Seeing Like a Khanate: On Archives, Cultures of Documentation, and Nineteenth-Century Khvārazm

Abstract

While students of imperial and colonial history began long ago to investigate the culture of documentation that informed the production, disposition and concealment of texts in archives, little has been done to understand how chancery practices and record-keeping activities in the modern Perso-Islamicate world relate to forms of governance. Material coming from the Khivan archives lends itself to provide for a corrective to this situation. By examining reports penned by leaders of mosque communities and reflecting on local archival practices, I address in this paper the following questions: Why did the Qongrats create and run an archive? What were the goals that the Qongrats wanted to achieve by developing and sustaining a project of documentation? I think these are pressing questions for anyone who sets out to make sense of trends of textualization in nineteenth-century Central Asia (and beyond) without succumbing to the somewhat facile narrative of modernization.