Excellent essay on the ‘misremembering’ (or to use Beiner’s phrase about NI radical Protestants ‘forgetful remembering) of British Empire. One stark argument stands out for me - the need to disconnect official archives with ‘the past’. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/11/02/misremembering-the-british-empire

Official - govt - archives hold a selective collection of papers created by those in power. These archives show how the world was ordered, analyzed and deconstructed by those administering from positions of power. They are useful to explore but they will never reveal ‘the past’

Official records held within an imperial context must be read (following Ann Laura Stoler) against the archive grain. They must be understood as colonial archives - written by those who did not understand and were not empathetic - that may hold kernels of truth within them.

Those kernels of truth are almost always accidental recoveries, they might be marginalia revealing infighting between govt depts or exasperation at the claims of an official as per the situation (‘!’). They often reveal a lack of knowledge about what is really happening.

I found when completing archival research on Long Kesh / Maze prison that filed existed across dozens of depts, both in London and Belfast. They were often at odds, distrusting, not sharing info, and not even aware who was in charge. The files were messy and out of sequence.

They files reveals a govt administration that had little idea what was really happening behind prison doors and which lacked agreement about how to deal with prisoner communal action. They told me more about the admin than about the prison; they were typical ‘colonial archives’

These are only the files I could actually get access to. Every archive has its own retention policy but for national archives only a tiny % of dept files are retained. The criteria worked with is often hazy and some files are simply never closed (to ensure they can’t be opened).

The one thing we have to remember when working with colonial archives is that they were not created for historians to pick through and reconstruct what happened in the past. They were made to administer, count and control. They present a top-down, outsider view on their subject.

Those files record what they find important and they do so in way a that treat the colonial subject - especially those who resist colonial claims to power - as an irrational nuisances that requires analyzing and then converting, neutralizing or removing.

Historians need not only be cognizant of these realities but explicit about them in their engagement and synthesis of archives. They need to question those govt archives with other sources - eg literature, media outputs, community archives or (my focus) material culture.