Eviction and the archive: materials for an archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias

Abstract

This essay outlines an experimental microhistory of the founding of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) in Seville, Spain, one that attends to the localized exclusions that characterize this Enlightenment project. If the “archival turn” has highlighted in ethnographic terms the ways in which silences are inscribed in archival practices and protocols, I propose an archaeological approach that looks to the archive's material and architectonic foundations. The critical turn in eighteenth-century historiography was linked to the emergence of the modern, historical archive, and it is at the intersection of these methodological disputes and the geopolitics of imperial competition that the AGI was established. New scholarship by critical historians in northern Europe provoked calls for an official response in Spain, and this task fell to Juan Bautista Muñoz. His historiographical defense of Spanish colonialism would lead to not only the publication of his Historia del Nuevo-Mundo but also the founding of the AGI as the infrastructure of modern historiography. I read Muñoz's work as an epistemic intervention in ongoing debates over the writing of history that necessarily turns on an architectural intervention in the built environment – not a “domiciliation” but the eviction and subsequent erasure of the inhabitants of the building chosen to house the archive. By foregrounding this eviction and the renovations that followed, I underscore the violence that founds the modern archive, bring into relief the colonial materials from which it is assembled and trace a shift from the nomological to the historiographical as the ground of imperial sovereignty.