At the end of the British Empire, colonial officials across the world actively destroyed the past. From Africa to Asia, bonfires were kindled using government records, raging in front of office buildings for days. Crates containing untold numbers of documents were covertly dumped at sea. Some individual papers were altered, doctoring the history of the Empire. Working to guidelines that vaguely instructed officials to handle records in such a way as to avoid embarrassment to Britain and those related to the Empire, countless files were lost to what became known as ‘Operation Legacy’. The result was a highly curated vision of empire’s end: incomplete, pruned of some of its ugliest truths, and rendered inaccessible to the populations most affected.
Alongside the destruction, a relatively small selection of papers was spirited away from the colonies to the metropole. These records found a new home, initially in London and later at a Foreign Office facility called Hanslope Park outside Milton Keynes. But the trove remained inaccessible to the general public and its existence unknown beyond a handful of people until 2011 when a court case forced the British Government to admit it was secretly holding thousands of files from former colonies.
In the wake of the scandal, in May 2011, Foreign Secretary William Hague committed to releasing “every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions”. Subsequently, almost 20,000 files that originated in some 40 former colonies were moved to The National Archives, forming series FCO 141. Since then, scholars have profited from these files to elaborate more precise histories of their areas of interest, to examine the British Empire as a whole, to drill down into the vandalism wrought by outgoing colonial officials upon the files in their care and to explore the question of what it means to decolonise archives.
The ‘Hanslope disclosure’, as it came to be known, was unquestionably an embarrassing debacle. Nonetheless, it seemed that the British Government had at least made almost all of its colonial holdings available to the public. It had not. As I examine in my recent paper, FCO 141 represents only about 18% of the Foreign Office’s colonial records. Some 82% of the files are still inaccessible. They comprise about 88,000 files from the Hong Kong colonial government, which remain locked away: their contents unknown and their future uncertain.
Compared to Britain’s other colonies, Hong Kong has a unique story of colonisation and decolonisation. Formed over the course of half a century from hundreds of islands and tracts of land, China ceded parts of Hong Kong to Britain but the largest area, the New Territories, was granted under a 99-year lease that would expire in 1997. In the 1980s, with the expiry of that lease on the horizon, Britain engaged Beijing in negotiations that resulted in Hong Kong being handed from the former to the latter in 1997 on the proviso that Hong Kong would continue unchanged for 50 years. Consequently, Hong Kong remains an awkward outlier in the history of British decolonisation: decades after the wave of independence swept over Britain’s empire, withdrawal was a negotiated process, prolonged across more than a decade, that fixed the city’s future for generations and did not result in independence or sovereignty being passed to the people.
Just as Hong Kong’s colonisation was unusual and its decolonisation unique, so too does the handling of Hong Kong Government records contrast with those of the rest of the British Empire. The outgoing colonial authorities inaugurated a programme of record copying. This ensured that London would be armed with 27,000 of the most pertinent papers on microfiche and 5,500 files on paper, according to the British Government’s most recent figures. These files would join some 55,000 files on microfilm that had been regularly created and shipped to the UK for safekeeping following the Second World War.
Yet none of these roughly 88,000 files joined their colonial cousins in FCO 141. Most of the files in the Hong Kong record series are in a microform format, so will require digitising. They will then need to be reviewed for political, commercial and personal sensitivities. Only then might they be transferred to The National Archives and made public.
Transfer cannot come soon enough. Sources about Hong Kong have taken on an elevated importance in recent years. In Hong Kong today, books are being removed from library shelves; school textbooks are being rewritten to take British colonialism out of the city’s history; even some artworks, old newspapers and artefacts are being withdrawn for reappraisal while a new version of history mandated by the authorities is proliferated. On the one hand, these acts of cultural vandalism are ensuring that a new generation has no sense of their city’s colonial past. On the other hand, in part in reaction against this, some young people are growing nostalgic for the British colonial administration despite having no direct experience of it. Primary sources about Hong Kong’s history are thoroughly political, desperately needed and yet woefully lacking.
Moreover, the British Government has long stated that it has a moral obligation towards Hong Kong people. When Hong Kong’s future was negotiated in the early 1980s, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made repeated references to Britain’s ethical responsibility towards Hong Kong. This duty was echoed across the House of Commons into the late 1980s and 1990s, as Jana Lipman has explored. In more recent years, the same vocabulary of obligation has been repeated in the words of politicians and in the act of establishing the Hong Kong-specific British Nationals (Overseas) migration route. Britain’s responsibility should not stop at how it treats people in the present – it should extend to how it handles Hong Kong’s past, too.
Colonial archives matter. They provide millions of people across the world with a tangible connection to events in the near past that shaped their present. They help to fill in gaps in national and individual identity that are impossible to complete otherwise. They attest to some of the most atrocious maltreatments in relatively recent history.
While valuing the insights they can afford, we must at the same time keep colonial archives in context. Such sources are far from politically neutral: their content, order and context of consumption can tacitly guide the reader towards particular ways of interpreting. The pages they contain reflect the perceptions of the person who wrote them (often, a colonial official). In cataloguing an archive, the power structures prevalent at the time may be unwittingly replicated and reinforced. Accessing a document stamped ‘official’ inside a government-sponsored building can encourage us to privilege and see as more veridical certain material above others. From the page to the structure of the collection to the reading room, colonial power and perceptions extend beyond administrations and seep silently into our very understanding of the past. The Hong Kong record series will not, therefore, provide unbiased answers to all of our questions. But it will give us a window into the colonial administration, reflect the relationship between state and society, and likely give glimpses into some of the more quotidian aspects of life under colonial rule.
Control over history has been exercised to an even greater degree in the Hong Kong case than others. As in other territories, colonial officials maintained the administration based partly on the extensive information they held and, towards the end of the administration, chose which documents to remove to the UK. But unlike other territories, the British Government continues to deny access to the Hong Kong files. Even after the 1997 handover and recent pressures on Hong Kong’s history, the records that were relocated to the relative safety of the UK remain closed. By controlling access, the British Government maintains a handle on the narrative of its colonial administration and on the broader history of Hong Kong. In withholding these files, the British Government denies Hong Kong people access to their own cultural, social, economic, political and personal past, controlling history as it controlled the colony.
Making the Hong Kong files available would likely be a boon to scholars of the city’s history. Moreover, the insights that the collection could offer may go some way to helping to reinstate voices that were marginalised during the colonial administration – a form of delayed justice enjoyed by certain groups across the world but so far denied to Hong Kong. At a time when history is being rewritten and weaponised in Hong Kong and across the world, the act of disclosure would represent an almost democratic, anti-colonial gesture that might give hope for the survival of Hong Kong’s history.
It is up to the British Government to determine where it allocates its energies. Putting resources towards expediting the release of the Hong Kong record series would support Britain’s oft-repeated claim to feel a moral responsibility towards Hong Kong. It would demonstrate – through actions rather than words – a degree of remorse for the colonial legacy it has left behind in the world. Lastly, it would show whether the current British Government values historical truth or is content to remain complicit in today’s all too prevalent politics of forgetting.