ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Beyond the Exhibition - Museums as Engines of Epistemic Imperialism, 1850-1920

• In Event: Colonialism, Collecting, and Ethnology

English Abstract

This paper examines how nineteenth-century European metropolitan museums functioned as inherently multi-dimensional entities, whose architecture, public orientation, collecting practises, and scientific connections produced and stabilised specific forms of epistemic imperialism. These institutions emerged at a moment when European states increasingly used museums to articulate their global ambitions, to naturalise imperial hierarchies, and to compete with one another for cultural and epistemic superiority. Through three case studies, the paper highlights how individual museums in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries combined different configurations of spatial structure, collection practices, and public narratives to enact their imperial knowledge agendas. By examining the British Museum, the Koloniaal Museum in Haarlem/Amsterdam, and the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the paper contrasts three configurations of epistemic imperialism: the British Museum’s aim to display the globality of its empire, the Koloniaal Museum’s trade-oriented production of practical colonial knowledge, and the Pergamon Museum’s late-entry attempt to gain epistemic imperial prestige through monumental displays of Mediterranean excavation finds. The analysis draws on architectural plans, institutional records, and contemporary publications to reconstruct the epistemic mechanisms through which these institutions sustained imperial authority. In bringing these museums into dialogue, the paper reveals how diverse spatial, economic, and academic practices converged to legitimise and consolidate imperial power by embedding it within enduring epistemic structures. Set against one another, these cases illuminate the plurality of imperial epistemic formations and the tensions that arose between their different ambitions, audiences, and claims to authority.

Author

• Alexander Stoeger, Saarland University