Lost Files, Forgotten Papers and Colonial Disclosures: The ‘Migrated Archives' and the Pacific, 1963–2013

Abstract

Between 2012 and 2013 the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office transferred some 20,000 colonial files from 37 territories to the National Archives in Kew. These ‘Migrated Archives’ had been repatriated to the UK between 1963 and 1994, but only in 2011 were they fully and publicly disclosed as the result of an English court hearing into claims of human rights violations by British authorities during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya (1952–60). Yet the Migrated Archives contain many records related to the Pacific, including Fiji, Vanuatu (the New Hebrides), the Solomon Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu. These Pacific records can be assessed in relation to approaches to contested property, public availability, diplomatic sensitivity and the management of official information. They also provide potentially new sources for Pacific historians on the politics of decolonisation in the region and the synergies and contrasts the Pacific shares with other areas of the former British empire.

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