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Emory’s African historians have had a great spring. Not only has the graduate program been recognized with a high ranking (No. 6 in the U.S.) but the library’s purchase of Adam Matthew’s digital collection, Confidential Print: Africa, has made the lives of anyone studying African history much easier. 

What are confidential prints? They are unpublished but printed internal documents of United Kingdom’s government departments. The confidential prints related to Africa are drawn from the Colonial (C.O.), Dominion (D.O.), and Foreign (F.O.) Offices files and are extremely important primary sources. The contents include a variety of reports, dispatches, analyses, and correspondence. There are also 300 maps. The originals are housed in the Public Record Office in Kew. 

While selected parts of these confidential prints have been printed or filmed, this digitized collection provides researchers unprecedented access to these materials which cover British interests in all of Africa, except Egypt. All documents are fully text-searchable once located by assigned headings or key words. Selections were made by a distinguished editorial board.

The time frame, 1834-1966, includes the early stages of imperial expansion and indigenous resistance in the interior of western and southern Africa, the European scramble for the continent in the late nineteenth century, and the expansion of settler colonialism in southern and eastern Africa, as well as the rising challenges to imperialism in the twentieth century that culminated in the rapid European withdrawal from the continent in the 1950s and 1960s.

Some sample contents: 

CO 879/1-190  Africa General, 1848-1861 reveals the spread of British sovereignty in west and South Africa, including the discovery and mining of diamonds. 

CO 885/1-140 Colonies general (selected files) covers the period from 1907 to 1929. These files concentrate on disease and medicine in Britain’s tropical African colonies, including sleeping sickness, hookworm, and leprosy.

FO 341/1-3 German Empire miscellaneous covers the years 1884 to 1900. These papers focus on the West Africa Conference (also known as the Berlin Conference and Congo Conference), which took place in Berlin in 1884-85 and marked the beginning of the European powers’ ‘Scramble for Africa.’

FO 403/1-482 Africa general spans the period from 1834 to 1959. Topics covered include the Activities of the Church Missionary Society in Lagos (1850s) and the establishments of the British East Africa Protectorate (modern Kenya) and Northern and Southern Rhodesia (1890s).

FO 458/1-157 and FO 485/1-3 Liberia cover British interests in Liberia during the years 1882 to 1950.

DO 201/1-53 Commonwealth Relations Office (selected files) covers the period between 1949 and 1966. Covers the independence of a number of colonies, including Nigeria.

For a fuller listing of contents, see the Nature and Scope page on the website.

Essays to give context to the collection will soon be included. 

Confidential Print: Africa is part of Adam Matthew’s Archives Direct program of digitizing selected contents of the British Public Record Office. Similar collections for the Middle East and Latin America are also available. All Adam Matthew digital collections can be cross searched through Adam Matthew Archive Explorer.