The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections – with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent – as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.
A full examination of the India Museum's founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain's arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections--with respect to materials, their manufacture, and original functions on the Indian sub-continent--as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded, and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of eighty years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum's involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.
From the archaeologists and smugglers of the Raj to the museums of post-partition Pakistan and India, from coin-forgers and contraband to modern Buddhism and contemporary art, this fourth volume of the Gandhāra Connections project presents the most recent research on the factors that mediate our encounter with Gandhāran art.
When we look at the artworks on display in museums, there is always a real possibility that some of these objects once belonged to victims of the Nazis – a possibility that has remained unacknowledged for far too long. Countless artworks were seized or forcibly sold, with many ending up in museum collections around the world, even in countries which actively fought to defeat Nazi Germany. Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections equips readers with the knowledge and strategies essential for confronting the shadow of the Nazi past in museum collections. Jacques Schuhmacher provides the vital historical orientation required to understand the Nazis’ complex campaign of systematic dispossession and extermination, and highlights the current environment in which museum-based Nazi-era provenance research takes place. This book introduces readers to the research methods and resources that can be used to reveal the moving stories behind the objects, highlighting the absorbing work of provenance researchers as it plays out in practice. Provenance research not only seeks to recover erased names and experiences and to reinsert them into a historical record, but also to ensure that the Nazis’ actions and worldview do not remain unchallenged in the galleries and storerooms of our museums today. Praise for Nazi-Era Provenance of Museum Collections ‘Jacques Schuhmacher has written a hugely powerful, instructive and important book, tracing the historic responsibility of the museum world in addressing the legacy of Nazi-era loot. Fluently combining extensive historical scholarship with his expert understanding of investigative tools, this study uses compelling examples of restitution cases to show how provenance research should be done and, crucially, why it must be done.’ Dr Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A ‘A timely work drawing upon first-hand experience in Nazi-era provenance research, providing a unique insight into the difficulties thrown up by the period. This book is sure to become a point of reference for those working in the field.’ His Honour Judge Baumgartner, Deputy Chair, UK Spoliation Advisory Panel ‘It is crucially important that we continue researching the history of ownership of our museum collections. Only then can historic wrongs begin to be rectified. By providing both a broad overview and individual case studies, Schuhmacher offers invaluable guidance on the complexities of Nazi-era provenance research’. Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery ‘A timely and user-friendly addition to the Provenance literature. Schuhmacher provides a how-to manual (complete with website addresses) and a much-needed clarification of immediate post-war restitution efforts. A must-have for all museum and art-world professionals.’ Lynn H. Nicholas, author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War ‘Allowing readers to understand the complex world of Nazi-era provenance research, this book is both a guide and a moving work of research in its own right. Jacques Schuhmacher is uniquely placed to write this book and to further the goal of material restitution.’ Professor Dan Stone, Director of the Holocaust Research Institute, Royal Holloway University of London ‘This is the place to start for anyone wanting to know about provenance research into looted Nazi-era works of art, or wanting to do the research themselves.’ Lord Inglewood, Chairman of the UK Advisory Group on Spoliation Matters
Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.
A half century after the Fair Housing Act, despite ongoing transformations of the geography of privilege and poverty, residential segregation by race and income continues to shape urban and suburban neighborhoods in the United States. Why do people live where they do? What explains segregation’s persistence? And why is addressing segregation so complicated? The Dream Revisited brings together a range of expert viewpoints on the causes and consequences of the nation’s separate and unequal living patterns. Leading scholars and practitioners, including civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, elected officials, and fair housing lawyers, discuss the nature of and policy responses to residential segregation. Essays scrutinize the factors that sustain segregation, including persistent barriers to mobility and complex neighborhood preferences, and its consequences from health to home finance and from policing to politics. They debate how actively and in what ways the government should intervene in housing markets to foster integration. The book features timely analyses of issues such as school integration, mixed income housing, and responses to gentrification from a diversity of viewpoints. A probing examination of a deeply rooted problem, The Dream Revisited offers pressing insights into the changing face of urban inequality.
The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
Traces the impact of world events on St Helena's topography, ecology and human population, from the early 1500s to the present day. Since its discovery in the early 1500s, St Helena - though remotely situated - has repeatedly participated in events taking place on a world stage; evidence of those encounters is etched on the topography, ecology and human population of the island. This book examines the impacts of a century of casual but destructive visits from sailing ships of various nations followed by settlement by the East India Company; the fortification and population of the island by the Company, including the importation of an enslaved population; efforts to make it economically self-reliant; its employment a base for scientific observations from Edmond Halley to Joseph Hooker and beyond; its role as a prison-fortress from Napoleon to the twentieth century and as a base for anti-slavery patrols in the South Atlantic following the Abolition of Slavery; its decline since the end of the days of sail; measures taken to reconnect it with the modern world in terms of sea and air travel as well as electronic communication; and efforts to regain to some degree the ecological diversity of the virgin island setting.
Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space. By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today. Praise for Mobile Museums 'This book advances a paradigm shift in studies of museums and collections. A distinguished group of contributors reveal that collections are not dead assemblages. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by vigorous international traffic in ethnography and natural history specimens that tell us much about colonialism, travel and the history of knowledge – and have implications for the remobilisation of museums in the future.’ – Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge 'The first major work to examine the implications and consequences of the migration of materials from one scientific or cultural milieu to another, it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of collections and offers insights into their potential for future re-mobilisation.' – Arthur MacGregor
The Lower East Side has been home to some of the city's most iconic restaurants, shopping venues, and architecture. The neighborhood has also welcomed generations of immigrants, from newly arrived Italians and Jews to today's Latino and Asian newcomers. This history has become somewhat obscured, however, as the Lower East Side can appear more hip than historic, with wealth and gentrification changing the character of the neighborhood. Chronicling these developments, along with the hidden gems that still speak of a vibrant immigrant identity, Joyce Mendelsohn provides a complete guide to the Lower East Side of then and now. After an extensive history that stretches back to Manhattan's first settlers, Mendelsohn offers 5 self-guided walking tours, including a new passage through the Bowery, that take the reader to more than 150 sites and highlight the dynamics of a community of contrasts: aged tenements nestled among luxury apartment towers abut historic churches and synagogues. With updated and revised maps, historical data, and an entirely new community to explore, Mendelsohn writes a brand-new chapter in an old New York story.
