Engaging Colonial Knowledge : Reading European Archives in World History

With contributions from established as well as younger scholars, the authors here offer a set of rich case-studies that demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge. The 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. Taking into consideration the most recent scholarship and theories of colonial and post-colonial studies, the authors employ various reading strategies to explore the potential and limitations of the European colonial archive. As a whole, Engaging Colonial Knowledge thus presents a commitment to generating new historical, anthropological and sociological insights about human phenomena from older archival traces; insights about the nature of cross-cultural interactions, indigenous social life, land tenure, political authority, marginalised activities, epistemologies of governance, or rites of power.

RICARDO ROQUE Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, Portugal. He works on the history and anthropology of colonialism, human sciences, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese empire. He is the author of Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930 (2010). KIM A. WAGNER Lecturer in Imperial and World History at the University of Birmingham, UK. He has published extensively on crime and rebellion in British India, including Thuggee: Banditry and the British in Early Nineteenth-Century India (2007) and The Great Fear of 1857: Rumours, Conspiracies and the Making of the Indian Uprising (2010).