The image of America as an Amazonian warrior woman was reproduced widely in Renaissance art and thereafter. As a central feature of a global archive and an iconic symbol, she conveys a range of Eurocentric anxieties intertwined with the dominant vision of indigenous extreme primitivism. Travel and captivity accounts with marvelous encounters became foundational discourses enticing early modern readers as they legitimated Iberian imperial expansion. The archive has been a patriarchal, geographical, and historical project dominated by political and economic interests biased toward regions with rich resources and populations. When considering the Iberian world and the global nature of colonialism, contingencies of time, place, and gender need to be considered in turn. A profoundly conflictive undertaking emerged in the creation of archival spaces, collections, and historical discourses on precolonial societies. In Mexico, historians, collectors, and bibliophiles depended greatly on surviving indigenous painted books in European collections and the missionary archive.

French Soudan was a former French colony now known as Mali. From the end of the nineteenth century onward, with the gradual abolition of slavery in this part of West Africa, newly emancipated slaves began to leave their former masters. At the end of the nineteenth century in the region of Kayes, the economy relied heavily on slave labor. Female slaves formed the majority of the slave population. Women had a greater value than men. A closer examination of the colonial archives shows that former female slaves in the region of Kayes, alone or with their family, even if they were the wives or the concubines of their masters, did participate in the migratory movements spurred by the abolition of slavery. This chapter presents two petitions filed in the archives so as to give the reader a glimpse of the historical work of reconstituting slaves' histories using scattered documents.

The colonial state was a bureaucracy. It wrote things down and preserved written records. When the colonial state was gone, it left behind masses of paper, which can be found in the capitals of former empires and in administrative centers all over Africa. They record both the minutiae of daily administrative life and the larger questions, both the ways Africa's colonial rulers saw the people they governed and how they responded to Africa's problems. Working in colonial archives involves a lot of persistence, but it can be fruitful. There are files labeled "Slavery" in many archives. They often date to periods when the colonial administration was struggling over what to do about slavery. They also include reports that colonial governors asked the administrative officers to make. Some include African voices, albeit filtered through European eyes.