I became aware that the backward countries of the world are and have been those that have not learned to take full advantage of the possibilities of pictorial statement and communication, and that many of the most characteristic ideas and abilities of our western civilization have been intimately related to our skills exactly to repeat pictorial statements and communications.1 In the oft-ignored colonial and civilisational discourse in the beginning lines of the oft-cited Prints and Visual Communication, repetition was central to ‘Western’ domination. Disparities in visual technologies and capacities for identical reproduction in the ‘West’ were the engine for the surveillance of subject peoples and an emergent third-person plural possessive epistemological discourse. The storage of graphic information, as distinct from material resources, emerged from the administrative challenges faced by the expansion of empires and consequent long-distance surveillance. As Anthony Giddens argued, ‘storage capacity is a fundamental element in the generation of power through the extension of time-space distanciation’.2 In Giddens’s formulation, the surveillance of a subject population entails the unilateral collation of information (the ‘storage of authoritative resources’) in conjunction with coercion. Although Giddens emphasises the development of alphanumeric writing as a response to the administration of societies of increasing scale, collecting, picturing, printing, printmaking, and archiving were central to the administration of empire. Bruno Latour expands this notion of print technologies by using the all-encompassing term ‘inscription’. He emphasises that the colonial project was facilitated not only by Ivins’s notion of the immutability of the print, but also by its mobility – cultural transfer and circulation – based on the principle of seriality.3 As Rose Marie San Juan succinctly stated, ‘in early modern Europe images start to move’.4