Colonial empire was built on distorted knowledge and strategic ignorance.

Evidence

Knowledge-production and its strategic absence—ignorance—are prevailing themes in the making of empire. Edward Said launched an entire field of colonial studies on the basic Foucauldian principle that distorted forms of knowledge were fundamental features of empire and its ruling technologies. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1335

Categorization

• DEFINE: Positions ignorance as the strategic counterpart to knowledge-production in colonial rule, grounding an epistemic-anxiety reading.
• ADDENDUM: Could support a piece on how epistemic gaps, not just false records, structured archival colonial knowledge.