The Birth and Death of the Office | History Today

The irony that underlies the current debate between remote work and the office is that office work is itself a kind of remote work. Why surrender control of a province to a capricious fief when it can be ruled more or less directly from Versailles? Why risk shipwreck, tropical disease and local resistance when colonial profiteering can be overseen from London? And why rely on the ‘mysteries’ of guilds and artisans when industrial-scale divisions of labour can be planned out meticulously from the comfort of a factory back office? The office is a technology that allows for unprecedented levels of insight and control; it concentrates knowledge and power in a single location – and it was for this reason that the monarchies and trading companies of 17th- and 18th-century Europe pioneered some of the earliest forms of modern bureaucratic management.