Cui bono information and record keeping? In his most recent work devoted to the study of British and French imperialism in the Levant in early modern history, Cornel Zwierlein has argued that “empires are built on ignorance.” It is, of course, true that during the old regime Western knowledge of things “Oriental” was patently defective, marked as it was by blind spots and glaring gaps; and if observed in the broader context of European colonialism in Asia, the British and French cases are hardly exceptional. Sanjay Subrahmanyam's Europe's India has shown compellingly that the Portuguese, too, blindly forged ahead in their imperial expansion into South Asia, with a good dose of improvisation. By focusing on a mission to Khiva, Bukhara, and Balkh in 1732, I set out to show that the Russian venture in Asia too was premised upon ignorance, among other things. More specifically, I argue that diplomatic and commercial relations between Russia and Central Asia developed in parallel with the neglect of intelligence gathered and made available in imperial archives. Reflecting on the fact that the Russian enterprise in Asia was minimally dependent on information allows us to complicate the reductive equation of knowledge to power, which originates from the “archival turn.” Many today regard archives as reflective of projects of documentation, which granted epistemological virtue to the texts stored, ordered, and preserved therein. The archives generated truth claims, we are told, about hierarchies of knowledge produced by states and, by doing so, they effectively operated as a technological apparatus bolstering the state. However, not all the texts which we find in archives always retained their pristine epistemic force. To historicise the uses, misuses, and, more importantly, the practices of purposeful neglect of records invites us to revisit the quality of transregional connectivity across systems of signification in the early modern period.

崔波诺信息和记录保存？康奈尔·兹维尔林（Cornel Zwierlein）在其致力于近代早期黎凡特地区英法帝国主义的最新研究中指出，“帝国是建立在无知之上的”。当然，在旧政权时期，西方对“东方”事物的认识显然是有缺陷的，因为它具有盲点和明显的缝隙。如果从欧洲殖民主义在亚洲的更广泛背景下观察，英法两国的案子也不例外。Sanjay Subrahmanyam的欧洲印度令人信服地表明，葡萄牙人在帝国主义扩张到南亚的过程中也盲目地向前迈进，即兴发挥了很多。通过集中精力于1732年对基瓦，布哈拉和巴尔赫的访问，我着手表明，俄罗斯在亚洲的冒险活动也是以无知为前提的。更具体地说，我认为俄罗斯与中亚之间的外交和商业关系的发展与对情报的收集和提供给皇室档案馆的情报的忽视是同时发生的。考虑到在亚洲的俄罗斯企业几乎不依赖信息这一事实，使我们可以简化源自“档案转向”的知识还原为权力的等式。如今，许多人认为档案馆是文件项目的反映，它赋予了存储，整理和保存的文本认识论的美德。有人告诉我们，档案馆产生了关于国家产生的知识层级的真相声明，通过这样做，它们有效地充当了支持国家的技术手段。但是，并非我们在档案馆中找到的所有文字始终保留着原始的认识力。为了对使用，滥用以及更重要的是有目的地忽略记录的做法进行历史化处理，请我们回顾近代早期跨各种符号系统的跨区域连接的质量。