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Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

Colonies did keep their histories recorded. It was systematically destroyed. Dutch in Indonesia, British in India, Europeans in America. It is very common to find mass graves in Africa even now for which there doesnt seem to be any records about how they came to be.

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The lack of recorded history is more about the west-central African, Caribean and American colonies. India has a decent historic record surviving today and it shows the usual story of class-stratified kingdoms waging wars, persecuting ethno-religious outgroups etc.

Source for the systematic destruction of historic documents in India and America ?

Not an answer to your question, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2017.1... doesn’t speak about India (which I fully accept might be a counter-example), but you can add Sri Lanka/Malaysia/Malta to the list of places with untrustworthy records, and it casts suspicion on others. (the article also makes clear at least sometimes it was done with the consent of the new regime).

This talks about the records of colonial regimes which I'm sure were subject to as much redaction and suppression as possible, but I was talking about the historical records of the colonized cultures pre-colonization - do we know about any systematic attempts to destroy those ? Things like having ancient Egyptian and Babylonian relics taken to Britain and Germany don't really qualify either here because even though they were used to glorify the colonizing empires they were extensively studied and preserved.

Ah ok, gotcha. Yeah I misunderstood. Re: records of pre-colonial civilisations, I don’t know much about this area.

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