The Politics of Leaking

Of course, this was an elite market, but it was a market nonetheless, accommodating a larger public than Sanudo’s retrieval of copies through acquaintances did at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Moreover, the step to print was short. In the decades between 1589 and 1618, several printed collections appeared, most (but not all) outside the Venetian state or under the cover of false imprints, and without the names of the relazioni’s authors. They were appropriately titled ‘Tesori Politici’, containing ‘relazioni, instructions, treatises and speeches of various ambassadors, apt to the perfect knowledge and intelligence of the states, interests and dependencies of the world’s greatest princes’. Such and later collections, generally in small formats so as to ensure greater diffusion, consistently boasted their authenticity—for example, ‘on the basis of an Italian Manuscript which had never seen the light before’. Some relazioni also appeared shortly after being delivered. And such was the demand for relazioni that forgeries appeared too. The movement between manuscript and print went both ways. For example, the Donà collection, as we have already seen, included several reports about France transcribed from the Thesori. Finally, many published historical works summarized or excerpted entire passages of relazioni, which became veritable classics by the eighteenth century, regarded as ‘one of the most solid foundations of historians’, as the erudite historian and future doge Marco Foscarini put it. As already implied by a nineteenth-century expert of Venice’s archives such as Rawdon Brown, Ranke walked in well-trodden steps. 

To speak of publication in general must not make us forget that we are talking of people, each with their different motivation for seeking, disclosing, or mediating the circulation of, relazioni. Some were minor nobles, real or self-styled. Cavalier Giulio Cesare Muzio repeatedly sold relazioni which he drew from his high-placed connections.¹⁰³ Secretaries and servants of patricians also acted as moles. A copy of ambassador Girolamo Lando’s report on England bears the signature of Lando’s maestro di camera, who obviously prepared the copy (with or without his master’s approval). Francesco Paisio, who had served as a secretary for the patriarch as well as for the governor of the fortress at Palma, was accused of having ‘disseminated many relazioni of ambassadors from England, France, Spain and elsewhere, descriptions of the Arsenal, expenditures and income of the Republic and every business of land and sea, including a description of all the fortresses of this state, indicating the number of soldiers on land and sea.’

Even more than supply, it was demand that drove this market. The Inquisitors’ informers tell us above all about ambassadors—the people they were interested in. The Spanish ambassador, for example, was reported to be on the look out for any relazione; most of all, he desired those concerning Spain and in 1612 was prepared to pay dear (una buona mano di cechini) for the most recent one. But beyond ambassadors, relazioni appealed to many other people. Like renghe, relazioni had a recognized educational value inside the ruling class. Outside, they were known as repositories of information and political maxims. As Gabriel Naudé’s celebrated bibliography of political texts shows, Venetian relazioni were an irrenounceable item in the personal libraries of the politically informed throughout Europe, collectors, antiquarians, and travellers. People whose birth excluded them from direct involvement in Venetian politics, but who constructed their status over the intelligence which they offered to their more powerful contemporaries, all sought relazioni.
- Filippo de Vivo, Information and Communication in Venice: Rethinking Early Modern Politics  (2007)

Now that the initial furore over Wikileaks has passed, its longer-term implications and effects are becoming a little clearer. On the one hand, the sensationalist-muckraking aspect of the projects has, it turns out, not panned out. Information by itself, no matter how outrageous or incriminating, has not been enough to mobilize politicians and other actors; without sustained access to confidential sources the material is basically no more useful for potential activists than tabloid innuendo. (The Tunisia scenario is more complicated, and it will likely not serve as a blueprint for future leak-related events.) On the other hand, the reactionary view that Wikileaks revealed nothing that we didn't already know has not been borne out either, and it's clear that in certain cases American diplomacy has been seriously embarrassed. Meanwhile, both Assange and the United States have moved away from the initial mise en place: Assange's organization has apparently given up on publishing anything, while his American opponents have suddenly turned bizarrely excessive and nearsighted in their treatment of Bradley Manning.  In any event, the most significant outcome of the Cablegate memos will likely be the stimulus they have given to other leaking projects around the world, which look to have become a permanent feature of the media-political landscape. (Of course, it's too soon to tell for sure.)

What I have noticed about the Wikileaks discussion is how quickly the frame of reference seems to shift from "a new and uniquely dangerous sort of leak" to "a new and uniquely dangerous problem the government has to deal with." There has been little effort to make clear that leaks are nothing new in great-power politics. The only point of comparison that seems to be available to most of the participants is the leak of the Pentagon Papers, and there the argument is always the same: Assange is not like previous leakers because he is not a courageous muckraking journalist, or Assange is just like them because he wants to take down the system. This, of course, is wrong. If anything, it's Ellsberg who, as a "leaker of conscience," is a historical aberration. As we can see from Filippo de Vivo's book, leaking in early modern Venice was a pervasive practice guided by all kinds of calculations: vanity, greed, scrambling for political advantage, treason, and even simple inertia.

Ellsberg was a historical aberration not because of his distinctive personal qualities, but because his antagonist was a historical aberration too. The hermetically sealed national-security state, not immune to espionage but largely protected from public disclosure of information, is a profoundly novel historical development. Eighteenth-century rulers could expect the most sordid sex scandal and corruption rumor to end up in the press within a few days. (So much was written about ragioni di stato and other forms of privileged state information in this period precisely because information security was so fleeting.) Even in periods when formal protection of journalistic or other speech was weak, leaking seems to have been more pervasive than today. In part, this is a question of culture, but there are more material explanations too, first among them being the dramatic growth in specialized bureaucratic knowledge that makes juicy documents so much more difficult to identify and disclose. The Cablegate memos, though, are about as close to de Vivo's relazioni as any document can get.

I bring up this historical parallel because there's a dangerous tendency emerging both among Assange's defenders (where it can be called wishful thinking) and his detractors (where it can be called paranoia). This tendency consists of turning Assange into the bearer of a new kind of politics driven by exteriority. His old theoretical reflections on the subject are illuminating: by destroying their monopoly on information, we are making them self-destruct. No wonder he ends up looking so much like a V-for-Vendetta figure. Conversely, of course, from the other side's point of view he looks not only dangerous and foreign but incomprehensible.

In order to make sense of Assange, this veil of mystery should be examined more critically. He's not in any serious danger of forcing real changes to "the system." In his more conciliatory moments, he has said that all he really wants is more openness within existing regimes. For all the overreactions of both sides, this in fact boils down to a rejiggering of the balance between privileged and electronically-protected bureaucratic national-security-state information and publicly accessible "free speech" information. In Venetian terms, this would be equivalent to the relazioni-buying chattering classes encouraging a looser archival policy. While the people on whose behalf Assange speaks are and remain excluded from politics itself (as those Venetians were and as people in contemporary liberal democracies are), they are supposed to form an indispensable part of the legitimation apparatus through which state decisions are understood and vetted. To put it briefly: Past regimes accepted some degree of peeking behind the curtain as inevitable and adjusted their tacts accordingly. Contemporary liberal democracies pretend there is a wall behind the curtain and get outraged when there turns out to be a dungeon there. Whether Assange knows it or not, he's acting to return us to the former model. This is probably better on the whole, but as with the French Revolution, it's too soon to tell.

Sketchwork

I have been here but two days, so will not be hasty in my decisions. Such letters as I write to Fipsihi in Moscow, I beg you'll endeavour to forward with all diligence; I shall send them open in order that you may take copies or translations, as you are equally versed in the Dutch and Chinese languages. 

... Letter III.
From Lien Chi Altangi, to the care of Fipsihi, resident in Moscow; to be forwarded by the Russian caravan to Fum Hoam, First President in the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin, in China...
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World (1760)

 I think I've talked about my potential dissertation topic several times on this blog already, and each time it keeps changing. (Not a bad thing, yet.) Now, though, I think I've finally begun to outline something coherent, so I wanted to record it here--after all, it will likely shape at least the next five years of my life.

What do we know about China and Europe in the eighteenth century, assuming we have some minimal level of interest in the period? Well, we know about chinoiserie, the continent-wide fashion for Chinese porcelain, furnishings, philosophy, and culture that most people place somewhere in the first half of the century. We know that Europeans were having trouble getting the Chinese to take them seriously. If we're a little bit more into it than that, we know about the Jesuits and their pioneering role in publicizing information about China; a little bit more, and we know about the Rites Controversy and the previous century's attempt to use Chinese as a prototype for a universal language. But there, in all but a handful of cases, our knowledge stops. Somehow the professional discipline of Sinology appears out of nowhere in the nineteenth century and the Jesuits disappear entirely (sometime around the time of their order's dissolution in 1773). Generally speaking, we don't think to inquire about how the knowledge got from China to Europe in the first place. We think, perhaps, about ships launching from Canton and landing in Le Havre. But what about that big European country that happened so conveniently to be located directly in the middle?

A handful of people have, in fact, recognized that Sinology existed as a discipline in eighteenth-century Russia. These, unfortunately, are not generally people with any interest in intellectual history. Russia is interesting to them because it was Westernizing, modernizing, becoming enlightened--and the assumption is inevitably that the direction of knowledge-transfer could only go one way. One of the most learned and sensitive scholars of Russo-Chinese relations dismisses the issue in two sentences: "Whenever Montesquieu or Voltaire, or Jesuit letters, had something to say on China it would be infinitely more interesting to the salons of St. Petersburg than anything Ilarion Rossokhin could ever expect to write. Indeed, their national energies were so wholly absorbed in the process of "Westernization" that Russians were unable to focus attention on their own experience in China."

Now, the problem here is not that the statement is wrong: it's true that Russian Sinologists usually found little favor in their own country. It's that it's wrongly conceived. Someone interested in how Russia used its "national energies" will find little of interest in this peripheral disciplinary history, since all the action was clearly in annexing territory, whupping the Turks and Swedes, and writing mannered neoclassical poems. It's even more of an obstacle when literally all the available studies treat the Russo-Chinese relationship as something that takes place between two masses labeled "Russia" and "China," like a game of Civilization. When you are writing diplomatic history, this works--but step into the realm of ideas and it turns out that your basic principles are incoherent. Ideas are not like "research points" you accumulate by moving the "national energies" slider.

In fact, if there was ever a historical conjuncture that demanded a truly international treatment, it was eighteenth-century "Russian" Sinology. Thus, Russia's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ambassadors to China (and earliest writers on the subject) included a Moldavian who spent much of his career in the Ottoman Empire; a Dane; a Slovak who began his career in Venice; and the adoptive son, of uncertain Scandinavian nationality, of a Scottish doctor turned Russian official. Two of the people most actively involved with the Sinological world--the Prussian Gottlieb (Theophilus) Bayer and the Frenchman J. N. Delisle--were barely even Russian subjects and certainly were not Russian culturally.  Moreover, Russo-Chinese contacts would be impossible without the Jesuits, who were themselves an international bunch. (No wonder, then, that treaties between the two countries were invariably signed in Latin first.)

Those Jesuits, whom we so strongly associate with the early history of Sinology, were in fact tightly linked to the Russians by ties of mutual dependence. Our traditional story holds that the Chinese were so enthralled by nifty Jesuit inventions and science that they permitted them to spread the Good Word as long as they provided technical assistance. By the eighteenth century, this was no longer true: although Kangxi seems to have appreciated the Jesuits as people, he no longer had much use for their skills. As the Jesuits frankly admitted, they were needed principally for one purpose: to facilitate communication with Russia. The Russians, in turn, relied on them for secret information (passed on illicitly on the basis of a feeling of shared Europeanness) as well as communication. Accordingly, something like three-quarters of the letters of the Jesuit Antoine Gaubil (which fill a thousand-page volume) were sent to or from Russian correspondents.

It's hard to tell why this is never mentioned except as an afterthought. Presumably, like in so many other cases, the Russian connection is peremptorily dismissed because Russia can be seen only as a passive recipient of Western beneficence. On the other hand, nationalist Russian scholars resist digging too deeply into the issue because it turns out that the lines between "Russian" and "foreign" are much blurrier than they'd like. A hardy backwoods boy like Lomonosov is a much more reassuring culture-hero than Bayer, who probably couldn't make himself understood in Russian at all.

But there are more substantive reasons too. Only a handful of Russian translations of Chinese texts were published in Europe, though the fact that they were suggests someone was reading them. Meanwhile, the academic structure within which the works of Russian Sinologists were published meant that dozens of them were turned out to the broad indifference of the aristocratic "general reader": it mattered little to Aleksei Leontiev, one of the leading figures in the field, whether anyone was buying them or not, since he was getting paid either way. It is therefore hard to estimate the influence of Russian Sinologists in Europe in the second half of the century, but it seems to have been unimpressive. (I plan to look at more specialized and state-centered discourses, such as geography, military science, and industrial R&D, to see how the situation was different there.)

In the early nineteenth century, Sinology reemerges out of the taiga, a development associated most closely with the name of Julius Klaproth. As far as I can tell, Klaproth did not like Russia and, later in life, tried to disassociate himself from it as much as possible--but in actuality it was only by working in the Russian service, with manuscripts in Russian libraries, and with scholars who benefited from Romanov-Qing diplomacy that he could get his start as a Sinologist. Meanwhile, Iakinf Bichurin, among the leading Sinologists of the century, got his start by catastrophically mismanaging the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing. As a fervent patriot, it is likely that he exerted as much strength in pulling Russian Sinology away from Europe as Klaproth did--but he produced so much enduring work that the Russian contribution could no longer be doubted. I suspect that the eighteenth-century experience was revised largely under the influence of narratives peddled by Bichurin and Klaproth to their respective home audiences.

None of the above should be treated as established fact yet. I have a lot of reading to do before I even grasp the outline of the relevant events. Nonetheless, I hope the global and Russified prehistory of modern Sinology makes for a good story--or, failing that, "fills a hole in the research." Comments would be appreciated.