Itinerant Bureaucrats and Empire

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Itinerant Bureaucrats and Empire," at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Colonized and post-colonial economies on the fringes of empires are often marked by intermittent exchanges between local populations, and colonial administrators and visitors traveling from settlement to settlement. These mobile functionaries include tax collectors, missionaries, venture capitalists, surveyors, naturalists, among others. One guiding question we have is the extent to which these brief moments of cultural exchange, conceptualized broadly, left enduring influence in local communities. The problem seems to be one of scale. How do we talk about these infrequent, and short, encounters with the colonial apparatus against a backdrop of deeper times and histories? And, if we direct our attention to certain moments at the expense of others, what do we miss the negotiated becoming and sedimentation of the "modern" colonial state apparatus? In this session, we discuss how the transient interactions between local communities and foreign administrators can clarify mechanisms of historical change in colonial and post-colonial contexts.