‘Accounting for every grain’

This chapter shifts focus away from examining the broader fiscal consolidation of the Company’s early state to looking at one of the most crucial by-products of this whole process of fiscal consolidation: the accumulative and organized repository of agrarian and fiscal knowledge from the time of Clive. This chapter engages with the development of what scholars have termed the ‘colonial archive’. Historians and anthropologists have broadly framed the development of the archive as a result of either the taxonomic tendencies of caste and social categories or as part of a systematized effort to exert power through ‘colonial knowledge’. Chris Bayly, for example, saw the colonial archive as a result of a shift away from mastering affective knowledge in Indian social communities towards abstract, statistical knowledge which crystalized in the archive. ¹ Arjun Appadurai has argued that such repositories were largely the result of an unprecedented ‘quantification’ of aspects of Indian society. Here, the Company’s tendency to organize, classify and number everything led to the formation of the colonial archive. ² Nicholas Dirks has made a similar, though more forceful, argument. He maintains that the colonial archive was intimately related to knowledge production and the construction of working caste identities, in which Indian intermediaries were quickly marginalized and ‘written out’. ³ And Matthew Edney has argued that the cartographic needs of the Company state led to a sophisticated, accumulative body of knowledge located around the need to ‘know the land’. ⁴