IN THE MAZE of modern shelving in the climate-controlled stacks of the Bodleian’s Weston Library, you can find a small run of shelves that contain one of the library’s founding collections, given in 1599 just as Sir Thomas Bodley’s idea was taking shape. This particular collection of books was given by his friend Robert Devereux, the energetic Earl of Essex, at the time one of England’s most powerful men, a bookish courtier, who was for a time the Queen’s favourite. Pull one of these from the shelves and you will find that it is bound in black leather with a coat of arms tooled in gold on the covers. The coat of arms is not that of Devereux, as you might expect, but that of the Bishop of Faro in what is now Portugal.
Faro is described in the travellers’ guides as ‘a prosperous, busy city’. The area around the cathedral is recommended as having a ‘delightful uneven space’, and the cathedral is mentioned as having Gothic ‘bones’. Nearby the Bishop’s palace looms over Faro’s Old Town. The guidebooks also point out that ‘Pillaged by the Earl of Essex, the bishop’s library formed the nucleus of the Bodleian in Oxford.’
The theft of knowledge has a long history. The collections of libraries and archives can sometimes contain materials that have been the result of plunder in wars and territorial disputes. This appropriation deprives communities from access to knowledge just as decisively as burning down a library or archive. Winston Churchill may or may not have coined the phrase ‘history is written by the victors’ but history is written through access to knowledge. This chapter is concerned with the control of history and issues of cultural and political identity.
The fact that so many ancient books are now in Oxford poses a set of interesting questions. When do bodies of knowledge, like the Bishop of Faro’s library, become legitimate political targets? Does their removal from the communities that originally owned them count as an act of destruction? Similar issues surround objects in museums brought back to Europe from imperial ventures – acquisitions such as the Benin bronzes, found in museums all over Europe, which are the subject of discussion in the museum world today.1
The bishop’s library came to the Bodleian through an unusual route – it was war booty during the intermittent conflict with Spain (1585–1604), which involved many factors. One was religion – Spain was a Catholic country and sought to impose its faith on England, which had relatively recently turned its back on Catholicism and religious leadership from Rome and had established the Church of England, a Protestant branch of Christianity with the monarch as its head and not the Pope. Elizabeth’s Catholic predecessor had been married to the Spanish King Philip II. The marriage had been hugely unpopular in England and much of Elizabeth’s foreign policy had been aimed at undermining Spanish power across the globe. The Spanish in turn never lost sight of England as a potential target for their own imperial objectives. Sir Francis Drake’s series of attacks on the Spanish Navy in 1587 were famously known as ‘singeing the King of Spain’s beard’. These skirmishes finally turned to open war with Spain’s unsuccessful invasion attempt in 1588. The war had become an imperial, Atlantic conflict, one that sought to establish control over the seas, and with it access to the colonial empires that would drive economic power. Spain had shown how this control could turn a country into a global empire bringing it extraordinary wealth. England saw opportunities, not just to defend its religious position but to go further. A decade after the defeat of the Armada, England was still using its navy to attack and to defend itself against Spain.
These ongoing skirmishes, in which religion, politics and trade were intertwined, involved a number of the leading figures of the English court. On the evening of 3 June 1596, an expedition led by Robert Devereux sailed from Plymouth bound for Spain, where he had intelligence that another invasion of England was being planned, a fear fuelled by a Spanish raid in Cornwall earlier in the year. The fleet reached the port of Cadiz on 21 June. Essex was the first to land with his troops, storming the city in a dramatic raid. A few days later, with smoke from the burning port of Cadiz still smelling on their clothes, the Essex raiding forces sailed west and staged a repeat performance on the neighbouring port of Faro on the Algarve. Soon after landing, Essex ‘quartered himself on the bishop’s house’, as one contemporary account describes it. While in the palace, Essex and his raiding party discovered the library of Bishop Fernando Martins Mascarenhas and selected from it a chest full of printed books, all with the bishop’s coat of arms embossed on the covers. They removed the books from the palace library and took them with all kinds of other plunder on board their ships.2
Once the expedition had returned to England, Essex gave the collection to Sir Thomas Bodley’s new library. The books were arranged on the newly designed shelves and listed in the first printed catalogue of the library, published in 1605.3 To Essex, Bodley and others in the country, these books would have been seen as a legitimate ‘prize’. England was at war with the Spanish Empire, defending not just its religion, but its territory as well. Mascarenhas was also the infamous Grand Inquisitor of Spain, in charge of religious enforcement, and as such may have overseen the torture of English seamen. The bishop was also responsible for censorship in Spain and under his authority was compiled a list of authors who were condemned on religious grounds, the Index Auctorum Damnatae Memoriae issued in Lisbon in 1624, a variant focussing on authors on the list of prohibited books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, first compiled under the authority of the Spanish Inquisition in Louvain in 1546.
In a strange twist of fate the Spanish Index proved an inspiration for Thomas James, the Bodleian’s first librarian. James had described the books as having come to his library ‘by divine providence’, noting that some of them had ‘whole leaves pasted together, the sentences blotted, and the books tormented in a pittifull manner’. The mere sight of the books, he said, ‘would grieve any mans heart to see them’ – surely the words of a true bibliophile, and an ardently Protestant one as well. James was particularly interested in the books that the compilers of the Catholic Index wanted their readers not to be able to read. In fact it became a source of ideas for new accessions for the Bodleian, with the library publishing, in 1627, a list of all the books in the Index that were not in the Bodleian, and therefore some of the books that he most wanted to acquire.4
The books still rest on the shelves of the Bodleian and have moved only a few yards in the 419 years they have been there, well cared for and always accessible to researchers from all over the world. Thomas James, however, has his name listed by Mascarenhas in the 1632 edition of the Spanish index of prohibited books (the Novus librorum prohibitorum et expurgatorum index), and was therefore banned from being read in Spain. Mascarenhas never got his books back but he did get his revenge.
Whilst the seizure of the library of the Bishop of Faro was opportunistic, and not the primary goal of the expedition, the theft of the Bibliotheca Palatina (the library of the Prince Electors Palatine, maintained in the city of Heidelberg in Germany) most certainly was. The Bibliotheca Palatina was one of the most celebrated libraries in the sixteenth century and a focus of civic, regional and Protestant pride. At the Reformation the people of the city of Heidelberg came out in favour of the Protestant reformers. Calvinist refugees were welcomed into the city and the university, and in 1563 the Heidelberg Catechism was promulgated there, becoming the official statement of Protestant faith throughout the Palatinate. The library had been created through the plunder of the Reformation and it mirrored in some ways the transfer of books from monastic libraries to secular libraries, and housed many manuscripts formerly in the Abbey of Lorsch, just to the north of Heidelberg, which was dissolved in 1557. Among the treasures of Lorsch Abbey was the famous Codex Aureus or the Lorsch Gospels, a superbly illuminated manuscript from the late eighth century and a witness to the artistic power of Charlemagne’s court.
When Heidelberg was captured by the Catholic League of Maximilian of Bavaria in 1622, Pope Gregory XV, who, as the first Jesuit-trained pope, knew the intellectual value of libraries, saw an opportunity to greatly enrich the papal library in Rome, the Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana. Pope Gregory arranged for the powerful position of Elector Palatine – one of the five electors of the Holy Roman Emperor – to pass to Maximilian. This was a triumph for Maximilian, and as a rather extravagant ‘thank-you’ present Maximilian presented the library to Pope Gregory within five days of the capture of the city, writing that the library was given ‘as booty and in demonstration of my most obedient and due affection’.5 Eventually the books were transferred to Rome – the shelves of the library being chopped up to make packing cases. They transformed the Vatican Library, adding 3,500 manuscripts and 5,000 printed books, almost doubling the collections; not only were medieval manuscripts acquired but also contemporary Protestant literature – of practical use to help the papacy develop counter-arguments. The removal of the library was a symbol of the transfer of power: the arsenal of heresy was disarmed by its move to the epicentre of orthodox faith. Walking around the Vatican Library today you can still see the names of the added collections: ‘Codices Palatini Latini’ (which is the shelf mark given to the Lorsch Gospels, for example), and ‘Codices Palatini Greci’: the Latin and Greek manuscripts from the Bibliotheca Palatina.
As the fates of the Bishop of Faro’s library and of the Bibliotheca Palatina show us, the forced removal of books and documents from one country to another has a long history. In more recent times the phenomenon has become known as ‘displaced or migrated’ archives. The fate of these records – some of them destroyed to hide evidence of maladministration and the abuse of power, some physically removed from the former colony and taken back to Europe – becomes a key question in who controls the histories of the former colonies: the newly independent nations or the former colonial powers?
The legacy of empire takes many forms for the European nations that spread their influence across the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Colonies were often run as departments of the civil service of the ‘home’ country, with many of the colonial administrators being people on tours of duty rather than citizens of the colonised territory. Archives were an essential part of the colonial enterprise. These records documented, often in striking detail, the behaviour of the colonial administration, and the rigour of record-keeping would often reflect the level of control. As such, the process of de-colonisation and independence of former colonies would make records critically important. Their documentation of often embarrassing behaviour by the colonial administration made them a target for destruction, but they were also valuable sources for the history and identity of a new nation and worthy of preservation.
Through the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries archival practice in the West has evolved with the notions of ‘archival order’ and ‘archival integrity’. This thinking developed from the work of the British archivist Sir Hilary Jenkinson (1882–1961) whose approach remains central to modern practice today. The order of an archive should follow the development of the administrative structures whose records are being archived. According to established practice, archives of the colonies were thought of as part of the archives of the colonial power. Normal record-keeping practice would involve, when the department is closed down, using established processes – looking at retention and disposal schedules, and deciding which papers should return to the ‘parent’ archive, kept back in the ‘mother country’. This has resulted, over the past seventy years or so, in a series of highly contentious issues that have pitted some of the newly independent nations against their former colonial overlords, with the legitimacy of historical narrative being central.
This matter continues to be an important one for Britain, as it had the largest empire of the European powers. The moving of archives from the colonies just prior to independence has led to the creation of a massive group of ‘migrated’ archives back in the UK, held by the parent organisation within government, the Foreign and Colonial Office record stores, known as FCO 141. For many years the existence of these records was either denied or, at best, subject to evasive comment by officials, but now this huge body of knowledge has been formally and publicly admitted, and the records transferred to the UK National Archives, catalogued and made available to scholars.6 In addition to these ‘migrated’ archives there were also many instances of deliberate elimination, sometimes through administrators following accepted procedures for managing records, but also as a result of attempts to hide evidence of appalling behaviour by former colonial officials that would have serious political and diplomatic consequences if it came to light.
The process of appraising records involves selecting some of them for either destruction or return, and does not necessarily imply malicious intent to hide evidence. The destruction of records would not necessarily have been carried out to protect personal reputations or hide evidence of wrongdoing. Not all the records generated by a government department can be kept – to do so would be madness and unaffordable madness at that. Previous legislation designed to help manage public records has allowed for disposal of valueless records, especially in the Colonial Office, which, by the early twentieth century, was a vast bureaucracy generating a huge amount of documentation in order to run the empire effectively from London.7 Typically the National Archives today will only keep 2–5 per cent of the records generated by a government department and this approach was the standard when applied to colonial records. Clerks working in the registries (departments which stored and tracked records that were needed by administrators) would routinely apply the guidance they had received on the retention of records, and would destroy records no longer necessary for current use in administration or that they did not feel had any long-term value for historians. Often these decisions were influenced by more pragmatic concerns – did they simply have enough space to keep unwanted files?
After the end of the Second World War many of the colonies of the European powers campaigned for independence. The process particularly affected Great Britain, Belgium, Holland and France. In deciding what to do with those records, the colonial administrators had to make decisions: should they destroy material as it was no longer necessary, should they pass it over to the newly independent governments or should they send it back to the parent country?
The first major experience of the process of independence of former colonies for the UK was India in 1947, closely followed by Ceylon the following year. In the period leading up to independence, whole runs of records were transferred back to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, rather than being subject to appraisal on a file-by-file basis, which should have happened prior to the return of any files. The head of the Special Branch of the Ceylonese police was surprised, during the process of sending the records back to London, to discover his own file among the mass of material being sent back.8
Malaysia became independent from Britain in 1957. In Kuala Lumpur in 1954 the main registry of the colonial government of Malaysia became over-full and large numbers of records, many dating back to the nineteenth century, were destroyed as they were assumed to be duplicates.9 Vital knowledge of Malaysia’s early history was lost in the process. Thanks to the work of historian Edward Hampshire we know that some of these records were destroyed for more sinister reasons. He discovered a document that provided guidance given to the colonial administrators in Malaysia, highlighting those ‘documents which it is undesirable should remain in Malayan hands’, which were those that reflected ‘the policy or point of view of the UK government which it is not desired to make known to the Federation government’ and, what was worse, those that ‘might give offence on account of their discussion of Malayan problems and personalities’.10
The destruction of archives was thus to hide the racist and prejudiced behaviour of the former colonial officials. Five lorryloads of papers were driven to Singapore (which was still a British colony at this time) and destroyed in the Royal Navy’s incinerator there. Even this process was fraught with colonial anxiety: ‘pains were taken to carry out the operation discreetly, to avoid exacerbating relationships between the British government and those Malayans who might not have been so understanding,’ wrote the British high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur, in a classic piece of British understatement. Interestingly, a note has been discovered revealing that the Colonial Office wanted the new government of Malaysia to inherit records that were for the most part complete, specifically to ensure ‘that as regards historical material the British could not lay themselves open to the charge of raiding archives for historical purposes and that the material should be left for Malayan historians to study’. The reason why this guidance was not followed, according to Hampshire, was due to the inherent conservatism of the officials on the ground.11
Migrated archives have become even more contentious over time as the former colonies seek to understand their historical past. In 1963, just before Kenya became independent, a clerk working at Government House in Nairobi burned many bundles of documents in a brazier on the lawn. Many of the records that documented the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau insurgency were destroyed there, in order to stop them coming into the hands of the new government. Some of this material found its way back to Britain to the famous FCO 141.12 It took a high court case brought in 2011 by veterans of the Mau Mau rebellion, seeking compensation from the British government, for the existence of the records, transferred in four crates with 1,500 files in November 1963, to become public. Only in 2014 were the records appraised, catalogued and passed to the National Archives. The ‘Kenyan Emergency’, as the Mau Mau rebellion was euphemistically referred to by the British, forced an approach to records kept in Kenya involving a process of retention and disposal that was inherently racist: only officers that were ‘British subjects of European descent’ were allowed to decide whether to keep or destroy them. The implication is that it was not ‘safe’ to allow Africans to decide the fate of their own history.13
These experiences were not confined to Britain. Other European colonial powers went through a very similar process. In South East Asia, for example, as Dutch authorities waged a rearguard action against the impending tide of nationalism and independence, archives were one of the symbols of power that the Dutch held on to – creating their own version of FCO 141, known as the Pringgodigdo Archive, a collection of papers relating to the nationalist cause seized by Dutch paratroopers in 1948 and analysed in detail by the Dutch military intelligence agency.14 The collection was formed to support a political campaign to discredit the independence fighters, in order to develop support for the war against the insurgents. Ultimately it failed to generate the kind of stories hoped for. Eventually Indonesia gained its independence, and after a passage of time a rapprochement with the Dutch government took place. The Indonesian government began to look for economic and political support from Western nations, from the Dutch in particular, and as part of this process a cultural agreement was forged which allowed Indonesian archivists to be trained in the Netherlands, heralding a degree of increased cooperation. Eventually the Pringgodigdo Archive was rediscovered, although thought lost for many years, and returned to Indonesia in 1987.
In both the British and Dutch examples the former colonies had the upper hand. It was their administrators who made the decisions about which papers should be destroyed and which papers should be migrated back to the ‘mother country’. Even then, knowledge of the existence of contentious files has been deliberately suppressed, and whole series of records kept out of the public domain, and even their existence officially denied.
The French developed an outpost of the Archives de France in Aix-en-Provence in the late 1950s, called the French Overseas Archive (AOM), with the express aim of uniting the archives of the now-defunct ministries with those transferred from the ‘former colonies and Algeria’ (Algeria was not formally regarded as a colony by the French but as an integral part of the French state).15 The first director at Aix was Pierre Boyer, who had been the director of the Archives of Algiers and who took up his post in 1962, the year that Algeria became independent. The collections were large – 8.5 kilometres of archives came to stock the new facility, which was subsequently extended in 1986 and 1996. The original team of staff was small, just Boyer and three others, who were initially supported by a team of soldiers from the French Foreign Legion, the famous military unit that played a major role in French colonial expansion in the nineteenth century: the new archive facility could hardly have been more intertwined with the French colonial experience. Boyer had himself been complicit in the destruction of archives in Algiers, in the lead-up to independence, with a now-famous episode where he sailed into the Bay of Algiers in June 1962 and tried to sink thirty cartons of police records. When it became clear that they would not disappear below the waves, he doused them with petrol and set fire to them. Presumably the files were not treated this way because they were just taking up too much room. The contents must have been highly contentious and dangerous to the reputation of France if they had fallen into the hands of the nationalist Algerians.16 A few days earlier the OAS (the clandestine terrorist organisation of French colonists who sought to prevent independence) set fire to the library of the University of Algiers.17 These few cartons are the tip of an unknowable iceberg of documents destroyed in Algeria, but many tens of thousands of files were sent to France; the majority may have ended up in the new facility run by Boyer in Aix. But many more were spread among the fonds (organised groups of documents) of other ministries (such as the defence ministry), as a result of statements made at the highest level in France at the time – from the president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing – that ‘these archives are among the constitutive elements of our national patrimony, as well as of our national sovereignty’.18 All of these have been claimed back by the government of independent Algeria at various points.19
The issue of archives became more intense in Algeria as the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of its independence in 2012 – a suitable moment for historical reflection and celebration of nation-building. The absence of the national archival material became increasingly evident, exposing differing historical narratives concerning the fight for independence. There is a hope in Algeria that the return of the archives might help avoid further social conflict.
Displaced and migrated archives continue to be a major issue between the former colonies and their former colonial overlords. Even today the relationships between colonial power and former colony remain complex. The archive of the Rhodesian army was removed from Rhodesia at the point when it became independent Zimbabwe, and for a time held in South Africa. It was for many years stored in a privately run museum in Bristol, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, but when that institution closed through lack of funds the collection became orphaned. The National Archives of Zimbabwe have claimed that it is part of their national patrimony and that it was removed illegally. An important historical source remains inaccessible both to the international community of scholars and to citizens of Zimbabwe. One of the chief concerns over this case is that the records reveal details of the behaviour of the army during the lead-up to independence that may not show the army in a good light.20
In the summer of 2019 the Bodleian held a display of manuscripts from its small but significant Ethiopian and Eritrean collections. The manuscripts on show revealed interesting information about the history, culture, language and religion of the region. Among the manuscripts are some which are part of what is known as the ‘Magdala Treasure’.
The Magdala expedition into Ethiopia (1867–8) was notable on a number of counts. The British Indian Army (commanded by Sir Robert Napier) invaded Ethiopia in order to rescue British civil servants and missionaries held hostage by Emperor Tewodros II. Tewodros was angry at Queen Victoria’s failure to reply to a letter he had sent. Hostages were freed, the Ethiopian army was annihilated and the fortress of Magdala stormed, falling to a final assault in April 1868, when the emperor committed suicide. The British Indian Army left soon after.
There was widespread looting of Ethiopian art treasures and cultural artefacts. According to one account, fifteen elephants and two hundred mules were required to carry away the booty. One contemporary witness, Gerhard Rohlfs, reported that
… we came to the Kings own apartments and here the soldiers had torn everything apart and piles of objects of all kinds lay in confusion … It was a regular junk shop on a large scale … at the time we did not know that when an English Army takes a city all the goods that fall into the hands of the troops are their property and are sold for the common benefit.21
The objects looted at Magdala found their way into state and private collections. Most of the books and manuscripts went into the Library of the British Museum (now the British Library), the Bodleian, the John Rylands Library in Manchester (now part of the University Library there), the Cambridge University Library and some smaller British collections. The theft of Tewodros’s library amounted to depriving Ethiopia of national cultural, artistic and religious treasures. There have been repeated calls for the ‘Magdala Treasure’ (as it is commonly known) to be returned to Ethiopia.
The displaced library collections could have a positive role to play in supporting cultural identity. The Bodleian’s display in August 2019 was attended by thousands of people from the British Ethiopian and Eritrean communities (including the Ethiopian ambassador to Britain), but it did not refer to Magdala even though one of the manuscripts on show had been one of the looted treasures. The display had been curated not by the staff of the Bodleian but by members of the Ethiopian and Eritrean communities living in the UK.22 The issue of Magdala and other examples of looting and imperialist behaviour were, of course, well known to the members of the curatorial team, but the captions did not refer to these histories. They concentrated on the personal responses to the manuscripts, often very sensory responses, evoking childhood memories and the experience of being in Africa, or of being of African descent but living in the UK and being British. The avoidance of the issues of looting was not deliberate, the focus was rather on the engagement between the communities and the manuscripts (an accompanying catalogue did explicitly deal with the provenance of the manuscripts).23 The exposure that the exhibition has given to Ethiopian and Eritrean culture was hugely positive to the curatorial team, who did not want anything to overshadow the opportunity to celebrate the cultural importance of the manuscripts and the culture they represent.
The removal of knowledge from a community even if that knowledge is not destroyed can have very serious consequences. The narrative of the past can be controlled and manipulated, and cultural and political identity can be seriously undermined when communities do not have access to their own history. Many of the former colonies of the European powers have been independent countries for many decades, and some of them remain concerned that their history continues to be locked inside foreign record stores. It is vital that the communities from which these materials have been removed should be allowed to take control of the narrative of history once again.