About the book

A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia is the sequel to an earlier book by Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge: From Gutenberg to Diderot. Published in 2012 by Polity Press, UK, it has received mostly positive reviews from academics and readers (see tab on  peers' and readers' reviews).

While Burke's first part in the series focused on intellectual history from 1450 to 1750 (or the early modern period), this second volume covers the vast ground between 1750 and the turn of the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age, two world wars and the rise of the Internet are all included. Burke trains his focus on the social structures that use knowledge, rather than the people that create or discover it. His history is less one of ideas and individuals than of ideologies and institutions. Museums, laboratories, universities, expeditions, governments and their agencies, professional and academic societies, journals and magazines are among the far-ranging subjects in the scope of this impressive book.