“Information” is there—in abundance. It depends on what kinds of things we imagine such an archive could allow us to know. In this letter- writing trove of Frans Carl Valck, his daughter Susanna, and their acquain- tances and family, no documents could offer thicker evidence of the veins of commitment, disregard, obligation, and investment that pulsed through their concerns and bound the life-force of personhoods and politics to- gether. But clarity about what Valck “really felt” about living in empire and off its rewards is elusive at best. Family letters provide a personalized and ethnographic inflection in a minor key, not the crescendo of major chords, but the plaintive notes in which things may not be felt as they seem to be.

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ E…, loc. 1527