Colonial administrative reports were self-serving documents that silenced colonized voices

Evidence

These are not the luxuriant pardon tales of Fiction in the Archives, from which Natalie Davis so finely drew out the cultural nuances of sixteenthcentury France. They are drier, formulaic documents—administrative epistles, curt exchanges, and lengthy monthly reports. They are the product of a state in expansion and of bureaucrats eager to be viewed favorably by their superiors, on whose judgment their salaries, positions, and pensions would depend. They are careful to deflect attention from their own faults, find small flourishes that affirm their loyalties, and are quick to reiterate their investment in Dutch policy and its methods of rule. Unlike the pardon tales, these stories categorically deny the voices of those they feared. Thus, the Luhmann family’s Gayo assailants could only be spoken for by what were imagined to be “trustworthy natives” whose allegiance to Dutch authority was thought to be secure. It is not the Gayo who are privileged in these accounts but a representation of them as geographically and cognitively caught between the Aceh War and the muggings in Deli, economically attracted to the estates but independent of them, politically labile and possibly dangerous. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1278

Categorization

• XREF: Extends Natalie Davis’s Fiction in the Archives by contrasting that genre with dryer colonial administrative documents — connects to the reader’s prior reading on archival methodology.
• SEED: Contrasting the pardon tale genre (Davis) with colonial bureaucratic ephemera could support an essay on what different document genres reveal and hide.