about

In 2009, five Kenyans – Ndiku Mutwiwa Mutua, Paulo Nzili, Wambugu wa Nyingi, Jane Muthoni Mara, and Susan Ngondi – brought a case against the British government regarding horrific abuse they had suffered from British forces during the 1950s. Pressed by the Kenyans’ legal team, British authorities in 2011 admitted holding a large collection of documents that had been covertly removed from Kenya, and other formerly colonised countries. What the British government called the ‘migrated’ archives included around 20,000 files from a total of 37 territories. The revelations shocked many researchers. When most of the documents were made available to researchers at the National Archives in London from 2012 to 2013, it became clear that transfers of power to newly independent countries from the 1940s to the 1980s were routinely accompanied by large-scale processes of sorting, removing, and destroying documents.

Given the renewed focus on histories of empire and their legacies for the contemporary world, interest in the British ‘migrated’ archives is now greater than ever. Yet there has been relatively little academic research about the ‘migrated’ archives relative to their importance for histories of decolonisation.

This project offers a major reassessment of this collection ten years after it was made accessible to researchers. It aims to produce the first book-length study of the ‘migrated’ archives affair. A scholarly work aimed at a popular audience, the book will offer a major reassessment of what the ‘migrated’ archives show about the end of empire. Arguing that many of the ‘migrated’ documents would be better thought of as ‘stolen’, it will explore why and how British authorities removed and destroyed colonial documents from the 1940s to the 1980s. The book will consider how white British officials sought to keep this secret from colonised people, even those who would soon become the new leaders of independent countries. It will also analyse how British authorities sought to keep the archives secret after their removal to the UK, often attempting to conceal them from people of colour from formerly colonised countries, but sometimes granting access to white British researchers.

For more about the project’s approach to the ‘migrated’ archives, see Principal Investigator Tim Livsey’s recent open access journal article, available here.