Winner of the 2013 BAC Cataloguing Grant Announced

The Business Archives Council is delighted to announce the winning applicant of the BAC cataloguing grant for business archives for 2013. Launched in April 2010, the grant is in support of the National Strategy for Business Archives. The Council intends to make the grant available annually during strategy implementation, 2010-2015.

The judging panel on behalf of the Council has awarded the grant to West Sussex Record Office for the cataloguing of archives of The Hornung Papers.

Hornung & Co Ltd were empire builders, founders and owners of the Sena Sugar Estates in Mozambique, the Compania de Cha Oriental Estate in Malawi, sugar refineries in Portugal and the West Grinstead Stud in West Sussex, amongst other concerns. A microcosm of the European colonial system, the records of Hornung & Co Ltd present a rare opportunity to shed light on the development, maintenance and eventual downfall of perhaps the most significant English agricultural business to operate in colonial East Africa. After almost a century of dominance, the Hornung sugar estates – which formed one of the largest sugar plantations in the world, and directly employed some 14,000 people – were sacked during the 1980s and literally left to rot, as a result of Mozambique’s civil war.

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