The (Post)colonial University Archive and its Uses

Abstract

Educational historians and other scholars with an interest in comparative education have not yet fully assessed the impact of the British Empire on the development of higher education in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tellingly, higher education hardly rates a mention in the recent four-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, nor has this topic earned a supplementary volume in the way that issues such as the Irish, missionaries, gender, and the black experience of empire have been accorded special treatment within the imperial theme. Yet it might be argued that within the wider British imperial impulse to support colonial education schemes, the founding of institutions of higher education throughout the Empire was to have perhaps the greatest impact, both politically and socially. While much of the history of "British" higher education has so far been written from a metropolitan point of view, many "colonial" or post-colonial institutions of higher education have recognized their own significance in the story of national awakening and have therefore been engaged in writing their own histories. This has often required the building of archives before the story can be written. This paper will examine the way in which three post-colonial universities (the University of Sydney, the National University of Singapore and the University of Hong Kong) have set about this process and how the act of creating an archive post-colonially has influenced the story of the past which is ultimately written.