The History of Archives: The State of the Discipline

Elizabeth Yale, 2015
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Link: muse.jhu.edu/article/597288

Published by John Hopkins University Press

Abstract: The history of archives seeks to understand archives as subjects of history, not just as its sources. The field has opened up new ways of thinking about major historical trends: the rise of the nation state, the development of public and private spheres, the growth of global institutions, and the ever-increasing emphasis on data in our information-rich “knowledge economy.” Archives are crucial sites for the exercise of political power as well as profoundly important resources for defining community identity. The work that archives do emerges from the tension between these functions, as well as the gaps between archival ambitions (information mastery, objectivity) and archival realities (partiality, anxiety, failures of access).

A condensed history of archives, and archiving, might go something like this: Man invented agriculture. (More on that “man” later.) Writing followed soon after as a way of keeping account of the land and its produce. Across the globe, at its several different independent sites of invention, writing, skill in which was initially restricted to scribal elites, was a tool for those in power, a kind of external memory system, allowing them to keep track of production and trade and levy taxes across the years.1 Records were generated. With agriculture, there was a need for storehouses for grain; with writing came a need for storehouses for records. Rulers accruing power through their control over resources invented the archive as a mechanism for consolidating and reinforcing that power. Over the millennia, with the gradual, fitful expansion of states and their bureaucracies, writing came to be used to record more and more things (poetry, mythology, divination, music, and math, to name a few) and archives expanded, too. Official records of one kind or another now occupy thousands of miles of shelves and many terabytes of computer hard drive storage space (the United States National Archives alone currently contains 10 billion pages of records and 133 terabytes of data, and it preserves less than 5 percent of government records generated in any given year).2 Archives have become, incidentally, useful to historians and other sorts of scholars.

According to this story, archives are sources of history, but they are also its subjects, sites with histories and politics of their own. Recognizing this, the history of archives, or archival studies, a field that is closely affiliated with the study of paperwork, information management, and the material page, seeks to understand archives as such.3 It understands archives as the product of decisions made by a range of stakeholders, from those who wrote the papers they contained, to the archivists who have processed and cared for them, to the state bureaucracies and officials who have determined which records were saved and which were destroyed, to the scholars who have excavated their contents over the years. No archive is innocent. [End Page 332]

Historians, and other scholars who rely on archives, do well to understand the histories that have shaped them: these histories constrain the kinds of stories that can be written from any particular archive. But the history of archives is useful not only (or even primarily) as methodological prophylactic. The questions of the history of archives are the questions of history, distilled. The field opens up new ways of thinking about the major historical trends of the early modern and modern world: the rise of the nation state, the development of public and private spheres, the growth of global institutions, the ever-increasing emphasis on data in our information-rich “knowledge economy.” In particular, recent work in the history of archives has revealed them to be crucial sites for the exercise of political power: archives are a key technology of rule. From sixteenth-century Spain to early twenty-first century South Africa, archives and archival practices have stood at the heart of empires, nations, commercial companies, and religious orders, institutions that have defined the modern world.

Archival stories are everywhere; they matter not only to historians and archivists. In the modern era—which we might, as the opening vignette above suggests, date back to the invention of writing—archives are where we go to establish ownership; to clear our names; to tell ourselves who we are as nations, churches, political parties, families, and individuals. Archives are where individual lives intersect with the apparatus of the state; this makes archives key sites for understanding conflict between governments and those they rule. The history of archives opens us up to new ways of thinking about how and why ordinary people, both individually and in groups, construct identities and histories. One sees archives mattering in disputes over the ownership of a tract of land, which depend upon the location and authentication of deeds and wills. Or in efforts to establish whether government officials committed crimes, which hinge on the discovery and interpretation of cryptic memos, emails, and voice recordings. Archives mattered deeply in the lives of ordinary Germans (and other Europeans) who collaborated with the Nazis, or sheltered Jews from them, during World War II and later sought to establish their good deeds or hide their complicity, by either opening up or manipulating the archival record. They mattered in the disappearance of a leftist activist taken into custody by the Guatemalan National Police in the early 1980s, whose fate could only be established by the records kept by that same police force, held secretly through Guatemala’s long civil war.4

The methods and questions of the history of archives impinge crucially on book history: they could be considered cognate fields. Like book history, [End Page 333] the study of archives is a multidisciplinary and even cross-professional endeavor, with noteworthy work being done by historians, literary scholars, and archivists (at least some of whom are also trained in literary and historical analysis). Also like book history, it engages with its subject on material, social, and intellectual levels. The history of archives considers the stuff out of which archives are made—paper, ink, file folders, reading rooms—to be crucial to explaining the functions of archives. Just as historians of the book set material evidence in the context of the broader legal, cultural, economic, and political structures that govern the production and reception of books, so do historians of archives consider the social, political, and institutional frameworks that govern the production, storage, and accessibility of archival documents.
Archives in Critical Theory

In its present incarnation, the history of archives as a field owes a great deal to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Derrida’s extended meditation on archives, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (originally delivered in 1994 as a series of lectures at a symposium held at the Freud Museum in London), explores the archive as an organizing principle of Western thought, particularly Freudian psychology.5 Archive Fever is not so much a study of a particular archive or archives. Rather it illuminates the impulse to archive, to record, to seek some kind of immoveable historical foundation. According to Derrida, there is a violence at the heart of archiving: when memories and stories are recorded in the archive, alternate possibilities, other ways of telling the story, are repressed or suppressed. When we return to the archive seeking “history,” we open up that instability.

Like Derrida’s, Foucault’s concept of the archive, explicated in The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, is figurative.6 Foucault’s archive is not a physical object (e.g., a set of papers held at an institution or a corpus of works) or even the totality of a culture’s written material, the books and papers and texts that hold its history. Instead, for him, the “archive” is the system underlying the discourse, that which allows things to be said and done in any given episteme. The archive of our present time is not really accessible to us, but the archive becomes more visible the farther back in time one goes. This concept of the archive is key to Foucault’s archaeological approach to intellectual history: the archive is in some sense below the discourse, serving as its foundation. This is a [End Page 334] paradoxical “archive,” existing at a level beneath the archive of documents, books, audio recordings, videos, what have you—the texts that constitute the discourse—but accessed through our analysis of those texts.

With these two critical studies, the modern “archival turn” in the humanities kicked into gear. Though they have not necessarily operated with a concept of the archive identical to either Foucault’s or Derrida’s, many scholars have followed these thinkers in taking a rather abstract notion of the archive as their guiding principle. In some cases, the archive becomes something like the historical record, and can thus be populated by any kind of written, printed, or audiovisual trace. In Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative, Roberto González Echevarría locates the origins of Latin American fiction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century legal, scientific, and anthropological writings (especially travel writings). He takes as “archive” these non-literary genres.7 The “archive” is idealized and abstracted to the point of being capitalized throughout the book. In a veiled criticism of Donald McKenzie and his work establishing early modern English printing history from printers’ archives, bibliographer G. Thomas Tanselle advocates for this expansion of our understanding of the archive. He argues that printed and written material count equally as “archive,” or primary sources whose materiality can give clues to their history, especially the circumstances of their production.8 Anjali Arondekar, in For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India, takes nineteenth-century British India as her field of action.9 She takes a broad view of what counts as the “colonial archive,” grounding her analysis of colonial Indian sexuality in her readings of letters, colonial reports, printed pamphlets, and novels. Arondekar retains a Derridean concept of the archival impulse: the recorded traces of history promise access to historical reality, but never quite deliver it. This problem is especially acute in the history of sexuality, where so much went unwritten (or unprinted) or written only indirectly.

Elsewhere, the “archive” becomes a figure for a tendency, an impulse, or an animating spirit that the scholar wishes to pin down. In The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, Thomas Richards explores the archival impulse in the British Empire, particularly in the nineteenth-century Raj. He construes the archive as a figure for the imperial “fantasy of knowledge elevated to global power” as revealed in British fiction.10 Each archive, and every study of the archives, engages with this fantasy with its own particular blend of indulgence, questioning, and rejection. [End Page 335]
Archives and Global Institutions in the Early Modern World

Since the heady days of critical theory, archival studies has taken an increasingly concrete turn, with robust analyses of the matter (paper, ink, stone) of archives as well as their social, political, and intellectual worlds. Filing systems; protocols for copying, circulation, and storage; rules governing usage and access (and where, in practice, archives are accessed in ways that depart from the rules): these are all of particular interest to the material history of archives, because they offer important insights into the lives of the individuals and corporate entities that generated and used them. Increasingly keen attention is paid to differentiating and articulating the work that archives do, as collections of documents, from that accomplished by other kinds of collections, such as libraries (though there is considerable overlap here, an overlap which needs to be explored). Particularized studies of archives, which require attention to the making, use, and meaning of documents and records in many formats (printed, written, typed, recorded, electronic), as well as mixed formats, as they cross between contexts, help to break up the abstract generalizations about print and scribal cultures that have sometimes marked our thinking about the history of books and writing.11

This approach is one of the most promising avenues for the future of the field, in part because it combines material analysis with the insights achieved by Foucault and Derrida (especially Derrida). As Ann Laura Stoler suggests, although one can discern in the scholarship on archives two distinct threads, one which regards them primarily as cultural theoretic objects (as in the studies discussed in the previous section) and another which explores them as material institutions, the two threads are intertwined, and speak to each other.12 Citing Archive Fever, recent material studies constantly return to the ways in which archives escape us. We go to the archive seeking grounding in a material reality that, ultimately, it can provide only partially, if at all.13

The material analysis of archives has revealed their key roles in the formation and governance of nation states and empires: they are instruments through which political power was (and is) exercised. The link between archives and rulers has deep roots—state archives are almost as old as writing. However, the link between archives, the ruler, and the state saw considerable development in the early modern period, as European states, empires, and religious, commercial, and academic institutions grew in size and complexity. The sympathies and tensions that defined the relationship between archives and power in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, [End Page 336] particularly in the context of the expansion of global commerce and the centralization of state power in France, Britain, and Spain, continue to bedevil the modern age.

A 2010 issue of Archival Science devoted to early modern “archival knowledge cultures in Europe” highlighted the role of archives as tools for managing global institutions. In his contribution, Filipo de Vivo traced the early modern history of Venice’s archives. The Venetians, rising in the late medieval period as a commercial maritime empire, were among the first European nations to develop a rich, well-articulated state archival system. De Vivo, in an ongoing project, is mapping the history of that system, tracing the intersections between seemingly mundane archival practices—such as the keeping of indices—with Venetian political history.14 Indexing “accelerated,” according to de Vivo, at moments when state administration became more complex—for example, during Venice’s territorial expansion in the mid-fifteenth century.15 Practices like indexing also connected in surprising ways to the Venetian government’s desire to maintain the secrecy of their operations. The most important records were the most secret records and thus it was essential to keep them useful through indexing—yet, because they were secret, few clerks were permitted to see them, and they were harder to maintain.16

As illustrated by Arndt Brendecke’s contribution on archives in Golden Age Spain, part of his larger project on empirical knowledge in the Spanish empire, sometimes archival studies leads one beyond the archive itself, that is, away from the archive strictly conceived as an institution formally identified as a national repository of documents. Brendecke considers the state archives as one element in a broader information economy.17 Records pertaining to the administration of the early Spanish colonies were distributed across public and private sites. A document’s value as an “objective” record depended in part on where it was stored: in the house of a conquistador’s grandson, in a stack on the desk of an archival clerk, or on the shelves in the official repository in Salamanca. The histories that were built from these archives were intensely political; the official royal chroniclers who assembled them were responsible primarily to the King, but they were also open to massaging their accounts at the request of the noble families of Spain. Chroniclers on all sides sought to prove their cases by pointing to the superior legitimacy of their archival documents.

In Britain, too, the need was felt for repositories in which one could collect all the information necessary to rule a geographically extended nation, or simply, to do one’s job, whether one was a naval administrator, [End Page 337] a diplomat, an archbishop, or a royal minister. As in Venice and Spain, the information age had arrived; but, as described by Nicholas Popper, it was still a highly personal one, one in which individuals operating within the state gathered together archives and used them to their own advantage, rather than seeing records as a common resource. The State Paper Office was founded during the reign of Elizabeth I, and not wholly neglected under subsequent monarchs—indicating the ongoing, felt need for archives in the management of the state—but individual ministers and secretaries continued to maintain control over their papers, passing them on to friends and successors or depositing them in the State Paper Office as they saw fit.18

The story of archives and the state got a crucial boost in seventeenth-century France, where Jean-Baptiste Colbert assembled a massive archive as Louis XIV’s chief minister. As described by Jacob Soll in The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System, Colbert sourced his archive from across government departments under his control (including the navy, the foreign ministry, and, most crucially, the ministry of finance) and used it as the foundation for the account-keeping and rational decision-making with which he kept the French state afloat.19 Colbert understood his archive as a component in a universal library that also included the full range of humanist writings on rhetoric, literature, law, philosophy, and the sciences.

Soll argues that Colbert, constantly summoning reports, saw the state, and the world, through paperwork: if it didn’t exist in a form of routinized writing, it didn’t exist. Soll suggests that this helps to explain Colbert’s otherwise curious lack of interest in developing a body of ethnographic knowledge that would have boosted French colonization efforts in the New World—such surveys would have to be sourced from North American Indians, who existed outside of writing. Or, at least, outside of what Colbert recognized as writing. Soll’s arguments here help us come to grips with an earlier generation of scholars’ suggestion that there is a vast divergence between the culture, intellectual life, and politics of oral and literate societies, even to the point that these societies possess different “mentalities.”20 But early modern Europeans approached the question of writing, orality, and the New World in diverse ways; to get a fuller picture of that diversity, it’s worth reading Soll’s book against Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra’s How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World, which probes how writing and oral testimony were used and perceived on both sides of the early modern Spanish Atlantic world.21 [End Page 338]

For all the power of Colbert’s archive, the impersonal state archive, like the impersonal state bureaucracy, was yet to come (and perhaps never will be, as we will see below). Though Colbert’s archive was assembled in the service of the state, it was a private archive, its contents inherited at Colbert’s death by his son, the Marquis de Seignelay. Louis XIV depended upon Colbert’s expertise—despite his famous declaration “l’état, c’est moi,” it was through Colbert that he knew his domains, and was able to govern them. Yet after Colbert’s death, Louis redistributed his administrative responsibilities among other noble families, breaking up the archiving power that Colbert had so jealously guarded.22 With a restricted ministerial portfolio, the family could no longer maintain Colbert’s massive archive, as there was no way to gather information from ministries outside their control. Archiving continued, but no one minister attempted to assemble a universal state archive; rather, individual ministers made and deployed document collections to particular ends, often against each other, on a tactical basis (as Colbert also did, but with a broader base of documents).

The history of archives reveals the extent to which the early modern state was made up of a collection of private persons acting in what they thought was their own (as well as the public) good. In his Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull, John-Paul Ghobrial. documents the efforts of William Trumbull, English ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth century, to compile a diplomatic archive that would support his work. Before leaving for Constantinople, Trumbull collected and copied as many documents relating to England’s relations with the Ottomans as he could lay his hands on. But what he could get access to was limited. Some documents were held at the State Paper Office, but many more were in private hands. As in Elizabeth I’s day, diplomats tended to retain control over their documents after leaving office, passing them down to friends and family members. Trumbull’s immediate predecessor, Lord Chandos, seeking to delay or even thwart Trumbull’s accession to the post, refused Trumbull access to his personal archive. Document collection was a constant theme of Trumbull’s years in Constantinople as well: the embassy kept registers for incoming Ottoman correspondence, and Trumbull also sought out Turkish documents, English translations of which he filed in his archive. These archives, including Trumbull’s “official register” remained in his descendents’ hands until the 1990s, when they were donated to the British Library.23

Ordinary people could play archival games too, as Kathryn Burns shows so ably in Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Burns focuses [End Page 339] on notaries, who made official records of personal, commercial, and legal transactions, registering land sales, wills, and dowries. She examines in great detail notaries’ protocols for creating documents as well as working habits in notarial offices, and dives into specific case studies in which individuals went to war with records. The politics in (and of) the archive come through clearly, as individuals set forth documents with strategy and cunning. An individual might be pressured to sign a deed giving property over to a religious order; a son might accuse a father of having forged the legal agreement governing the use and inheritance of his mother’s dowry; wives registered “exclamations” to defend themselves against their husbands’ (sometimes violent) efforts to force them to take legal actions against their will and better judgment.24

Burns emerges from this study with an important methodological caution. Archives have often been figured as windows or mirrors: these metaphors construct archives as optical devices that give a full, faithful view of the past. In Burns’ memorable phrase, however, “archives are less like mirrors than like chessboards.”25 In order to read them accurately, we need to be alert to the formal language, protocols, and customs of their creators (in this case, both notaries and “ordinary” Peruvians) as well as the ways in which those writing (or represented in) documents used those documents to achieve specific ends.

Markus Friedrich’s work on the “networked” Jesuit archive opens new horizons, locating corporate identities in information management practices that extended beyond any one personal or institutional archive.26 Friedrich, who is working on a larger project on record and information management in the early modern world, traces the movement of records between various levels of the early modern Jesuit hierarchy, showing how management of the order depended on the effective circulation, preservation, and use of information, particularly information regarding the institution’s charters and land grants both in Europe and around the globe. Their information management processes reflected the Jesuit Order’s institutional structure, with regularized procedures for copying documents across repositories, making them available at multiple levels of the hierarchy. System failures were numerous, with lost records abounding, but nonetheless, institutional decision-making as well as scholarly works produced by Jesuits were rooted in the archives. The massive quantities of knowledge assembled in these archives were envied by learned European Protestants.

The Jesuits were far from the only early modern corporation to develop archives. Guilds, scientific societies, joint-stock companies: all saw the development [End Page 340] of archives as a way of managing their work in the world. Archives work was knowledge work; it was also economic work. The early Royal Society of London, for example, understood proper record keeping to be key to accomplishing their mission of rebuilding natural knowledge on solid ground.27 Keeping complete records of experiments and observations, as well as the correspondence and conversations in which those experiments were discussed, was as important as doing the experiments themselves. Science advanced on archival foundations.
Archives, Nationalism, and Empire

In nineteenth-century Europe, archives came to be seen as foundations of national identity. State archives were founded or reorganized as institutions dedicated to preserving the histories of nation states (or providing evidence of the historical continuity of nation states that did not yet exist, like Germany). The French Archives Nationales, founded in the French Revolution with modern France—French royal archives and libraries became national archives and libraries—is characteristic of this role of archives as loci of national identities. The archive grounded the nation firmly in shared historical memory. In the assimilation of previous archives into a national archive, the nation was projected materially back in time so that a unified story of national historical development could be told. As a national repository of government documents, the Archives Nationales enshrined the history and identity of France; over the course of the nineteenth century, debates about the structure and functioning of the French National Archives reflected changing conceptions of the French nation.28 Somewhat similarly, the first United States Congress passed a law establishing requirements for the publication and preservation of congressional records.29 (Though it was not until the 1930s that the National Archives was solidly established as a brick-and-mortar institution.)30 Alongside this increasingly tight connection between nation and archive, history was defined by an emerging cadre of professional, university-based historians as the archivally-grounded study of the nation state: the Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke is perhaps the most famous exponent of this view. During this period, archivists and historians developed a shared professional ethos committing them to the authority of the records enshrined in archives.31

Peter Fritschze, in one of the many delightful essays in the volume Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, edited by Antoinette [End Page 341] Burton, takes the story of nations and archives from nineteenth-century modern to late twentieth-century postmodern.32 His essay, “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation,” articulates their relationship in German history. Fritszche questions the role that the German archives, particularly the Bundesarchiv, or state archive, can play in the construction of a shared national past after the trauma and loss of the twentieth century. The German national archive came together in the early nineteenth century as a collection of relics and ruins that would serve as evidence for a thing that did not yet fully exist, the German nation. This collection was made at least partly in response to the threat to German identity posed by France. The Nazis built on this national archive by constructing a racial archive, a set of collective and personal records that allowed individuals to demonstrate their alignment (or lack thereof) with the Nazi’s “biological categories.”33 Through this archiving process, the Nazis reengineered the German people as a “collective Aryan subject.”34 The Holocaust and the trauma of World War II fractured the archive: “The national archives live on, in the form of the Bundesarchiv, but they no longer make the pretense of speaking for the nation or its past and do not encompass the records of its experience. Its holdings cannot provide the answers to the questions about complicity, survival, and murder or even provide a record of loss.”35

The fracturing of archives in war and violence inserts them into national histories — the stories a nation tells itself about who it is — in new ways. The Nazi conquest of Europe was accompanied by archival looting, focusing in particular on the military and diplomatic records in countries they overran, as well as archives belonging to enemies of the Reich.36 Many of these records, which came from France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, and Luxembourg, were taken back to Moscow by the Russians, and have yet to be returned to their countries of origin. The meaning of this story of “double theft” depends on the perspective from which it is told. To Western European nations, the Russians retain what is not rightfully theirs; many Russians, on the other hand, believe that those records are their due, part of the raft of cultural materials taken by the Soviet army in “compensation” for the damage the Nazis inflicted on their country.

As these examples indicate, the archive’s identity was by no means made fixed or unproblematic by its twin alliance with the nation state and the historical profession. Though the information masters of the nineteenth century might have wished them so, archives were not transparent windows onto the past. In her book, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler explores the [End Page 342] troubled history of the nineteenth-century imperial archive, focusing in particular on the archives of the Dutch colonial administration in what is now Indonesia. There she sees failure, distress, and fear; actions that were taken on the basis of incomplete knowledge; and uneasy negotiations between colonial administrators in the field and at home, who possessed varying degrees of formal power, and “native” colonial informants, who possessed knowledge and information, which gave them power, as well.37 Stoler’s Dutch administrators, embedded deep in the heart of the colonial apparatus, were anxious. Stoler questions the Enlightenment narrative of imperial archives as sites of mastery, whether of knowledge, society, or nature. The archive, read carefully, reveals mastery as a scrim, the panoptic gaze of the colonial official as a “frail conceit.”38 Applying Stoler’s insights to a study of the imperial Bureau of Archives administered by the United States during the American occupation of the Philippines (1898–1916), historian Cheryl Beredo sees “the colonial project as simultaneously powerful and fragile, as at once repressive and unsure, as both ideally ordered and manifestly unruly.”39

Contrast Jacob Soll’s Colbert, master of all he surveys. Though Soll admits that Colbert’s system for developing universal knowledge did not always produce perfect control of his kingdom, the emphasis of the book is on the successes of the system.40 Soll holds Colbert’s archive up as an icon of an information-based control of nature and society that, he suggests, took full hold in the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, when philosophes like Denis Diderot looked back on Colbert’s ambitions to universal knowledge in the service of the state with something like aspiration.41

If historians of the early modern period are intent upon showing that their subjects really were modern, the modernists are equally keen to make us understand that “modern” isn’t really what we think it is. That is, the difference between Soll’s Colbert and Stoler’s colonial administrators has something to do with the vantage point from which each is viewed. Soll writes Colbert from the perspective of medieval governance and record-keeping systems, which were nowhere near as elaborate or systematic as Colbert’s. Stoler writes from the other side of the age of empire, when European powers were revealed as nowhere near as mighty as they may have seemed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But the contrast between Stoler and Soll’s approaches to their subjects highlights another tension in the historiography of archives. It’s possible to write the story as one of mastery over information (and through information, knowledge) and the power that mastery conveys. But it’s also possible [End Page 343] to write it as a story in which individuals aspire to, but fail to reach, that mastery. “Information mastery” is a powerful ideal, one as alive in our own day as in seventeenth-century France or nineteenth-century Batavia. Total information awareness is seen as the key to control of territory, of economic conditions, of political situations (and people) with potential for unruliness.

The goal of information mastery structures the practices of archivallyaware state officials, but always remains just out of reach. In this sense, it’s a bit like an “epistemic value,” as discussed by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their book Objectivity.42 Daston and Galison document the changing ways in which scientists define objectivity from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, as well as the ways in which they attempted to achieve it. Similarly, the history of archives can explore changes over time in what it means to think and act archivally. Though we will never see any one individual—whether a powerful royal minister, a colonial official, or a Venetian clerk—fully achieve information mastery, we can see how individuals organize their filing practices and documentation systems towards that goal, and how assembling vast reams of information allows them to structure their world and act in it. We can be aware of the power of information mastery as an epistemic value while not making the mistake of believing that it has been achieved in any particular case, without falling prey to what Thomas Richards calls the “fantasy of knowledge elevated to global power.”43
Archives and Justice in a Postcolonial World

Since the end of the Cold War, the history of archives has gained striking real world relevance. State archives and record-keeping practices have come under particular scrutiny in states where authoritarian governments have given way, either partially or fully, to pressure for more democratic, open societies. A range of studies, written by both archivists and historians, have documented the use of archives under secretive authoritarian governments who have collected information on their citizens and used it against them while maintaining the secrecy of that information, even to the point where officials have refused to follow state laws for the transfer of government records to the archives, instead destroying or embargoing records as they leave office, a process in which archival administrators have sometimes been complicit. If information is power, secrecy and the destruction of records are two of the ways in which that power is wielded. [End Page 344]

These studies, at least some of which function as historical scholarship and social activism at the same time, have also explored the process of opening up those archives and making them accessible to those whose lives they documented. Though welcome, this process has also been fraught with difficulty. Archivists have worked with nongovernmental organizations, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (as in South Africa), citizen-activists (and citizen-archivists), and governments to establish as a human right an individual’s access to the data the government keeps on herself and her family. This right, labeled “habeas data,” has emerged in particular from a Latin American context, where many countries went through civil conflicts in which autocratic governments used forced disappearances and secret executions of opponents as means for suppressing dissent.44 A writ of habeas data is akin to a writ of habeas corpus—but issued retrospectively, many years after a loved one’s disappearance. The work of Trudy Huskamp Peterson, who as Acting Archivist of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration in the early 1990s was involved in legal actions related to President George H. W. Bush’s attempt to retain personal control over the records of the National Security Council, has been particularly important here.45

The opening up of archives to serve the people of a nation, as well as its government, is often a difficult process, a continuation of conflict rather than its end. In many instances, this opening up remains incomplete, at best. This can be seen in literature that has emerged from both post-civil war Guatemala and post-apartheid South Africa. In Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala, Kirsten Weld documents the rediscovery and reopening of the Guatemalan National Police Archives. She traces a path from the creation and use of the records by the state during Guatemala’s 36-year civil war through their reclamation by leftist activists in the last decade. Weld shows how the Guatemalan government wielded the archives as instruments of terror. Citizens, particularly leftist activists, never knew precisely what records were kept on them, and these records could be used against them at any time, as a basis, for example, for their arrest, which could lead to their disappearance and murder.

Studies in this field do the most to reveal the distance between the image of the archive, particularly the state archive, as a neutral repository of historical reality and its constructed political nature. Weld recommends “thinking archivally.” She writes, “archival thinking demands that we see archives not only as sources of data to be mined by researchers but also as more than the sum of their parts—as instruments of political action, implements of state formation (‘technologies of rule’), institutions of liberal democratization, [End Page 345] enablers of gaze and desire, and sites of social struggle.”46 One might also point here to Craig Robertson’s identification of the passport as an example of an “archival technology,” a document whose power to certify national identity depends upon its integration into broader systems of state archival file management, with the state archives functioning as the memory of the state, the databanks to which it returns to remind itself where and when it has encountered a particular person before.47

Yet if archives are instruments of terror, the records they contain can also be used as the basis for efforts to restore justice. The story that Weld tells on this front is a moving one, particularly when she comes to the uses made of the archives by the relatives and friends of those who died in Guatemala’s civil war. Individuals turn to the archive seeking evidence of what happened to disappeared brothers and sisters, missing parents, absent friends. They go to the National Police Archives expecting closure; expecting to know, at last, what happened to the missing. Yet the archive cannot always provide such closure: the records were destroyed, damaged, or never existed, or the records that are available conflict with an individual’s memory. Individuals seek their loved ones; all they find are “paper cadavers,” if that.

Evidence from the National Police Archive has also been used as the basis for attempts to restore justice through criminal prosecutions of Guatemala’s former rulers, particular military officials.48 As Weld documents, in order to serve as historical and legal evidence, the records had to be processed according to the tenets of archival science, with respect for the ways in which they reflected the bureaucratic structure that had generated them. The human rights activists working on the collection were impatient with this requirement, and wished to follow an easier path: refiling everything chronologically. But they came to see that the documents’ value depended on reconstructing as closely as possible their original order—no easy task, given that the documents had been discovered in disarray, moldering in a leaky, disused warehouse. Trudy Huskamp Peterson’s outside expertise was particularly valuable in convincing the activists to think archivally.49 Yet efforts to use the documents in court, too, have not produced fully satisfying victories. The military has responded with its own lawsuits (also grounded in archival evidence but from archives still held confidentially from the Guatemalan people), as well as physical violence against those engaged in the project of recovering and using the police archives.50

South African archivist Verne Harris documents the struggle that began over South Africa’s archives as apartheid came to an end.51 As in Guatemala, archives have been of central political importance, both as instruments [End Page 346] employed by the apartheid state against its people and as sources for conflicting narratives of the history in which South Africa’s identity as a nation was grounded. In Harris’s telling, the South African State Archives Service was both victim of the apartheid state and a complicit participant in enforcing the apartheid regime. The State Archives Service was a relatively weak political player within the military-dominated apartheid government, and various branches of the government “persistently refused to subject their records systems to design analysis and archival appraisal or to co-operate in the transfer of records into the service’s custody.”52 On the other hand, the institutional culture of the State Archives Service was thoroughly imbued with the apartheid ethos: the official language was Afrikaans, white Afrikaans-speaking men dominated the staff, and institutional culture tended to be undemocratic and nontransparent.53 Since the official end of apartheid in 1994, the Archives Service has worked towards becoming a more open, democratic institution, but this is a yet-unfinished process.54

The complicity of many state archivists with the apartheid government is a key jumping off point for American archivist and historian Randall C. Jimerson in Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Jimerson, arguing from a perspective similar to those developed by Weld, Stoler, and Burns, argues that because archives are not politically neutral sites, archivists need to be aware of the political context of their work, and do their best to avoid being complicit with repressive regimes.55 Even in more open, democratic societies, archival policies governing collection, access, and use are generally made by—and serve—those in power. This is a complicated issue for archivists, as professional codes of conduct are valuable tools for helping to ensure that archivists are impartial guardians of the historical record. Yet these same codes of conduct may restrict archivists’ ability to act in the face of injustice: as Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg observe in Processing the Past, an archivist who copied and shared documents, for example, after the fashion of Daniel Ellsberg (the leaker of the Pentagon Papers) would have faced severe professional sanctions.56 Jimerson might suggest that an archivist can never be an impartial guardian of the material historical record: he or she is always working for someone. [End Page 347]
Reading against the Grain: Archival Methodology and the History of Women and Gender

Closely connected to the history of archives are works in which scholars reflect on their experiences in archives and raise methodological questions about the uses of archival evidence. The question of how we do things with archival documents inevitably leads back to questions about why those documents were collected in the first place, and how they have been shaped by their own histories. Furthermore, historicizing the archive invites a recursive questioning of the foundations of historical scholarship: if the archive is not a transparent window onto the past, then what is the ground of historical reality, and what is historical truth?

Arlette Farge’s Le Goût de l’archive, newly and beautifully translated into English as The Allure of the Archives, combines archival memoir with a historian’s methodological handbook.57 In her scholarship, Farge has relied on eighteenth-century French judicial archives, and her book examines the particular questions that these archives raise, but it offers more generalizable lessons as well. She asks profound questions about how we use archives, what we can expect from them, how we deal with the overwhelming masses of unique and particular lives that the archives can reveal, how we integrate that material into interpretive frameworks while respecting the individuality of each life the archive reveals, often in fragmentary form. Farge hearkens back to Foucault’s more theoretical use of the word “archive,” providing a practitioner’s manual for excavating the sensibilities, mentalities, and patterns of human relationship that underlie the strange and fugitive statements that constitute the textual body of the archive.

Carolyn Steedman’s Dust, which takes Derrida’s Archive Fever as its jumping off point, similarly questions the historical truth that can be brought out of the archives. Steedman ranges across the archives, both literal and figurative, of nineteenth-century France and Britain. As she asks what it means to base historical claims on archival evidence, she follows two parallel tracks. She considers how nineteenth-century actors, including Jules Michelet, the French archivist and historian, and novelist George Eliot, traced history through the archives as well as how late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century historians do the same. Steedman asks what it means to ground historical narrative in archival materiality: What kind of truth claims are we making when we take the archival as the warrant for truth? Echoing Derrida, Steedman suggests that these claims are less stable than they seem. [End Page 348]

“More on that ‘man’ later,” I promised at the beginning of this essay. Farge and Steedman both examine the archives for evidence of women’s lives, thoughts, feelings, but they have to read “against the grain” to do so. This is frequently true not only of women but of other nonelites as well—the poor, the dispossessed, the colonial, postcolonial, or ethnic or sexual minority subject. As Randall Jimerson and Laura Mayhall have observed, many archives were not founded with women in mind, at least not as historical actors.58 Only fairly recently—in the last century or so—have archives been organized to capture women’s lives, often by women themselves, as with activists who, in the first half of the twentieth century, organized archives of their work in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain.59 Similarly, the last century was marked by African-American led efforts to establish archives that could serve as a foundation for black history.60 The radical archives movement of the present day is to some extent an expansion and extension of these earlier efforts.61

With a few reasonable exceptions made for high-status women, to the extent that women’s lives have been captured in the archives, it’s not generally been as historical actors whose papers were deliberately saved because contemporaries judged them to be of value to history (as did antebellum Americans who caught the fervor of preserving the Founding Fathers’ papers). Rather, as Farge’s study suggests, women (as well as other nonelites) often enter the archive when their lives intersect with an official archive-keeping institution—often the legal system. Documents produced out of these intersections—witness statements, criminal confessions, court transcripts—often catch people in extremity, unprepared, and at a low point in their lives. Or they produce documents that give partial or evasive accounts, as witnesses, criminals, and victims seek to use their words to force particular legal outcomes, insofar as they are able.

How are we to interpret documents like these? Attention to the history of an archive can be important here as methodological corrective, particularly when it focuses on the circumstances under which documents were created, who participated in that process, and what conventional forms they followed in creating the documents. Frances E. Dolan, in True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, explores the use (especially in print compilations) of early modern English women’s statements by Anglican Church courts, which dealt with cases of sexual misconduct.62 Historians and literary scholars are often eager to read these statements as authentic representations of early modern women’s voices. But the statements were taken by court clerks, often according to conventional [End Page 349] forms—for example, they were frequently (though inconsistently) converted to the third person.63 Attention to these formal requirements of the genre can help us to better recover what we can of early modern women’s “voices,” while acknowledging, with a sense of humility, that the voices of the dead are never fully recoverable.

But every archival record is necessarily a partial document (partial “in all senses of the word,” to quote Craig Robertson).64 Thus, no matter what kinds of archival records we’re dealing with, it’s crucial to attend to the gaps between documents, the differences, and the anxieties. This is what Ann Laura Stoler does in her book on colonial Dutch archives, turning the lens on the individuals who made up the official bureaucracy, regarding them, much like those they surveil, as people caught up in the machine.
Personal Archives

The history of archives, as the above discussion indicates, has largely focused on state and institutional archives. We know far less about the origins, histories, and meanings of personal archives, especially beyond the life of the individual who originally assembled them. Whether or not personal collections of papers even count as archives is an open question (and this is not even to touch the distinction that professional archivists make between active records, which institutions maintain and use, and documents, which are properly housed in archives). In Archive Fever, Derrida locates the original archive in the record keeping of the magistrate: it is by nature an official body. Randolph C. Head of the Global Archivalities Network, an international research group devoted to the history of early modern archives, picks this story up in the Holy Roman Empire: there scholars elaborated the science of diplomatics to establish canons for authenticating legal and political documents. They argued that collections of documents were only archives insofar as they were maintained by sovereign authority, whether a prince or a city-state.65 Only such authority could confer archival authenticity, according to diplomatist Nicholas Christoph Lyncker: “Private cabinets do not merit the name archive, since they lack public faith.”66 Such usage persists in official definitions of “archive,” particularly those endorsed by archivists.

And yet “archive” is now colloquially applied without reservation by many—including the scholars cited in this essay—to private collections of papers. Private archives are frequently preserved, e.g. by being purchased [End Page 350] or otherwise acquired by public rare books and manuscripts libraries, a phenomenon rarely seen in the early modern world, where “private” papers were handed down through families and friends or scattered and destroyed. They might be published (as were, for example, the correspondence of noted scientists John Ray and Robert Boyle), but more rarely would they be publicly archived. Furthermore, many archives, such as Colbert’s, occupied an uneasy space between public and private, state and personal, institutional and individual: what it means to be a public versus a private archive in any given historical moment is (or should be) open for discussion.

Any suggestions on this point can only be tentative, but perhaps we’re witnessing here the ongoing evolution in who counts as a “public” citizen as well as in the nature of public institutions. Those whose archives are bought and housed in public institutions are those whose private lives are of interest because of their public contributions: their work as novelists, poets, scientists, artists, social reformers, or philosophers. These figures, who once occupied the shadows cast by government and church authorities (as they drew sustenance from them as patrons) take on the “public” status once reserved for those authorities. In so doing, they make their archives collectible in their own right. The increasing security of public archives also participates here: when such institutions are weak, ill-prepared to preserve material, liable to accident and invasion (as in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and even into the nineteenth and twentieth), publication of papers is seen as the surest means to preserve them. Here is yet another way in which the story of the history of archives turns out to be the story of the evolution of the public sphere and the state.

Like work on the history of institutional archives, the best studies of personal archives take a material approach, and help us to better understand the circumstances of the production of the documents in an archive, as well as their subsequent histories. Understanding production and subsequent history can be an important methodological corrective; or it can be interesting in its own right. John Randolph leads the way here, with a study of the Bakunin family archive, preserved because of the fame of Mikhail Bakunin, the nineteenth-century Russian anarchist.67 Randolph offers a biography of the archive as a collection of material texts, studying their transformations as they passed out of the hands of the family and into the hands of the state.

The history of early modern British science has proved rich ground for the study of personal archives and information management practices, with volumes or essays published on the papers of Robert Boyle, Hans Sloane, Samuel Hartlib, Robert Hooke, Isaac Newton, and John Aubrey.68 [End Page 351] This activity coordinates with exciting projects in early modern intellectual history more broadly, such as efforts to digitize, catalogue, and make available vast swathes of learned correspondence. These projects include Oxford University’s Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters, as well as digitizations of the papers, correspondence, and notebooks of figures such as Newton, Hartlib, and the astrologer-physician Simon Forman.69 Arnold Hunt’s essay on Hans Sloane’s archives, a contribution to the edited volume From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, sets Sloane’s papers in the context of his broader collecting activity, of which it was one facet. Sloane seems to have sought to assemble a broad-based archive for the history of science—in addition to his own correspondence and papers, he obtained by inheritance or purchase papers from Robert Hooke, Edward Lhuyd, and John Dee, among others.70 Sloane’s archival activities, as well as the motives driving them, deserve more investigation. Michael Hunter, in his volume on the Boyle papers, uses the history of the archive to offer key guidance for its would-be users, pointing out how handwriting analysis (Boyle employed a series of amanuenses over the course of his life) can be used to discern the archive’s “strata,” which then allows us to reconstruct the sequence of Boyle’s thoughts as he wrote and compulsively revised treatises. An earlier volume edited by Hunter, The Archives of the Scientific Revolution, includes many similarly valuable insights into the archives of a range of seventeenth-century scientific figures.71 Recently, Richard Yeo has offered insight into the note-taking and record-keeping processes of seventeenth-century English virtuosi, including Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, John Locke, and Samuel Hartlib.72 Though they might not have used the term “archive” (as Yeo recognizes), they thought long and hard about information management.73 They renegotiated the links between writing and memory and found new ways of disciplining collective observation and preserving the vast reams of material generated by the Baconian project of reforming the natural sciences.

In The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts, Sarah Dry tells archival history as an adventure story whose cast of characters includes “the inventor of the kaleidoscope, the discoverer of the planet Neptune, the wife of a self-made Yankee business guru, and a Jewish biblical scholar,” as well as John Maynard Keynes.74 Dry follows Newton’s archive, a trove of astronomical, mathematical, theological, and alchemical writings, as it fragmented across owners, both individual and institutional, over the centuries (a process of dispersal that began, in a [End Page 352] sense, in Newton’s lifetime, as many of his insights were communicated in letters—components of what Paul Needham has termed the “outward archive”).75 She charts it into dead ends (the Earl of Macclesfield’s library—in hindsight, a temporary resting place) and surprising afterlives (the digital Newton Papers Project, which, in presenting digital surrogates, translations, and transcriptions of papers dispersed across the globe via numerous auctions, recollects Newton’s archive in one site). In the last century, value has driven dispersal, as wealthy individual collectors have sought to purchase pieces of Newton at auction. What Dry finds is an index of our appreciation of science as a cultural activity, as well as our estimations of who scientists are (or should be): Newton’s alchemical and theological writings were long ignored, even suppressed in favor of rational Enlightenment natural philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy. Even today, she notes, a page of Newton’s “scientific” writings will fetch more at auction than a page of theology76

Lisa Gitelman’s book, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents, touches on the history of personal archives in the twentieth century. She links workers’ interest in making personal archives of materials related to their jobs to the proliferation of reproduction technologies in the modern workplace, particularly the photocopying machine. She further connects this to the relationship between office workers and the larger institutions that employ them, both public and private, observing in particular the gaps that can open up between employers and employees. One response to that alienation—which can rise to the level of believing that one’s employer is pursuing an immoral or illegal course of action—has been to compile a personal archive documenting the organization’s activities. In the last third of the twentieth century, photocopying encouraged the maintenance of such personal archives: as Gitelman writes, “xerographic reproduction helped shift the meanings of reproduction from access to archive.”77 In this context, the balance between openness and secrecy was a point of contention, one upon which employers and employees, as well as broader constituencies who may have a stake in the employers’ actions (such as the citizenry of a nation, where the employer was a democratic government) may have differed. Gitelman highlights controversy over secrecy and openness in her discussion of Daniel Ellsberg’s copying and distribution of the Pentagon Papers, which she links forward to the national security policies of the Bush and Obama administrations.78 Guatemala isn’t the only state to maintain that the functioning of archives as a tool of governance depends crucially on [End Page 353] their secrecy, and the retention of government control over those archives. Again, in the U.S. context, as well, the destruction of documents is as important as their retention, as a tactic for exercising state power: Gitelman explores this in a brief discussion of the destruction of records that came to light during the 1973 Watergate hearings. In his testimony, after denying that he had shredded key documents, John D. Ehrlichman stated, “We have a great disposal system at the White House. If you really want to get rid of a document, you put it in a burn bag and seal it up and it’s never opened again, and it goes into a furnace and that is the end of it.”79

As these examples show, the South African apartheid state is far from the only government to attempt to shape the historical record by destroying documents. Echoing early modern state archival practices, modern-day officials also create strategic gaps in the record by declaring documents private. In the United States, at least, this tactic has served as a workaround to the legally codified expectation that all government records belong to the public and should be open to it.80 Upon departing the State Department, Henry Kissinger retained the transcripts his office made of his phone conversations, claiming they were personal rather than government property. Historical trends in this arena are not entirely comforting. To take one example: since the passage of the Presidential Records Act in 1978, presidential papers have been a battleground, with successive administrations seeking to limit public access to them, even though the 1978 Act declared them public property. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the PROFs case (named after the IBM email management software used in the Reagan White House) established, against the strenuous objections of Reagan and Bush officials (including some National Archives personnel), that electronic records were public records. But in 1993, George H. W. Bush and then-National Archivist Don Wilson signed an agreement that conferred all control over electronic records generated during his presidency to Bush himself. Shortly thereafter, Wilson was appointed the first director of the Bush Presidential Library. Wilson and Bush’s agreement was overturned in a legal challenge led by the American Historical Association; however, a related ruling that National Security Council records are not subject to the jurisdiction of the National Archives and Records Administration, and are thus private presidential papers, was allowed to stand.81 [End Page 354]
Conclusion

These are the sympathies and tensions that structure the politics of (and in) the archive. On the one hand, officials assemble archives as a way of keeping tabs on populations under their control: they compile reports, assemble copies of charters, file correspondence, all in the name of maintaining order. Information management has long been a precondition for, as well as a mode of, effective governance. Yet, on the other hand, archives are not only the province of official bureaucracies. They also function as communal resources, sites at which personal, civic, and national memories can be accessed, and from which they can be brought before the public, to constitute the affective glue that holds a community together. Though this essay has primarily focused on the period from 1500 to the present, this use of archives predates the modern. Dutch archivist Eric Ketelaar tells the story of how at moments of political strife, city leaders in late medieval Flanders brought documents out of the archives and into the market place, to publicly “perform” them as a way of reinforcing communal memory and identity, grounded as these were in rights and freedoms granted to towns and recorded in letters and charters.82 In twentieth-century America a strong emphasis on public ownership of documents in a democracy rendered controversial presidential attempts to retain control over the records of governance. The two functions of the archives are in sympathy with each other, in that they both depend upon the archive’s status as an official resource maintained by governmental authority. Yet they are also in profound tension, given the distance that can open up between a government (or other official institution) and the people living and working in and under it.

Yet the history of archives need not be just about states—or archives. As several of the studies considered in this essay have suggested, in historicizing the archive—in understanding its repertoire of roles in written cultures—we need to look back to all the ways in which archives, and record-keeping more broadly, have been situated with respect to broader ecologies of writing, paperwork, and print. When, and why, has the preservation of written documents mattered, not just in Europe and the Americas, but globally? Who has attempted to preserve them, and how? How have materials so preserved been deployed in political, economic, social, and cultural contexts? How have they served as tools of knowledge-making? In answering these questions, failures of access, secrecy, the accidental or deliberate destruction of records, ambiguous borders between public and private, are all just as important as the positive actions that archives make possible. Indeed, such [End Page 355] “negatives” are part and parcel of how archives function as political, cultural, and intellectual tools. If we move forward in attempting to shed light on these questions—always grounded in a material approach informed by the history of the book—we will come closer to understanding the power wielded through writing.
Elizabeth Yale

Elizabeth Yale is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa Center for the Book and a Rare Book School Mellon Fellow in Critical Bibliography. Her book, Script, Print, Speech, Mail: Nature, Nation, and Learned Communication in Early Modern Britain, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. She is currently working on a project tracing the afterlives of early modern scientific papers, including their archiving, posthumous publication, and destruction.

Notes

My thanks to Jonathan Rose for his assistance with this essay.

  1. Ernst Posner, Archives in the Ancient World (2002 reprint of Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972); Eleanor Robson, “The Clay Tablet Book in Sumer, Assyria, and Babylonia,” in A Companion to the History of the Book, ed. Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 67–83; Maria Brosius, ed., Ancient Archives and Archival Traditions: Concepts of Record-keeping in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002); Stephen D. Houston, ed., The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  2. “About the National Archives of the United States,” accessed 19 August 2014, http://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html.

  3. Lisa Gitelman, Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014); Ben Kafka, The Demon of Writing: Powers and Failures of Paperwork (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2012); Matthew S. Hull, Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Christopher A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996).

  4. Examples come from the following works: Eric Ketelaar, The Archival Image: Collected Essays (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997); Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).

  5. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), esp. 126–131.

  7. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998).

  8. G. Thomas Tanselle, “The World as Archive,” Common Knowledge 8 (2002): 402–06.

  9. Anjali Arondekar, For The Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009).

  10. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire (London: Verso, 1993), 9.

  11. Compare Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 8–9, on the power of the document to do the same. [End Page 356]

  12. Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 45.

  13. In addition to Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, see Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001); Steedman, “‘Something She Called a Fever’: Michelet, Derrida, and Dust (Or, in the Archives with Michelet and Derrida,” in Archives, Documentation and Institutions of Social Memory: Essays from the Sawyer Seminar, ed. Frances X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006), 4–19; Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers.

  14. Filippo de Vivo, “Ordering the Archive in Early Modern Venice (1400–1650),” Archival Science 10 (2010): 231–48.

  15. Ibid., 242.

  16. Ibid., 246–47.

  17. Arndt Brendecke, “‘Arca, archivillo, archivo’: The Keeping, Use and Status of Historical Documents about the Spanish Conquista,” Archival Science 10 (2010): 267–83. See also Arndt Brendecke, Imperium und Empirie: Funktionen des Wissens in der Spanischen Kolonialherrschaft (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie, 2009).

  18. Nicholas Popper, “From Abbey to Archive: Managing Texts and Records in Early Modern England,” Archival Science (2010): 250, 255–56, 262.

  19. Jacob Soll, The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Intelligence System (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009).

  20. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (Methuen & Co., 1982. Reprint, London: Routledge, 2002); for a contrasting view, see Ruth Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).

  21. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

  22. Soll, The Information Master, 153–159.

  23. John-Paul Ghobrial, The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London, and Paris in the Age of William Trumbull (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55, 64.

  24. Burns, Into the Archives, 104–13.

  25. Ibid., 124.

  26. Markus Friedrich, “Archives as Networks: The Geography of Record-keeping in the Society of Jesus (1540–1773), Archival Science 10 (2010): 285–298.

  27. Mordechai Feingold, “Of Records and Grandeur: The Archive of the Royal Society,” in The Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Michael Hunter (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), 171–84; Elizabeth Yale, Script, Print, Speech, Mail: Nation, Nature, and Learned Communication in Early Modern Britain (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press), chapter three.

  28. Jennifer S. Milligan, “’What is an Archive?’ in the History of Modern France,” in Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, ed. Antoinette Burton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 159–83; Lucie Favier, La mémoire de l’état: Histoire des archives nationales (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Steedman, Dust, 17–37.

  29. Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009), 82.

  30. Craig Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 73–74.

  31. See, for example, Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 13–31.

  32. Peter Fritzsche, “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 184–208.

  33. Ibid., 196.

  34. Ibid., 200. [End Page 357]

  35. Ibid., 203.

  36. Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, “From Nazi Plunder to Russian Restitution,” in Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, F. J. Hoogewoud, and Eric Ketelaar, ed., Returned from Russia: Nazi Archival Plunder in Western Europe and Recent Restitution Issues (Builth Wells: Institute of Art and Law, 2007), 3–134.

  37. Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 21–22 and throughout.

  38. Ibid., 23, 57–60.

  39. Cheryl Beredo, Import of the Archive: U.S. Colonial Rule of the Philippines and the Making of American Archival History (Sacramento, CA: Litwin Books, 2013), 13.

  40. Soll, The Information Master, 118–19.

  41. Ibid., 4–5.

  42. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2010).

  43. Richards, 9.

  44. Weld, Paper Cadavers, 60–61; quote on 61.

  45. Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 174–77.

  46. Weld, Paper Cadavers, 13.

  47. Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion: Historicizing the Archive and the Passport,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 68–86.

  48. Weld, Paper Cadavers, 241–43.

  49. Ibid., 76–84.

  50. Ibid., 44–45, 244–46.

  51. Verne Harris, Archives and Justice: A South African Perspective (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2007).

  52. Ibid., 176.

  53. Ibid., 177.

  54. See the essays in Refiguring the Archive, ed. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, Michele Pickover, Graeme Reid, and Razia Saleh (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002).

  55. Jimerson, Archives Power, 342–63.

  56. Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 180.

  57. Arlette Farge, The Allure of the Archives, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

  58. Jimerson, Archives Power, 85; Laura Mayhall, “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’: British Feminism and the Historical Imagination,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 232.

  59. Mayhall, “Creating the ‘Suffragette Spirit’,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 232–250.

  60. Laura E. Helton, Remaking the Past: Collecting, Collectivity, and the Emergence of Black Archival Publics, 1915–1950 (Ph.D. diss, New York University, 2015).

  61. See, for example, the “Radical Archives” conference held at New York University, April 11–12, 2014, accessed January 22, 2015, http://www.radicalarchives.net.

  62. Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); see also Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

  63. Dolan, 111–112.

  64. Robertson, “Mechanisms of Exclusion,” 83.

  65. Randolph C. Head, “Documents, Archives, and Proof around 1700,” Historical Journal 56 (2013): 909–930.

  66. Head, 918; quoting Nicholas Christoph Lyncker, D. Nic. Christoph Lynckeri jcti. Celebratissimi, dissertation de archive imperii (Jena, 1686), reprinted in Collecta, ed. Wencker, 82–109, quote on 85. [End Page 358]

  67. John Randolph, “On the Biography of the Bakunin Family Archive,” in Archive Stories, ed. Burton, 209–31.

  68. Michael Hunter, The Boyle Papers: Understanding the Manuscripts of Robert Boyle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Arnold Hunt, “Sloane as a Collector of Manuscripts,” in From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter (London: British Library, 2012), 190–207; Felicity Henderson, “Robert Hooke’s Archive,” Script & Print 33 (2009): 92–108; Sarah Dry, The Newton Papers: The Strange and True Odyssey of Isaac Newton’s Manuscripts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps: How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive,” Book History 12 (2009): 1–36.

  69. Lauren Kassell, ed., with Michael Hawkins, Robert Ralley, and John Young, “The Casebooks Project: Simon Forman’s and Richard Napier’s Medical Records 1596–1634,” www.magicandmedicine.hps.cam.ac.uk; Rob Iliffe, director, AHRC Newton Papers Project, www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk; Howard Hotson, director, Cultures of Knowledge, http://www.culturesofknowledge.org; Mark Greengrass, director, Hartlib Papers, hridigital.shef.ac.uk/hartlib. All accessed January 23, 2015.

  70. Hunt, “Sloane as a Collector of Manuscripts,” 196, 203–04.

  71. Michael Hunter, ed., The Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998).

  72. Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

  73. Yeo, Notebooks, 329–330, n. 104.

  74. Dry, Newton Papers, 4.

  75. Paul Needham, Galileo Makes a Book: The First Edition of Sidereus Nuncius, Venice 1610 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 54; see also Needham, “Concepts of Paper Study,” in Puzzles in Paper: Concepts in Historical Watermarks, ed. Daniel W. Mosser, Michael Saffle, and Ernest W. Sullivan II (New Castle, DE/London: Oak Knoll Press and British Library, 2000), 1–36.

  76. Dry, Newton Papers, 206.

  77. Gitelman, Paper Knowledge, 110.

  78. Ibid., 85–97.

  79. Ibid., 96.

  80. On archives, the public good, and secrecy more broadly, see Richard J. Cox and David A. Wallace, ed., Archives and the Public Good: Accountability and Records in Modern Society (Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 2002).

  81. Blouin and Rosenberg, Processing the Past, 174–77.

  82. Eric Ketelaar, “Records Out and Archives In: Early Modern Cities as Creators of Records and as Communities of Archives,” Archival Science 10 (2010): 201–10. [End Page 359]