Curating empire

Museums and the British imperial experience

Sarah Longair, John McAleer

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781784993467
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526118288
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

Curating empire explores the diverse roles played by museums and their curators in moulding and representing the British imperial experience. This collection demonstrates how individuals, their curatorial practices, and intellectual and political agendas influenced the development of a variety of museums across the globe. Taken together, these contributions suggest that museums are not just sites for accessing history but need to be considered as historical sites of significance in themselves. Individual essays examine the work of curators in museums in Britain and the colonies, the historical display and interpretation of empire in Britain, and the establishment of 'museum networks' in the British imperial context.

Curating empire sheds new light on the relationship between museums, as repositories for objects and cultural institutions for conveying knowledge, and the politics of culture and the formation of identities throughout the British Empire.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• General editor's introduction
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Curating empire: museums and the British imperial experience
• Curator-explorer extraordinaire, and the display of Africa in nineteenth-century Norfolk
• Visiting the empire at the provincial museum, 1900–50
• Carving out a place in the better Britain of the South Pacific: Maori in New Zealand museums and exhibitions
• Curiosities or science in the National Museum of Victoria: procurement Networks and the purpose of a museum
• Narrative as history, image as memory: exhibiting the Great War in Australia 1917–41
• The experience of a ‘lady curator’: negotiating curatorial challenges in the Zanzibar Museum
• A museum for Sierra Leone? museum policy in British West Africa
• Edgar Thurston at the Madras Museum (1885–1909): the multiple careers of a colonial museum curator
• Sir William Gregory and the origins and foundation of the Colombo Museum
• Tipu’s Tiger and images of India, 1799–2010
• Afterword: Objects, empire and museums
• Index