__smbhome.uscs.susx.ac.uk_fafc6_Documents_Articles_Mitchell Boehme Lester JHG Centre of the Muniment_paper.pdf (200.4 kB)
'The centre of the muniment’: archival order and reverential historiography in the India Office, 1875
journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 14:43 authored by Peter Mitchell, Alan LesterAlan Lester, Kate BoehmeIn 1875, the civil servants and scholars George Birdwood and Clements Markham both submitted proposals to the India Office regarding the cataloguing and arrangement of its archive. These proposals had in common that they both involved the records of the early modern East India Company, and evinced an understanding of the archive as both a privileged repository of historical artefacts and a technology of imperial government. However, they articulated divergent ideologies of empire, ways of conceptualising the past and its materials, and understandings of the ways in which information and knowledge should be mobilised in an imperial context. This article analyses the two proposals in the light of their proposers’ biographies, their politics, and their institutional and disciplinary commitments; and it notes each proposal’s contribution to the production of a historiography which valorized early modern navigators, traders and mercantile communities as progenitors of the British imperial state. The proposals’ troubled bureaucratic history emerges as an expression of conflicts of practice, ideology and administrative cultures within the India Office, and more broadly within the imperialisms of the time.
Funding
Snapshots of Empire: managing a diverse empire all at once; G1680; LEVERHULME TRUST; RPG-2015-155
History
Publication status
- Published
File Version
- Accepted version
Journal
Journal of Historical GeographyISSN
0305-7488Publisher
ElsevierExternal DOI
Volume
63Page range
12-22Department affiliated with
- Geography Publications
Research groups affiliated with
- Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Publications
- Centre for International Education Publications
Full text available
- Yes
Peer reviewed?
- Yes
Legacy Posted Date
2018-08-23First Open Access (FOA) Date
2020-09-11First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date
2018-08-22Usage metrics
Categories
No categories selectedLicence
Exports
RefWorks
BibTeX
Ref. manager
Endnote
DataCite
NLM
DC