushed by greedy, autocratic forces multiply. The engineers of socialist Chile come up with an ingenious way to use real-time data about transportation flows to scupper a CIA-backed truckers’ strike, only to have Salvador Allende’s government toppled by a CIA-backed coup. The idealistic members of California’s Homebrew Computer Club meet in a Menlo Park garage to share computer expertise with anyone for free, only to be crushed by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who wants to sell everything to everyone, preferably at monopoly prices. The personal computers that were supposed to free us from the fetters forged by Big Government and Big Business now surveil us in the service of both. It sounds as if the dreary history of data is destined to continue. Risam’s own concluding words hammer home how data confers more power on the already powerful, over and over again.

Is there any escape route out of this oft-told tale of data doom loop? Risam closes with a split-view vision of our future 100 years from now, one part mildly dystopian and the other mildly utopian. The dystopian future is much like the present, only more so: instead of your phone waking you up and keeping track of your every snore, your every step, it’s the ominously named Atlas Data Corp spying on you via ubiquitous cameras, streetlamps, even your pajamas. You’re never surprised, because algorithms that know everything about your past tastes simply extrapolate them to offer you tailor-made ads and entertainment. You’re comfortable but controlled. Shift to the utopian future, and it, too, uses data for everything, but for the public, by the public. Health data is collected but not weaponized; algorithms come up with more efficient workplace solutions, but they’re subject to worker approval; grocery store produce tells you what it contains and where it comes from but lets you decide what to buy. It’s not data that makes the difference between the two futures but us. A question hovers over the book’s conclusion: after 11,000 years of being data-driven, can we now finally drive data?