British colonial governance in India was built upon global technologies of writing produced through European mercantile colonialism; the extraction of the embodied Mughal administrative knowledge from a Persianette (or Tamil-proficient, as in Southern India) Indian clerical class, and its materialisation into official paper-based forms, as shown by Christopher Bayly; and a scribal-clerical ‘habitus’ as described by Bhavani Raman. This research focuses on the architecture, spaces and material culture associated with the paper-bureaucracy of the colonial government of Bengal that Jon Wilson calls one of the world’s earliest modern states. It argues that this paper-/ writing-oriented habitus also mandated a chain of materialities and spatialities (paper-records, furniture, spaces, and architectures of colonial governance). Focusing on the colonial cutcherry (office), the nerve-centre of Bengal’s zilla sadar (provincial administrative) towns, I analyse such ‘papered spaces’ as record rooms and clerical offices. The work is conceptualised around paper as a key agent of colonial governance, including the expanding spheres of its logic, which profoundly permeated the cutcherry’s material-spatial culture and experiential ‘lifeworld’. I also reflect on how colonial paper-practices intersected with other more immaterial and mobile circuits of knowledge and information spread over the town and country, and how such paper-governance was fed, for example, by spatial geographies of paper supply and printing. For the research, I combined extensive on-ground documentations of the material fabric of the buildings with archival research (governmental papers, period literature and art) in India, Bangladesh and Britain.

中文翻译：

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纸制空间：1820 年代至 1860 年代孟加拉、印度殖民地的省级治理的文书实践、物质性和空间文化

英国在印度的殖民统治建立在欧洲商业殖民主义产生的全球写作技术之上；正如克里斯托弗·贝利 (Christopher Bayly) 所展示的那样，从 Persianette（或精通泰米尔语，如印度南部）印度教士阶层中提取莫卧儿行政知识，并将其具体化为官方的纸质形式；和 Bhavani Raman 所描述的抄写员“习惯”。这项研究的重点是与孟加拉殖民政府的纸制官僚机构相关的建筑、空间和物质文化，乔恩·威尔逊称之为世界上最早的现代国家之一。它认为，这种以纸张/写作为导向的惯习也规定了一系列物质性和空间性（纸质记录、家具、空间和殖民统治的建筑）。以殖民时期的刀具（办公室），孟加拉的 zilla sadar（省级行政）城镇的神经中枢为重点，我分析了诸如档案室和文书办公室之类的“纸质空间”。这项工作围绕纸张作为殖民治理的关键代理进行概念化，包括其逻辑的扩展领域，它深刻地渗透到刀具的物质空间文化和体验式“生活世界”。我还反思了殖民时期的纸张实践如何与遍布城镇和乡村的其他更非物质和流动的知识和信息电路相交，以及如何通过纸张供应和印刷的空间地理来支持这种纸张管理。在研究中，我将建筑物材料结构的大量实地文件与档案研究（政府文件，