Data Empire The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate

"This brilliant, readable book offers a striking new historical perspective on accountants and number-crunchers, demonstrating the extent to which data has shaped and controlled people's lives across centuries and continents." -Corinne Fowler, author of Our Island Stories

"A powerful and thought-provoking deep history of data and power, essential reading for understanding the opportunities and dangers of the technological revolution now transforming our world." -Jonathan Kennedy, author of Pathogenesis

"If data is the new oil, then Roopika Risam's Data Empire can stand next to Daniel Yergin's epic history of oil, The Prize as a fascinating tale of how data slowly became the most consequential commodity in our world." -Jonathan Taplin, author of Move Fast and Break Things and The End of Reality

"Here is the new history of mankind demanded by our times. We can understand our past, going all the way back to our emergence as a species, as a struggle over data. Data used to turn into power through intermediates like money and politics, but now it does so more directly. Humanity was forced to enact reforms to make money and politics survivable. This book asks what we will do about data now that we have no choice but to do something." -Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, founder of virtual reality and author of Who Owns the Future?

"A timely and ambitious history of humanity's oldest technology: keeping track. For millennia, humans have counted and recorded the world-first with pebbles, notched bones, and cave art, later with ledgers, censuses, and now algorithms. Data Empire traces how these practices became instruments of power, shaping trade, governance, and the fate of entire populations. A compelling, highly readable account of data's often unseen influence on our lives." -Brooke N. Newman, author of The Crown's Silence

"From the earliest inscriptions, through the record-keeping of the Han dynasty and the Domesday book, to the modern world of the internet and AI, Risam demonstrates how data has both controlled and liberated us, and, in doing so, molded the human story. Breathtaking in its scope and enormously fulfilling in its depth, this book is profoundly fascinating." -Lewis Dartnell, author of Being Human

"In Data Empire, Roopika Risam retells the epic, tragic, and triumphal stories of how humans generated data to encode and organize their worlds. Risam explores information as a powerful tool, one that can help us to recover historical memories or deliver "engines of control" into the hands of Silicon Valley tech firms. From Paleolithic cave paintings to ancient shipwrecks to Mesoamerican calendars to ICE raids, Risam shows us how our society has been confronted again and again by the threat and weaponization of data. But we have a choice: we can resist and take back our data, but only if we work together." -Sarah E. Bond, author of Strike

"What if the story of data is the story of humanity? In a work of enormous erudition, Risam guides readers across continents and centuries to reach a sobering conclusion: data is us-our societies, our cultures, our futures-and we are ceding control to an unaccountable few." -Dan Bouk, author of Democracy's Data

"Roopika Risam's Data Empire offers fascinating new perspectives on data's role in classifying persons, controlling resources, and hardening hierarchies. Her captivating longue duree history-from King Sargon to cybernetics-puts record-keeping at center stage, arguing that data is not merely the residue of events, but one of its main drivers." -Frank Pasquale, author of The Black Box Society and New Laws of Robotics

"[A] brilliant history . . . Elegantly weaving scholarly research with trenchant political analysis, this is a must-read for those seeking to understand the deep history of the AI boom." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Roopika Risam has let data's story unfurl over centuries and across continents. The result is something profound, a chance to see how our current moment of LLMs and data brokers and ubiquitous surveillance sits in the bigger story of human history. This is an essential book." -Jer Thorp, author of Living in Data

"A book that promises not to just show how empires have collected and weaponized data over the ages, but also how we can resist....an easy must-read." -NPR, "15 Books Our Critics Can't Wait to Read This Summer"

"From Neolithic times to the present day, a social scientist reveals how human recordkeeping became a powerful, sometimes coercive technology for shaping human lives. . . . An expansive and sobering history of the interplay of human data, conquest, and control." -Kirkus

"The author's arguments will resonate with readers of Nexus by Yuval Noah Harari, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff, and The Power of Knowledge by Jeremy Black. . . . A sweeping and convincing argument that information undergirds power." -Library Journal

"Both a historical survey and a call to action, this work challenges readers to imagine digital resistance in a world defined by corporate and state extraction. Data Empire is essential for historians, digital humanities scholars, and social activists." -Booklist