This article explores the Detached Papers of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, an underused sub-series within The National Archives’ T 70 collection. These records offer a unique and detailed insight into the British administration of West African forts, and the lives of enslaved people forced to work in these fortifications. While the Royal African Company has been the subject of extensive scholarship, the Company of Merchants – its successor – remains understudied. Through letters, minute books, fort lists, and financial records, the Detached Papers, recently catalogued at item level for the first time, provide a critical and untapped source on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, revealing overlooked narratives of local relationships, familial networks, and the operational structures that underpinned the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. This article focuses on three key areas to exemplify the importance of these records for future research: the cultural and political life of the Fante; the networks and influence of Company Governor Richard Miles; and the identities and experiences of enslaved people in British-controlled forts. By engaging with the fragmentary nature of these records, the article interrogates archival silences to surface the submerged histories of exploitation, agency, and survival within the archives of enslavement.

The preservation of vernacular architecture in Təgray, Ethiopia, faces significant challenges due to factors such as conflict, ‘modernization’, socio-economic pressures, and environmental degradation. These issues have accelerated the transformation of this architectural heritage landscape, underscoring the need for innovative conservation strategies. This field study, conducted between January and August 2024, combines archival research with advanced 3D documentation technologies to propose a preservation framework. It highlights the limited access to archives from previous studies and expeditions, which are often stored in European and North American institutions. While increased digitization has improved this situation, it still hinders local scholars, authorities, and communities from effectively contributing to science-based conservation efforts in the region. Greater access to these archives would significantly benefit the growing movement of community-driven conservation activities. By integrating archival data with 3D documentation techniques, a comprehensive understanding of vernacular architecture can be achieved, encompassing its historical development and enabling the formulation of effective preservation strategies. This approach allows for detailed insights into construction methods, spatial organization, and the cultural significance of buildings, enhancing conservation efforts and ensuring the preservation of architectural heritage for future generations. The research demonstrates that sustained access to archival information, combined with advanced 3D technologies, significantly enhances the accuracy of documentation, spatial analysis, and restoration planning for Təgray’s architectural heritage. Moreover, these advanced documentation technologies function as dynamic archives, refining the precision of earlier architectural records and facilitating more effective community outreach and application. The study also underscores the importance of collaboration among heritage professionals, archivists, technology developers, and local communities to ensure sustainable and comprehensive preservation initiatives.

Zimbabwe’s colonial and postcolonial governance systems provided generous space for the participation of individuals and private organizations in the management of the environment. In 1959, W. Rudyerd Boulton, a museum ornithologist from America established the Atlantica Foundation near Harare (then called Salisbury) later known as the Boulton Atlantica Foundation (BAF). The Foundation received its funding mostly from the USA (with CIA links) and became one of the earliest successful private institutions and ‘ecological research stations’ in the country and the region. This article uses the Boulton Atlantica Foundation as an entry point to address the documentation of small creatures such as birds and butterflies and the ultimate creation of historic collections or private archives. The Boulton Atlantica Foundation provides a template for understanding the complex nature of the creation and care of archival collections as well as the politics of their administration. It puts forward the argument that all archives are extensions of power and authority and that archives are not mere sources of information but active agents of global power systems. Environmental projects have remained outstandingly subtle platforms for the display of global powers. The article also seeks to put at the core of its analysis the human character and interests of founding persons as critical to collection development, care and eventualities; it aims to provide more insights into the uses or abuses of all archives and to show how postmodern analysis might unravel new insights into colonial collections.

This study, constructed with the use of the hitherto little-consulted personal archives of Jacob Festus Ade Ajayi, 1929–2014, one of the pioneer historians from Africa, explores his emergence as a historian who fervently believed in the value of working in collaboration with colleague historians committed to the promotion of the history of Africa. It discusses the impact of his unique role in the furtherance of cooperation as demonstrated both by his work in global institutions, including universities in Africa, UNESCO and the International African Institute, and his publications. It concludes with a commendation of his contribution to the development of historiography in Africa.

Rise Up1is the successor to the Fitzwilliam’s exhibition Black Atlantic, reviewed in a previous issue of ABRD (Carson 2024). Like the first exhibition it combines artefacts and texts from museum, archive and library collections with new art works which interrogate and interpret the history and ongoing legacies of slavery, resistance and emancipation in Britain and the Black Atlantic. Both exhibitions owe much to the University of Cambridge’s ‘Legacies of Enslavement’ project.2 They tackle head on issues around national, university, institutional and individual entanglement with the slave trade and plantation slavery, questioning how to react in the present to profits and investments from the outrages and abuses of the past.

As we were finalizing the publication of Paul Richards’ article, ‘A novelist among the anthropologists: Barbara Pym and The International African Institute’,1 we were delighted to receive an invitation to the unveiling of a blue plaque to Barbara Pym in Pimlico, London, and a celebration (part concert, part religious service, part tributes from celebrity admirers).