Colonial written accountability depended on elaborate report and coding infrastructures

Evidence

Systems of written accountability called for elaborate infrastructures. Paper trails of weekly reports to superiors, summaries of reports of reports, and recommendations based on reports all called for systematic coding systems by which they could be tracked. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Material infrastructure of colonial paperwork connects to the reader’s interest in archival form. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”