In 1966, A. H. Kamau walked through the corridors of the Hayes Repository in west London, guided by Bernard Cheeseman, as a part of a six-month training on archives administration. Kamau, Kenya’s first African assistant archivist, reported on his visit to colleagues in Nairobi explaining that “this repository is known as ‘Limbo’ because the type of records accommodated in it had as yet to have their fate decided.”1 Unbeknownst to Kamau at the time, among the 215 linear miles of records awaiting their fate that surrounded him, were 100 feet of Kenyan records. His escort, Bernard Cheeseman, had arranged the deposit of more than 300 boxes, consisting of documents that mainly dealt with the Emergency and flown in from Nairobi, just three years prior. With a duplicity characteristic of the UK Colonial Office’s Intelligence and Security Department, Cheeseman boldly led Kamau through the stacks lined with locked steel cages of secret Kenyan documents under the guise of teaching best archival practice to the new professional, trusting that his pupil would not know any better which documents lay hidden. Cheeseman’s ease was misguided. Shortly after Kamau’s training, Kenya’s Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Kibinge, wrote to the British High Commission in Nairobi wishing to begin negotiations for the return of these documents.

Chapter 7 frames Kenyan attempts of archival retrieval as a matter of decolonization at the international, bilateral, and national levels. Importantly, it also draws attention to how the concealment of the “migrated archives” affected political activity not only within Kenya but also in England, as a country undergoing its own re-nationalization process at the end of empire. The process of recovering records from the UK provided the Kenyan Government a framework in which to invoke a sovereign and unified Kenyan polity as the rightful home for the “migrated archives,” while dissent over Kenyatta’s centralized authority grew within the country. Meanwhile, British engagement with the “migrated archives” throughout the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the consolidation of postcolonial archival secrecy with other European partners as evident in the voting blocs formed in the 1983 Vienna Convention on the Succession of States in Respect of State Property, Archives and Debts.

Without overstating the case for direct lineage between current-day international organizations and the Colombo Plan, its Consultative Committee practices of generous time for discussion, decision-making by consensus and diverting the most controversial content to other forums, find echoes in the ways of ASEAN. In its recurring discussions about region, acknowledgment of Cold War dynamics, and the potential for regional action through north-south cooperation, the Colombo Plan might also be regarded as a staging post towards the more recent embrace of the ‘Indo-Pacific’. In the history of development, the Colombo Plan, while constrained in its operation by legacies of colonialism and Cold War alignments, also enjoyed a certain license during the long 1950s before standardized aid measurement and the professionalization of foreign aid bureaucracies caught up with it. It enabled member countries to tell stories about themselves for regional readers and viewers.

Chapter 3 examines the programmatic consolidation, destruction, and removal of sensitive documents in Kenya and East Africa to London as constitutional negotiations were underway as a way to simultaneously curate, in ways favorable to British interests, materials for the writing of colonial history and for the making of a postcolonial political order. It presents recordkeeping as a political project through which the outgoing colonial government in Kenya attempted to strategically furnish the incoming independent government with documents that would facilitate structural continuity during the transition to political independence while at the same time removing those which might jeopardize British interests, at the personal and governmental levels, thereby creating the conditions for impunity.

By the late 1950s, the Colombo Plan had gathered steam and supporters. As this chapter shows, the small Bureau in Colombo attracted talented experts who worked as advocates as much as the administrators. Drawn on a rotating basis from donor nations, the directors of the Bureau could be counted to expand the realms of their work and reporting. For several of the newly joined, membership was a step towards higher diplomatic cachet, towards full sovereignty, membership of the UN, or simply higher standing among neighbours. Representatives enjoyed the indulgences granted by long meetings. In addition to lavish hospitality, the annual meetings provided ample space for reflections on the state of ‘East–West’ relations and on the best paths towards peace and prosperity. Still buoyed by the momentum from Bandung, leaders such as Sukarno relished the chance to again proclaim how the world had changed and how Indonesia would not be moulded into a Western approximation of how a state should appear. One grievance that Asian representatives found they had in common with colleagues from Australia and especially New Zealand, was the effects of price fluctuations on their main exports.

This chapter focuses on the role of institutions in shaping economic efficiency and development throughout European history. It argues that institutional innovations have been central to Europe’s long-term economic progress, even though inefficient institutions have sometimes persisted due to vested interests. We first discuss what is considered a development-friendly institutional setup, and then analyse relevant historical institutions such as serfdom, open fields, guilds, cooperatives, the modern business firm and socialist central planning to understand their specific (in)efficiency contributions and distributional consequences.

This chapter analyses the relationship between population growth and resource constraints in European history, focusing on the Malthusian theory, which posits that population growth leads to stagnation due to finite resources. The chapter challenges this view by examining how technological innovations, agricultural improvements and changes in fertility strategies affected population dynamics. It explores how societies adapted to resource constraints and avoided the Malthusian trap through mechanisms such as the demographic transition. The chapter also uses case studies such as the decline of the Roman Empire to discuss the relevance of simple models for interpreting historical processes and presents nuanced insights into the complex interplay between population, resources and economic development.