era onward, a stupendous flow of information between the newly founded
settlements and the trading posts with the mother country followed in the
wake of their activities. Or, as Evelyn Wareham describes it: '[wjritten record
keeping was a phenomenon that arrived with travellers, traders, missionaries,
and bureaucrats and '[rjecords generated by colonial administrations
are intrinsically associated with political systems by which local communities
were subjected to outside power'.18 The effect which all these registration
and archiving activities had on global relations is shown by the historian
and anthropologist Nicholas B. Dirks in his book Colonialism and Culture
'As the world was shaped for Europe through cartography which, writ large,
included ship logs, narrative route maps, the establishment of boundaries, the
textualisation of treaties, the composition of epics, the fighting of wars, the
raising of flags, the naming and appropriation of newly discovered spaces, the
drawing of grids, the extermination of savages so also it became peopled by
classificational logics of metonymy and exclusion, recognition and opposition.
Marking land and marking bodies were related activities Before places and
peoples could be colonised, they had to be marked as 'foreign', as 'other'
as 'colonisable".19
In their frenzy to expand, the Europeans also caused much destruction. This went
so far at times that very little was left of the indigenous culture. Perfect examples
of this were the Aztec and Inca empires, which together with their culture and
religion, disappeared within a few decades of Spanish domination. The micro
organisms the Spanish brought with them led to a massacre among the Indian
population. With regard to Asia, we should mention the sacking of the summer
palace of the Chinese Emperors in 1860 or the demolition of the dalam of the
Sultan of Bantam circa 1840. Greed, contempt for the host culture and the
ecstasy of conquest led to the devastation we now regret so much but which must
be seen within the context of the time. Not only were the economic commodities
shipped to Europe in huge quantities, but the cultural artefacts were too.
Many European museums, libraries, archives and other scientific institutions
owe their ethnographic and specialist manuscript collections to this activity.20
If we wish to use the term colonial archives, we propose to follow Thomassen's
description of an archive as process bound information and the concept of
colonial as defined by Hack and Rettig. Colonial archives may in that case
be defined as process bound information that flows from the constitution,
maintenance, direction, management, exploitation and development of
the territories and populations which have a relationship of administrative
dependency on an external ruling power. According to such a definition,
colonial archives may be created equally in the colony or in the colonising
state. Consequently, colonial archives are by this definition produced from the
coloniser's perspective. Within the context of the Netherlands, these activities
were directed from the VOC power centre, de Heeren XVII - the seventeen
gentlemen on the governing board - until the end of the 18th century. Colonial
CHARLES JEURGENS AND TON KAPPELHOF COLONIAL ARCHIVES
17 Wesseling, Verdeel en heers, 106.
18 Wareham, 'From Explorers to Evangelists', 99.
19 Dirks, 'From little King to landlord', 6.
20 See for example: Lunsingh Scheurleer, 'Collecting Javanese Antiquities' Jasanoff, Edge of Empire Legêne,
De bagage van Blomhoff en Van Breugel. Effert, Volkenkundig verzamelen Willink, De bewogen verzamel-
geschiedenis.
11
