Colonial archives stayed live ammunition that later rulers could rearm

Evidence

As such, documents in these colonial archives were not dead matter once the moment of their making had passed. What was “left” was not “left behind” or obsolete. In the Netherlands Indies, these colonial archives were an arsenal of sorts that could be reactivated to suit new governing strategies. … But as the last decade of colonial scholarship so rightly insists, pursuits of exploitation and enlightenment are not mutually exclusive but deeply entangled projects. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 41

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘archive as reactivatable arsenal’ image connects to the reader’s existing thread on silence/noise archives of power — records as deferred weapons.
• QUESTION: Generalizes beyond the Netherlands Indies: does the re-arsenal description hold for other colonial archives? A comparative test worth a footnote or short piece.