Introduction

It is all too tempting for those of us who live in Europe or one of the Anglophone countries to take a Eurocentric view of archives. The conventional narrative of archives is that they grew up in the 19th century and were associated with the ‘scientific’ or ‘German’ school of history pioneered by Ranke in Germany and Acton in England. In this narrative, the growth of archives meant that historians were able to write a history which was based on records rather than on repeating what had been said in earlier books. The scientific historians drove the antiquarians out of the temple.

Although in the West archives are part of the beginning of modernity, elsewhere they were closely connected with the experience of colonialism. In Malawi and India they have played a dual role, both the record of the European settlers, traders and governments and, at the same time, a tool for recording an oral culture and developing national identity. In Japan they have followed a quite different path. There is a long tradition of writing official histories (of companies and organizations and even the nation itself) in that country, and of accumulating a collection of archives to facilitate the writing of history. Unlike in the West, where history followed the archive, in Japan the archive followed the history.

The situation in Hong Kong is similar but different to that in Japan. For most of its history as a British colony, Hong Kong was dominated by large British companies which developed the habit of collecting archives in order to produce corporate histories and anniversary books. Some of their records are now deposited overseas and, sadly, most of Hong Kong's public records were destroyed in World War 2. Most Chinese-owned companies were small or medium sized and family owned, and it was not until the 1970s that they began to take an interest in their own culture and heritage and began collecting archives and undertaking research. What seems to be fairly universally true is the ability of archives to right wrongs done by governments to their citizens. In Malawi, the archives were used to secure compensation for people damaged by the regime of Dr Banda; in Australia they were of significant value in the restitution of ancestral human remains and the compensation of children mistreated in children's homes.