Archives and Paperwork

Abstract

This chapter outlines the role of paperwork and archives in Western, colonial, and post-colonial societies since the late medieval period, when paper came into widespread use in Europe. Since this time, political rule and global exchange, whether economic, intellectual, cultural, or religious, have been managed by the movement, transfer, and copying of paper (and now electronic) records: letters that guaranteed a diplomatic or commercial envoy's safe conduct through foreign territory, tax forms and property deeds, questionnaires surveying natural resources in a given locality, passes that exempted traders from local tariffs, slips, and labels that botanists used to keep track of seeds and pressed plants as they named, catalogued, and classified the natural world, just to mention a few examples. The long-term storage of these materials in archives and libraries has been essential to their functioning as tools of political, economic, and intellectual control. Following these pieces of paper as they travel through societies and in and out of archives, and treating the paper and the archives themselves as objects of our inquiry, rather than windows through which we see history, clues us in to who has power in a society and how they wield it.