and gets down to the root of what postcolonial scholars - who include both
authors of colonized and non-colonized nationality - are presenting when they
write the history and contemporary effects of colonization.
With Orientalism, Said set out to turn the study of the Orient - what we would
refer to today as the 'Middle East' - on its head. This geographical region even
today is still seen as someplace 'different' from us, yet 'classical orientalists'
refer to Middle Eastern antiquity as the birth of Western civilization. Classical
Orientalism was at its strongest during the European domination of the area
from the end of the 18th century to the mid 20th century. This, as we have
already found, was a time when European colonists were feverishly gaining
knowledge on the territory they controlled, which Said attributes to the fact that
'knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an
increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.'23 In Said's theory, as
the colonists were dehumanizing the colonized, this knowledge became not only
their complete understanding of the place, but the place itself. To former Prime
Minister and later Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, 'British knowledge of Egypt
is Egypt.'24
Before Said wrote on the history of Middle Eastern colonial oppression, Sartre
had predicted in the 1950s that the world was at the point where colonialism
would reach its limits and would be overthrown, in part due to colonialism's
'attempts to bar the colonized people from the road of history.'25 Of course,
Sartre was right, and within a decade of his writing, tumultuous events
throughout half the world created independent states on nearly every continent.
But this did not create nations free of the system he was describing. Any system
must record its actions for fear of losing the information which keeps the
system operational. Thus, the fundamental parts of the colonial system still
exist in the archive. A system is, after all, a single entity constructed of many
parts. Without these parts - mainly the creation and maintaining of colonial
records - colonialism would cease to function as a system. While the system has
been broken down, the archive has stayed in place, allowing for colonialism's
continued existence and domination over post-colonial societies. Other aspects
of the system, like English law, political structure, and the English language, also
still exist and continue to play roles in the former British Empire. The archive,
however, as each is unique to its home nation, acts as a permanent reminder of
colonialism with none of the unifying aspects of any other part of the colonial
system.
Archives are often left out of stories of colonialism by authors reviewing the
height of the British Empire either with cynicism or longing. What little that is
written on (post-)colonial archives is too often written by postcolonial theorists
who either mention the archive only in passing and fail to capitalize on its
importance or who concentrate on new definitions of archives outside of the
information science profession. Archivists, not without blame, rarely discuss
such cultural significances relating to their profession. The archive - far from just
a static location where records go to live out the rest of their existence - was a
central player in what can be seen as the most important global phenomenon of
COLONIAL LEGACY IN SOUTH EAST ASIA -
THE DUTCH ARCHIVES
23 Said, Orientalism, 36.
24 Said, Orientalism, 32.
25 Sartre, 'Colonialism is a System, 136.
26 Said, Orientalism, 32.
27 Said, Orientalism, 41-42.
32