Operation Legacy

Operation Legacy was a programme of the British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) to destroy or hide files that would implicate the British Empire in wrongdoing, as to prevent them from being used by their ex-colonies.^[1][2][3] It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height,^[4] and involved at least 23 countries.^[5]

Methods of operation

MI5 or Special Branch agents were required to vet all secret documents in the colonial administrations to find those that could "embarrass" Britain or show "racial prejudice or religious bias."^[5] Some 8,800 files were consequently stored in Britain.^[5] Precise instructions were given for methods to be used for destruction, including burning and dumping at sea.^[5] Some of the files detailed torture methods used against opponents of the colonial administrations, such as during the Mau Mau Uprising.^[6]

As decolonisation progressed, British officials were keen to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment that had been caused by the overt burning of documents^[7] that took place in New Delhi in 1946, which had been covered by Indian news sources. On 3 May 1961, Iain Macleod, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a telegram to all British embassies to advise them on the best way to retrieve and dispose of sensitive documents.^[4] To prevent post-colonial governments from ever learning about Operation Legacy, officials were required to dispatch "destruction certificates" to London. In some cases, as the handover date approached, the immolation task proved so huge that colonial administrators warned the Foreign Office that there was a danger of "celebrating Independence Day with smoke."^[8]

Research

Academic study of the end of the British Empire has been assisted in recent years by the declassification of the migrated archives in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. After the UK government admitted in 2011 that it had secret documents related to the Mau Mau Uprising, it began to declassify documents and by November 2013 some 20,000 files had been declassified. These documents can be accessed at the National Archives in Kew, London.^[9]

See also

• Historical negationism
• Cover-up
• Post-colonialism
• Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migrated Archives

References

1. Gilbert, Rosa (3 November 2016). "Erasing Empire". Jacobin.
2. Cobain, Ian (2016). The history thieves: secrets, lies and the shaping of a modern nation. London: Portobello Books Ltd. ISBN 978-1-84627-584-5.
3. Elkins, Caroline (2022). Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. Knopf Doubleday. p. 618. ISBN 978-0-593-32008-2.
4. Bowman, Craig (9 January 2014). "Operation Legacy: How Britain Destroyed Thousands Of Colonial Files". War History Online. Retrieved 26 July 2017.
5. Milmo, Cahal (29 November 2013). "Revealed: How British Empire's dirty secrets went up in smoke in the colonies". The Independent. Archived from the original on 24 May 2022. Retrieved 12 March 2022.
6. Cobain, Ian; Bowcott, Owen; Norton-Taylor, Richard (17 April 2012). "Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes". The Guardian.
7. Moon, Penderel, ed. (1973). "The Interim Government (July-October 1946): September 5". Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal (PDF). London: Oxford University Press. pp. 346–347.
8. Rostron, Bryan (28 June 2020). "OP-ED: The horror! The horror! The long colonial hangover". Daily Maverick. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
9. Sato, Shohei (11 April 2017). "'Operation Legacy': Britain's Destruction and Concealment of Colonial Records Worldwide". The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 45 (4): 697–719. doi:10.1080/03086534.2017.1294256. ISSN 0308-6534.

Further reading

• Badger, Anthony (28 September 2012). "Historians, a legacy of suspicion and the 'migrated archives'". Small Wars & Insurgencies. 23 (4–5): 799–807. doi:10.1080/09592318.2012.709761. ISSN 0959-2318.
• Herbert, Joel (2019). The Sun Never Sets: Rethinking the Politics of Late British Decolonization, 1968 to the Present (Doctor of Philosophy thesis). University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. doi:10.17615/acph-1a93.
• Whittle, Matthew (2016). Post-War British Literature and the "End of Empire". London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. doi:10.1057/978-1-137-54014-0. ISBN 978-1-137-54013-3.

External links

• "Mau Mau". Radiolab. WNYC. 3 July 2015. Retrieved 1 August 2017.