The Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke worked for two years with staff across the British Museum to select objects with which to explore the cultural impact of British Imperialism.
Locke, most well-known for his celebratory installation, The Procession, shown in the Duveen Hall at Tate Britain – a stunning spectacle of figures reflecting the ebb and flow of cultures, people, finance and power and its links with the sugar magnate, Henry Tate, said “I try to …mix ideas of attraction and ideas of discomfort”..” The same could be said of his more curatorial role at the British Museum, where the focus is on British interactions with Caribbean, African and Indian cultures.
Museums have, in recent decades, been forced to face up to questions of post‐colonialism, social inclusion and multiculturalism, to engage in the pressing debate as to who owns a culture and its artefacts. Whether they like it or not, institutions such as the British Museum have been thrust into the 21st century, where they can no longer be neutral about the messages encoded within their displays and the social values and beliefs traditionally espoused by the dominant culture. Slowly (too slowly for some), black minority ethnic groups are seeing their histories entwined with other narratives to constitute a broader picture of our ‘national heritage’. Museums now like to see themselves as providing a space to explore difficult contemporary issues, as places where they can offer a modicum of reconciliation for past wrongs. The museum’s role is no longer restricted to reflecting a monolithic, monocultural view of society. The history of slavery has long been the neglected ghost story in the national narrative of these islands. From the great stately homes of England to Tate Britain and the British Museum, our institutions have been built on the commercial exploitation of human trafficking and slavery.
In 1753, an Act of Parliament created the world’s first free, national, public museum. The British Museum opened its doors to ‘all studious and curious persons’ in 1759. Initially, visitors had to apply for tickets to see the museum’s collections during limited visiting hours, which meant entry was restricted to well-connected visitors who were given personal tours by the museum’s Trustees and curators. From the 1830s onwards, regulations changed, and opening hours were extended. The 1753 Act purchased the museum for the public. Using global networks created by European imperial expansion, the museum could collect materials from far-flung corners of the globe financed with an income partly derived from the enslaved labour on Jamaican sugar plantations.
In a video interview at the beginning of the exhibition, Locke makes it clear that there is no set route through the galleries and that objects and displays echo and mirror each other. Power, coercion, wealth, vulnerability and collusion form a complex historical palimpsest. On entering the gallery, a display of white (a nice irony?) Parian marble busts, including that of Queen Victoria, Princess Alexandra and Prince Albert Edward, souvenirs of the Great Exhibitions of 1851 and 1862, are dressed in exotic gold-coloured headdresses. These seem to be asking us to reconsider our imperial past, along with the untold narratives of exploitative power that weigh down British history. Closely researched, the exhibition unpicks the distorting and, often, mendacious stories we tell ourselves. Stories supported by generations of imperialist writers such as Rudyard Kipling.
Boats are deeply significant in Locke’s work, not just as metaphors for life’s journey but as symbols of the cultural flow of goods and wealth that crisscrossed the Empire in a complex web. Miniature ships complete with sails and rigging show the vessels that set sail in search of bounty. Nearby, we come across a leather case of Murano and Bohemian glass beads. Beads were used in Africa as early as AD1000, but from the 1600s, European-made glass beads became part of the currency in the trade for ivory, palm oil and enslaved people.
Forgotten bits of history are winkled out in this exhibition. In 1660 Charles II, King of Scotland and Ireland, and his brother the Duke of York, along with City of London Merchants, founded the Company of Royal Adventurers into Africa. The term’ adventurers’ rather gives that game away. The ‘Dark Continent’ – to use the title of the explorer Henry M. Stanley’s book, ‘Through the Dark Continent and in Darkest Africa’ – was seen as a prelapsarian, ‘primitive’ continent ripe for European pickings. The handwritten charter is chilling, revealing the formalised involvement of England in the profitable transatlantic trade of enslaved people. The popular view of Charles II is that of the stylish Restoration monarch, but as Locke says: ‘which history we remember depends on what’s been made visible to you’.
An old black and white photograph of Queen Mary and King Geroge V shows them sitting on a platform in full regal regalia in India to honour their succession to the throne. Proclaimed as Empress of India in 1877, Queen Victoria was the first British monarch to be honoured with a Durbar in Delhi, a lavish ceremony that drew on Mughal tradition. Such staged dramas were necessary demonstrations in the legitimisation of British rule, for as Locke says, ‘When you rule an empire, you’ve got to remind people constantly of your power’,
When slavery was abolished in the West Indies, it was not the slaves but the slave owners who were compensated. The graphic proof is presented in the handwritten document presented by the British government after emancipation in Essequibo, Guyana, in 1834. The categories, with their prices, are clearly delineated and include field labourers, head domestic servants, and inferior domestics.
Centre stage of this exhibition sits a replica of the Koh-I-Noor diamond. The world’s largest diamond had been held in the hands of a succession of rulers across South and Central Asia before it came via the East India Company to the British crown. “Any big gemstone”, Locke admits, “has its problems, “but this one has a world of problems. It’s been through lots of different empires, so it’s not as simple as saying ‘it should go back’, where should it go back to? As with lots of things in history, it’s complicated. I don’t think the diamond will, or for that matter should stay here forever; Empires fall”.
As more and more comes to light about our Imperial past, exhibitions such as this will have an important role in re-writing accepted historical narratives. Whilst highlighting the wrongs done by the British government over generations, the exhibition is subtle and imaginative and does not come up with trite solutions. The legacy of the British Empire is complex and endlessly debated, with some arguing that it spread technology and ideas of democracy, good governance and free speech, whilst others point to the suffering brought to millions in acts that violated fundamental human rights for profit. Hew Locke highlights this lattice of thorny questions in moving and thought-provoking ways. It is, after all, only when we ask the right questions that we will get anywhere near finding the right answers.
Hew Locke: what have we here? British Museum 17 October 2024 – 9 February 2025, Adults from £16, Members and under-16s free
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