Thirty years ago, in 1993, Cambridge University Library acquired a substantial quantity of materials from the Commonwealth and Britain’s former colonial territories. This repository originally came from the Colonial Society, which over the decades became the Royal Colonial Institute, then the Royal Empire Society, and finally the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS).1 This institution had begun collecting and archiving these documents around 1868, when it received funding to rent a suite in the Westminster Palace Hotel, and did so more intensively after 1900, as the collection grew and moved to larger premises. By the time the RCS library was integrated into the special collections of Cambridge University Library, it housed extensive and invaluable archives, including ancient texts in cuneiform script dating back to around 2200 BCE, as well as documents from the twentieth century.2 Among the latter were ten boxes of postcards from different regions of the former British Empire, printed between 1890 and 1969.3
Continue reading Visualizing Labour in German East Africa: Photographic Images and their Circulation- See the history of the Royal Commonwealth Society (RCS) collection, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
- See the RCS Library, (accessed 5 Jan. 2024). [↩]
- Cambridge University Library, GBR/0115/RCS/PC, Postcard Collection. [↩]
