National archives are influential technologies of the nation-state. They are sites which are constructed through exercises of power and act as vectors through which power can move, shaping narratives and histories through contents, organization, affordances and denials of access. Looking to the first half of the twentieth century, this project engages the history of records removal from across the United States’ colonial empire–including the Philippines, Puerto Rico, the Panama Canal Zone, and the US Virgin Islands–and consolidation at various US federal agencies, most notably the US National Archives. Treating archival records not purely as byproducts of the administrative state, but as powerful imperial technologies in their own right, this project builds a set of arguments about the role of archival infrastructures in US nation-building efforts and imperial expansion in the early twentieth century.