Presenting a set of rich case-studies which demonstrate novel and productive approaches to the study of colonial knowledge, this volume covers British, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, America and the Pacific, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

SUSAN BAYLY Reader in Historical Anthropology, Cambridge University, UKNIELS BRIMNES Associate Professor, Aarhus University, DenmarkLEIGH DENAULT Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, UK and Research Associate, Centre for History and Economics, King's College, Cambridge, UKCAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK Lecturer in Early Modern History, the University of Leicester, UKANN LAURA STOLER Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies, the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, New York, USAALAN STRATHERN Research Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, UKNICHOLAS THOMAS Professor of Historical Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UKPAULINE VON HELLERMANN Research Fellow, the University of York, UKANDREW ZIMMERMAN Associate Professor of History, the George Washington University in Washington, DC, USA

Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Engaging Colonial Knowledge; R.Roque& K.A.Wagner PART I: EPISTEMIC FISSURES 'In Cold Blood': Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives; A.L.Stoler North Indian Lives in the Archives of the Colonial State; L.Denault Reading Farm and Forest: Colonial Forest Science and Policy in Southern Nigeria; P.von Hellermann PART II: INDIGENOUS VOICES IN COLONIAL RECORDS Insights from the 'Ancient Word': The Use of Colonial Sources in the Study of Aztec Society; C.Dodds Pennock 'In unrestrained conversation': Approvers and the Colonial Ethnography of Crime in Nineteenth-Century India; K.A.Wagner From Civil Servant to Little King: an Indigenous Construction of Colonial Authority in Early Nineteenth-century South India; N.Brimnes French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina; S.Bayly PART III: ARCHIVES OF ENTANGLEMENT Treachery and Ethnicity in Portuguese Representations of Sri Lanka; A.Strathern William Hodges as Anthropologist and Historian; N.Thomas Entangled with Otherness: Military Ethnographies of Headhunting in East Timor; R.Roque 'What do you Really Want in German East Africa, Herr Professor?' Counterinsurgency and the Science Effect in Colonial Tanzania; A.Zimmerman Endnotes