Revolutionary War due to their strong cultural connection.
For the majority of their histories, until very recently, Australia, Canada, and
New Zealand - and the United States for that matter - had no reason not to
promote their White and British identity or label themselves a British-derived
nation. The fact that their archives reflected this and were based on the British
model was therefore no matter of concern and would have been viewed as
natural. In native colonies, where Europeans did not supplant native populations
by force but instead stayed a demographic minority with political control, it was
much different. Here records meant power. It was an empire built by military
strength, but kept together by meticulous record keeping. This was where any
man could perform his British duty in the jungle somewhere and record it for
posterity. Posterity, as it has turned out, was not British. The archives, however,
still are.
The military might that created the empire that archives would record and
control was based on Britain's naval supremacy from the 16th though 20th
centuries.7 It was, after all, the navy of Drake and Nelson. Building a worldwide
empire in a time before flight relied on naval domination. Sailing both east and
west, the Royal Navy expanded the British Empire to every habitable continent.
Once reaching these foreign lands, the colonists initiated their system of
controlling, occupying, or destroying the native populations through intentional
and unintentional, physical and intangible means.
The Structures of British Imperialism
When these colonialists brought writing to traditionally oral societies, they were,
in effect, bringing their form of archiving, structured to their cultural standards.
They were bringing a control of information. The invention of writing came
from a necessity to record information - to archive. Even in societies with a
written language, the colonists knew the power of record keeping. JoAnne Yates'
recognition that in American businesses 'flows of downward communication
from all levels of management conveyed information, procedures, rules, and
instructions' were used to 'control and coordinate processes and individuals at
lower levels is just as apt when discussing the colonization of a country.'8 Record
creation is part of an imperialist's strategy of claiming a territory. Like planting
a flag, official record keeping is the act of a foreign power stating that they have
an ownership over the land. When the Spanish burned the archives of the Aztecs
they were demonstrating the importance of record keeping in controlling the
populace.9 Cut off a people's archive and you cut off their ability to fully grasp
their history and culture, and with it, you can subjugate them to your history and
MICHAEL KARABINOS POST(-)cOLONIAL ARCHIVES
4 Others place the number of colony types higher, but in the simplest of terms it can grouped as Settler or
non-Settler.
5 Supriya, Remembering Empire, 3.
6 Thompson, Imperial Britain, 32.
7 George Orwell equates Britain's naval power to the Englishman's 'dislike of standing armies' stating that
'[mjilitary dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such things as a naval dictatorship.' The hypo
crisy is further multiplied when read in the context of a paragraph where Orwell himself waxes on the
hypocrisy of English anti-militarism when the country controls the world's largest empire. Orwell was once
part of the British imperial bureaucracy, but his later socialist writings were anti-imperialist. Orwell, Inside
the Whale, 69.
8 Yates, Control Through Communication, xvii.
9 Knuth, Burning Books, 3.
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