Family letters reveal colonial power networks invisible in official archives

Evidence

In this chapter I broach only a small portion of this compendium of the correspondence of kith and kin temporarily residing in, visiting, or traveling between Bali, outposts in East Sumatra, sugar factories in central Java, French country estates, Swiss spas, and stolid, brick family houses that still line the prestigious avenues overlooking the canals that run through The Hague. The generational rhythms of these lettered careers and lettered lives register the social habits and political sensibilities of those who dwelled in colonial worlds and on their political margins. Names unconnected in official archives are joined in these missives by birthday celebrations, by greetings sent to those close to the person addressed, by news of leaves, and by announcements of births, promotions, marriages, and deaths. Tracking Frans Carl’s relationships through them opens a grid of power, honor, and constraint that eludes official chartings. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 1313

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s purpose on epistemic anxieties in colonial archives — this is the methodological justification for using personal correspondence to fill archival gaps.
• SEED: Possible angle: how ‘private’ family correspondence functioned as an unacknowledged parallel record of colonial administration that official archives erased.