In the British Empire, the quill, even more than troops and trade, projected power. Asheesh Kapur Siddique’s The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World explores the British governance practice of hand-written documents to record and direct events in far-flung parts of their empire. For reasons of control and security, the printed word was not trusted. The study is valuable because it has us think about the material conditions by which “power aspires to cohere.”
Colleges, firms, doctors’ offices, and parishes all have archives, but the archive of an empire is another matter entirely. Empires must corral diverse populations, and the archive was the brain of the British effort:
Information about present-day human behavior could be gained by sending trusted servants to travel, spy, and observe both human and natural phenomena, record their findings in writing, and report them to their higher-ups. … By correlating this incoming information about the present with archival documentation about the past, administrators believed they could produce reliable guidance on matters of statecraft.
Clerks in London logged and indexed the incoming papers, making use of colony-specific categories but also paying attention to keywords to log some correspondence under generic categories like “Plantations General.” Once collated, the manuscripts were materials for ministerial decisions and missives penned by secretaries were sent out as “Instructions” to Crown officials around the globe. As Kapur Siddique summarizes: “I trace how officials sought to produce political order through the deployment of sovereign reason expressed in writing and show how the empire’s demographic transformation complicated that work.”
The British Atlantic contained English settlers, Native Americans, and slaves from Africa, as well as French Canadian Catholics, and in British Asia, Persian-speaking elites in Bengal and a polyglot India. Kapur Siddique observes: “Perhaps no single political formation since the fall of Rome faced the problem of governing in relation to cultural difference more acutely than the British Empire.” What emerges from the pages of The Archive of Power is that the British empire had a selective interest in its populations. This had interesting and grim implications which I wish Kapur Siddique had explored a little more. Most of us worry about government prying and our figuring too much in state records but Kapur Siddique’s work provokes a disturbing thought: those peoples in the British sphere who did not have the attention of the archive barely survived. In that empire, it was better to be an object of the archive’s fussing, than not.
Paper Politics
With the phrase “archival epistemology,” Kapur Siddique picks out the early modern drive to an “information state.” The archive system of political knowledge was centered on agents loyal to specific state ministers writing letters directly to their patrons which meant critical information remained inside a tight circle bound by personal affections.
Knowledge moved slowly. The tools of the secretaries, who took oaths of diligence and secrecy, were parchment (for high-value political objects), paper, ink pots, binding, books, and quill—quills were a primary tool of government for centuries until the invention of fountain pens in the later nineteenth century. Quite apart from time drafting with quill and ink, messages between England and India in the age of sail took between three to six months, depending on the season.
For all their secrecy and administrative character, the archives were not bureaucracies.
Decision-making relied on analogy, what Kapur Siddique dubs “precedential knowledge.” Keying incoming reports to older manuscripts recording past circumstances and decisions, the governance model was likely copied from common law adjudication, which proceeds by analogies discerned between old and new. As Kapur Siddique notes, law in the period concerned not abstract principles of equity, but rule of law “intimately tied to its manifestation in written records.” The same was true of governance which functioned almost by adage: the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
The fealty of a manuscript archive had a purpose: “If they controlled the circulation of these records, administrators assumed that they could ensure they retained a monopoly over this essential component of power.” However, putting stress on the monopoly was the fact that at the start the British empire was a collaboration between the state and corporations. All had their own archives, which meant that sovereignty was split. The manuscript archive controlling the British Atlantic and British Asia was first located in the family home of Sir Thomas Smythe (1558–1625), who had managerial roles in both the Virginia Company and the East India Company. It is a strange thought that the early British Empire was built from a family dwelling in today’s City of London but more astonishing is that, as late as 1782, the British Home and Foreign Offices only numbered sixty-five salaried clerks and secretaries. The shared sovereignty model withered with the 1784 India Act which established a ministerial Board of Control over the East India Company.
Peoples and Rule of Law
Government was tiny at the close of the eighteenth century and a curiosity that Kapur Siddique brings to light is that these few souls did not actively manage all the peoples in the empire. Kapur Siddique puts perhaps the most significant claim of the book, thusly: “There was no singular Other against which imperial self-conceptions developed but a variety of them. Not all nonwhite people were construed in the same way in the imperial mind.”
In the British Atlantic, English settlers were governed by the legal archives of the mother nation, but Native Americans were never subjects of the Crown and so barely appear in the archives of the period. The British mostly related to them ad hoc, through war, diplomacy, and trade. At the time, England had no governance stake in Africa and Africans were categorized as “merchantable” and of no concern to the state archives, despite a voluminous paper trail of slaving in other quarters. Was the catastrophic fate of these peoples linked to their absence from government archives? Archive governance could be supple, with notable adaptations in rule made for the French in Canada and the Persian-led administration in India. Both their archives pre-dated, and modified, English rule. Possessing archives of their own seems to have vouchsafed liberty to these peoples and certainly staved off a catastrophic fate.
As Canada came under British rule, the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench, William Murray argued that there was no precedent for abolishing the laws of the conquered. Historically, change in sovereignty had not also changed settled law: “The fundamental maxims are, that a country conquered keeps her own laws, ‘til the conqueror expressly gives new.” New, expressly stated laws came soon enough, principally in the domains of criminal and trade law, but otherwise London’s rule was happy enough to take direction from the French archive in Canada.
In India, a further step was taken: the archive’s texts relied upon were not only in Persian but staffing remained Mughal. The East India Company conquered territory and monopolized trade “on the basis of a complex set of delegated charters and authorities both by English and `Asiatic’ sovereigns.” The East India Company was a militarized corporation with an army comprised of British, continental European, and Indian troops. At the head of the company-state in India stood Robert Clive, named in one treaty as a nawab of Bengal, with the title Sabit Jang Bahadur—The Firm in War.
Pen and ink archives ceased to be the pivot of the British Empire under the dual pressure of the belief that government office is a “public trust” and, critically, the rise of “nonarchival forms of reasoning.”
The Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 made the Company the diwan, a tax-gatherer with the attributes of a sovereign power. The Company took over even criminal law cases but ruled via a state apparatus staffed with a Persian-speaking Mughal elite. In consequence, Indians lived much as they had before the conquest: “The company governed as diwani using Indian, not English, laws and administrators.” Indeed, having the status of diwan meant “the corporation’s literal inhabitation of Mughal offices.” The assumption of power led to significant changes in some quarters of the Company. Worried that using the local archive and secretaries might lead to cheating the Company out of revenues, stress was placed on company men learning Persian—with promotions keyed to proficiency—and even commissioning translations of major historical and philosophical works. Rapacity became entwined with refinement, leading the wit Samuel Johnson to comment wryly: “It is new for a Governor of Bengal to patronize learning.”
Early Modern to Enlightenment
For all their secrecy and administrative character, the archives were not bureaucracies according to Kapur Siddique. Patronage staffed the manuscript archives and secretaries were expected to be loyal to their benefactors. For this reason, they are best thought of as “closed, self-referential, and secret” administrations, in contrast to bureaucracies, with their sense of office in service of the common good. This personalist politics fell afoul of fresh Enlightenment thinking. Kapur Siddique quotes Alexander Hamilton arguing that American liberty was not vouchsafed by a parchment charter but by “the sacred rights of mankind.” These are “not to be rummaged for,” Hamilton argued, “among old parchments, or musty records,” but are “written, as with a sun beam, in the whole volume of human nature, by the hand of divinity itself.”
Kapur Siddique captures the transition well:
Government was not to proceed by mastering control of an archive of manuscript sources accessible to an administrative elite. Rather, effective government required overcoming the manuscript form and secretive nature of the archive entirely, and replacing the archive as a source of policy knowledge with printed, non-manuscript texts that everyone could access and read.
Pen and ink archives ceased to be the pivot of the British Empire under the dual pressure of the belief that government office is a “public trust” and, critically, the rise of “nonarchival forms of reasoning,” specifically political economy. A student of Adam Smith, the Scot Dugald Stewart at the University of Edinburgh was the first to lecture on the general principles of effective government. Inspired by Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Stewart argued that once causes of good government had been identified by historical study, the causes could be put into operation in all settings and the reliance on personalist and particular archives jettisoned. As Kapur Siddique observes in a telling phrase, the switch to governance by political economy created an ever-expanding “army of officials” and did nothing to abate the need for information gathering nor secrecy in government. Perhaps we ought not to be surprised given the ring of truth in Hannah Arendt’s opinion that real power begins where secrecy begins.
Narrow Focus
The Archive of Empire is a reworked doctoral thesis and is sensibly modest in its themes and claims. It is too much to expect a young historian to range as widely and philosophically as a Tom Holland or Victor Davis Hanson. That said, the reader is left wishing Kapur Siddique had cut loose a little when converting the dissertation into a book.
The volume raises rich questions about which Kapur Siddique could have speculated more. For example, while the archive model of governance withered in the face of a political economy of general causes, there is a large question about outcomes. Might it be that the supplanting of the informal, observational, and haphazard accumulation model of rule by abstract theory opened the door to the great ideological conflicts that marred the twentieth century? The personalism of the archive has a strong Tory flavor about it and I wonder whether that sensibility emerges enhanced by comparison with the consequences of the Whiggery that replaced it.
The asymmetry in the archive’s attention is full of philosophical implications. Did the use of the Persian archive by the East India Company serve liberty well? Did a vernacular archive afford more protections to Indian populations than the ad hoc treatment of the Native Americans? It certainly seems so. Though speculative, there is some urgency to these questions. America’s leading geopolitical thinker, Robert Kaplan, observes that empire has been the default mode of governance for millennia and he sees new empires aborning. On the back of Kapur Siddique’s valuable work, we had best hope that we appear in the archives and data sets of one of the prevailing powers.
