Entangled Histories

This book seeks to highlight some of the difficult imperial histories and legacies embedded in the Ethnographic Collection of the National Museum of Ireland and enable dialogue with source communities as well as Irish audiences. Ethnographic material acquired as part of the British Empire, represents the duality of Irish participation with the structure and practices of Empire and Ireland’s own experience as Britain’s oldest colony.

From the late 18th to the early 20th century, Irish explorers, soldiers, colonial officers, and administrators enforced British rule abroad against a backdrop of calls for self-governance, the repeal of the Union, rebellion, and civil war. Irish emigrants contributed to the advance of the colonial frontier. Trophies from battlefields in South Africa, Sudan and Ethiopia and taken during sanctioned looting of the royal palaces of Benin, Nigeria and Kumasi, Ghana, were displayed as symbols of their victory and evidence of the ‘civilizing’ power of the Empire.

However, expeditions also depended on local experts for supplies and were reliant on what Indigenous people were prepared to trade. Indigenous artists actively engaged with colonial markets and enriched precontact art forms with tradegoods and created portable souvenirs. Diplomatic gifts also drew Western visitors into their own networks of influence. The collections therefore also offer insights into Indigenous creativity and innovation, as well as resistance.

Examining the Collection through a modern lens of biographies as part of decolonizing practices reveals the multi-layered identities of the collectors, the objects themselves and their creators. Part I offers in-depth histories of the institutions whose collections were transferred to the Dublin Museum of Science and Art in 1877, reconnects donors and traces objects’ journeys to the museum, as gifts, loot, military and missionary collecting. Part II is divided geographically and focuses on the individual donors and artists and the life histories of specific objects, their contexts and uses.