But it seems you do not realize, Meneer Pangemanann, that your report is not for the general public. Only a very few people in the Indies and in the world have read and studied it…. You will never know, and indeed do not need to know, who else has read it. Your work of scholarship, as you like to call it, will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives. Once everyone finished reading it, it became dust and smoke, in the safekeeping only of the devils of the night.^[1]

It is 1912. Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s novel, House of Glass, begins in the chill of the Dutch East Indies’ state archives and in the heat of colonial Java’s emergent Indonesian nationalist movement. Dutch authorities call on Jacques Pangemanann, a former Eurasian police officer, newly appointed native commissioner to the elite Indies intelligence service, to defuse the movement’s spread. His mission is to read the classified state archives, spy, report on and then destroy Minke, the movement’s leader. But this complicity undoes Panegamanann and ravages his soul. He hears voices, becomes estranged from his family and falls into alcoholic despair. His descent from colonial officer to “bandit,” and ultimately to archive-bound “terrorist” is rapid. By the book’s end, he will have destroyed his own hero, Minke, and himself.
When the novel opens, Pangemanann has just completed his meticulous report, assessing the strength of the nascent anti-colonial movement and the commitments of its alleged instigators, the mostly Muslim educated elite on Java. Those few architects and agents of empire with privileged access eagerly read it. Leaders of the sugar industry syndicate laud his work. But his words will never enter the “nearly ten miles of closely packed papers,” that make up the sanctified space of the government archive.^[2] He may enter the inner sanctum but leave no trace: as spy he can have no presence, as an “Indo” (a “mixed-blood”) of tainted native, if elevated, origin, he can only have a muffled voice. Too lowly to be acknowledged, his “findings” are too sensitive to be preserved. As his European superior bluntly informs him, “he need not know” who has read it, “[it] will never receive the honor of being kept in the State archives.” Burned as soon as it is read, it is reduced to “dust and smoke” – an archive belonging to the “devils of the night.”^[3]
House of Glass is the name Pangemanann gives to his report, but “house of glass” references to a more fundamentally disquieting space in the colonial imaginary – at once the fragile security of the Dutch police state and the false security of Europeans living nestled in it. The quest for affective knowledge – that which moves people to feel and act – was the coveted pursuit of state intelligence, but beyond its grasp. Framed by the deceptions of archival access, House of Glass begins with the state archive only to veer far from it, for Pangemanann hides his most precious document in the safety of his house. In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s vision, disappeared documents and distorted reports are the archive’s paltry truths. The building that houses the state’s records is a “mausoleum” with palatial columns and thick stone walls. It does more than chill and still the air. It keeps out both the tropical heat and the resilient motion of a resistant social world that is Java.
House of Glass reads at once as a condemnation of colonial rule and a fierce parable of the contemporary seductions of power in what was Soeharto-ruled, postcolonial Indonesia. For Pramoedya, whose stories were transmitted orally in prison where he was incarcerated for fourteen years with his writings banned, it is not surprising how sharply his assault is aimed – at the erudite, educated ignorance that Java’s Dutch officialdom cultivated, and that the colonial archives produced and contained.^[4] Pramoedya Ananta Toer mocks those officials (and scholars) who hold tight to their paper documents, who imagine they can know the Indies without setting foot outside the archive and their carefully tended inscriptions in it.
One of his targets is clear: those who “study to become colonial expert[s] by going in and out of these buildings,” of those who believe that “documents are more reliable… than the mouths of their authors.” If the “taste of the archive” is in the heady rush of discovery, in the sensations and desires the archives stir, for Pram, the colonial archives are the bitter after-taste of empire, the morsels left for us, their voracious contemporary readers.^[5] Regimes of official documentation in his account are inert remnants, iconic roadmaps to regimes of domination that warp the integrity of the best of men. Such closed-circuited regimes of impoverished testimony produce their experts who in turn reproduce them.
This site of safekeeping, a pyre of empire, is one plausible way to describe the deadening weight of colonial archives. But it is not the one I have in mind. Pramoedya’s caricature is a still life, or a pointillist free frame that captures the rigidities and distortions of a colonial optic. In his novel, the archive has no pulse. For Pram it serves effectively to contrast the vibrant political culture of a Java that high and low officials labored to grasp but could barely comprehend.
But colonial state archives are sites of perturbations of other kinds – less monuments to the absence or ubiquity of knowledge than its piecemeal partiality, less documents to the force of reasoned judgment than to both the spasmodic and sustained currents of anxious labor that paper trails could not contain. Nietzsche warns that “the legislation of language” establishes truth.^[6] But here, that legislated lexicon produces a surfeit that spills over and smudges the archive’s policed edges. In these Dutch colonial archives, what could, should, and need not be done or said collude and collide in the corridors of race, and in the constricted political space of a never stable, Dutch-inflected “colonial situation.”
For Pramoedya, the tremors of colonial rule are outside the archives. In this book, I pursue how deeply epistemic anxieties stir affective tremors within them. The pulse of the archive and the forms of governance which it belies are in the finished reports and in the process of their making, in the fine crafts of cribbing and culling on which colonial bureaucracies so relied. In the interstices of sanctioned formulae, these Netherlands Indies archives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century mark the distance between recognized and disqualified knowledge, between intelligible accounts and those deemed inappropriate for exchange. Not least, here is what Michel de Certeau might include as a space of “displaced histories,” contrary and subjacent – but not necessarily subaltern – that hover in the archive’s long shadows.^[7] Sometimes these are emergent and awkward, sometimes suspended and unfulfilled narratives within the archive’s dominant mode. And sometimes there are stammers, more “disabled histories,” a few brief words in Malay, seized from a “native informant,” not given the due of a narrative at all.
This book is about such a colonial order of things as seen through the record of archival productions. I ask what insights into the social imaginaries of colonial rule might be gained from attending not only to colonialism’s archival content, but to the principles and practices of governance lodged in particular archival forms. By “archival form” I allude to several things: prose style, repetitive refrain, the arts of persuasion, affective strains that shape “rational” response, categories of confidentiality and classification, and not least, genres of documentation. The book’s focus is on archiving as process rather than archives as things. Most importantly, it looks to archives as condensed sites of epistemological and political anxiety rather than as skewed and biased sources. These colonial archives were both transparencies on which power relations were inscribed and intricate technologies of rule in themselves.
Those on which I draw here are from the official archives of the Dutch colonial state, missives and reports that passed up and down the bureaucratic ladder, or stayed secreted within privileged echelons of it. But the sweep of the archive is not confined to these alone. Filling that archive are those loosely tied to the Indies’ administrative apparatus but not salaried by it. These were doctors, clergymen, private school teachers and orphanage directors whose local knowledge and expertise on specific populations and practices were intermittently sought, those who took these occasions to rehearse common sense or share their views on what it meant to be Dutch, on what they thought of concubinage, or on what they imagined were the attributes of “mixed-blood” children and the nature of their moral character.
Along with the surefooted views on policies by which we have come to identify colonial enterprises are the remnants of writerly practices of a very different kind: those that chronicle failed projects, delusional imaginings, equivocal explanations of unanticipated outbursts of distrust of a state apparatus on which European comforts would so precariously depend. Relegated to archival asides are lowly civil servants gone bankrupt in efforts to pay for their sons’ requisite schooling in Holland. European women go mad in throwaway sentences. In abbreviated asides, impoverished widows of district officials send their servants to beg to their neighbors for them. These are archives peopled with Dutch administrators, German and French planters scrambling to figure out whether their plantation holdings might be attacked by a few workers bent on revenge against an abusive planter – or by phantasmic “hoards of Islamic insurgents” armed to storm their guarded gates. Within the constricted ontologies of rule, understandings of outrage often escaped the reasoned state.
Because imagining what might be was as important as knowing what was, these archives of the visionary and the improbable should rivet our attention to their erratic movement back and forth in verbal tense: the conditional could powerfully reshape an immediate response as it recursively rewrote the present and refigured events that had long passed. The portent-laden future of revolt and betrayal is always on the imminent and dangerous horizon. Thus when colonial social reformers conceived scrupulously planned utopias made of small-scale farmers drawn from the mixed-blood orphanages, their minute descriptions of those children’s inclinations mirrored visions of what they conceived adults to be and what they feared improperly schooled children might become. Such projections, in turn, made more real the visceral fear of the resentments such subjects in the making were thought to harbor. Plans to school the young for state loyalty and limited aspirations underscored their lack of both. Resplendent in the feared, the unrealized, and the ill-conceived, such visions open, in Chapter Four, to what I call a strategy of “developing historical negatives” to track a microspace of the everyday through what might become and could never be. These “blueprints of distress” trace out agitations of a peculiar kind – not events, but the “negative prints” of what stirred official anxiety, to which colonial agents responded with infeasible policies for implausible arrangements that could neither be carried out nor sustained. If historians “tell of things that have been,” and poets “of things as might be,” as Paul Ricoeur’s parse on the Aristotelian distinction insists, this ethnographic history of these colonial imaginaries slides between the fictive, futuristic and the everyday and concrete to capture something of each.^[8]
Here I treat these colonial archives both as a corpus of writing and as a forcefield that animates political energies and expertise, that pulls on some “social facts” and converts them into qualified knowledge, that attends to some ways of knowing as it repels and refuses others.^[9] Such a field has centripetal and centrifugal force. In no small part, it inscribes the authority of the colonial state and the analytic energies mobilized to make its assertions. But it also registers other reverberations, crosscurrent frictions, attractions and aversions that worked within and against those assertions of imperial rights to property, persons, and profits that colonial regimes claimed as their own.
This is what Roland Barthes might have called a “storeyed” archival field in both senses of the term: layered and crafted from practical and unevenly sedimented deceptions and dispositions that accumulated as acceptable or discarded knowledge. The Pangemananns, whose reports were destroyed as soon as they were read, leave only a faint trace. Rather, these chapters pause at the hands and habits of those charged with the writing, recording, sorting, and proliferation of documents in the unremarkable forms in which they appeared; in the tone and tenor of a reprimand, dismissal or praise, in floridly clear or illegible signatures at the bottom of a neatly copied page. Sometimes their actors appear in the entitled scrawls of an angry query across a report, or in the faceless, careful handwriting of “copy machines” (as Eurasian clerks were disparagingly called) – subjects whose racially marked positions conferred no place for, nor right to a signature at all.

ARCHIVAL CONVENTIONS

When the archive, on the contrary, seems easily to give access to what one expects of it, the work is all the more demanding. On has to patiently give up one’s natural “sympathy” for it and consider it an adversary to fight, a piece of knowledge that isn’t to annex but disrupt. It is not simply a matter of undoing something whose meaning is too easy to find; to be able to know it, you have to unlearn and not think you know it from a first reading.^[10]

La Farge’s warning to proceed with caution, to allow oneself to falter in the face of the archive’s repetitive, formulaic and the most obvious, is one I take to heart. The official documents of colonial archives like those of the Netherlands Indies are so weighted with fixed formats, empty phrases and racial clichйs, one is easily blinded by their limpid prose and dull repetitions. Our readings are blunted by what has been often parsed as the seemingly panoptic glare of a vacuous, stylized official gaze. But in these archives the panoptic is a frail conceit. Administrative overviews index conventional forms of assumed mastery less than comprehensive knowledge. Such overviews – of regions, problems or target populations – were rendered from cribbed and cluttered, spare and hurried reports of the disorder of things, written in the studied ineloquence of bureaucracies. Sometimes they were impressionistic and distant, elsewhere animated by intimate fear less than intimate knowledge of what multiple colonial civil servants thought they saw, what was reported to them by an unnamed underling, or what they claimed others said.
Wedged within those folds of truth-claims emerges something else: uncensored turns of phrase, loud asides in the imperative tense, hesitant asides in sotto voce. These register confused assessments, parenthetic doubts about what might count as evidence, eye-witnesses with dubious credentials, dismissed rumors laced with pertinent truths, contradictory testimonies called upon and quickly discarded.
These, too, were assessments that implicitly weighed the stature and sensibility of their authors, and the distance that separated their words from the received scenarios of colonial common sense. In Chapter Five, I refer to these as elements that make up a “hierarchy of credibility”: scales of trust that measured what forms of witness, of words and deeds, could be taken as reliably relevant. But these hierarchies are also sometimes inverted. In the brutal immediacy of a murder, in the panic of an impeding attack, in the anxious rush to fulfill a superior’s demand for information (and for proof of one’s vigilance), in the concerted effort to ward off disaster, words could slip from their safe moorings to reappear unauthorized, inappropriate, and unrehearsed. These are not outside the archival field. Nor are they outside the grids of intelligibility in which those documents are lodged, but the subjacent coordinates of, and counterpoints within them. Such confusions and “asides” work in and around prevailing narratives as they push on the archive’s storied edges.
Derrida’s evocative image of the archive as a site of “house arrest,” one that “gathers together signs,” suggests no entry for the wayward, no access to intruders.^[11] But the paper trails left by European colonial projects could never be sealed that tightly. And not in the Indies where magazines, pamphlets, journals, dailies both pilfered from the official record and were made an evidentiary part of it. Here an image of house-breaking might better be joined with house-arrest to more vividly capture what those in command feared (as much as native insurgence) – that their houses of glass might be shattered by “inside” jobs: by civil servants improperly schooled in what not to see or say (as was Assistant-Resident of Deli, Frans Carl Valck, in Chapters Five and Six), by recalcitrant Indo-Europeans who refused to answer a state commission on their domestic and sexual affairs (as in Chapter Four), and by the unseemly action of the colony’s most respected city-fathers, European high officials (as in Chapter Two) who in protesting government policy, circulated documents and directives meant only for their rarified readings and well-trained ears.
This is the ethnographic space of the colonial archives, where truth claims compete, impervious or fragile, crushed by the weight of convention or resilient in the immediate threat of the everyday; where trust is put to the test and credibility wavers. Here I linger over unspoken orders of rubric and reference that did more than define plausible evidence. Specific if not unique to the shape of these colonial archives is a racialized common sense about people and places – about Javanese coolies and Acehnese insurgents, about the sensibilities of the Indisch, Indies-born and bred Dutch versus imported, transient and echte Europeans. Such implicit commonsense figured centrally when reporting preceded inquiry, when evidence was spare – or absent.
Conventions suggest consensus, but it is not clear what colonial practitioners actually shared. District reports were built upon changing beliefs about what mattered to state security and what sorts of people were deemed a present or possible threat. It was also shaped by how skillfully or poorly seasoned bureaucrats and fledgling practitioners knew the tacit changing rules of decorum and protocol, and what rhetorical devices were deemed persuasive and currently active in the game.
Conventions also suggest familiarity and durability. I take them instead as moving targets. Stock phrases take on different political import depending on where they are placed. Contexts of relevance rapidly changed. References to the need for European nurseries might seem unremarkable in lengthy reports on education, but offer striking openings to political thinking when colonial administrators obsessed over them in classified documents elsewhere: in a commission on European pauperism, in recommendations to quell creole discontent, in debates over mixed-bloods “too proud” to learn manual labor. As I have argued elsewhere, this was not “information out of place.”^[12] In these contexts, they mark implicit anxieties about subject-formation, about the psychic space of empire, about what went without saying, and about the common sense that made these reasoned pairings with “obvious” connection.

THE SEDUCTIONS OF STATE SECRETS

Institutions create shadowed places in which nothing can be seen and no questions asked. They make other areas show finely discriminated detail, which is closely scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an unintended shape as a result of practices directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch these practices establish selective principles that highlight some kinds of events and obscure others is to inspect the social order operating on individual minds.^[13]

Archivists are the first to note that to understand an archive one needs to understand the institutions that it served. “State secrets” are one of those key conventions of concealment that produce the “shadowed places” to which Mary Douglas refers: such shadow places are cast by persons with opaque titles, bureaus with non-descript names, pieces of paper that become “lost,” inaccessible, “miscataloged,” and are thus rendered unusable and irrelevant. “Shadowed places” are what states create, emblematic conventions of the archival form. States do more than traffic in the production of secrets and their selective dissemination. State sovereignty resides in the power to designate arbitrary social facts of the world as matters of security and concerns of state. Once so assigned, these social facts – Indo children breastfed by native servants (who were sometimes their mothers,) poor whites who went by non-Christian names, Indos “disguised” in the dress of native traders, language use at home – are dismembered from their contexts, flung into the orbit of a political world that is often not their own. These otherwise innocuous practices become iconic indices of a colonial world perceived at risk, signs of alert that accrue political deliberations, that sanction the rush in of more evidence, that confirm causal connections that warrant more secreted documentation.
Weber claimed that the “official secret” was a “specific invention of bureaucracy,” its “fanatically defended” prize possession.^[14] In the Netherlands Indies, documents marked with an “x” as “secret,” “very secret” and “highly confidential” were elevated to sacred status, to be guarded and then later revealed. As in the European Pauperism Commission of 1901, the stature of its recommendations derived in part from an earlier secreted commission that it exposed. And as with Pangemanann, both honored and ashamed by the secrets to which he was privy, to gather information was not necessarily to know who would read it, or the narratives which it would fortify before being shredded or stored.
State secrets excite expectations, not least among students of empire.
For we often covet that which the state conceals, regarding their secrets as accurate measures of their most nefarious intents: unmasking their magic and deceptive opacities is our calling. But we also know that codes of concealment are the fetishes of the state itself. Within colonial bureaucracies, such “secrets” sometimes have strange biographies. Secrets may earmark privileged knowledge; or, as with commissions of inquiry, create the categories they purport only to describe. In the Indies colonial archives, they do some of both. Classified documents served as a signal to direct attention and cued for one’s repeated return to what knowledge should be valued and what their readers should know. They also called up and upon technologies of intelligence: secret police, fingerprinting, coded scripts, and men like Pangemanann whose names were expunged from documents. Secret documents could have as their source, vertrouwensmannen (“trustworthy men”) who were native paid informants, Eurasians who were cultural translators, and not least purveyors of culture, anthropologists and others deemed Java experts.
Secrets do more than limit access. They promise confidences and confidence in limited circulation about something others do not and should not know. Items about clandestine police maneuvers, military preparations, and deliberations about an impending revolt are what we expect to be marked as geheim with an “X.” But sometimes promises of access to the unknown were bizarre fictions at best. Confidential documents both secret and secrete what becomes elevated to “vital” information. Throughout the official archives of the Dutch colonial state are documents earmarked for confidentiality that were not secrets at all.
If one could argue that the presence of European beggars and homeless Dutchmen in the streets of Batavia in the 1870s were “secrets” to those in the Netherlands, they certainly were not to European post office clerks, Javanese construction workers, or Chinese storekeepers who lived on the sprawling low lying peripheries inhabited by the impoverished of Java’s urban centers.^[15] Similarly, why was the letter written by a Dutch lawyer to the Resident of Batavia, announcing his attendance at a demonstration, a “highly secret” document? Was it because he signed it “I remain like our King, a liberal Dutchmen” at a time when to be “vrijzinnige” (liberal and modern) in the colonies bordered on a subversive act?^[16] Was it because it was “unseemly” for a high official to so brazenly declare his similarity to the modern King and refrain from deference? Or was it that he boldly declared his intent to participate in the colonies in a European demonstration?
Both instances suggest that what were secret in such documents was not their subject-matter but their timing and the anxieties of the state’s response that gathered around them. Classified missives on European beggars were less about what to do with the destitute than measures of disagreement and disquiet about how to racially classify those who fell into such straits. Reports on vagabond whites were “secret” in 1874 and not twenty-five years later when the public Pauper Commission appeared because officials could not agree on whether there were thirty-nine white paupers living among natives in the urban slums of Batavia, or thousands.^[17]
Documents were sometimes marked geheim because of the magnitude of a problem; at other times because officials could not agree on a shared sense of what the problems were. Rather than secreted truths about the state, they point to sites of unease, anticipatory warnings of emergent movement among subject populations (what Raymond Williams might even include as “structures of feeling”) of resentments that may not yet have had a name.^[18] As Frederick Barth once observed, secrets do more than sanctify: they invoke deeper secrets of their own.^[19]
Not least they invite disclosure. Critique emerges in the interstices of what goes without saying and what should not be said: sometimes documents referred to those who parodied common sense conventions. As we shall see, the “dirty secrets” of Sumatra’s planters were in classified missives not because the planters’ abuses of their laboring populations were not known, but precisely because they were not to be acknowledged and aired by an “inept” civil servant like Frans Carl Valck – and they were.

COLONIAL COMMISSIONS

If it is obvious that colonial archives are products of state machines, it is only now we are seeing them, in their own right, as technologies that reproduced those states themselves.^[20] Andrew Ashforth may have strongly stated the case in his study of South Africa’s Native Affairs Commission, when he noted that “the real seat of power” in modern states is “the bureau, the locus of writing,” but it is an insight that Weber shared and that many students of colonialisms would subscribe to as well.^[21] Systems of written accountability called for elaborate infrastructures. Paper trails of weekly reports to superiors, summaries of reports of reports, recommendations based on reports all called for systematic coding systems by which they could be tracked. Colonial statecraft was an administrative apparatus to gather, draw together, and connect – and disconnect – events, to make them legible, insignificant, or unintelligible as information. Particularly striking in this accumulation process is how much of what was collected was made irrelevant to what state officials decided, both to what they acknowledged they could do in practice and what about the Indies they claimed to know.^[22]
Nowhere was this process more evident than in the form of state-sponsored commissions of inquiry. Colonial commissions reorganized knowledge, devising new ways of knowing while setting aside others. One implicit task was to reconstruct historical narratives, decreeing which past events were pertinent to current issues and how they should be framed. Sometimes commissions were responses to catastrophic events and extended periods of crisis.^[23] As responses, they generated increased anxiety, substantiating the reality of “crisis,” the wisdom of pre-emptive response, foreshadowing that new directives were demanded, as were their often coercive effects. By the time most commissions had run their course, political sign posts were set in place: “turning points” were identified, precedents established, causalities certified, arrows directed with vectors of blame – if not action – sharply aimed.
As often, they attested to what a commission had set out to show in the first place.^[24] That is, if the commission knew what it was after. As the Dutch anthropologist, Frans Husken, notes of colonial commissions in Java, “when nothing else works and no decision can be reached, ‘appoint a commission’ was a favorite response of colonial authorities.”^[25] Commissions could reactivate knowledge but also stop it in its tracks. As technologies of delay, they could effectively mobilize interest and satisfy it and arrest decision. They were primed to distract. Pathos and statistics may seem a strange pairing, but both were at the political heart of state inquiries. Some were searingly detailed. Some were impressionistic and abstract. Vignettes about the unnamed and anecdotes of the everyday established the truth-claims of local officials, their local knowledge and ethnographic authority.
Such commissions, as we shall see in Chapter Four, were also consummate producers of social kinds. The European Pauperism commissions of 1901 reassigned clusters of people for state scrutiny and in so doing wrote, revised and overwrote what was to count in ascribing race. Ways of living were congealed into “problems,” subject persons were condensed into categories, innocuous practices made into subjects of analysis and political things. Statistics, historical narrative, and anecdote were culled and made ready at hand as mutually corroborating evidence for commission-making projects. Proof of the difference between destitute whites and Indo-European paupers were construed by identifying distinct sorts of persons, with specific dispositions, and states of mind. Details of the everyday were elevated to reliable proof of character. Neglect of children, indifference to work, succumbing to native standards were affective states not captured in numbers; condemnations of the sensory world in which poor whites lived shed more palpable and convincing evidence of what colonial agents already thought they knew about sorts of people and how race shaped their habits and inclinations.
Like statistics, commissions were common tools of statecraft forged by social reform-conscience nineteenth century states. As instruments of moral science, statistics used deviations from the mean to identify deviations from the norm. Commissions joined those numbers with prototypic cases to measure gradations of morality and the gradations of unfreedom that went along with them.^[26] That so many commissions were mounted in the late nineteenth century was part of a technology of state practice that spanned the imperial globe.^[27] In metropole and colony, these were high profile promises of public accountability that in turn fostered the commensurabilities on which international colonial conferences thrived. In the Indies, they garnered moral authority both through the specific comparisons they sought to make between their “mixed-blood problem” or their “poor white problem,” and those in South Africa, Australia, and elsewhere in the imperial world.
This was a politics of comparison in which biopolitical assessments of differential racial capabilities and character were key features of social technology.^[28] Those commissions like the European pauperism commission or the South African Carnegie Commission on Poor Whites thirty years later explicitly linked domestic relationships – between parent and child, nursemaid and infant – to the security of the state. Relations between people and objects – to clothing, furnishings, room arrangements and window-openings – were invoked as well. Eye-witness testimonies to intimacies of the home had become data of a particular kind – critical to the state’s audit of its commitment to the public good, to racial differentiation, and to its own viability.
Not least, these commissions were quintessential “quasi-state” technologies of the state but authored and authorized with persons of stature outside it. If modern states gain force in part by creating and maintaining an elusive boundary to civil society, such commissions exemplified that process.^[29] “Outside” experts verified both the state’s right to assess the public interest and its commitment to objectivity. Commissions, in short, demonstrated the state’s right to power through its will to the production of truth.

ETHNOGRAPHY IN THE ARCHIVES

[Ethnographic work] is neither a matter of piling on theoretical antecedents nor a matter of going where no one has been before. I would put it rather that we need to go precisely where we have already been, back to the immediate here and now out of which we have created our present knowledge of the world. That means constructing a mode of enquiry which will enable a return to fields of knowledge and activity in the hindsight of unpredicted outcomes, and which will thus enable recovering of material that investigators not aware they were collecting. The ethnographic method… with its insistent demands of immersement, begins to look extremely promising.”^[30]

A convention in the study of colonial governance is to treat their state bureaucracies as information hungry machines, ambitiously taxonomic, bent on categorical claims about those social differences that mattered and those that did not. Scholars of the colonial have become deft at identifying the distance between those normative, imposed categories of social difference that so contrast with the more mobile social, and intimate relations in which people lived. If one no longer needs to argue, as Sally Falk-Moore did twenty years ago, that fieldwork should be treated as “current history,” the case may still need to be made that archival productions should be treated in more registers as ethnography.^[31]
Students often ask what and where is ethnography in the colonial archives. Is it in what, where or how we approach these gatherings of documents? Is it in the issues addressed or their treatment? What would and should what Marilyn Strathern calls “immersement” look like for the ethnographer on historical colonial ground? One could respond that the ethnographic space of the archive resides in the disjuncture between prescription and practice, between state mandates and the maneuvers people made in response to them, between normative rules and how people actually lived their lives.
But, as the last decade of historical ethnography suggests, no single answer will do. Ethnography in and of the colonial archives attends to processes of production, relations of power in which archives are produced, sequestered, and rearranged.^[32] If ethnographies could be treated as texts, students of the colonial have turned the tables; to reflect on colonial documents as “rituals of possession,” on relics and ruins as sites of contested cultural knowledge. Here I treat archives not as repositories of state power, but as unquiet movements in a field of force, as restless realignments and readjustments of people and the beliefs to which they were tethered, as spaces in which the senses and the affective course through the seeming abstractions of political rationalities.^[33] I take sentiments expressed and ascribed as interpretations, as indices of relations of power and tracers of them.
No longer does the case need to be made that “sources” are not “springs” of colonial truths.^[34] Distinguishing fiction from fact has given way to efforts to track the production and consumption of facticities as the contingent coordinates of particular times and temperaments, places and purposes^[35]As some of the best of this work now recognizes, filing systems and disciplined writing produce assemblages of control and specific methods of domination.^[36] More than ever, new studies of archival production tackle the politics of colonial knowledge and the “arrested histories” – those histories suspended from received historiography – that are its effects.^[37] How states shape and efface personal memories also places emphasis on how those alternative accounts are retained as preserved possibilities for future claims and political projects.^[38] Ethnographic sensibilities have led us to ask how oral and vernacular histories cut across the strictures of archival production and refigure what makes up the archival terrain. They prime us to look for arrogant assertions of know-how couched in unacknowledged native expertise.^[39] Such sensibilities have opened to a broadening array of genres of documentation, to representational practices that impinge on received canons of inscription, to collages of memory that at once deface official writing as they provide new forms of historical evidence.^[40] Methodologically, they pose a challenge to conventional historical narrative, inviting students of the colonial to take critical license with “sources,” with what counts as context, and creative license with form.^[41]
If every document comes layered with the received account of earlier events and the cultural semantics of a political moment, the issue of official “bias” opens to a different challenge: to identify the conditions of possibility that shaped what warranted repetition, what competencies were rewarded in archival writing, what stories could not be told and what could not be said. Such queries have invited a turn back to documentation itself, to the “teaching” task that the Latin root docere implies, to what and who was being educated in the bureaucratic shuffle of rote formulas, generic plots and prescriptive asides.
COLONIAL COMMON SENSE AND ITS EPISTEMIC FRAMES

The archive does not have the weight of tradition; and it does not constitute the library of libraries, outside time and place it reveals the rules of practice... its threshold of existence is established by the discontinuity that separate us from what we can no longer say.^[42]

In this book, ethnographic sites emerge in the difference between prescription and practice, but more pointedly elsewhere. I look for the pulse of the archive in the quiescence and quickened pace of its own production, in the steady and feverish rhythms of repeated incantations, formulas and frames. I pursue it through the uneven densities of Dutch archival preoccupations and predicaments: where energies were expended, what conditioned the designation of an event, what visions were generated in the pursuit of prediction, which social groups garnered concern and then did not.
One of those densities, not surprisingly, thickens around social categories themselves. Here I track them through, what I call, their “social etymologies.” “Social etymologies” trace the career of words and the political practices that new categories mark or that new membership in old categories signal. Most importantly, social etymologies attend to the social relationships of power buried and suspended in those terms.^[43] Such etymologies index how social kinds were produced and what kinds of social relations were construed as plausible evidence of membership. Social etymologies then are not just about words; they trace practices gathered into intelligible forms, they seek those histories that have found quiet refuge in them.^[44]
They might also register how new social categories gained relevance as they annulled designations that no longer were sufficient to make the distinctions relevant to current reformist projects. In the successive waves of “European pauperism” commissions, discussed in Chapter Four, state visions sometimes were contested by those persons whose personal histories they rewrote and remade. Persons clustered into an administrative category that joined “pauper” and “white” rejected both the stigma of “pauper,” the state’s assessment of their living conditions, and the government aid designed for them
But the career of categories is also lodged in archival habits and how those change: in the telling titles of commissions, in the requisite subject headings of every administrative report, in what sorts of stories get relegated to the miscellaneous and “misplaced.” Attending to “words in their sites” and the conceptual weight they bear, along with the authority with which they are endowed, I ask how people think and why they seem obliged to think, or suddenly find themselves having difficulty thinking, in certain ways.^[45] It is, then, not just any words that matter; rather those “that revolve around different focal points of power,” that are “set in play by a particular problem” as they gather around them debate and the provisional terms of convention.^[46]
If Foucault’s conception of archaeology joins “the lesson of things, and the lesson of grammar,” as Deleuze claims, it is also an “audiovisual archive” that combines two forms of stratification – a “practical assemblage” of the visual and the verbal in any historical formation. On the terrain of race that “audiovisual” archive is key. It attends to “the lesson of things” to measure the “multisensory complexes” of unseen racial attributes as well.^[47] Throughout these archives, racialized categories are shuffled, reassigned and remade. In Chapter Four, “Developing Historical Negatives,” a category of “inlandsche kinderen” (who were neither “natives” [inlandsche] nor children [kinderen] as a literal translation would suggest,) could mark those of mixed background, could connote those of illegitimate birth, or as easily include those Europeans whose attachments to, and familiarity with, things Javanese were considered dangerously unsuitable for a colonial situation.
Debates on the inlandsche kinderen were driven by implicit notions of racial decorum, and anxious concern over the non-visual criteria of racial membership. If easily distinguished from both well-heeled European, native, or Chinese populations, who they were enjoyed less consensus. Sometimes the inlandsche kinderen was used for those Europeans born in the Indies (as was the term los hijos del pais used in the Philippines for Spaniards born in the colony);^[48] elsewhere it served to designate the impoverished mixed-blood population, but often not. Sometimes those of “mixed race” (gemengd ras) were not included – the term inlandsche kinderen was reserved implicitly not for all Europeans born in the colony but for destitute whites whose circumstances and cultural affiliations marked them as not quite European.
But the term disappears almost as abruptly as it came into use. Whatever a politics of identification and guardianship might have animated its currency in the late nineteenth century when unpublished commissions on white impoverishment were written, by the time of the published commission in 1902, the term was in decline; and by the 1920s, with racialized distinctions increasingly codified, it was largely abandoned.^[49]
Such discrepancies are neither misrecognitions nor cultural “mistakes” to be set aside. They provide a diacritics of the patent and latent distinctions that marked the colonial epistemology of race.^[50] Actively under scrutiny throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, by the 1920s the term inlandsche kinderen morphed into other designations with newly fashioned taxonomies that more clearly identified the covert attributes of racial membership as the earlier term slipped away. It is precisely those moments of difficulty, the “breach of the self-evident,” by which Foucault designates an “event.” It is such “uncertainty” in the order of things that enlists us to locate such sites for problematization.^[51]
Ethnographic sensibilities guide my forays into the nature of Dutch colonial rule and its archival formations in what I take to be another basic way; namely, in attention to what Peirce calls, the “habit-taking” processes by which people align themselves with forces that are already there. Habit-taking works off colonial conventions and their common sense and is part of their making. These were the “grids of intelligibility” that made certain conventions acceptable, obvious and familiar – or discordant and strange. My concern is with the conditions of epistemic choice and chance, of inculcation and innovation, how people charged with large-scale management and local situations imagined they might identify what they knew they could not see, what common sense they used to assess racial belonging or political desires that were not available to ocular senses, and how they distinguished politically motivated passions from private ones.
Anthropology has no privileged claim on the study of common sense or the epistemologies that underwrite it. But as Michael Herzfeld argues, anthropology may have special purchase on how we go about the comparative study of what constitutes common sense and how people know it.^[52] Michael Polyani refers to a “tacit dimension,” Mary Douglas to “implicit meaning,” Pierre Bourdieu to “habitus,” Charles Taylor to an “implicit understanding,” – the distilled dispositions and trained capacities that work through bodies and on them.^[53] Each, with different emphasis, identify those habits of heart, mind and comportment that derive from unstated understandings of how things work in the world, the categories to which people belong, and what one needs to know to hold unarticulated but well-rehearsed convictions and credulities.
What constitutes common sense is at once historical and political; colonial contexts teach us clearly that dispositions are trained and disciplined, and not without deliberation. Like habitus, they are neither uniform nor uncontested. Dispositions emerge out of a habitus that is rejected, accepted or uneasily accommodated. Dispositions are not given, they are interpretations, discerned and made.^[54] Nor were they always below the threshold of reflective surveillance.^[55] To my mind, this shaping of common sense, and how it is taken up, is the substance of colonial governance and its working epistemologies. By Bourdieu’s account “habitus is that presence of the past in the present.”^[56] What I call “epistemic habits” are steeped in history and historical practices, ways of knowing that are available and “easy to think,” called upon, temporarily settled dispositions that can be challenged and that change.
Rather than treating epistemology as a domain of the foundational, architectural, and fixed (I think here against Rorty’s claim that “time will tell but epistemology won’t”) – I start from a premise shared by students of historical and social epistemology: that epistemic considerations are neither transcendent nor abstract.^[57] They are of the colonial world and squarely in it. Colonial governance entailed a constant assessing and recapping of what colonial agents could know and how they could know it. Central to all the chapters then is an engagement with this disquiet; with colonialism’s unevenly shared epistemic formations, the varying uneasiness and differential discomforts about what could be assumed to be communicable and circulated – or unrepeatable and not subject to the economy of official exchange. Epistemic formations “provide us with the possible, with the thinkable, with the constellations of concepts that are in question, what people assume to know about their worlds and how they disagree over them.”^[58]

AFFECTIVE STRAINS

But even these terms of “debatability” may be up for grabs.^[59] Chapter Two, “Habits of a Colonial Heart” explores the messy space between reason and sentiment, the sort of elusive knowledge on which political assessments were dependent and often had to be made. One is reminded of Max Weber’s contention that bureaucracies excise those domains they cannot measure, that “bureaucracy develops… the more completely it succeeds in eliminating from official business love, hatred and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional elements which escape calculation.”^[60] By Weber’s criteria, the Dutch colonial bureaucracy was at best an imperfect success. “Emotional elements,” personal grudges, long-harbored resentments, whether assaults should be taken as acts of personal affront or political subversion, may have escaped calculation but they were deeply part of what Douglas Holmes has called the “para-ethnography” of the lay world – queries and details of the everyday that had to be sensed and could not be measured by enumeration.^[61]
Managed hearts were critical to colonialism’s political grammar. Imperial projects called upon specific sentiments, and assessed racial membership, in part, by how feelings were channeled and who were appropriate carriers and recipients of them. To whom one expressed attachment versus pity, contempt, indifference or disdain provided both cultural and legal “proof” of who one was, where one ranked in the colonial order of things, and thus where one racially belonged.
Colonial statecraft required the calibration of sympathies and attachments, managing different degrees of subjugation both among its agents and those colonized. Being a taxonomic state meant more than setting out categories; it meant producing and harnessing those sentiments that would make sense of those ascriptions and make them work. Reason may be the “public touchstone of truth,” but it is anchored in sensibilities as Kant insisted – in affective states as well.^[62]
Sentiments are not opposed to political reason but are at once modalities and tracers of it. Here I treat sentiments as judgments, assessments and interpretations of the social and political world.^[63] They are also incisive markers of rank and the unstated rules of exemption. How and to whom sentiments of remorse or rage, compassion or contempt were conveyed and displayed measured degrees of social license that colonial relations so inequitably conferred.^[64] To underscore this crucial point: expressions of sentiment depended on situated knowledge and thus relational know-how about rank – where and to whom one displayed one’s range of feelings within it. Archival documents participate in this emotional economy in some obvious ways: in the measured tone of official texts, in the biting critique reserved for marginalia, and in footnotes to official reports where moral assessments of cultural practice were often relegated and local knowledge was stored.^[65] Not unlike Steven Shapin’s tracking of the seventeenth century social history of truth, I ask who and what was granted epistemological virtue, with what cultural competencies, and by what social criteria.^[66]
If colonial archives were nurseries of legal knowledge and official repositories of policy, they were also repositories of good taste and bad faith. Scribes often wrote out the final, clean copy but not always. “Semi-official” correspondence might be penned by their authors. Reports to the Governor-General in Batavia and to the Minister of Colonies in The Hague were composed by men of letters whose status was enhanced by reference to Greek heroes and French bons mots. Such proof of competence and good judgment was demonstrated in no small part by configuring events into familiar and recognizable plots. In this empire’s “lettered cities” of administrative work, virtue was defined by limited and selective familiarity with the Indies.^[67] Those with too much knowledge of things Javanese were penalized as were those with not enough.^[68]
But administrative anxiety was also rightly riveted on those affective states of European colonials which could not be easily gauged, on those neither within the state’s reach to manage or assess. The public demonstration by European and creole whites in Batavia in May 1848, the subject of Chapter Two – when family attachments threatened to crash against the demands for state loyalty – underscored that those in charge of the city and the colony knew how much habits of the heart could not be contained as the “private,” they could as easily spiral into the political and were not in the state’s control. At issue was the contagious, transient quality of sentiment and its portability. Whether certain sentiments were political dangerous because they were local, or smuggled on the last mail boat via Paris newspapers and by word of mouth, they really did not know.
If epistemology was once the term given to formal theories of knowledge and their formal systematic study, students of social and historical epistemology have since taken it in a very different direction. Armed with a vocabulary of (epistemic) community, (epistemic) culture, (epistemic) crisis and (epistemic) practice, emphasis is on the procedures and activities on which certain ways of knowing rely, not unlike what de Certeau called historiographic “operations.”^[69] While such a lexicon is more commonly reserved for the study of scientific communities of experiment and expertise, such an approach to knowledge production offers productive ways of thinking about governing practices that too depended on how much conviction, experience and expertise were shared, and the extent to which architects and agents of rule could count on the fact that they were so.
Science culture and colonial governance had, what Ian Hacking famously has called, “the taming of chance” in common as well.^[70] Much as classical probability theory was to measure the incertitudes of a modernizing world, colonial civil servants were charged to do the same.^[71] Both ventures treated the conventions and categories of analysis as neither innocuous nor benign. As interpretive communities both depend on rules of reliability and trust, on a shared common sense about what was likely, that allowed prediction and directed the political projects it served.
They are also communities of expectation. If the sciences participate in “a permanent process of… reshuffling of the boundary between what is thought to be known and what is beyond imagination,” colonial governance did much the same.^[72] Sound conjecture and expectation can make governing strategies work, or as anti-colonial movements have amply demonstrated, make them violently fail. And like scientific communities, new objects emerge between what one does “not quite yet know” and that for which there is not yet a name. Such epistemic objects are produced in the haze of, what historian of science Hans-Jorg Rheniberger, calls “a mixture of hard and soft,” as Michel Serres put it, “object, still, sign, already; sign still, object already.”^[73] The making of colonial categories shares this ambiguous epistemic space. New social objects were the archives’ product as much as subjects of them.
Foucault’s insistence that “to grant epistemic warrant is a covert way of distributing power,” echoes throughout colonial studies in some of its most productive sites that trace both its embedded forms and more blatantly coercive ways.^[74] But just how that warrant was granted, how firmly entrenched, and how much dissent and debate accompanied that process is not always clear.^[75] Some of the problem may be with an over commitment to Foucault’s vocabulary. An “episteme” has come to index a scale, longevity, and hardening of thought formation that may set us astray. A “regime of truth” suggests a durability of distinctions, a finite field of truth claims that colonial knowledge production would never attain. As I argue in Chapter Two, understanding “what happened” in May 1848 calls on different vectors of intelligibility, alternate causalities and attributions of affect that crossed and met. I use the terms “grids of intelligibility” and “regimes of truth,” cautiously, with the caveat that both mark epistemic habits and ways of knowing cut through with competing investments and claims. As these archives of the Indies’ colonial agents and architects evince, it was not epistemic clarity but epistemic uncertainties that generated the densest debates and the longest paper trails that winded their way through such a range of seemingly unrelated subjects. Like imperial formations themselves, colonial truth-claims were provisional, in solution, and subject to change.

TRACING THE ARCHIVAL TURN

If “the transformation of archival activity is the point of departure and the condition of a new history,” as de Certeau has argued, we are clearly in a new moment.^[76] The warning of Evans-Pritchard in 1951 that anthropologists tended to be “uncritical in their use of documentary sources” had little resonance then.^[77] So too did Maitland’s earlier dictum that anthropology had “the choice between being history or being nothing.”^[78] Both pronouncements read as fairly quaint today.^[79] Among historians, literary critics and anthropologists, archives have been elevated to new analytic status with distinct billing, worthy of scrutiny on their own. One might be tempted to see this as a Derridian effect of the last decade, following the publication of Archive Fever.^[80] But the archival turn has a wider arc and a longer durйe. Archive Fever compelling captured that impulse by giving it theoretical stature, but Jacques Derrida’s intervention came only after the “archival turn” was already being made.
This move from archive-as-source to archive-as-subject gained its currency across the richly undisciplined space of critical history and in a range of fields energized by that reformulation.^[81] The sheer number of volumes devoted to “the archive” is staggering: in film and literary studies, in analyses of truth commissions or the human genome project, from rereadings of histories of colonialism to those of gay rights.^[82] “Reading” here is an agentive act, one squarely focused on what we know and how we know it. Focus on the politics of knowledge is a methodological commitment to how history’s exclusions are secured and made.
One could argue that “the archive” for historians and “the Archive” for cultural theorists have been wholly different analytic objects: for the former, a body of documents and the institutions that house them, for the latter a metaphoric invocation for any corpus of selective collections and the longings that the acquisitive quests for the primary, originary, and untouched entail.^[83] Those differences may suggest sharply defined domains, but the blurring which is so common today is hardly a recent intervention.^[84]
For indeed, something resembling the broader social life of an archive, what might be called ethnography in an archival mode, has been around for sometime. Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory of a sixteenth-century miller, like Natalie Davis’s use of pardon tales, drew on “hostile” documents to reveal “the gap between the image underlying the interrogations of judges and the actual testimony of the accused.”^[85] Both questioned “how people told stories, what they thought a good story was, how they accounted for motive.” In Davis’ notion of “fiction in the archives,” she worked through pardon tales to reveal both the “constraints of the law” and its popular manipulations, and both the terms of argumentation and the broader set of literary forms invoked to support or undermine those claims.^[86] Still, these were not ethnographies of the archive, but in it.
Archivists obviously have been thinking about the politics and history of archives for sometime.^[87] What marks the past decade are the new conversations between archivists and historians about documentary evidence, record-keeping, what features of archival form and content can be retrieved, and how decisions should be made about historical significance and preservation.^[88] As storage technology revamps, both question what information matters, what tacit narratives inform contemporary archival practices, and what should be retained as physical form is changed.^[89] All are asking what new accessibilities and connections are gained – and what is lost – when parchment and paper gave way to digital recordings.

COLONIALISM’S ARCHIVAL GRAINS

Genealogy is gray, meticulous and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times.^[90]

If one were to characterize what has informed a critical approach to the colonial archives, it would be a commitment to the notion of reading colonial archives “against their grain” of imperial history, empire builders, and the priorities and perceptions of those who wrote them. Schooled to think “from the bottom up,” students of colonialism located “structure” with colonizers and the colonial state, and “human agency” with subalterns, in small gestures of refusal and silence among the colonized.
In reading “upper class sources upside down,” we sought to read against the languages of rule and statist perceptions. “Un-State-d” histories were to demonstrate more than the warped reality of official knowledge, but its textual properties and the violences condoned by such political distortions. In Ranajit Guha’s influential formulations, colonial documents were rhetorical slights of hand that erased the facts of subjugation, reclassified petty crime as political subversion or located violence and unreason as inherent to the colonized.^[91] The analytic tactics pursued have been those of inversion and recuperation, efforts to recast colonial subjects as agents who made and make choices and critiques of their own.
Insistence on the link between what counts as knowledge and who is in power to record their versions of it has since become a founding principle of colonial ethnography. But it may also be taking us somewhere else. In treating archival documents not as the historical ballast to ethnography, but as a charged site of it, is the call for a methodological shift: to move away from treatment of the archives as an extractive exercise to an ethnographic one. That call has been taken up differently: sometimes hotly pursued, other times a nod in that analytic direction. For some, it represented a turn back to the powerful “poetics of detail.”^[92] To others, the archival turn provided a way to cut through the distorted optics of colonial historiography and the distinctions that cordoned off fiction from authorized truths.^[93]
Michel-Rolph Trouillot said it with consummate clarity, that “historical narratives are premised on previous understandings, which are themselves premised on the distribution of archival power.” More importantly, he offered neophytes to archival work a way to tackle what de Certeau meant by “historiographic operations,” by distinguishing the archival power lodged in moments of creation from practices of assembly, retrieval and disciplinary legitimation.^[94] If Trouillot urged students to distinguish among these different operations, Nicholas Dirk’s call for “a biography of the archive,” insisted on who was performing that labor by showing how much early colonial officials cum historians in British India were dependent on native informants who did the work of collection and cultural translation for them.^[95] But “mining” for treasures rather than immersement is still a prevalent and all too expedient mode.
Feminist historians have long sought out creative ways of demonstrating how, what Bonnie Smith aptly dubbed “male prowess,” shaped archival production, the initiation rites of historiography and the absence of agentive histories of women excised from documents and excluded from subsequent texts.^[96] On colonial terrain, the challenge to locate women as subjects continues to critically stretch the scope of the archive in ways that redefine what kinds of reading and writing are historically germane.^[97]
My own first sense of what I call here “the pulse of the archive” was decades ago when I found myself confronted with reports on the horrific mutilation and murder of a European planter’s wife and children in 1876 on Sumatra’s East Coast. Multiple reports were collected on the murder, preceding attacks, and speculation on both the most immediate affronts and distant uprisings to which the murder might be linked. Nor were accounts always fettered by knowledge of the assault. In an earlier version of Chapter Five, I explored how rumor ricocheted between planters and the workers they feared and the insurgents they ignored, undoing facile distinctions between reliable and conjured information, between fact and fantasy, between mad paranoia and political reality.^[98] The contrast between neat copy and hurried hand, an impatient and uneven pace of query and response, enraged and tempered narrative, fine-grained knowledge and unabashed ignorance, all struck me as startling testimonies to how empire worked and to what we still did not know about it.^[99] Those challenges remain at the heart of this book and with me today.
Most students of the colonial who now work with archives in a reflective mode, treat “the archive” as something in between a set of documents, their institutions, and a repository of memory – both a place and a cultural space that encompasses official documents but not confined to them. Some of the most creative work branches out to the range of scripted and performed practices that bear the psychic and material stamp of colonial relations.
Here I explicitly do something else: several chapters stay largely within the state’s purview with 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.^[100]Power and control, as students of archiving are quick to point out, is fundamental to the etymology of the term and should need no iteration.^[101] Moralizing stories mapped the scope of state vision, the restricted limits of government responsibility and what were defined as its philanthropic missions.
Nor were they to be read in any which way. Issues were rendered important by where they appeared, how they were cross-referenced, where they were catalogued, and thus how they were framed. Official exchanges between Governor-Generals and their subordinates, between a Governor-General and a Minister of Colonies, and between the latter and the King, served as reference guides to administrative thinking, abbreviated cheat sheets of what counted as precedent and what properly fell under “concerns of state.” Some reports were meticulously scrutinized, others were carelessly read and set aside. Archival convention, however, dictated that all were abundantly cross-referenced in ways that produced paths of precedent and mapped relevance. Citation also served, not unlike footnotes, to affirm the import of one’s observations, choice of historical context, and implicitly the legitimacy of one’s selected narrative.^[102]
Some would argue that the grand narratives of colonialism have been amply and excessively told. On that assumption, students of colonialisms often turn quickly and confidently to read “against the grain” of colonial conventions. One fundamental premise of this book is a call for a less assured and perhaps more humble stance – that we explore the grain with care and read along it first. Assuming we know those scripts rests too comfortably on predictable stories with familiar plots. It leaves intact the assumption that colonial statecraft was always intent on accumulating more knowledge rather than on a selective winnowing and reduction of it. It takes as a given the equation of knowledge to power, and that colonial states sought more of both.^[103] Not least, it leaves unaddressed how often colonial categories reappear in the analytic vocabulary of historians rather than as transient, provisional objects of historical inquiry that themselves need to be analyzed if not explained.^[104]
Colonial archives were sote only a site of command, but of countermand as well. “Factual storytellings” – what Hayden White ascribes to what counts as history – did not always prevail.^[105] Perturbations in the form of discrepant accounts, dissenting voices and extraneous detail could disable action, unhinge the “facts,” and forestall response. Archival power was no more monolithic than the governing practices which it enabled and on which it was based. Subjugated knowledge erupts in contested ontologies of peoples and things. Countervailing interpretations of what compromised danger and threat could send ripples through imperious states and the polished surface of their writerly modes.
As such, I am drawn to think about archival events with and against Foucault’s compelling invitation to treat them as “reversals of a relationship of forces, the usurpation of power, the appropriation of a vocabulary turned against those who had once used it.”^[106] Such an approach undoes the certainty that they are stable “things” with ready-made and neatly drawn boundaries. But the search for dramatic “reversal,” “usurpation,” and successful “appropriation” may hide “events” that are more muted in their consequences, less bellicose in their seizures, less spectacular in how and what they reframe. Here I treat archival events more as moments that disrupt (if only provisionally) a field of force, that challenge (if only slightly) what can be said and done, that question (if only softly) “epistemic warrant,” that realign the certainties of the probable more than they mark wholesale reversals of direction.

THE WATERMARKS OF EMPIRE

Most of this book’s chapters treat specific government archives of the nineteenth century Netherlands Indies and the circumscribed problems their authors and collators sought to avoid or address. The final chapter is punctuated by work that slips in and out of the official colonial archives and in and out of their time frames.
In Chapter Six, “Imperial Dispositions: The Politics of Dis-regard,” I question how much we who study the work of empire know about the dispositions of those it empowered. It wrestles with those habits of heart and comportment recruited to the service of colonial governance but never wholly subsumed by it. More directly, it identifies a “politics of dis-regard,” what psychological and political machinations it takes to look away for those who live off and in empire, as Valck did, and as many of us may find ourselves doing now. Here I take the story of Frans Carl Valck told through government archives in Chapter Five, from a private archive of a very different sort, from the family papers housed in a genealogical bureau established decades after Valck’s death by one of his scholarly descendants.
The story of his failed career appears here as a palimpsest, erupting at the tender and fraught center of his relationship with his only child, a daughter from whom he remained estranged for most of their lives. Sometimes the course of his Indies career as a colonial civil servant is centrally framed; sometimes it is irrelevant and only partially visible, elsewhere it is utterly absent, delicately unacknowledged, discretely erased. Viewed from these differences of time, tone and place, I imagine what it might take to write a history of empire “in a minor key,” through another vantage on the confused sensibilities that cut across Valck’s official record – in the collision and collusion between his personal and public lives. It is this chapter that opens most directly to one way of thinking a colonial history of the present.
When historical ethnography was just coming into its own, John and Jean Comaroff urged us to “create new colonial archives of our own.”^[107] Some students of empire have sought new kinds of sources. Others have looked to different ways of approaching familiar archives with questions we have never asked and readings we have not yet done. In this book, it is unexplored fault lines, ragged edges and unremarked disruptions to the seamless and smooth surface of colonialism’s archival genres over which I linger and then attempt to track. My attention is on the field of entangled documents that have been “scratched over” and crossed-out many times. But it is as much on repetitions, what Edward Said reminds us is always about “filiations” pursued or abandoned. “Repetition cannot long escape the ironies its bears within it,” nor the histories upon which it calls.^[108] In these colonial archives, these repetitions join the disparate, enlist the counterintuitive, and provide the vectors of recuperations and ruptures by making familiar what they hoped to know.
De Certeau defined the science of history as a redistribution in space, the act of changing something into something else. Archival labor, he warned, must do more than “simply adopt former classifications,” it must break away from the constraints of “series H in the National Archives,” and be replaced with new “codes of recognition” and “systems of expectation.”^[109] But such a strategy depends on what we think we already know. For students of empire, colonial codes of recognition and systems of expectation remain at the elusive center of imperial rule, its implicit plots and its deflecting and resilient narratives.
When Robert Darnton some twenty years ago identified “history in the ethnographic grain” as what cultural history should be about, he had in mind how people make sense of the world and “thought about how they thought.”^[110] Epistemic anxieties are precisely about that reflection. Here the ethno-graphic is about the graphic, detailed production of social kinds, the archival power that allowed its political deployment, and the grafting of affective states to those inventions. Reading along the archival grain draws our sensibilities to the archive’s granular rather than seamless texture, to the rough surface that mottles its hue and shapes its form. Working along the grain is not to follow a frictionless course but to enter a field of force and will to power, to attend to both the sound and sense therein and their rival and reciprocal energies. It calls on us to understand how unintelligibilities are sustained and why empires remain so uneasily invested in them.