Netherlands Indies colonial archives functioned as a reactivatable arsenal for governance.
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. Documents honed in the pursuit of prior issues could be requi- sitioned to write new histories, might be reclassified for new initiatives, could be renewed to fortify security measures against what were per- ceived as new assaults on imperial sovereignty and its moralizing claims. — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 41
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Reinforces documents-as-agents theme and supports the reader’s archival methodology.
Related
- Colonial archives could be reactivated to serve new governing strategies. (similarity 0.95)
- Colonial archives stayed live ammunition that later rulers could rearm (similarity 0.89)
- Conditional and future-tense archival writing shaped colonial administrative responses (similarity 0.86)
- Archival documents act as generative substances that shape the colonial apparatus. (similarity 0.85)
- Dutch colonial archives functioned as both repositories and sites of the imaginary shaping history (similarity 0.85)
- Archived document bundles reveal contested epistemic habits under colonial conditions. (similarity 0.84)
- Archives preserve non-events — records of things that never happened (similarity 0.83)
- Archival form itself constitutes a technology of colonial governance (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial archives actively produce categories rather than merely record them (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination. (similarity 0.82)
- Colonial archive documents function as citational genealogies, not just records (similarity 0.81)
- Dutch colonial archives store unrealized plans as the real stuff of state knowledge (similarity 0.81)
- The Inlandsche kinderen were largely invisible to colonial statistics but omnipresent in state archives (similarity 0.81)
- The archival field both consolidates and internally resists colonial authority (similarity 0.80)
- Colonial administrative overviews signaled assumed mastery rather than real knowledge (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Colonial archives functioned as active technologies of rule, not passive records
#corroborates(0.75) - Colonial archives could arm the state to justify inaction and abort policy.
#exemplifies(0.70) - Colonial verbalen encoded a genealogy of administrative precedence.
#expands(0.70) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 91 - Colonial filing systems themselves produced methods of domination.
#expands(0.65) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 201 - Colonial archival history requires spanning both actual events and officials’ imagined futures
#expands(0.60) - Archival genres themselves shaped colonial epistemic practices
#expands(0.60) - Colonial archives simultaneously conceal and reveal state investments
#expands(0.60) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 317 - Conditional and future-tense archival writing shaped colonial administrative responses
#expands(0.55) - French colonialism built permanent structures assuming endless occupation
#corroborates(0.55) - Current colonial scholars read archives as places and cultural spaces
#responds-to(0.50) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 316