The British Museum: Storehouse of Civilizations

by James Hamilton

Genres: History
Pages: 224
Rating:

Synopsis:

James Hamilton explores the establishment of the Museum in the 1750s (from the bequest to the nation of the collections of Sir Hans Sloane); the chosen site of its location; the cultural context in which it came into being; the subsequent development, expansion and diversification of the Museum, both as a collection and as a building, from the early 19th to the 21st century; the controversy occasioned by some of its acquisitions; and the legacy and influence of the Museum nationally and globally.

A product and symbol of the 18th-century Enlightenment, the British Museum is as iconic an expression of that cultural tendency as Johnson's Dictionary, the French Encyclopedie and Linnaean plant classification. Its collections embody the raw material of empiricism - the bringing together of things to enable the widest intellectual experiment to take place.

A concise history of one of the world's greatest and most comprehensive museum collections, from its founding in 1753.

James Hamilton’s The British Museum: Storehouse of Civilizations definitely isn’t the place to go for a critique of the British Museum’s collection practices. It does briefly mention some of the controversies, but mostly it’s a paean to the vision of the whole endeavour, fascinated with how the institution has developed.

And… to be fair, I found it equally fascinating: I didn’t expect to be so interested in the phases of building of the museum, but it really tracks with the way the collections increased, the splitting off of various things like the Natural History Museum and eventually the British Library. Hamilton manages to avoid it sounding too dry, and there are lots of colour photographs and additions which add well to the text (even if I don’t, personally, usually find them very enlightening).

A surprisingly quick read overall, and fascinating. It explicitly discusses (and reproduces) some of the founding tenets and principles, including the ones which are cited in arguments about refusing to return objects etc, so it’s also an interesting primer for discussion of repatriation and decolonisation, even if Hamilton doesn’t dig into that in this book.

Rating: 4/5