Access to colonial archives depends on knowing unstated governing logic, not just finding documents

Evidence

Transparency is not what archival collections are known for and the Dutch colonial archives in which this book plunges are no exception. … But the question of “accessibility” to the workings of the Dutch colonial administration in the nineteenth-century Indies is a real one that eludes the contemporary inventory numbers by which documents are requested and searched. Inaccessibility has more to do with the principles that organized colonial governance and the “common sense” that underwrote what were deemed political issues and how those issues traveled by paper through the bureaucratic pathways of the colonial administration. Not least, “access” rests on knowledge of the history of colonial Indonesia, on changing perceptions of danger as much as the structures of command. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 77

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Troubling Transparency’s finding that FOIA-era access systems conceal as much as reveal — access is never neutral procedure. — connects to: the MOC “The Word Is a Fence: Language as Battleground, Property, and Partition”
• QUESTION: The claim that ‘inaccessibility has to do with the principles that organized colonial governance’ is worth chasing: which specific bureaucratic principles most distort what survives in the record?