IN 2008, CAROLINE ELKINS did a great service for students of empire. Together with several other eminent historians, she served as an “expert witness” in the four-year high court trial, brought against the British government by five elderly Kenyans over atrocities committed during the Mau Mau insurgency of the 1950s. As a result, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office uncovered a massive repository of colonial-era records spirited away from Kenya and elsewhere at decolonisation. Known as the “Migrated Archives”, these more than 10,000 files were afterwards made available to researchers and promise to transform new histories of the end of empire.
This “discovery,” for Elkins () and others, was as good as proof of the dark reality of Britain’s empire, revealing patterns of document removal and destruction that amount to a “conspiratorial suppression of historical evidence” over the nation’s imperial past. One wonders if such conclusions
