Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive: Humanities, Law and British Indentureship

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'Towards an Integrated Colonial Archive' aims to provide proof-of-concept for the development of an integrated humanities, law and social science archive. By creating a carefully curated, interactive digital website, it aims to increase public engagement with specialist research, generate new interdisciplinary scholarship on colonialism, and provide a method for cultural institutions to frame specialist collections to increase public interest and use of the collections. This project curates various digital and physical holdings of the University of London and Cornell University library systems, in collaboration with public archives and galleries, and aims to demonstrate that, by overlapping and digitally integrating holdings on the indentureship period that would not typically be read or viewed alongside one another--such as maps, statutes, court judgments, land registers, ship logs, indenture contracts, novels, music, studies in linguistics, oral histories, poetry, photographs and recipes--the project can provide an accessible and engaging archive that establishes greater public interest and engagement in the history of indentureship. This type of integrated, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional archive is meant to be primarily digital, to maximise its accessibility. The project website will serve as a prototype for the integration of records and holdings that can be taken further developed in the future. The timing for this type of archival integration is critical because, although indentureship research is growing, public interest in the era is critical for the preservation and documentation of time-sensitive resources, including deteriorating archival records, and vanishing oral histories and diasporic cultural and linguistic practices. Interest in the era is dispersed across a range of aspects, and archival integration consolidates a host of interdependent records and scholarly works that would otherwise be distributed across various collections and indeed various countries. With this proof-of-concept, in a next phase, we would ideally do similar work to integrate selected holdings of major institutions that hold primary archival material on the era, such as the British Library, the British National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Jamaican National Archives. The main output of the project is a public website featuring the 'integrated colonial archive' approach to curating and displaying selected holdings from across disciplines. The website serves as a public resource, the dissemination of the project data and the project's proof-of-concept of the integrated archive model. Additional outputs include an academic symposium towards the end of the grant period to examine the method and late-stage version of the website, an exhibition to accompany the launch of the public website, and a peer-reviewed article to describe the process and methodologies involved in creating the integrated colonial archive.