culture. Simply put, [t]he more the colonizers knew, the more effectively were they able to control and manipulate the colonized.'10 By merely speaking colonists inadvertently had a profound effect on peoples around the world for centuries after their first landfall. Today in India, as in many former British colonies, English, the language of the colonial master, is spoken as a unifying language for people of different ethnicity.11 Similarly, French is spoken throughout Africa, and Spanish throughout Latin America. While this has positive aspects from an independence country standpoint - communication with former ruler and a connection which could lead to aid and strong diplomatic ties - the negative aspects are just as visible. Numerous languages have died as a result of imperialism when they were replaced with European languages, a process started when the first colonialists landed. Eventually the multicultural empire had to communicate, and English dominated. When one enters a foreign land, they speak about it. And then they begin to write about it. The merger of British bureaucracy and the English language laid the foundation for records and archives as a colonial force with a lasting impact. Information was transcribed as soon as colonists arrived. Authors wrote novels and adventurers wrote memoirs of their travels. Local governments were created and clerks took records of daily business.12 With knowledge recorded in writing, power was firmly in the hands of the colonizers. Once you record information, you make it your own. The British recorded their colonial business, taking psychological control with the archive. Such practices may go back to the earlier days of 17th century British expansion, when the 1660 Restoration brought about 'a new attitude to statistical knowledge.'13 As the empire spread around the globe it became important to study and arrange the records in order to prove Britain's place as the distributor of civilization. It is no coincidence that the creation of what is today the National Archives of the United Kingdom and the height of British imperialism overlap. As Britain determined that records must be kept centralized and that knowledge management leads to the control of more than just information, their empire was able to expand in ways never known before. Records, once created, need a repository; they need to be cataloged and put in a specific order so they can be found later. The 19th century and early 20th century was a time of great information gathering, especially among the British, who were the 'most data-intensive' imperialists.14 Colonial information was not always recorded by civil servants in government offices. As the empire expanded, disciplines such as geography and anthropology grew. The Royal Geographical Society, founded in 1830, hosted parties where dining club members occupied themselves discussing 'exploration in Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the polar regions, and central Asia.'15 Anthropologists and archaeologists scoured the empire and 'uncovered' previously Tost' histories. Amateur and government-sponsored ethnographers took to the far reaches of the empire, where they 'maintained diaries and logs, or wrote extensive reports COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA - THE DUTCH ARCHIVES 10 Knight, Narratives of Colonialism, 72. 11 Ashcroft, Post-colonial Transformation, 56. 12 George Orwell's Burmese Days is a wonderful example of a jungle outpost of the Empire governed by Britons longing to create British society elsewhere, gekomen tot hier 13 Williamson, A Short History, 4. 14 Richards, Imperial Archive, 4. 15 'History,' Royal Geographical Society, http://www.rgs.org/AboutUs/History.htm, accessed September 2, 2008. 30

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