From India to Independence: The formation of the Burma collection at the British Museum

Green, Alexandra

From India to Independence: The formation of the Burma collection at the British Museum

Resource type

Journal article

Creator (person)

Green, Alexandra

Date published

October 26, 2016

Abstract

The formation and development of the British Museum’s collection of Burmese objects provides numerous insights into British experiences of Burma from the macroscopic level of colonial annexation to the individual predilections of collectors. The variety of the collection meshes with the institution’s role as a museum of civilization. Yet the eclectic collection reveals the country’s relative unimportance within the British colonial project in India and collapses the colonial premise of museums as a locus of encyclopaedic knowledge organized along systematic lines. Conceptions of archaeology, geo-political importance, art, and ethnography have all contributed to the shape of the collection, as have stereotyped images of Burma. The collection encapsulates nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial, archaeological/art historical, ethnographic and museological endeavours and discourses, and indicates what may occur to collections as these ideas alter, as they have done over the course of nearly 200 years.