“While everything isn’t data, data is everywhere.”
As our tech-fueled era grows more sophisticated, that statement has never been more true. Film and media studies department chair Roopika Risam foregrounds this idea in her latest book, “Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control and Dominate,” which was featured in former President Barack Obama’s 2026 summer reading list. Across 11,000 years, Risam tracks how information has consistently functioned as a means of legitimizing, expanding and determining authority — redefining data not as a contemporary innovation, but as a historical inheritance.
Though not faultless, “Data Empire” is a richly-constructed portrait of data’s historical role as a crucible and weapon of empire. While the book explores the ways in which we both shape and are shaped by data, it also serves as an urgent reminder of humanity’s responsibility to arbitrate the relationship between data and the world.
As a work of nonfiction, it would be easy for “Data Empire” to get lost in the details. Yet Risam subverts that expectation by interweaving fact and narrative. Drawing from her research, she opens each chapter with a close-up anecdote of historical figures — thus making the history more compelling and accessible to a lay audience. The discussion of data interpretation’s historical importance as a means of authority in chapter four, for instance, begins with the narration of a scene in which Roman emperor Constantine I watches two bishops debating over a text.
By framing the history of data around human narratives, Risam also rejects the historical and current use of data as a means of dehumanization. “Data Empire” posits that although data has been instrumental in creating the systems that have helped authorize, administer and expand governance throughout history, it has also been harnessed for control in ways that have promoted systemic suffering. Risam illustrates how data was used to optimize the number of enslaved people that could fit on a transatlantic slave ship, construct the caste system and found the study of eugenics — all developments that worked to reduce humans to numbers. By centering the human perspective, Risam honors some of the voices often hidden from the numerical record. “Data Empire” thus becomes a story about both data and the stories data erases.
One of the most compelling parts of “Data Empire” is the breadth of historical forms in which data is presented. On one hand, readers see data in its typical, modern quantitative contexts. Risam tracks the development of the modern census and the invention of computing systems in the latter half of the book. On the other hand, readers are also introduced to the unfamiliar media used as early forms of record. Examples include quipus, the string-based recording devices that served as a form of community-based accounting system in Incan and Andean cultures; the divination records preserved by the Shang Dynasty; and the Han Dynasty historian Sima Qian’s historical text “Shiji” that aggregated data, narrative and oral tradition in a single volume.
In illustrating these early forms of data use, Risam argues that data collection was historically never just numerical. She describes how Indigenous women in Australia and the Torres Strait Islands communicated spatial knowledge through song or how Brahmin sages transformed themselves into vehicles for ritual and cosmological histories by memorizing sacred Vedic texts. By highlighting these historically intersectional functions of data as a source of both narrative and communication, Risam erases the conventional dichotomy between narrative and numbers.
Ironically, the central weakness of “Data Empire” is that while drawing from all this data to paint its history, data is never adequately defined. Risam characterizes data at many points, taking pains to describe the term’s etymology — the word comes from the Latin “datum,” meaning “to give” — and richly illustrates the historical entwinement of data, information and knowledge. Nonetheless, “Data Empire” evades a clear definition of the term.
“Data Empire” could have also benefitted from more clarity of structure and concision of focus, particularly in the first two parts, one of which focuses on its origins and the other on its historical uses as a mechanism of ordering people. Without clearly defined limits — or, understandably given the scope, much contextualizing of the individual historical cultures and periods — the temporal and geographic breadth spanned in each of these early chapters may be a little dizzying to some readers. In chapter four, for instance, the narrative moves swiftly from Ancient Rome to Islamic and European empires and Chinese dynasties — not always chronologically or evenly charted geographically, but rather depending on the topic at hand. Elsewhere, the notion that power is located in the archive, introduced in chapter one, resurfaces in both chapters two and four. In its ambitious attempt to represent a breadth of history, connections between historical events occasionally get lost or repeated at the cost of cohesion.
By contrast, the closing chapters of “Data Empire” showcase the astutenes of Risam’s analyses within clearly defined parameters while still backed by informational depth. In her characterization of the modern information state, Risam provides rich evidence for how data is being mobilized under different authorities — often to destabilizing effect. She describes the time when data innovation offered a promising system to stabilize Chile’s democratic socialist economy, but the regime was crushed by a CIA-backed coup before it could bear fruit. She highlights how community-based innovations such as Wikipedia and personal devices, envisioned as tools for universal access to information, have since been commodified and privatized by businesses. She also aptly describes states’ weaponization of data for political aims — as the U.S. federal government has been known to leverage Social Security to identify targets for deportation, or as China has been suspected of responsibility for the severance of Taiwanese islands’ electric cables in 2023.
Bleak as this portrait of our modern reality is, it’s the ideal conclusion to “Data Empire,” adding a contemporary urgency to the novel’s historical focus. By framing our present-day reality within the context of historical patterns, Risam cements “Data Empire” as a critical wake-up call for awareness of the various economic and political underpinnings of our society’s deployment of data — however historic this phenomenon may be. As we reckon with the novel ways in which we interact with data and information today, Risam reminds us that we have the ultimate agency and responsibility to leverage data not as a weapon of fear, but rather as a tool for progress.
