In the long history of overseas expansion, an immense and diverse collection of Western texts, images, drawings and maps relating to various parts of the world, has been produced - part of which survives today in archives and libraries around the world. Colonial representations of foreign peoples, their cultures and practices, make a claim to knowledge, the claim that a reality was being apprehended and described, either scientifically or simply as the outcome of lived experience. These representations have for long been taken at face value as veracious and balanced accounts of distant and exotic places. Within the last three decades of the twentieth century, however, colonial knowledge has increasingly been criticised as expressive of a biased Eurocentric understanding of the Asian, African, or American indigenous worlds. This line of approach, advanced in works such as Edward Said's Orientalism, has stressed the necessity of approaching those texts more critically with regards to the context in which they emerged. Colonial knowledge was inextricably embedded in the projects of colonial power, or trapped within Western constructs, which inevitably represented non-Western peoples and cultures as backwards. More recently, and due in part to the growing influence of literary theory in connection with historical investigation, some scholars have argued that colonial knowledge presents no more than an inverse mirror-image of Western cultural values. If earlier readings tended to approach the colonial archives as undistorted depictions of other places and cultures, recent criticism has reduced them to a matter of textual constructions and misrepresentations. <p>Yet, in many instances, Western representations are the only tools available with which to approach the history of non-Western cultures. Do colonial accounts of noble and ignoble savages, assassins, cannibals, thugs, headhunters, pirates, scheming eunuchs and debauched sultans have no further interest beyond confirming our preconceived notions of the biased nature of Western ideologies? What use, then, can we make of this repertoire that is neither limited to a simplistic positivism nor to the rejection of its value as historical evidence? How, in short, can we engage with colonial knowledge? </p><p>The project and the volume Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Imperial Archives in World History will explore these important questions.</p>