Scholars of empire increasingly approach archives not as neutral storehouses of information, but as sites of institutional power that play an active and ongoing role in the writing of history. They have explored how colonial knowledge production has shaped the primary source record, and how practices of record-keeping shape the historical narratives that are written. As the history of Britain's 'Migrated Archive' reminds us, decisions around what to record, which records to retain, where to store them, and how to regulate access to them, are inherently political. This seminar asks what we understand imperial archives to be, how we can account for the politics of the imperial archive, and how when working with imperial archives we identify and navigate the categories our sources create and the perspectives they enshrine or elide.

Seminar Questions

1. Of what kinds of materials are archives of empire constituted?
2. How can we understand archives as part of imperial technologies of rule?
3. What role(s) do archives play in the production of historical narratives?
4. In what ways is attending to the history of archival production relevant to archival research?
5. How can historians avoid reproducing the silences and power structures inscribed in imperial archives?

Seminar preparation: think of an imperial archive or archival source you have worked with and (re)consider your methodology in the light of the seminar readings. What kind of questions and reflections do they prompt? Do they provide you with useful methodological tools? If you haven't used archival materials before, you might browse databases such as Empire Online,Link opens in a new window Colonial State PapersLink opens in a new window, and East India CompanyLink opens in a new window for ideas. Please come prepared to discuss the chosen archive/source.

Core Readings (pick three)

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2015 [1995]), pp. 31-69. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 1-12. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ann Laura Stoler, 'Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance', Archival Science 2 (2002), pp. 87-109. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 1-19. LinkLink opens in a new window.

David Anderson, 'Whose History? The 'Migrated Archive' and Britain's Colonial Past', Lecture at TLRH 'Out of the Ashes' Lecture Series, Trinity College Dublin, 23 November 2020. Audio recordingLink opens in a new window.

Further Reading

Aguirre, Carlos, and Javier Villa-Flores (eds.), From the Ashes of History: Loss and Recovery of Archives and Libraries in Modern Latin America (Raleigh, NC: Editorial a Contracorriente, 2015). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bailkin, Jordanna, 'Where Did the Empire Go? Archives and Decolonization in Britain', American Historical Review 120.3 (2015), pp. 884-899. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Ballantyne, Tony, 'Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond)', in: Antoinette Burton (ed.), After the Imperial Turn: Thinking With and Through the Nation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 103-121. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Bastian, Jeannette A., Stanley H. Griffin, and John A. Aarons (eds.), Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader (Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press, 2018). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Burton, Antoinette, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Burton, Antoinette (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Craggs, Ruth, 'Situating the Imperial Archive: The Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945', Journal of Historical Geography 34.1 (2008), 48-67. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Donato, Maria Pia, 'Introduction: Archives, Record Keeping and Imperial Governance, 1500-1800', Journal of Early Modern History 22 (2018), pp. 311-326. Link.

El-Malik, Shiera S., and Isaac A. Kamola (eds.), Politics of African Anticolonial Archive (London and New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Harlow, Barbara, and Mia Carter (eds.), Archives of Empire, Volume 1: From the East India Company to the Suez Canal (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Harlow, Barbara, and Mia Carter (eds.), Archives of Empire, Volume 2: The Scramble for Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Hilden, Irene, Absent Presences in the Colonial Archive: Dealing with the Berlin Sound Archive's Acoustic Legacies (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Longair, Sarah, and Chris Jeppesen, 'Domestic Museums of Decolonisation? Objects, Colonial Officials, and the Afterlives of Empire in Britain', in: Berny Sèbe and Matthew G. Stanard (eds.), Decolonising Europe? Popular Responses to the End of Empire (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 221-237. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Mkhize, Khwezi, 'Archives of Empire', Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies 45.2 (2019), pp. 183-197. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Perry, Adele, 'The Colonial Archive on Trial: Possession, Dispossession, and History in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia', in: Antoinette Burton (ed.), Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 325-350. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Poulter, E.K., 'Silent Witness: Tracing Narratives of Empire through Objects and Archives in the West African Collections at the Manchester Museum', Museum History Journal 6.1 (2013), pp. 6-22. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Reid, Kirsty, and Fiona Paisley (eds.), Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive (New York: Routledge, 2017).

Richards, Thomas, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (New York: Verso, 1993). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Roque, Ricardo, and Kim Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). LinkLink opens in a new window.

Sato, Shohei, ‘Operation Legacy’: Britain’s Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide', The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 45.4 (2017), pp. 697-719. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Smallwood, Stephanie E., 'The Politics of the Archive and History's Accountability to the Enslaved', History of the Present 6.2 (2016), pp. 117-132. LinkLink opens in a new window.

Steedman, Carolyn, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002). LibraryLink opens in a new window.

Stoler, Ann Laura, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). Link.Link opens in a new window