Situating the imperial archive: the Royal Empire Society Library, 1868–1945

This paper explores the Library of the Royal Empire Society from its foundation in 1868 to the mid-twentieth century. It begins by considering the production of imaginative geographies of the British Empire not only by the materials in the collection but also by practices and technologies of assembling, classifying, cataloguing and display which went on in the Library. The architecture, spaces and experience of being in the Library are considered as integral to these imaginative geographies and the role performed by the collection. The second part of the paper considers the ways in which the Library was imagined as a centre of calculation for imperial, economic and geopolitical concerns and some theoretical and methodological issues involved in understanding how and by whom the Library was used. The Royal Empire Society Library offers an insight into the interplay between imperialism and wider concerns about knowledge, vision, order and control, as well as highlighting the importance of recognising the specificity of different types of knowledge space.