Operation Legacy
Operation Legacy was a British
Methods of operation
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 1947, 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
See also
- Historical negationism
- Cover-up
- Post-colonialism
References
- ^ Gilbert, Rosa (3 November 2016). "Erasing Empire". Jacobin.
- ISBN 978-1-84627-584-5.
- ISBN 978-0-593-32008-2.
- ^ a b Bowman, Craig (9 January 2014). "Operation Legacy: How Britain Destroyed Thousands Of Colonial Files". War History Online. Retrieved 26 July 2017.
- ^ a b 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 2022-05-24. Retrieved March 12, 2022.
- ^ Cobain, Ian; Bowcott, Owen; Norton-Taylor, Richard (17 April 2012). "Britain destroyed records of colonial crimes". The Guardian.
- ^ Wavell: The Viceroy's Journal : Ed. by Penderel Moon (PDF). Oxford University Press. 1973. pp. Entry dated September 5. 1946.
- ^ Rostron, Bryan (28 June 2020). "OP-ED: The horror! The horror! The long colonial hangover". Daily Maverick. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
- 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. 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. .
- Whittle, Matthew (2016). Post-War British Literature and the "End of Empire". London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. ISBN 978-1-137-54013-3.
External links
"Mau Mau". Radiolab. WNYC. July 3, 2015. Retrieved August 1, 2017.
