Recovering Colonial Data Histories: The Unrecognized Data Sets of the British Empire

Contemporary studies of the relationship between data and colonialism focus on extraction of Big Data by Big Tech corporations for profit. In this body of work, influenced by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias’ The Costs of Connection, data is rarely historicized and is treated as an artifact of the present and of the future. By positioning data as a site of colonialism today, one that mimics the extractive processes subtending expropriation of land and natural resources, this scholarship implies that colonialism is over, replaced by a new frontier where our data is mined for capital. Restricting the scope of data and colonialism to developments in computation over the last decade, these studies fail to recognize that an extractive approach to data has been foundational to the rise of colonialism.

Exploring the extractive approach to data deployed by Great Britain for its colonial project, this presentation discusses the formative role that data played in building, sustaining, and managing the empire. It examines several key sources of this data—travelogues, land surveys, gazetteers, and blue books—as sites of analysis for uncovering the long, historical relationship between data and colonialism. These sources, this presentation argues, should be understood as data sets that informed decisions that were central to the rise of British colonialism, such as where to establish colonies, how to manage and surveil colonized peoples, and how to assess the economic health of the colonies. And, in doing so, it demonstrates that data empires are not the sole domain of Big Tech today but have, in fact, been part of a much longer history, and one inextricably linked with colonial structures of power, exploitation and control.