An archive that only collects is a passive thing. These are the pieces of written work that have come out of this one, or that sit alongside it — where the testimony stops being material and starts being an argument.
The first of them is built directly on four of the records published here, and cites them as primary sources. The others approach the same preoccupation from a different direction: what institutions inherit, what they choose to keep, and what gets lost when nobody writes it down. The last of them asks that question of a different subject entirely — not military memory but language, and who decides which version of it survives.
What follows are abstracts. The full texts are not posted publicly — several are entered in competitions or under review for publication — but they are available on request.
Four officers of three services, commissioned across four decades, were asked the same closing question by this archive: the one story they would not want forgotten. Not one of them answered with a war. They reached instead for a father who asked the army to expel his own son, a coma four days from the nearest road, a boy of sixteen alone with eighty rupees, and a dead mentor’s last piece of advice.
The essay argues that the pattern in what these men chose to remember is itself historical evidence — that the Chetwode Code, colonial in origin but not in ethics, sits at the centre of the Indian officer’s professional identity, and that it was the inner reason an inherited colonial army stayed out of politics when so many others did not. It reads the omissions through Passerini on structural silence and Portelli on the velocity of narration, and sets the code against Cohen and Wilkinson on civil–military relations.
In 1947 two states inherited the same army, the same regimental structure, and the same doctrine — that only certain communities, concentrated in Punjab and the north-west, were fit to bear arms. Eleven years later one was still a democracy and the other had had the first of many coups.
The paper asks how far that divergence can be attributed to a single inheritance handled two different ways, and works through a structured comparison of how each state treated recruitment, ethnic composition and the political reach of its officer corps.
The essay argues the opposite of the proposition it was given: that the arc bends toward force, and that justice is not a property of history but something authored into it. Its position is that justice is a fiction — not because it is false, but because it is written by somebody. It is built on the Holocaust, the British Empire and Malala Yousafzai, set against entropy and scale dependence.
The essay begins by refusing the received picture — flags lowered, administrators departing, new maps drawn in a hurry — and goes back to imperium, meaning command. Its argument turns on a single word in the standard definition of imperialism, ‘especially’, and on how narrowly the historical discourse has drawn the test for whether an empire has actually ended.
India is building language models for communities that have never been represented in one. The essay argues that this is worth doing, and that it is currently repeating a very old pattern: outsiders deciding which version of a language gets recorded, and the people who speak it finding out afterwards how their words were used.
It follows two strands. The first is consent — recordings gathered under a preservation mandate now feeding the training of national language models. The second is standardisation: a model settles on one regional variant, that variant becomes the canonical form, and the others are quietly reclassified as dialects. Against both it sets the harder counter-argument, that imperfect inclusion still beats total exclusion, and the work of Te Hiku Media in Aotearoa as evidence that consent-based collection is possible, if slower and costlier.
It belongs on this page because it is the same question this archive is built on, asked of a different subject: what is owed to the people whose words you record.
The four oral histories cited as primary evidence in The Battle They Did Not Choose are published in full in this archive, with their footnotes and their photographs.
Where an essay draws on this archive, the interview is cited as a primary oral source, with the date of recording and the name of the officer, and the reader is pointed back to the published record so that the quotation can be checked against the full account. Nothing is quoted from an interview that the veteran has not read and approved.
Work still under review for publication is marked as such above and listed as a draft, not as a published paper. Full texts are shared on request rather than posted, so that competition entries and work under peer review are not published ahead of a decision.
If you have a scholarly or editorial reason to read any of these in full, write to me and I will send it.