Toward Early Modern Archivality: The Perils of History in the Age of Neo-Eurocentrism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This essay addresses the revival of culturalist assumptions in historical archival studies and suggests an alternative framework. Rather than provenance, it privileges textual circulation; rather than civilizational divides between supposedly distinct “European” and “Islamic” archivalities, it highlights mutability and commensurability as defining elements of a broadly shared, if inherently dynamic, internally complex, and transactionally defined early modern archivality. We first show how the historiography on early modern archives has inadvertently perpetuated a myopic Eurocentric view of the centralized archive as a key aspect of European archivality. We analyze how the construct “Islamic archivality,” when proffered as a comparative counterpoint to such European archivality, not only promotes an outdated understanding of “Islam” (and, indeed “Europe”) as a discrete, transhistorical phenomenon, but rests on a limited set of mostly pre-Ottoman, medieval examples. By positing “Islam” as fundamentally premodern, this historiography sidesteps significant shared late antique genealogies of textual practices and mobilities across a vast early modern region that traverses modern continental/civilizational configurations. In lieu of the prevalent comparative mode, which juxtaposes civilizational blocs and then selectively contrasts specific archival institutions and practices, we suggest concentrating on intersections and circulations of documents and practices across ethnolinguistic, territorial, and juridical boundaries. Drawing on examples from our research in Ottoman diplomatic archives, we challenge scholars of early modern archivality to move beyond fixed notions of “European,” and “non-European,” “centralized” and “decentralized” archives, and “original” and “copy,” as primary indices of comparison, and attend to the social life of documents and their mutability through circulation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".