The Imperial Archive and Knowledge Production
Empires governed in part by gathering knowledge, and this topic studies the surveys, censuses, and archives through which the colonized were classified and ruled.
Definition
The study of how imperial states produced, organized, and relied upon knowledge of colonized populations, including the archive as both instrument and object of analysis.
Scope
This topic examines the production of colonial knowledge: the censuses, maps, surveys, ethnographies, and archives that empires used to know and administer their subjects, and the fantasy of total knowledge they expressed. It draws on work by Richards, Cohn, and Stoler on colonial knowledge and the archive.
Core questions
- How did empires gather and use knowledge of the colonized?
- What forms did colonial knowledge take, from censuses to ethnography?
- How should the colonial archive itself be read and interpreted?
Key theories
- Colonialism's forms of knowledge
- Bernard Cohn showed how British rule in India operated through investigative modalities such as the survey, census, and museum that classified and fixed Indian society.
- Reading along the archival grain
- Ann Stoler argued that colonial archives should be read not only for facts but as artifacts of the anxieties and common sense of colonial governance.
History
Building on Said and Foucault, scholars in the 1990s and 2000s analyzed the colonial state as a knowledge-producing apparatus. Cohn's studies of British India, Richards's account of the archival fantasy, and Stoler's archival theory established this as a major strand of postcolonial scholarship.
Debates
- Knowledge as control or as anxiety
- Scholars debate whether colonial knowledge signaled confident mastery or, as Stoler stresses, persistent uncertainty and unease.
Key figures
- Thomas Richards
- Bernard S. Cohn
- Ann Laura Stoler
Related topics
Seminal works
- richards1993
- cohn1996
- stoler2009
Frequently asked questions
- What is the 'imperial archive'?
- It refers both to the vast records empires accumulated about their territories and subjects and to the idea that comprehensive knowledge could secure imperial control.