One Missing Document, and the Problem of Documenting History in the Imperial Archive
What started out as a simple paper chase soon became a project about Qing efforts to generate and track information about local administrative activities...
Useful to Whom? How Bureaucracy Shapes What We Know about Technology in the Early Modern Iberian State
Historians often describe Iberian administrators as diligent record keepers of “useful” knowledge, but what motivated local bureaucrats was often the desire to show that they knew how to follow the rules.
Natural Science as Humanistic Knowledge: Negotiating Epistemic Legitimacy in Sweden, 1800–1850
Scientists, physicians, and state officials argued that the mental and moral development of students resulted from studying nature—just like their peers in philology and classical languages.
Ideal-Type? Style Icons! New Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge
Nine case studies explore how institutions, and people interacting with them, made sense of their own administered worlds.
