Abstract

"Methods and Archives: New Turns in Business History"

Atiya Hussain, Graduate Institute (atiya.hussain@graduateinstitute.ch)

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the understudied nature of the economic facets of decolonization, sustained in part by a distinction in official archives between political considerations and economic and financial considerations of retreating imperial powers. The discovery in 2011 of much-rumoured lost documents relating to the ‘end of Empire’ relates most famously to the Kenyan Mau Mau emergency of 1952–60. However, post-colonial histories have been more generally plagued by the archival destruction that accompanied imperial retreat and the simultaneous construction of new ‘national’ narratives, often at odds with earlier connected histories.

These silences are particularly striking in one of the early cases of decolonization, the Indian sub-continent where the partition of British India into India and Pakistan has fuelled a divergent historiography, even as history has been politicized in the post-colonial states. A critical engagement with business histories becomes extraordinarily valuable, particularly on a sub-continent where many of the most important corporate players pre-date the establishment of the post-colonial states in August 1947.

In contrast to state-managed archives, which were established in Pakistan well after Independence/Partition, and which are under increased scrutiny within India, corporate archives offer the potential of superseding the narrow – and far more recent – contours of history mediated by the borders of 1947. The archives of Godrej, a company established in 1897 or of Tata, which remains a leader of Indian business after it was established in 1868, proffer alternatives to the partial view of official archives much as historians reach for literature and oral histories. Yet more expansive is the view offered from the archives of multinational corporations such as Unilever that, owing no allegiance to state-sanctioned narratives, reveal decolonization to be a far more uneven process than official narratives.