What is a document? What information is it understood to convey? What power does it grant? Each of these contingent questions gestures at the historical intersections between information and power. As defined by the field of information science, documents are objects socially construed to bear evidence. Scrutiny of documents originating in different historical contexts reveals the agendas and intentions of their creation. Still, whereas documents are typically presupposed to truthfully represent their subjects, these informational mediums are rarely neutral and can be subject to willful or incidental distortion, misrepresentation, or confusion. The term documentary authority therefore refers to the ways that authors—sometimes individuals, but more often institutions and especially states—pursue and obtain power through the creation and dissemination of evidentiary texts.
Historically, many global institutions claimed documentary authority through their production and circulation of texts. Among these, religious institutions, particularly Christian churches, have long made documentary claims, whether through the issuance of edicts by church authorities or by maintaining records pertaining to land and population. In devoting resources to collecting, documenting, and circulating information in order to claim power and even establish forms of governance, these institutions may be called state-like. In many historical and geographical contexts, the ability to produce, update, store, and circulate documents can be regarded as an index of governing capacity. Documents authored or commissioned by individuals to prove identity (such as notarial documents) or property (such as merchant contracts) rely on mutual acceptance but also on the backing of legal, political, or religious authority.
Documents created by or on behalf of a state are important elements of the history of political development. The documents created by governmental authorities include edicts, legal *codes, gazettes, censuses, tax registers, surveys, passports, and maps. Such documents are material instantiations of state power, describing and facilitating claims to authority over populations, institutions, and territories. States are the primary, although not the sole, social institutions that have historically possessed the organizational power and material wealth necessary to collate information pertaining to their jurisdictions and to produce documents representing these subjects. Other semi–state institutions that have claimed documentary authority through their production and circulation of texts include churches, colonial enterprises like the East India Company, and municipal and urban authorities.
In global historical terms, states that developed bureaucratic traditions usually deployed documents to political purposes. In his influential classification of modes of authority, Max Weber defined the bureaucratic “office” as constituting two equally important parts—the staff of officeholders and the documents, rules, and precedents that substantiated the workings of the office. As states develop more complex bureaucratic systems, they generate and circulate information about their laws and regulations to the subject population. Simultaneously, the multitude of offices that make up the state apparatus build archives and document the history of the state and its institutions. Both circulation and archiving are claims to legitimate authority, even as neither activity guarantees the legitimacy of such authority.
Although Weber understood bureaucratic authority to be a phenomenon of modern social organization and capitalistic development, premodern states and institutions also invoked documents to political use. Whether by using state-mandated coinage or weights and measures in commerce, paying taxes according to an officially compiled register or census, or obeying sentences meted out by an official bearing a legal handbook spelling out the laws of the land, subject populations understood the role of documents in marshaling authority. Documentary authority was particularly important to the rise and lasting power of the bureaucracy in early China. In its rise to become the first imperial power in Chinese history, in the ninth century BCE, the Qin state established weights and measures, coinage, and not only laws but specific guidance for officials charged with enforcement. In this context, documents—texts cast in bronze or inscribed on bamboo strips—became hallmarks of state power and efficiency.
The reasons that states either accumulated and safeguarded or circulated and disseminated documents likewise relate to calculations of political power. In *early modern Venice, the urban council attempted to prevent political information from circulating in public, and it hired only illiterate men to guard archives. In Tokugawa Japan, too, the shogun prohibited the open discussion of state news. In both contexts, the governing body guarded its documents to reduce public scrutiny. By contrast, the early modern English throne, eager to showcase direct communication with subjects, widely circulated royal proclamations. The central state does not always control the means of circulation, nor its result. When imperial elites exchanged state documents in Song dynasty China, they articulated shared understandings of the empire that helped perpetuate the imperial formation despite persistent existential threats.
In both Western and non-Western historical contexts, increased documentation accompanied the development of more complex bureaucratic systems. In early modern China, the population grew rapidly through both territorial conquest and agricultural prosperity. State documents supplemented the sparse manpower of the field bureaucracy to maintain imperial authority. Bureaucratic agents used documents like seals, licenses, and imperial judgments to carry out the will of the state. In fact, the assumption of field office was so closely connected to its documentary apparatus that taking up an office was called “receiving a seal.” In order to ease the pains of transmission over long distances, imperial officials corresponded using a densely layered language of quotations and set phrases. And when officials traveled to distant posts, they carried seals and texts bearing archival markers that marked these documents as pieces of an expansive bureaucratic infrastructure. Documents granted power to the bearer only so long as he or she had a legitimate relationship to the state. By specifying a purpose or agenda, documents limited the personal power of the individual.
States often closely guarded the technological processes or material elements of political documents. In early modern Europe, the growing availability of print and paper and the growth of *literacy allowed states to collect increasingly detailed information about their populations and to create and circulate ever larger numbers of documents in order to pursue their agendas. At the same time, such plentiful material and human resources could also undermine state power. By forging, altering, or otherwise misusing documents, individuals subtly disrupted the authority of the bureaucratic state. The problem of forgery and the uncertainty involved in authenticating a document, an individual’s identity, or the value of a coin are defining elements of early modern societies. In response, states pursued new administrative techniques to protect and strengthen the authority of their documents. These included seals, signatures, and dates, but also the patterned language and bureaucratic jargon that characterized state texts. Each marked state documents as official and safeguarded against forgery and misuse.
One particular *genre of document—government gazettes—helps illustrate the complexities of documentary authority for early modern polities. Early European examples of state-sponsored periodical publishing, such as the late seventeenth-century London Gazette and Gazette de France (Gazette of France), are usually treated as state media in contest with popular representations of political news, especially the newspaper. However, like its Chinese counterpart, the Peking Gazette, the London Gazette primarily published not reporting or opinions, but excerpted state documents. In East Asia, especially China, state gazettes documented state business and were meant to be read by officials of the empire and neighboring states. Once published, these documentary periodicals provided an official vantage on state business to any audience, official or not. Gazettes became particularly important for European travelers to China seeking out the documentation produced by the Chinese state, and especially how these documents portrayed the power of the monarch. In subsequent colonial endeavors, European powers established government gazettes as relatively cost-effective instruments of state authority, recounting laws, judicial decisions, and other correspondence relevant to maintaining the empire.
The publication of excerpted documents in government gazettes challenged the state’s desire to avoid forgeries but also facilitated the state’s wide circulation of texts. Visual and rhetorical elements of state documents allowed them to be received and evaluated outside the contexts of government offices. In Europe, officially sanctioned periodicals carried stamps and other marks of royal license. In China, a well-versed reader could recognize entries in the court gazette as authorized excerpts from official memoranda and imperial edicts. The interchangeable packaging of state texts in multiple documentary formats of the early modern era anticipated the mutability of format in the *digital age: when text can be copied, stripped of formatting, and restyled in infinite combinations, visual markers become less relevant than one’s understanding of genre conventions.
Although the use of documentary authority by historical states is particularly well demonstrated in the early modern era, the question of how documents relate to political power is relevant across the *longue durée of human society. Indeed, the need for authenticating markers has not been obviated by the seeming disappearance of paper documents from modern society. Digital documents are encoded with layers of authenticating information, such as the *metadata that traces the creation and modification of a document or the certificates, e-signatures, and encryption that each attest that a document is what it claims to be. Present-day examples of manipulated biometric data and *leaked emails make amply clear that documents are multivalent tools—and destroyers—of political authority. Long-standing problems of validity, representation, and legitimacy necessitate that historians and other scholars think carefully about the ways that seemingly neutral documents can be deployed and distorted in contexts of past and present.
Emily Mokros
See also archivists; bureaucracy; censorship; error; forgery; governance; inventories; libraries and catalogs; publicity/publication