‘Official’ Histories of the End of Empire

The study of the end of empire through the production of official histories has been a challenging undertaking due to the sensitivities and controversies that accompanied imperial deconstruction. The choice of editors also affected the ways in which the demission of empire was reflected. Although the quasi-official British Documents on the End of Empire represented a progression from previous official histories by incorporating documents drawn from a wider range of Whitehall departments, its shortcomings were exposed by the revelation that thousands of files, the so-called ‘migrated files’, generated by the colonial administrations themselves, had been clandestinely held by the FCO.