Understanding Colonial Archives: Reflections on Records from Habsburg Times in the Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Abstract The most important records of the Austro-Hungarian administrative history of Bosnia and Herzegovina are kept in the fonds of the Provincial Government in Sarajevo and of the Joint Ministry of Finance, Department for Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Vienna, both forming part of the collection of the Archives of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo and together amounting to approximately 2000 shelf metres. The author looks here through the lens of “colonial archives” to assess the missed potential of the two fonds for writing the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina, pointing out that historians have hitherto used them primarily to study political history and a few segments of socio-economic history, neglecting recent approaches to re-establishing archives’ value for research. Yet, as the author shows, the so-called “archival turn” would prove to be an asset in deepening the understanding not only of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Austro-Hungarian imperial history, but its history more generally.