Review Article of: C. Breathnach (2026). Absence in the Archives. Elements in Historical Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 84 pp. For the open access edition: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/absence-in-the-archives/587846C3687A675DE72B137014C4ACC2#element.

Voor een Nederlandse bewerking zie hier.

Dr G.J. van Bussel

Summary

In Absence in the Archives, Ciara Breathnach distinguishes between archival ‘absence’ and ‘silence’ and connects documentary loss to historical evidence, rights, and redress. This review argues that the distinction is valuable as a practical vocabulary but less convincing as a comprehensive theory. Breathnach’s historical case studies are stronger than the framework that organizes them: different forms of archival loss require different categories and remedies, while non-creation, community archives, organizational power, and digital custodianship remain insufficiently developed.

About the author

Ciara Breathnach is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork, where her work spans Irish socio-economic, gender, cultural and health history. She is Vice Chair of the European COST Action project CA22116, ‘The Great Leap’. She has held fellowships at Harvard (2014), New York University (2022), and at both Cambridge and Oxford (2023/24). She has advised Ireland’s leading cultural institutions, including the Heritage Council, the National Library Board, the National Archives Advisory Council, the Irish Manuscripts Commission and the Dictionary of Irish Biography. She has also collaborated with documentary filmmakers and national archives. ¹

The Thesis and Verdict

Breathnach distinguishes between absence and silence as two distinct issues within archival theory. According to Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘silence’ refers to the bias inherent in the creation, curation, retrieval, and narration of facts: a source may survive, but in a distorted or partial form. ² In Breathnach’s usage, ‘absence’ is defined more strictly as a record that existed, was catalogued or recognized, and was subsequently lost, destroyed, or withheld. This distinction matters because, while ‘silence’ can be ‘read against the grain’ to reveal what it conceals, ‘absence’ precludes this possibility entirely: there is no longer a source to interpret. ³ Postcolonial, subaltern, and feminist scholarship often conflate the two. Breathnach argues that they should be distinguished, and that this distinction extends beyond historiography since the loss of records can also impact civil rights claims, citizenship, social welfare entitlements, and transitional justice.

By requiring that a record must have ‘existed, been catalogued or known’ before it can count as absent, the framework excludes records that were never created or taken into custody because the people or events involved were not considered important enough to document. This is neither ‘silence’ (where surviving sources must be ‘read against the grain’) nor ‘absence’ (where nothing was catalogued or known to be lost). Whether Breathnach’s two-part distinction can support the theoretical weight the book places on it, or whether it neatly covers only a subset of cases, is a question that structures this review.

Breathnach’s distinction between ‘absence’ and ‘silence’ is most convincing as a practical vocabulary for distinguishing a documented loss from a surviving but distorted record. It is less convincing as a general theory of archival absence. The book groups together mechanisms that differ in agency, intentionality, institutional location, and remedy, while excluding non‑creation and extra‑institutional survival. Its empirical evidence is stronger than the framework that organizes it. The review that follows develops this verdict under three headings: a category problem, a scope problem, and a power/remedy problem.

Structure

Building on Trouillot’s four-stage framework of source creation, archival curation, fact retrieval, and history-making, the book introduces an additional layer of absence at each stage. This is cross-referenced with Terry Cook’s periodization of archival theory: juridical legacy, cultural memory, societal engagement, and community archiving. ⁴ The case studies progress from the nineteenth-century British Public Record Office and colonial record-keeping in Ireland and India, through to a detailed examination of Ireland’s ‘weaponized’ destruction of records during the Civil War of 1921–22. Finally, the book addresses the risks posed by the abundance of information in the digital era. In the epilogue, the author calls for collective, rights-based advocacy from historians against further loss.

Chapter Overview

1. Introduction. States the thesis and overlays Breathnach’s absence framework onto Trouillot’s four stages. The rest of the book examines that distinction.

2. Situating Absence. Lays the theoretical groundwork by contrasting Cook and Trouillot. Breathnach argues that ‘absence’ is structurally built into archival practice because finite resources necessitate selection. She distinguishes between ‘ordinary absence’, which results from limited resources, and ‘constructed absence’, which involves deliberate destruction or suppression of information. She claims that ‘absence’ exacerbates the ‘silences’ that have historically marginalized women and other groups, and that it is categorically worse than silence because nothing remains to be critically analysed.

3. Tracing Silence and Absence. The empirical anchor. This chapter traces the organizational history of the Public Record Office (London), its Irish counterpart, and the recordkeeping apparatus of British India. It covers fires, embezzlement, weeding committees, the tonnage of destroyed papers, and the 1877 Act that empowered the Master of the Rolls to order destruction. The chapter demonstrates how ‘absence’ was legally normalized, becoming codified into statute and routine rather than being confined to extraordinary violence.

4. The Island of Ireland. A Case Study. The chapter narrows in on the 1922 Four Courts fire as the paradigm case of weaponized destruction and then traces its long historiographical aftermath. Oral tradition was mobilized to compensate for what was lost, and partition fragmented what survived along political lines. This is the book’s clearest demonstration of permanent, deliberate ‘absence’ and its most concentrated case. Irish history has had to be written around a hole rather than from a source.

5. Absence and Archives in the Digital Age. Shifts to the present: considers the difference between ‘made digital’ and ‘born digital’ records, the risks of digital abundance (as discussed by Ian Milligan ⁵, and the widening gap between well- and under-resourced organizations. The author argues that the structural vulnerabilities behind nineteenth-century paper losses are re-emerging faster and on a greater scale in digital recordkeeping, and that historians are not yet equipped to recognize digital ‘absence’ when it occurs.

6. Epilogue. Moves from diagnosis to advocacy, historians should organize collectively, promote interdisciplinary and rights-based approaches, and defend archival access rather than assuming it. If ‘absence’ is recognized as a specific and identifiable problem rather than just a type of ‘silence’, it can be actively resisted. Taken together, the six chapters form a deliberate arc: they theorize the distinction (chapters 1–2), prove it historically (chapters 3–4), project it forward (chapter 5) and mobilize around it (chapter 6). The Ireland case study is pivotal: it is simultaneously the book’s most detailed evidence for ‘constructed absence’ and the centre of gravity on which the epilogue’s call to action is based.

Strengths

The distinction between ‘absence’ and ‘silence’ is useful, but it is not, in itself, a new theory of the archive. Archival science has always considered incompleteness to be fundamental rather than accidental, and no archivist would be surprised to learn that appraisal inevitably involves loss. Breathnach’s work is narrower and more practical; she is refining terminology that historians have used loosely. Her argument rests on the specific premise that destroyed records prevent ‘reading against the grain’ in a way that merely biased records do not. This distinction is valuable in concrete examples, such as arguments about redress and evidentiary standing, where whether a source is biased or missing affects what can be claimed and proven. As a general reorientation of archival theory, the case is weaker than the book’s framing suggests. As a tool for constructing rights-based or legal arguments on the basis of a documented gap, it is genuinely useful.

Chapter 3 is the book’s most impressive achievement. The 1877 and 1898 Public Record Office Acts, the record of ninety approved departmental disposal schedules by 1914, and the detailed account of fires, embezzlement, and the judgement calls of the weeding committee provide a solid foundation for the theoretical framework, rather than leaving it abstract.

A book arguing for a long organizational lineage of ‘constructed absence’ needs to trace how the same administrative habits (embezzlement, culling material deemed ‘of no possible interest to anyone’, and aggressive weeding) travelled from London to Ireland and India, before reappearing in the destruction of the independence era (Operation Legacy and the 1957 Delhi document pyres). The case of Ireland is examined in depth to establish this lineage, while the more cursory treatment of other cases still demonstrates its geographic reach. Rather than treating archival loss as a purely historiographical inconvenience, situating it within transitional justice and rights frameworks connects historical scholarship to legal and human rights literatures that the field has been slow to engage with. Regardless of the limitations of the eventual remedies proposed, acknowledging ‘constructed absence’ as a rights violation is an improvement in itself, providing future historical scholarship with a basis for more rigorous accountability mechanisms.

Weaknesses

Cambridge Elements is a series of compact books intended to stimulate thought and open a line of inquiry. It would be unfair to expect this format to provide exhaustive answers to all the questions raised. This constraint explains much of what is missing. However, it does not excuse an absence of accuracy. Nothing about the format required the argumentative structure of the book to rely so heavily on its central binary, particularly when the material needed to complicate that binary was already present in its own case studies. The following criticism is offered in that spirit: not as a demand for a longer book, but as an argument that even a shorter book owes its readers a balance between its claims and its evidence.

1. A category problem: different forms of constructed absence require different classifications and remedies

Heterogeneity within ‘constructed absence’

In Chapter 2, Breathnach distinguishes between ‘ordinary absence’ (structural and resource-driven, and the inevitable by-product of appraisal and disposal scheduling) and ‘constructed absence’ (deliberate destruction or information suppression). This provides some of the categorization that an ambitious binary requires, as routine loss is not simply grouped together with everything else. However, ‘constructed absence’ itself then has to encompass phenomena that share only intentionality and differ in all the ways that matter.

Government-directed suppression, such as Operation Legacy and the Amritsar material, is backed by legal and coercive authority and can potentially be answered in law by an identifiable actor who, in some cases, is still in power. In contrast, individual deliberate destruction for personal gain, such as embezzlement, has no organizational policy behind it and constitutes a crime against the archive. Collateral destruction resulting from political violence, rather than being a targeted act against the record itself — such as the Four Courts fire, where the building was seized as a military position rather than the archive being the target — sits somewhere else entirely. It is an act of war whose archival consequences were unplanned and unavoidable. Claims of rights against a state, fraud prosecutions, and wartime accidents are not the same phenomenon and do not call for the same response; yet each may appear deliberate from the perspective of the surviving gap. Rather than treating this category as a single mechanism, it could be subdivided usefully along these lines — by agent, intent, and remedy. This subdivision would refine Breathnach’s own distinction, giving her more scope to theorize each mechanism individually.

Accidental and environmental loss

The two-tier scheme does not address a further category of destruction: that which has no political dimension or resourcing decision behind it, such as damage caused by an accident, a storm, or a flood. This does not fit into the ‘ordinary’ category (as it is not a selection decision) nor the ‘constructed’ category (as it was not intentional). The book’s own Chapter 3 narrative, which moves fluidly between topics such as fires, embezzlement, weeding committees, and legislated disposal, tends to blur this distinction.

The politics of ‘ordinary absence’

The dichotomy between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘constructed’ seems to portray resource-driven selection as an apolitical form of housekeeping, contrasting it with the value-laden deliberateness of ‘construction’. Breathnach does not claim that archival routine is neutral. She argues that archives are structurally exclusionary. However, the issue is more specific: within her own two-part schema, ‘ordinary’ functions as the unmarked background against which ‘constructed’ absence stands out as the politically significant case — a division that sits uneasily alongside her own citations.

The judgement of which material is deemed to be of ‘no possible interest to anyone’ is not neutral; it tends to reflect the same social prejudices that drive suppression, but these are distributed across small, routine judgements rather than being concentrated in one visible act. They were, in fact, the very mechanisms through which a particular form of state power defined what was valuable, what was knowable, and who was worth remembering. ‘Ordinary’ and ‘constructed’ absence may differ less in kind than in how visibly power manifests itself: concentrated and identifiable in one case and diffuse and normalized in the other, as Foucault already argued. Power not only intervenes repressively from outside but is also a productive and diffuse force operating through everyday practices, classifications and routines. ⁶ The ‘ordinary’ is thus the most insidious site of power, precisely because its biases are rendered invisible and natural. If ‘ordinary absence’ carries the same bias as ‘constructed’ absence, then treating it as the unmarked background against which deliberate destruction stands out as the real object of concern does not adequately reflect the extent to which exclusionary practices are actually being carried out under the ‘ordinary’ label in Breathnach’s own case studies. ‘Ordinary absence’ does the same exclusionary work as its ‘constructed’ counterpart; it is simply harder to see.

Systemic logic vs. Individual agency

Breathnach’s extension of Trouillot’s work involves attributing ‘absence’ to specific individuals at each stage: the scribe; the appraising archivist; and the Deputy Keeper, who judged the census returns to be ‘least likely to be inquired after’. However, these decisions are better understood as being determined by organizational, systemic logic, independently of who occupies the role. The same pressures — space, cost, and the belief that the records held were of ‘no possible interest to anyone’ — recur across personnel and decades in the London and Dublin chapters. Alongside Foucault’s interpretation of power, this suggests that the logic is organizational rather than individual, and that a more systemic analysis would have strengthened the argument.

Power as motive, not category

Far from neglecting power, Breathnach engages with it. Drawing on Derrida, she explains the archive as a site where privilege and violence converge. She also references Carter’s argument that archives structurally exclude due to their scope. ⁷ Her case studies support this: Operation Legacy, the suppression of Amritsar-related material, and the 1955 India Office Library dispute are all examples of organizational power being exercised over the record. However, power is absent as a category within her own formal framework, alongside resourcing failure and routine appraisal. Power functions throughout as a motive and an atmosphere rather than a distinct causal pathway. This is important because power-driven suppression behaves differently and demands different solutions. Given how central power already is to her strongest case studies, its absence from the formal framework suggests more than an oversight: ‘constructed absence’ is usually the result of power, not a peer category to it.

2. A scope problem: non‑creation and extra‑institutional survival fall outside the framework

Non-creation

According to Breathnach, ‘absence’ requires that a record has ‘existed, been catalogued or known’, and then been lost. This may be an intentional limitation of scope: the book explicitly states that ‘absence’ concerns records that once existed. However, this definition excludes at least two phenomena of great importance to the scholarship to which the book is responding.

The first type is non-creation: records that were never made or entered into custody because the people or events involved were not considered important enough to document in the first place. This is arguably the paradigm case for postcolonial and feminist historiography: the absence of testimony from enslaved people, colonial subjects, and women in administrative records is often not a matter of something being catalogued and then lost, but rather of it never having been created in the first place. Breathnach’s framework does not address this issue, leaving it unresolved.

Extra‑institutional survival and community archives

The second category is more subtle and is approached by the book without being named: records that exist, or may still exist, but which never entered an archival institution. This includes family papers, oral tradition, private and community collections, and material that was never donated, seized or otherwise brought into such an institution. Chapter 4 relies on this category: oral tradition is described as being ‘mobilized to compensate’ for the Four Courts fire, but the framework does not formally recognize it. This distinction is important: a record can be fully recoverable and preserved in community memory, in a family archive, or in a diaspora collection, but not in a form that existing legal systems are built to recognize. This sits oddly alongside Breathnach’s use of Cook, whose periodization ends at ‘community archiving’, which is precisely the practice of keeping records outside state institutions. This is a horizon towards which her case studies gesture, but never quite reach. Breathnach must answer the question of whether such a situation represents an absence in the archives. ⁸

3. A power/remedy problem: the framework under‑theorizes organizational power and proposes advocacy at a level below that of the actors responsible for destruction

Archival purpose and organizational logic

Specifically in the redress chapters, Breathnach treats archival absence as a failure of accountability: a betrayal of the records that citizens are entitled to consult. This framing is persuasive and effective, even though elsewhere in the book, Breathnach insists that archives are inherently selective and power-laden rather than neutral. However archives are theorized in the book, they were never built to be comprehensive or neutral records. They serve the accountability and evidentiary needs of the organization that produced them rather than being comprehensive records kept for the benefit of citizens or historians. Interpreted in this way, nineteenth-century weeding committees assessing ‘sufficient public value’, or the Solicitor-General ruling that Irish agricultural returns were ‘privileged’ and disposable because they were inadmissible in court, cannot be considered malpractice. They are simply the archive behaving as an organizational instrument is designed to behave.

The archive is not failing to be objective when it discards or withholds information. Rather, it is succeeding at being what it was built to be. As an organizational instrument, the archive is accountable to the rules, priorities, and biases of the organization that created it, rather than to some external standard of comprehensiveness or fairness. A prejudiced rule, faithfully followed, produces a functioning archive, not a dysfunctional one. Recognizing this mundane, rule-bound reality is not an excuse, but an acknowledgement that effective reform requires the dismantling of the organizational logic itself, rather than merely moralizing about what archives ‘should’ be. The book would benefit from directly engaging with the possibility that ‘absence’ is not a deviation from proper archival function awaiting correction, but rather a structural output of how archives are designed to operate. This is what makes the archive a constructed, subjective object rather than a neutral witness: not because it is unreliable, but because it is deliberately selective.

This is a point that archival science itself has arguably under-theorized, and this gap has a specific history. The discipline’s own ‘archival turn’ of the 1990s and 2000s — reframing the archive as a site of memory, power and discourse — exposed the meaning of archives, but displaced an older, more mundane vocabulary for explaining how they actually function: the organization as a rule-bound information-processing entity with its own operational logic, prior to any question of what the archive symbolizes. By developing a theory of the archive as a symbol of power, the field arguably lost sight of the organization as a mundane, rule-following entity that actually decides what gets kept on ordinary administrative and legal grounds.

Remedial Asymmetry

Operation Legacy, the suppression of Amritsar material, and apartheid-era disposal schedules were all state-sanctioned acts carried out with legal and coercive authority completely beyond the control of the scholarly community. The proposed remedy in the epilogue — the mobilization of historians, an interdisciplinary approach, and a rights-based method — operates at the level of professional practice and offers no leverage against the power that produced the destruction, especially when that power remains active.

Chapter 3 exacerbates this issue rather than mitigating it. Record destruction in Britain was not illegal but rather legislated through the 1877 Act and its 1898 amendment, as well as the ninety approved disposal schedules by 1914. This means that the state authored the rules that authorized destruction. A remedy that addresses scholars as advocates does not address where such rules are written or repealed. This objection follows from Breathnach’s own comparative evidence. Notably, her positive example of transferring records to independent repositories in Canada and Australia occurred following public inquiries and legal pressure rather than historian advocacy. Her material on contemporary India, where politically sensitive research topics are actively ‘screened out’ by current government policy, highlights the starkest contrast: this is live, ongoing gatekeeping that cannot be addressed by any methodological reform among historians, as it requires accountability pressure operating at the same level as the exercising power.

Digital fragmentation and algorithmic mediation

Chapter 5 largely presents the absence of born-digital material as an issue of overwhelming abundance for under-resourced archival institutions. While this is true, it is also rather generic. A more pertinent question is not how much digital material exists, but rather how many independent organizational control points now affect the survival of any given record. While a nineteenth-century deposit had one custodian and one retention decision, a contemporary digital record is usually fragmented across different platforms, vendors, and departments, each with their own conflicting retention policies. It is this fragmentation of custodianship, rather than volume, that is the main driver of absence in the digital era, so its absence from the discussion represents a missed opportunity.

AI, algorithmic discretion, and synthetic presence

In a book from 2026 grappling with digital abundance, AI is mentioned only once. This understates its role at almost every stage of Breathnach’s framework. The point is not that the book fails to analyse AI at every stage — it does not attempt to do so — but that the appraisal-stage discretion that Breathnach identifies naturally extends to systems that she does not discuss. Automated retention recommendations, the algorithmic triage of ‘low-value’ records on a scale that no nineteenth-century weeding committee could match, and AI-assisted redaction whose logic is often opaque even to the organizations deploying it, are all instances of the very appraisal-stage discretion that Breathnach identifies as the point at which ‘absence’ is created. However, these instances are now being exercised on a much larger scale by systems that may not be auditable, let alone contestable, by the citizens whose records are affected. AI’s role in creating the illusion of presence from real absence is also under-explored. Generative systems can already reconstruct text from fragments or infer plausible content around gaps in damaged records. This creates a synthetic record that is neither the original nor an honest acknowledgement of loss; it is a statistically plausible substitute that can be mistaken for either. For a book whose central claim is that ‘absence’ deserves separate treatment precisely because it forecloses ‘reading against the grain’, unmarked synthetic filler quietly reopens that foreclosed space without acknowledging what was lost. This issue deserves its own subcategory in the framework, rather than a passing mention.

Conclusion

Absence in the Archives is best read as a well‑evidenced provocation and a useful piece of applied vocabulary—a framework and lexicon for thinking about archival absence, as the Element itself frames it—rather than as a settled, comprehensive theory. The distinction between ‘absence’ and ‘silence’ has practical traction for historians arguing that a specific documented loss forecloses a specific claim, and the redress framing gives it further force.

As a general theoretical framework, however, it is less effective. ‘Constructed absence’ bundles together state suppression, criminal destruction, and collateral wartime damage, although these differ in agent, intent, and remedy. ‘Ordinary absence’ is treated as a neutral baseline, even though routine appraisal carries the same exclusionary biases as overt suppression. And the requirement that a record must have ‘existed, been catalogued, or been known’ excludes non‑creation and extra‑institutional survival, which are central concerns for the scholarship the book implicitly addresses. The evidence the book provides is stronger than the framework that organizes it, and the gaps are clear enough to inform a research agenda: splitting ‘constructed absence’ into distinct mechanisms; giving non‑creation and community archives formal standing; treating contemporary gatekeeping of research access as a case in its own right; and analysing digital custodianship and algorithmic mediation with the same detail as nineteenth‑century material. The case studies and the redress argument make the book worth reading, and the theory is worth arguing with.

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1. Online source, retrieved 1 September 2026, from: https://research.ucc.ie/en/persons/ciara-breathnach. ↩︎
2. M-R Trouillot (1995). Silencing the Past. Power and the Production of History, Beacon Press, Boston. ↩︎
3. As proposed by: A.L. Stoler (2008). Along the archival grain. Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princeton. Also: V. Harris (2009). ‘Against the grain. Psychologies and politics of secrecy’, Archival Science, Vol. 9, No. 3, pp. 133-142. ↩︎
4. T. Cook (2013). ‘Evidence, memory, identity, and community. Four shifting archival paradigms’, Archival Science Vol. 13, no. 2–3, pp. 95-120, p. 95. ↩︎
5. I. Milligan (2019). History in the Age of Abundance? How the Web Is Transforming Historical Research, McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal, p. 9. ↩︎
6. See especially: H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (eds.) (1983). ‘Afterword by Michel Foucault: The subject and power, M. Foucault. In Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp. 208-226. ↩︎
7. J. Derrida (1995). ‘Archive Fever. A Freudian impression’, Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2, pp. 9–63; and R.G.S. Carter (2006). ‘Of things said and unsaid. Power, archival silences, and power in silence’, Archivaria, Vol. 61, pp. 215–233. ↩︎
8. See for a broader discussion about this subject: V. Harris (2002). ‘The archival sliver. Power, memory, and archives in South Africa’, Archival Science, Vol. 2, pp. 63–86. On the value of community archiving: M. Caswell, M. Cifor, and M.H. Ramirez (2016). ‘’To suddenly discover yourself existing’. Uncovering the impact of community archives’. The American Archivist, Vol. 79, No. 1, pp. 56-81. ↩︎