For Seija and Graham Tattersal

Copyright © David Vincent 2016

The right of David Vincent to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7112-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7113-0(pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Vincent, David, 1949- author.

Title: Privacy : a short history / David Vincent.

Description: Cambridge ; Malden, MA : Polity, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015025091| ISBN 9780745671123 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745671130 (paperback)

Subjects: LCSH: Privacy, Right of. | BISAC: HISTORY / General.

Classification: LCC JC596 .V56 2016 | DDC 323.44/8–dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025091

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The history of privacy is a curious mixture of noise and silence. There is a large and inconclusive literature on the concept of privacy, and a boiling debate about contemporary threats to the protection of personal information. However, much of the commentary treats the decades before 9/11 as privacy's medieval period, and the centuries before the internet are lost in the mists of time. The requirement for an historical perspective is usually satisfied by brief, second-hand references to Jeremy Bentham or George Orwell. The first official review of privacy in the United Kingdom, the Younger Report of 1972, lamented the absence of any historical writings on the subject at all. As it happened the first monograph, David Flaherty's now classic account of colonial New England, was about to be published, and since then there has been a scattering of excellent studies of privacy reaching as far back as the medieval period and into the classical world. However, apart from the heroic, multi-volume, multi-author survey piloted by Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the field has presented an archipelago of books and articles, rarely linked together. Critical areas of culture and practice, including housing, religious observance, literacy and reading, are for the most part only tangentially related to the main narrative of change, and there is a range of topics, including the ways in which people in the past sought solitude and conducted private relationships outside their homes, which have yet to receive any systematic historical treatment.

The following brief history seeks to give an account of the long-run development of privacy, not just to provide those involved in current debates with a clearer temporal perspective, but also to narrate the concepts and practices on their own terms in successive centuries. Given the fragmented nature of the existing scholarship, it is partly a literature survey and partly a review of adjacent bodies of research, particularly in the fields of mass communication, housing, religion, domestic relations, and surveillance. There is throughout an engagement with primary evidence; condensed though the account must be, there is a need to keep close to the texture of emotions and practices of those struggling to balance complex aspirations. The book is organized on a straightforward chronological basis, beginning in the late Middle Ages and ending with the fallout from the Snowden revelations. Each of the five chapters has dates, but given the nature of the subject matter, these are only approximations. Many of the themes cross the boundaries between one period and another. Even in the final chapter on the digital revolution, the impact of computers could be seen as beginning both earlier and later than the nominated date of 1970. The book concludes with a note on further reading, which summarizes the current field of publications on privacy, relevant work in related fields, and those topics requiring further research.

An enterprise of this kind is not so much standing on the shoulders of giants as stumbling about in the long grass hoping not to be trodden on. The pursuit of a long-run account has forced me out of my comfort zone in nineteenth-century history, and I am particularly grateful to Anne Laurence and Amanda Goodrich for helping to reduce the errors and solecisms in the earlier chapters of the book, to John Naughton for his informed and balanced understanding of the course and consequences of the digital revolution, and to audiences in various parts of Britain and Europe who have commented on versions of the argument. Elliott Karstadt and Andrea Drugan at Polity have shown faith in what turned out to be a lengthy short project. Charlotte Vincent has examined every word and phrase in the text, patiently asking at every point that necessary question, ‘what does this mean?’ To her, as always, my profound thanks. The dedication is for a life-long friendship; a true value of privacy.