Information on the move.
Colonial archives: pillars of
past global information exchange
At home in Europe
The white man can be seen as a man
As soon as he leaves home he is frightful
He analyses, spies, classifies, defines, appropriates
Conquers and dominatesA
Do the current focus on global issues in the historical discipline and the
attention that is paid to globalisation also provide new perspectives for our view
on colonial archives? These questions are at the core of this article.2 In this
contribution I discuss whether it makes sense to connect ideas and insights of
globalisation to the colonial archives in order to get a better understanding of
the nature and patterns of information exchange and to get a different, maybe
better understanding of the substance of these archives. In the second part of this
article I pay closer attention to the Dutch colonial archives created in the early
19th century.
Globalisation and networks of information
Globalisation has become a vogue word that pops up in almost every discipline.
It seems to be attractive to take theories and ideas of globalisation as the starting
point for new forms of analysis and explanation, but before one can do this, it is
important to describe how globalisation is defined.
We are functioning in a world that is fundamentally characterised by 'objects in
motion'. For Arjun Appadurai, the anthropologist and author of several books on
global issues, it is the disjunctive flow of objects in motion - these objects include
ideas, ideologies, people, goods, images, messages, discourses, technologies and
techniques - that defines the essence of globalisation.3 The global order is 'a
complex overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood
in terms of existing centre-periphery models'.4 Historians seem to agree that
globalisation in any case concerns communication and connection. The first
45
CHARLES JEURGENS
1 Kayoyo, My Father's footsteps.
2 During past few years I gave several research seminars on this theme and I want to discuss some of the
preliminary findings here. One of the students, Nico Vriend, also attended these seminars and inspired by
this approach he wrote his thesis of which the results are published elsewhere in this book.
3 Appadurai, Globalization, 5-6.
4 Appadurai, 'Disjuncture and difference', 50.
