The Transnational Archive of the Sinosphere: The Early Modern East Asian Information Order

This chapter argues for the existence of an intellectually Confucian-centred, Classical Chinese language delivered archive of knowledge across early modern East Asia. I argue that this broad, transferable, and often commercially delivered Sinosphere archive supported the creation of state-led information orders in early modern East Asia. This argument resonates with recent work in South Asian and Global History demonstrating the role of regional early modern information orders in facilitating global flows of knowledge. I focus particularly on the transregional nature of the literary, pedagogical, and book culture that underlay the information order of early modern East Asia, and the state’s prime role in its development in early modern Japan. The article thus employs the concept of archivality to analyse early modern information systems, demonstrating patterns of trans-regional knowledge development in East Asia which resonate with other early modern global examples.

Death, Distance, and Bureaucracy: An Archival Story

This chapter in two parts considers several legal cases from Spanish America. It argues that geographic distance shaped the pace of proceedings and created bureaucratic distances critical to case outcomes. Geographic distance also shaped document trajectories, influencing how they would be stored and where they would come to rest. Archivists, both in the colonial period and since then, are the vital mediators of these many forms of distance. They were vital to the creation of document content, they determined which documents survived, and they make choices today that influence location and access. The cases being examined are from Guatemala and Mexico; they are drawn from both inquisition files and the secular criminal courts; they take place between 1698 and 1718. All the cases focus on the crimes and perceived transgressions of non-white women: witchcraft, murder, and adultery.

The Early Modern Secretary and the Early Modern Archive

It was the secretary who handled the delivery of incoming letters, drafted and copied outgoing correspondence, filed papers for retention and, quite literally, held the keys to his master's secrets. This chapter reviews the current state of scholarship on the early modern secretary and asks what we can learn from the material traces that these invisible technicians left on the documents that passed through their hands. Secretaries sought to differentiate themselves from mere clerks by developing a more sophisticated range of techniques for the handling and retrieval of written documents, and the rise of the secretary as a distinct profession was therefore accompanied by the emergence of a new technology of the archive.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Accounting, and the Genesis of the State Archive in Early Modern France

This study shows how, between 1661 and 1683, the culture of double-entry, mercantile accounting was central to Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s massive project of royal archive building in ancient régime France. Scholars have tended to see state archives as the products of learned and legal culture. The case of Colbert demonstrates that mercantile culture and commerce also made an essential contribution to archival development in the early modern period, as well as laying the foundation for state sponsored learning, science, industry, art, building, and administration. It illustrates how economic interest and financial management drove archive formation and organisation in the early modern era, correcting the dominant emphasis on techniques derived from scholarship.

‘Friction in the Archives’: Access and the Politics of Record-Keeping in Revolutionary England

This chapter traces the legal and political frameworks that underpinned rights of access to archives in the decades preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1642, showing that there were two different cultures of access: one determined by the rights of subjects to consult legal court records; the other shaped by the culture of secrecy associated with the records of crown estates and royal prerogative. Over the course of the civil war, a new language of access emerged. The assertion of parliamentary sovereignty and the dislocating experiences of civil war mobilisation led to a radical, perhaps unprecedented, articulation of the rights of the people to control and access the information that defined their material rights and status. Ultimately this chapter argues that this new, if short lived, articulation of public right of access to records is important not only for the history of record-keeping, but also reveals much about the political and material interests that were at stake in the English revolution.

Introduction: Archives and Information in the Early Modern World

The introduction to the volume explores the evolution and effect of the scholarly trends that have brought the study of archives and record-keeping to the forefront in both historical and archival circles in recent decades. It discusses key questions of definition that continue to obscure and bedevil our comprehension of how archival and information cultures functioned in the early modern era. It also provides an overview of the salient themes emerging from this collection of chapters and identifies some avenues for investigation in this field in the future. It calls for greater collaboration and cross-fertilisation to breach the lingering disciplinary divide between historians and archival scientists.

Afterword

The afterword provides a critical reflection on the contribution made by this volume to the historiographies of early modern archives and information. It highlights the need for further exploration of archival impulses beyond state bureaucracy, pointing to their role as instruments of power in a wider range of contexts and environments. It also underlines the value of paying close attention to questions of materiality and the conditions of document survival and durability. It concludes by calling for greater collaboration between professional archivists and academic historians.

Truth and Suffering in the Quaker Archives

Using the records and publications of the Quakers, this chapter considers the religious and political context behind the creation of the Quaker archive and the relationship between scribal material and print culture in making meaning. The story of Mary Fisher’s (c.1623–1698) trip to Constantinople to convert the Sultan of the Ottoman Turks provides a valuable case study in how a letter became an archival document before circulating widely in print. Initially a product of the zealous, evangelical epistolary culture that characterised Quaker writings of the 1650s, it was transferred into the public archive created during the extreme persecution of the 1660s to situate the Quakers within a longer history of suffering. Later it was used to advance the political argument for toleration by offering an instance of Muslim hospitality in counterbalance to Christian cruelty. The chapter highlights how changing historical contexts transform the nature of the truth of archives.

Archival Intelligence: Diplomatic Correspondence, Information Overload, and Information Management in Italy, 1450–1650

The rise of permanent diplomacy in the 15th century and the expansion of diplomatic networks in the 16th resulted in a massive surge in correspondence between ambassadors and their masters back home. Historians justly inscribe this phenomenon in the early modern information revolution, but news only turns into information and information into useful knowledge if it is packaged and retrieved for re-circulation. Information overload requires new management techniques, which were honed by chancellors and secretaries. Archives were centres of information long before they became repositories of sources for historians. Focusing on Italy in the period 1450–1650, this article discusses the gathering and circulation of diplomatic letters and dispatches, systems for managing correspondence on receipt, techniques for processing information, and the storage of correspondence in archives. It compares the arrangements adopted in republics and principalities to underline their differences as well as similarities.

Early Modern European Archivality: Organised Records, Information, and State Power, c.1500

Comparative case-study analysis can provide valuable insights into record-keeping systems within Europe and cross-culturally. Building on a comparison of empirical evidence from 16th-century Lisbon and Würzburg, this chapter makes three methodological arguments. First, a critique of Ernst Posner’s path-breaking Archives of the Ancient World (1972) leads to the conclusion that we must revise our categories for the analysis of record-keeping across cultures. Instead of assimilating non-European repositories to European archives, the broader category of archivality avoids the uncritical naturalisation of European practices while still recognising similarities cross-culturally. Second, archivality is most useful if applied primarily to the accumulation of records by institutions of power, such as empires, kingdoms, and states, as one subset of record-keeping more broadly. Third, inventories and organisational structures represent a particularly promising area for comparative analysis. Comparison of the Lisbon and Würzburg evidence shows two related but diverging archivalities at work in early modern Europe.