This article represents an experiment in examining the political world of early modern England. It argues that small, contingent shifts in the practices of acquiring and communicating political knowledge reshaped the information resources of the English regime, reconfiguring its modes of operation and reverberating into structural transformation. What emerged from this alteration was a political form only recently thematized by historians: the information state, or a government that prioritized the collecting, interpreting, manipulating, and disseminating of information as a primary mode of exercising and maintaining power. Historians of early modern continental Europe have devised a number of models to explain how control of information became essential to statecraft, and these examples cumulatively suggest that distinct political environments took slightly different paths to converge at similar points, with Italian polities likely experiencing the process first but not exporting it wholesale to other locales. The information state has been portrayed as a consequence of the complex diplomacy that accompanied endemic warfare and territorial expansion on the fifteenthcentury Italian peninsula; a managerial and strategic response to the challenges faced by the global empires precariously strung together by Philip II of Spain and evangelical Catholic orders; an intelligence system born of the fusion of humanist and mercantile traditions at the heart of France’s absolutist monarchy; a symptom of state formation in which older offices were reconfigured to collect evidence rather than adjudicate disputes; and a function of growing public participation in politics, which led the state institutions tomonitor and controlmore assiduously the circulation of information through their polities.

中文翻译：

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伊丽莎白时代英格兰的信息状态

这篇文章代表了一个检验近代早期英国政治世界的实验。它认为，在获取和传播政治知识的实践中，微小的、偶然的变化重塑了英国政权的信息资源，重新配置了其运作模式，并引发了结构转型。从这种变化中产生的是一种最近才被历史学家主题化的政治形式：信息国家，或优先将收集、解释、操纵和传播信息作为行使和维护权力的主要模式的政府。早期现代欧洲大陆的历史学家设计了许多模型来解释信息控制如何成为治国之道的必要条件，这些例子累积表明，不同的政治环境在相似的点上采取了略有不同的路径，意大利政体可能首先经历了这一过程，但不会将其批发出口到其他地方。信息国家被描述为伴随着 15 世纪意大利半岛地方性战争和领土扩张的复杂外交的结果。对西班牙菲利普二世和福音派天主教教团不稳定地串在一起的全球帝国所面临的挑战的管理和战略回应；在法国专制君主制的核心，融合人文主义和商业传统而诞生的情报系统；一种国家形成的征兆，旧的办公室被重新配置以收集证据而不是裁决纠纷；