The distortion of British history

The British Museum has announced the appointment of a curator to study the history of its own collections. On the face of it, nothing could be more anodyne. The history of collecting has been a fashionable topic in academic circles for decades. What sort of people collected, why, and how, tells us much about their cultural assumptions and their ways of seeing the world. It would be mildly surprising that the BM has been so slow to catch on – except that there seems more to it than scholarly pursuit of knowledge.

While the research will indeed cover ‘wider patterns’ of collecting, the Museum announced that it is ‘likely that issues such as the role of the slave trade and empire… will be relevant to some of the research undertaken’. Given what is happening elsewhere, I would venture to suggest that slavery and empire will probably dominate the whole project.