Curating the Colonial Past
Curating the Colonial Past
$120.00
USDIn the early 1960s, British colonial administrations in East Africa organized the systematic destruction and removal of secret documents from colonies approaching independence. The Colonial Office in London arranged the deposit of these documents in high security facilities, where they remained inaccessible until 2011 following a compensation suit by Kenyan survivors of British colonial rule against the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Curating the Colonial Past presents the first full length exploration of these 'migrated archives', chronicling the struggle between British attempts to conceal and Kenyan efforts to reveal evidence of the colonial past. Neither displayed nor destroyed, Riley Linebaugh explores how these records formed an archival limbo in which the British government delayed moral and legal judgement of empire. Yet, these practices did not go unchallenged. Linebaugh demonstrates how disputes over the 'migrated archives' facilitated the continuation of anticolonial sovereignty struggles beyond independence, struggles which persist into the present.
- Explores the making of the 'migrated archives', facilitating historical and contemporary understanding of archival politics in colonial history
- Utilises archival sources from Kenya and the UK, providing a transnational account of the making of colonial archives
- Provides an interdisciplinary approach to the 'migrated archives' which combines history and archival studies
Reviews & endorsements
‘To whom does the past, especially an arguably dark colonial past, belong? Linebaugh's is the first, fascinating, fully detailed, vitally important, account of the fifty-year struggle of Kenyan citizens, against not only the British, formerly imperial, government but also their own, to uncover their agonised past and seek justified reparations from those whose responsibility had been thereby revealed. This is as much an international history of post-imperial bargaining over documentary decolonisation as a bilateral one between Britain and Kenya-and a warning to all historians of how much more our evidence might have been knowingly contaminated than we have always known to expect.' John Lonsdale, Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge
Product details
October 2025Hardback
9781009525411
316 pages
229 × 152 mm
Not yet published - available from October 2025
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Part I. Struggle to Conceal:
- 1. Protecting bad intel in a dirty war
- 2. Secret-keepers and mythmakers
- 3. 'Operation legacy'
- 4. The scramble for Kenya's history and the making of an archival limbo
- Part II. Struggle to Reveal:
- 5. International archival (B)orders
- 6. 'The memory of a nation:' The co-development of Kenya and its archives
- 7. Decolonization and the struggle for Kenya's 'migrated archives'
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index.
