THE ARCHIVE STATE AND THE FEAR OF POLLUTION - FROM THE OPIUM WARS TO FU-MANCHU

This article considers the relationship between the production of a Br itish imperial archive on China and the global politics of empire over the last century and a half. Drawing upon the theoretical work of Bru no Latour, Gayatri Spivak and Thomas Richards, the archive is explored as a coherent set of material practices designed to decode and recode China and other colonized territories. Imagined as an interface betwe en knowledge and the state, the British archive required the establish ment of an epistemological network designed to generate knowledge on C hina. The knowledge so produced was then used to manipulate local scen es and to provide intelligence in 'the Great Game', the continuing con test with Russia over domination in Central Asia. Because of its desir e for comprehensive knowledge of other peoples and places, the archive also generated its own phantasms, ones which threatened to undermine and destroy empire. This process of self-haunting is explored through the figure of Fu-Manchu, a discernible mutation of epistemological emp ire, and linked to the cold war which emerged on the Eurasian landmass after 1945.