Dutch colonial archives functioned as both repositories and sites of the imaginary shaping history

Evidence

I explicitly do something else: several chapters stay largely within the state’s purview by attending to documents viewed by state officials but not always produced by them. As I use the term, the Dutch colonial “archives” were both a corpus of statements and a depot of documents, both sites of the imaginary and institutions that fashioned histories as they concealed, revealed, and contradicted the investments of the state. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 317

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the author’s operative sense of the Dutch colonial archives as simultaneously corpus, depot, imaginary site, and history-fashioning institution.