This thematic issue of Itinerario brings together a selection of papers presented at the international conference Beyond the Islamicate Chancery: Archives, Paperwork, and Textual Encounters across Eurasia, which was held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in early October 2018. The conference was the third instalment in a series of collaborations between the Institute of Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Pittsburgh examining Islamicate cultures of documentation from different angles. Surviving precolonial and colonial chancery archives across Eurasia provide an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of connectivity across writing cultures and, especially, documentary practices. This particular meeting has attempted to situate what has traditionally been a highly technical discipline in a broader historical dialogue on the relationship between state power, the archive, and cultural encounters.

Robert Cribb is in Leiden for the International Convention of Asia Scholars, held in July 2019. Despite having just arrived from Canberra, where he is professor at the Australian National University, he gladly made time for an interview over lunch. During his long career as a historian and Indonesia scholar, Cribb has traversed many different research themes, including the history of mass violence and crime, national identity, environmental politics, and historical geography of Indonesia, providing sufficient ingredients for a two-hour long conversation on the identity of scholars, students, and orangutans, bridging Europe, Australia, and Indonesia.

A growing literature explores the varying role of print media in the colonial world and the new types of publics such newspapers and periodicals produced. However, this literature has tended to focus on specific regions, and has often sidestepped the larger question of how to conceptualise the relationship between print media and colonial rule. While some have used the term ‘colonial public sphere’ or ‘colonial publics,’ others have preferred to avoid these terms and instead thought in terms of multiple and overlapping publics. What this literature has shown is that a single analytic model for analysing public spaces of discourse is not usable. In this Introduction to our Special Issue we propose a new framework for studying the publics created through print media in the colonial world. We outline a set of four factors – addressivity, performativity, materiality and periodicity – that can be applied to specific historical case studies. We then explain how the issue as a whole models this methodology as a means to analyse how print media (as one medium within the public sphere) functioned in specific colonial and semi-colonial spaces around the world.

This special issue on violence, migration, and gender in the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking world brings together specialists on the Iberian colonies in Africa as well as scholars focusing on the domestic impacts of decolonisation in Spain and Portugal to this day. The articles in the issue focus on social change broadly understood, analysed through a historical and anthropological lens. For the first time, this endeavour brings together questions related to violence and gender, forced migration, and administrative internment, as well as current (European) migration regimes, in an “Iberian” perspective.

Over the course of the eighteenth century, India's Mughal empire (1526–1858) fragmented into a number of regional polities that were, in turn, gradually subsumed under the paramount authority of the British East India Company. This essay describes concomitant developments in the empire's Persianate political language, particularly with regard to ideas of sovereignty, statehood, and dominion. It argues that by the mid-eighteenth century, the Mughal “empire of Hindustan” was increasingly framed as a territorialised governing institution comprising emerging provincial sovereignties rooted in local ruling households. This conceptual dispensation, however, remained ill-defined until the 1760s, when a treaty regime dominated by the Company built upon this language to concretise the empire as a confederacy of independent, sub-imperial states. The essay contends that in the short term, this redefinition bolstered the authority of incipient dynasties in provinces like Awadh, but in the longer term generated conflicts that abetted the expansion of colonial rule and laid conceptual foundations for British paramountcy in India.

In the 1870s, Indian news editors warned their readers of a series of crises threatening India. They saw the famines, wars, and poverty that they were describing as symptoms of the same illness: Colonial governors had failed to implement an ethical system of governance, and had therefore failed to create a healthy body politic, choosing to expend energy in punishing or censoring dissent when they should have been constructing more durable civic institutions. In North India, earlier Mughal traditions of political philosophy and governance offered a template to critique the current state. In drawing on these traditions, editors linked multiple registers of dissent, from simple ‘fables’ about emperors to more sophisticated arguments drawn from newly reinterpreted akhlaq texts, creating a print record of the multilingual, multivalent literary and oral worlds of Indian political thought. The figures of the Mughal emperors Akbar and Aurangzeb, representing the zenith and nadir of Mughal sovereignty, in turn linked popular and learned discussions on statecraft, good governance, and personal responsibility in an age of crisis. The press itself became a meeting point for multivalent discourses connecting South Asian publics, oral and literate, in their exploration of the nature of just rule in the context of empire, calling, in the process, new ‘publics’ into being.

In Spain's last colony, Western Sahara, both efforts by the colonial power to stimulate development and the negative impacts of colonisation intensified between the end of the Ifni-Sahara War (1957–58) and the Spanish withdrawal in 1975. Spanish economical and geopolitical interests triggered an important industrial and urban development of the territory. Cities such as Laayoune, Villa Cisneros, Smara, and the Bou Craa phosphate deposits were to showcase Spanish modernising colonial policies.

However, the effects of war, the control of colonial frontiers, and severe droughts during the 1960s strongly affected Sahrawi society. In this context, the Spanish colonial state developed new forms of control over the Sahrawi population, which included the progressive (forced) settling of nomadic people around military posts and Spanish cities, bringing about the adoption of new economic paradigms. Not only did the Francoist government distribute subsidies, both money and goods; it furthermore implemented policies aimed at controlling the Sahrawi way of life, particularly in the areas of hygiene, education, and gender relations. The essay analyses these “carrot-and-stick” strategies at the intersection of colonial control and forced sedentarisation with regard to the implementation of a market-oriented economy in Western Sahara.

It is broadly assumed that attempts by the Russian state of Muscovy to establish stable diplomatic and mercantile channels to India via Central Asia were started upon the initiative of the Emperor Peter I (1682–1725). Such attempts are generally interpreted as being part of a large-scale project that reflected the growing imperial and colonial ambitions of Russia and which, in turn, entailed strong antagonism from the ruling elites of Central Asia, thereby setting a tone for relations that would continue for the next century and more of reciprocal relations between the local principalities and Russia. By exploring chancellery documents from seventeenth-century Muscovy, we find that the first diplomatic communications between Russia, Khiva, and Bukhara can in fact be dated to long before the reign of Peter I. The first Romanov tsars sought to initiate exchanges with Khiva and Bukhara as a means of establishing diplomatic and commercial ties with the Mughal emperors; at the same time, meanwhile, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara had their own reasons for pushing Muscovy to engage with Central Asia as a conduit to India. Over the course of the seventeenth century, Central Asian diplomats went to great lengths—both in diplomatic correspondence and through direct interpersonal contacts—to convince their Russian counterparts of the region's attractiveness as a source of precious Indian commodities and as a logistically convenient passage to India. Despite such rhetoric, however, the authorities in Khiva and Bukhara were in fact highly reluctant to “open” the region to Russian agents: repeated attempts by Muscovy to engage in diplomatic fact-finding as a means of establishing influence in the region invariably foundered in the face of Central Asian resistance. Bukharan and Khivan circles seem, in fact, to have held out the enticing idea of “a passage to India” simply as a rhetorical device to secure recognition in Muscovy for their own diplomatic and mercantile missions.

The forced removal and resettlement of population was a main feature of late European colonialism, in Africa and elsewhere. Both were crucial to the formulation and enactment of securitarian projects and developmental schemes, and to their recurrent intersection and close interdependence. The repertoires of repressive developmentalism—the shaping of development strategies by securitarian concerns and the contamination of schemes of security by socioeconomic rationales—were diverse, inspiring the various authorities and guiding many specific operations on the ground. This text provides one telling example of these repertoires, the Operação Robusta (1969–1974), which entailed the forced removal of thousands of men, women, and children from the district of North Cuanza to the district of Zaire (both in the north of Angola, under Portuguese rule, and in the middle of an armed conflict that started in 1961), and was seen as a model for similar actions. Assessing the drives and the prospects associated with the operation, this text also addresses its violent dynamics and effects, namely the substantial separation of families, the meagre provision of welfare, and the intense processes of land expropriation.

The scholarly discussion of archives in the premodern Islamicate world is beset by problematic generalisations. Such a view to some degree stems from a top-down view of archiving that focuses on state archives at the expense of practices of archiving occurring outside a chancery context. This article challenges the assumptions that support an enduring narrative of paucity, by examining non-chancery archival practices in Mamlūk Cairo on the eve of the Ottoman conquest in 922/1517. In doing this, it looks to some of the surviving original documentary material: legal property deeds with connections to waqf endowments whose potential to shed light on archival history has largely remained untapped. Surviving in large numbers in modern collections in Cairo, these documents contain abundant traces of their own archival histories. By presenting a micro-scale case study drawn from this material, this article shows the energetic and meticulous documentary and archival practices that surrounded property transactions in late-Mamlūk Cairo.

This article is focused on a magazine called Jambo, which was published by the British East Africa Command for troops in its employ between 1942 and 1945. Jambo was an agglomeration of political articles, general interest stories, propaganda, cartoons, crosswords, and more, with many of its contributions authored (or drawn) by men serving in the Allied forces. Here, I use Jambo to consider notions of the “colonial” and “imperial” during the Second World War, exploring how the realities of racial segregation in the colonies fit awkwardly with imperial service. Jambo also permits us a window into the views of some hundreds of British servicemen, who wrote extensively about the Africans with whom they served, revealing the complexities and shifts in British perceptions of African peoples during the conflict. Jambo is unique in another respect: it also provided a forum for African troops. In few other publications—and even fewer with such wide circulation—could educated (but nonelite) African peoples reach thousands of British readers. Though their published letters and articles were few compared to those written by Jambo's British authors, African writers used the venue to critique the conditions of their military service, argue about the sort of social ordering they desired in their home communities, and create an alternate narrative of the war. Like most colonial publications, Jambo had intended audiences, but also voracious, additional, alternate publics that mediated the articles which appeared in its pages. All this suggests that we might think of the colonial public sphere as both local and global, inward and outward looking, personal and communal, and situated along a continuum between colonial and imperial contexts.

Cui bono information and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that “empires are built on ignorance.” It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things “Oriental” was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Europe's India has shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the “archival turn.” Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archives always retained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, the Yik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating the Yik Khuan Poh in its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

How did the populations of a remote Cape Verdean island—Santo Antão—construct and formulate their goals of emancipation and social reform in the late colonial period? This article revisits the experiences of anti-colonial mobilisation in the island in the late 1960s, bringing them together with other narratives of social needs formulated by Santo Antão's populations. Those include the fears of being recruited for plantation labour in São Tomé e Príncipe, the objective of obtaining the improvement of social infrastructure, and the local struggles for water that became again more acute between 1945 and independence. The article shows that local experiences of Cape Verdean populations, of both the islands’ elite and local peasants, sharecroppers and fishermen, were much more complex than a simple, straightforward narrative of nationalist sympathies and activity. The internal conflicts outlined here also point to the numerous struggles that would shake Santo Antão's society after independence.

This study first considers how master secretaries of the Ottoman Imperial Council went beyond their field of scribal business and began to have a share in carrying out the empire's foreign policy by putting it into words. Next, it deals with the specific genre of documents that took shape step by step as one chancery office worked up an incoming writ and forwarded it to another bureau. It thereby shows how we can indeed unearth new knowledge on political history by looking into these outputs of the chancery's practice of writing and keeping financial transactions between dignitaries, superintendents, petitioners, and departments. The study then tackles in what ways one can link these trends to the early modern growth of the chancery and the branching out in government, and how the state's lordship rights and making, as well as keeping, logs were understood in those times. A document belonging to the handled genre is reproduced, transcribed, and translated at the end.

At the end of the eighteenth century, members of the colonial elite of the Captaincy General of Venezuela addressed a letter to the king of Spain in which they sought permission to have a printing press in the city of Caracas. In the letter, they argued that the establishment of such a press was fundamental for the economic and commercial development of the Captaincy. Months later, they learned that the permission for a printing press had been denied without further explanations. Venezuela became one of the last capital cities in colonial Spanish America to possess this technology. The lack of a printing press during this politically dynamic period moved by the Atlantic revolutions did not necessarily affect public access to reading, sharing of information, and political debate in Venezuela. Venezuela's unique geographical location, and its open and frequent connections with the Caribbean region during the Age of Revolutions allowed for the effective entrance and transit of people and written materials that spread revolutionary ideas and impressions, creating a dynamic and contested political environment. Here I argue that during the late-colonial period, semiliterate forms of knowledge transmission, partially promoted by Spanish reformism, mobilised a socially diverse public that openly debated the monarchical regime, the system of slavery, and the hierarchical socio-racial order of colonial society. The colonial public sphere in Venezuela was shaped, then, within a context of emerging socio-racial tensions and became a space of contestation and struggle, animated by the overlapping of contradictory political discourses.

This study contributes to recent debates about the character, nature, and relevance of the public sphere in the colonial world. It explores the circulation of manuscripts and ephemeral written materials, the different modes of production and reception of texts that developed in the colonial context, and an analysis of the character of the urban spaces that facilitated the performativity of texts. It thus offers a new framework for understanding the emergence of a public sphere in Venezuela, a colonial peripheral province with no printing press.

These concluding reflections assess how the contributors to this special issue intervene in key assumptions that shape the current field of archival studies. As the “archival turn” gains ground, forms of Euro- and state-centrism reappear in scholarship otherwise innovative in its attention to the textual remnants of the past. Here, instead, we explore the methodological stakes involved in defining both the “archive” and the historical power brokers who created and preserved a documentary record in pursuit of their varied social, cultural, economic, and political projects. The essay points to the resurgence of culturalist and civilisational indices for comparative archivistics, and follows the arguments collected in this issue to assert by contrast the often uneven and uneasy regional, administrative, and procedural definitions at work within preserved records. Identifying “mobility” as both a methodological tactic and a historical process, this conclusion presents a fluid rather than fixed textual landscape and presents an alternative frame for investigating preservationist practices.

Over sixteen months in 1857 and 1858, Walter Buller produced a weekly newspaper for Māori of the Wellington region in their own language. Although he was the son of a Wesleyan missionary and an official interpreter, the niupepa was neither a church nor a government publication, although it promoted discourses favoured by both. A number of niupepa had preceded Buller's Te Karere o Poneke, the first appearing in 1842, but his paper was distinctive in the sizable platform he provided for correspondence. Over half of the items printed comprised letters from Māori, many of them commenting on, and occasionally critiquing the colonial milieu.

The concept of “public sphere” is heavily theorized, often postulated in acultural terms (although suspiciously European in form) and it is debatable if Te Karere o Poneke's readership and their engagement with the textual discourse meet the theory's required criteria of constituting a public sphere. New Zealand was annexed to the British Empire in 1840, meaning that by 1857 colonization was still a relatively new phenomenon, but with substantial immigration and a developing infrastructure, change was both extensive and dynamic. According to the theory, it may be difficult to apply the concept of “public sphere” to Māori anytime during the changing contexts of nineteenth-century colonialism, and indeed other colonised cultures for whom the advent of literacy, Christianity, market economy and colonial administration had been sudden and unexpected. Of course this does not mean that Māori lacked a voice, at times critical. Using Te Karere o Poneke as a case study, this essay argues that Wellington Māori of 1857 do not readily fit the Western model of the “public sphere”, but they nevertheless utilized the discursive spaces available to them to discuss and evaluate the world they now encountered.