ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the practices that Joseph Williamson, Secretary of State under English King Charles II, devised and used to navigate global political developments. Williamson’s rise resulted from his mastery in information management. In Britain he controlled the posts, funded informants, dispatched clerks to transcribe extracts from archives, and took assiduous notes during his daily meetings; and he received regular correspondence from Europe and the assemblies of England’s Atlantic colonies, as well as reports from the institutions which managed imperial enterprises. Williamson positioned himself as an instrument of centralization overseeing the paperwork intended to elide the problem of chronological geographical distance. He created and reformed archives, circulated standardizing memoranda, regularized communication patterns within the realm, and improvised with notebooks to coordinate his information empire. But credibility was only one factor with which he assessed the fidelity of incoming communications, and he trusted more the correlation between individual reports and the testimony of the archive as a whole. The reliance on the archive introduced a different kind of distance from the spatial and geographical species that his correspondence was designed to confront, a bureaucratic distance inherent in paperwork that would come to shape England’s imperial designs.
