Lecture: Archives and Archivalities: Record-Keeping and Sovereignty in Early Modern Eurasia

The ascendency of historical archival studies has re-focused attention on the relationship between record-keeping practices, the extension of authority across composite domains, and the redefinition of sovereignty between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Yet when positing the “archive” as an object of research, scholars dedicated to the history and evolution of documentary repositories also risk returning to culturalist modes of comparison and to teleological arguments concerning institutional developments. This talk traces a trans-imperial circulation of textual artifacts that belies the typology of “European” and “non-European” archival practices and resists locating the “archive”within a particular locale. It suggests instead that the coeval transformation of chancery practices across Eurasia challenges both the myopic focus on the historiography of “early modern European archives” and the usefulness of the “Islamic archive” posited as the counterpoint. Drawing on examples from circulatory textual regimes that cross and re-cross ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries, the talk challenges scholars of early modern archivality to attend to how the mobility and mobilization of texts offers an alternative site for the archive. This alternative focus on mobility requires in turn a different analysis of both the current storehouses of “documents” and the archive-minded practices that generated the texts now preserved therein.