TLRH IWhose History? The 'Migrated Archive' and Britain's Colonial Past

Recorded November 23, 2020. An online lecture as part of the Out of
the Ashes Lecture Series, with David M Anderson Professor of
African History University of Warwick. In April 2011, Foreign
Secretary William Hague informed the British Parliament that a
collection of some 25,000 historical files, that had been illegally
held by his department for over 50 years, would be speedily
transferred to The National Archive, at Kew. This vast collection
of historical papers related to Britain’s imperial past, and is now
known as the Hanslope Disclosure. These were records that Britain
had secretly removed from each of 37 of its colonies at the point
of decolonization: these files were deemed too important or too
damaging to leave behind, or potentially too useful to destroy.
This lecture tells the story of how this so-called ‘Migrated
Archive’ came into being, what happened to it over the years in
which it was secretly retained, and how it came to be ‘discovered’
in the midst of a human rights trial at London’s Supreme Court on
The Strand. Nearly a decade after that ‘discovery’, controversy
still swirls around the question of who owns this ‘Migrated
Archive’ and what should be done with it. Whose history is this,
and where does such an archive belong? The answers to these
questions reveal much about Britain’s unease in dealing with the
history of its past empire, and about the culture of secrecy that
still infects British public institutions – even those that are
supposed to be the guardians of our national heritage. About David
M.Anderson David M. Anderson is Professor of African History, in
the Global History & Culture Centre at the University of
Warwick. He has published widely on the history and politics of
eastern Africa, including Histories of the Hanged (2005), The Khat
Controversy (2007), The Routledge Handbook of African Politics
(2013, ed), and Politics and Violence in Eastern Africa: The
Struggles of Emerging States (2015, ed). Three projects will come
to publication in the coming year: Allies at the End of Empire
(ed), From Resistance to Rebellion, and Africa’s New
Authoritarians. He is now working on a volume of essays on the Mau
Mau counter-insurgency in 1950s Kenya, drawing upon colonial
documents released since 2012, and (with Michael Bollig) an edited
volume of essays on Conservation in Africa. Anderson is editor of
the African Studies Series at Cambridge University Press, would
founding editor of the Journal of Eastern African Studies, and
regularly contributes to the print and broadcast media on African
politics. Dr Daniel Geary, Mark Pigott Associate Professor in
American History at Trinity College Dublin, will also give a brief
response to the lecture. Dr Geary's research focuses on the
intellectual, political, and cultural history of the
twentieth-century United States, and also includes the development
of ideas about race and ethnicity; the transnational history of
civil rights movements and of white nationalism; and the
relationship of politics to popular culture. About the Out of the
Ashes Lecture Series This three-year lecture series explores the
theme of cultural loss and recovery across the centuries, from the
destruction of the Library of Alexandria in antiquity to
contemporary acts of cultural loss and destruction. A panel of
world-leading experts reflects on how societies deal with cultural
trauma through reconstruction and commemoration, and on how the
international community should respond to cultural loss. The series
is global in scope, pan-historical and multi-disciplinary in
approach, and features international scholars and practitioners of
the highest calibre. Find out more -
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/whats-on/details/2018/out-of-the-ashes.php
The Out of the Ashes lecture series is generously supported by Sean
and Sarah Reynolds. Learn more at:
https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/