Engaging Colonial Knowledge Reading European Archives in World History [Paperback]

Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge; R.Roque & K.A.Wagner PART I: EPISTEMIC FISSURES 'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives; A.L.Stoler North Indian Lives in the Archives of the Colonial State; L.Denault Reading Farm and Forest: Colonial Forest Science and Policy in Southern Nigeria; P.von Hellermann PART II: INDIGENOUS VOICES IN COLONIAL RECORDS Insights from the 'Ancient Word': The Use of Colonial Sources in the Study of Aztec Society; C.Dodds Pennock 'In unrestrained conversation': Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-Century India; K.A.Wagner From Civil Servant to Little King: an Indigenous Construction of Colonial Authority in Early Nineteenth-century South India; N.Brimnes French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina; S.Bayly PART III: ARCHIVES OF ENTANGLEMENT Treachery and Ethnicity in Portuguese Representations of Sri Lanka; A.Strathern William Hodges as Anthropologist and Historian; N.Thomas Entangled with Otherness: Military Ethnographies of Headhunting in East Timor; R.Roque 'What do you Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania; A.Zimmerman Endnotes

Overall, the contributions emphasise the potential of the colonial archives in providing access to a historical reality through the addition of analytical criticism. The case studies convincingly indicate omissions of 'post-Orientalist' criticism....The high quality of the individual contributions is undeniable. - Nathanael Kuck, Comparativ

SUSAN BAYLY Reader in Hiló6