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Fantastic article about what looks to be a fascinating book on the problems historians have on retrieving the true nature of empire - the fact the records are so partial for a reason: to conceal it https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/06/the-history-of-thieves-by-ian-cobain-review
It is a pity that so few historians actually spend any time working in archives as it would give them an insight into how the curation of public memory happens in practice.
Most national archive retain a tiny percentage of records that were actually create by government depts. There is legitimate reasons for this as there are limits of space and many of the files documenting the minutiae is the social service are actually very boring.
However, it does leave the problem - and that can be intentional or unintended - that at certain points in time agents of the govt (usually civil servants) have to make decisions about what is worth (or not) or retention.
I did this job for a relatively short time and so I know that back in the early 2000s I was going to govt departments and reviewing files that were 5 years old, or 20 years old and deciding whether they should be the 5-10% i was told we should keep or the majority we should dump.
I completed this role without any official guidance as to what we should keep but with an explicit understanding that anything to do with the Troubles (this was in Northern Ireland) should be a priority.
This has two issues that I’ve realized since - first the records from the periods I was looking at were nearly all dated from sometime within the Troubles so the retained files will skew our knowledge to those directly dealing with that fact.
Second, it was clear that some depts were more willing than others to let us see and assess their files. Some depts called us to review their files suspiciously infrequently (and we were treated with hostility when we did) and others sent us incomplete series of files.
Often we didn’t have any record of what files were originally there and how much what we were shown represented what they had originally created and ultimately the dept didn’t have to show us anything they deemed not closed.
How the latter was potentially abused - ie not closing of files - was most clearly illustrated to me was when I was told that a dept had some ‘Secret’ files that they wanted to destroy but they would only ‘close’ them if we confirmed we wouldn’t want to retain them.
It was through this role that I realized how partial our record of even the most recent past was and how little we could trust govts to report on themselves. Of course there were always files that were too important to destroy or those with insights no one had realized.
But in my experience the ‘smoking guns’ that tell us of errors, misjudgments or illegalities in govt archives were the exception, not the rule.
