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'The centre of the muniment’: archival order and reverential historiography in the India Office, 1875

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 14:43 authored by Peter Mitchell, Alan LesterAlan Lester, Kate Boehme
In 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 Geography

ISSN

0305-7488

Publisher

Elsevier

Volume

63

Page range

12-22

Department 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

2018-08-23

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2020-09-11

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2018-08-22

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