'investigative modalities'. Cohn identifies historiographical, observational/travel,
survey, enumerative, surveillance and museological modalities. These different
forms of collecting information accumulatively lead to a comprehensive, all
embracing colonial archive. Collecting and recording historical information
formed a significant base for colonial power and the colonial cultural remit.
The observational modality particularly concerned the actual understanding of
the Indians by the European travellers and how they recorded this in journals,
letters and the like. The survey modality was seen by Cohn as 'any systematic
and official investigation of the natural and social features of the Indian empire'.
The enumerative modality was, according to Cohn, of decisive significance for
the administrative successes of the colonising power. By distilling the reality
of Indian pluralism into categories and numbers, India became ordered in an
administrative sense; manageable and controllable.7 Or, as James Scott calls
it: 'State agents have no interest in describing an entire social reality
Their abstractions and simplifications are disciplined by a small number of
objectives 8 The surveillance modality is an extension of this form. Colonial
administration constructed special instruments to control groups who were
defined as beyond civil bounds. Finally, India was also seen as a vast museum,
full of ruins from antiquity and populated by people who - from a European
perspective - still lived for the greater part in the past. The British collected
this past and India became an important supplier of the collections of future
museums.9 Efere Cohn sketched out the constituting processes and information
gathering which did lead to the panoptical colonial archives. It is true that
with this typology it becomes easier to define the term colonial archives, but
this approach has at least two problems when looking at it from an archivistics
viewpoint. Cohn's typology only covers part of the object of archival science
(after all, he only speaks about collecting and recording information) and the
term colonial has so far not been defined in relation to the term archive.
Colonies and colonialism
Archivists have defined the term archive as process bound information,10 but in
order to determine what constitutes colonial archives, it is necessary to define
the meaning of colonial or colony. Jan A. Somers provides a simple but striking
description of the effects of the appearance of the Dutch merchant ships under
the command of the brothers Cornells and Frederik Houtman on the Bantam
coast in 1596: 'relations were gradually formed which we would later characterise
as colonial'.11 However, this colonial relationship is much more complicated
to define. Somers describes the colonial relations between the Netherlands
and the East Indies as 'a relationship between nations conducted in a territory
which was initially defined as property, and then almost in the legal sense of
private ownership A colonial relationship is and will by definition remain a
relationship where the power of domination is maintained by (military) force'.12
CHARLES JEURGENS AND TON KAPPELHOF COLONIAL ARCHIVES
9 Cohn, Colonialism, 9-10.
10 Thomassen, 'Een korte introductie'. Other definitions are also in circulation. See for example Yeo,
who defines archival documents as 'persistent representations of activities or other occurrents,
created by participants or observers of those occurrents or by their authorized proxies' in: Yeo,
'Concepts of Record (2)', 136.
11 Somers, Nederlands-Indie, 13.
12 Somers, Nederlands-Indië, 18.
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