Historians of British colonial rule in India have noted both the place of military might and the imposition of new cultural categories in the making of empire. Bhavani Raman uncovers a lesser-known story of power: the power of bureaucracy. Drawing on extensive archival research in the files of the East India Company’s administrative offices in Madras, she tells the story of a bureaucracy gone awry in a fever of documentation practices that grew ever more abstract—and the power, both economic and cultural, this created.

In order to assert its legitimacy and value, the East India Company was diligent about record keeping. Raman shows, however, that the sheer volume of their document production allowed colonial managers to subtly but substantively manipulate records for their own ends, increasingly drawing the real and the recorded further apart. While this administrative sleight of hand increased the company’s reach and power, it also bolstered profoundly new orientations to language, writing, memory, and pedagogy for the officers and Indian subordinates involved.

Immersed in a subterranean world of delinquent scribes, translators, village accountants, and entrepreneurial fixers, Document Raj maps the shifting boundaries of the legible and illegible, the legal and illegitimate, that would usher India into the modern world.

Bhavani Raman is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is now writing about the early history of extraordinary laws and emergency under East India Company rule in South Asia.