Mitchell, Peter, Lester, Alan and Boehme, Kate (2018) 'The centre of the muniment’: archival order and reverential historiography in the India Office, 1875. Journal of Historical Geography. ISSN 0305-7488
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Abstract
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.
Item Type: | Article |
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Keywords: | History of Geography; Royal Geographical Society; India Office; East India Company; imperialism; information |
Schools and Departments: | School of Global Studies > Geography |
Research Centres and Groups: | Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies Centre for International Education |
Subjects: | G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) > G0001 Geography (General) > G0080 History of geography G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General) > G0001 Geography (General) > G0141 Historical geography |
Depositing User: | Alan Lester |
Date Deposited: | 23 Aug 2018 13:51 |
Last Modified: | 29 Oct 2018 17:24 |
URI: | http://srodev.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/78231 |
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📧 Request an updateProject Name | Sussex Project Number | Funder | Funder Ref |
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Snapshots of Empire: managing a diverse empire all at once | G1680 | LEVERHULME TRUST | RPG-2015-155 |