National Identity in the British Museum’s Enlightenment Gallery
In 2002, the Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums was signed by the ‘greatest’ museums in the world, with the British Museum among them, stressing their role as ‘agents in the development of culture’, and calling for an appreciation of the complexities of repatriation claims. In an article entitled ‘Britain is at the centre of a conversation with the world’, Neil MacGregor wrote the British Museum ‘was the first national museum in the world [that] had nothing nationalist in its purpose, and it remains one of the great achievements of the Enlightenment’. MacGregor retired as director of the British Museum last December, almost twelve years to the date that the Enlightenment Gallery was unveiled in commemoration of the museum’s 250th anniversary of its foundation by parliamentary act in 1753.
The permanent exhibition 'Enlightenment: Discovering the world in the 18th century' is accessed from the Great Court and opens onto a long hall, which was built in 1828 as the King’s Library until it was relocated to the British Library in 1998, and restored for its modern purpose. The occupation of such spatial prominence within the British Museum, allowing easy approach, underlines many facets of significance. The choice of building and theme referring to its 18th century origins intentionally presents an opportunity for the museum to recount its own history, which begins with the founding donor Hans Sloane, private collector and president of the Royal Society. His bust adorns the exhibition’s leaflet – quite a statement to those who see beyond the baroque quantity of hair. Jeremy Coote, head of Pitts Rivers Museum, believes ‘it is in fact the people who ‘made’ the collections and to whom the displays refer, the antiquaries, collectors, and explorers, who drive the gallery, an intuition reinforced by the appearance throughout the gallery of busts of such luminaries as Hans Sloane, Charles Townley, and Joseph Banks’. Annotated objects are mostly discussed in relation to their collector, returning them from tours to Britain, or labels might frequently be entitled as ‘Charles Townley’s Cista Mystica’ or ‘James Primasp and his collection’. Suffice to say that all these eminent collectors are white, male and British.
On entering the gallery, one walks into the physical and metaphysical centre of the exhibition, a section called ‘Classifying the World’, that binds the other six topics together. There is no prescribed chronological or thematic guide and incites free roaming through the displays, which are meant to resemble cabinets of curiosity. The gallery’s focus lies not on the objects – of which there are five thousand, none of which are considered treasures and all having been taken from the stores – but on transmitting the intangible with material culture. The lack of labels in the glass cases surrounding the walls also aims to illuminate the state of knowledge in the 18th century by encouraging speculation over explanation; hence the double-barrelled meaning of the title, according to its curator Kim Sloane, as it eggs people to ‘work it out for themselves using those 18th century methods of comparison and reason’. This museological interpretation of Enlightenment thought and practise is ultimately intended to question their systems of understanding the world, and to provoke thought on the inadequacies of artificial representation of nature. Whether visitors conclude upon this intended process remains questionable, but through the eclectic array of items, the exhibition does convey the encyclopaedic pursuits and universal aims of enlightened collectors.
Yet the exhibition declines discussion on cosmopolitanism, a key strain in 18th century thought, as Schiller so passionately discloses in the opening of Rheinische Thalia (1785): ‘I am writing as a citizen of the world, who serves no prince’. There is surprisingly little about the intellectual movement in an exhibition that claims on its leaflet to be about ‘the Age of Enlightenment, a time when people –including the collectors who created the British Museum – used reason and first-hand observation of the world around them to understand it in new ways’. There is no mention of any core Enlightenment themes of law or philosophy, or the rejection of monarchical and religious authority, as set out by Descartes’ return to first principals in didactic reasoning, or any mention whatsoever of the first democratic rumbles throughout Europe. Not only can one criticise the omission of all continental thinkers, but the gallery also neglects major British thinkers, such as Locke, Hume, Adam Smith or the Marquis of Salisbury, who arguably contributed more to intellectual thought than any of these collectors. Voltaire is only portrayed in connection with Joshua Wedgewood’s porcelain profiles; otherwise, he remains entirely absent.
What is particularly interesting in this phrase is its appropriation of British collectors, and so Britain in general, to the Enlightenment. This is an extraordinary statement for the British Museum to make, as the historiographical consensus is still trying to define a ‘British’ Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is traditionally seen to originate in France, but since Peter Gay’s emphasis on the international nature of the movement, scholarly debate has widened to include the Enlightenment in various national contexts, such as Franco Venturi’s work on Enlightenment in Italy. Although a Scottish Enlightenment has long been taken into account, an ‘English’ Enlightenment was simply denied in the 1970s, although this has changed with the works of J.G.A. Pocock. A ‘British’ Enlightenment raises questions on nationhood, as the Britain only existed since 1707 and was severely tested by the Jacobean Wars, in whose afterglow the British museum was founded – the first institution to bear the word. The British Museum airs its belief in a British Enlightenment to claim its ethos for the nation and presents this unflinchingly, without ambiguity.
The brown and burgundy paletted room with wooden floors and panelling has been described as ‘pompous’. Certainly it is bibliophilic, but the antiquarian books that adorn the walls only serve a decorative purpose. They boast no other function, except in nurturing the mystical portrayal of genteel intellectual life, such as armchair philosophers might enjoy. The intellectual subject matter of the Enlightenment Gallery does not absolve it from a museum’s attempt to appeal to the audience’s sensibilities and attachments. The space is mnemonic of a romanticised view of the grand country mansions or monastic Oxbridge libraries. What with all the curiously shaped instruments around, it evokes Dumbledore’s study from the Harry Potter books and film franchise, or the library in the film My Fair Lady. Another selling British bulwark is its monarchy and the room’s strong royal connections are heightened by the original intent of calling the exhibition The King’s Library: discovery and learning in the Age of George III. The ‘quintessentially British’ is heavily marketed to lure masses that have lapped up these popular myths and fiction.
As one walks through the British Museum, one is struck by the great linguistic and national diversity. The queuing coaches add up to an annual average of 6.5 million visitors, roughly 12 per cent of all tourists in London that the British Museum receives. Recent figures have shown that the British Museum was 2015 top attraction in Britain with a rise of 1.82 million visits to the previous year. The British Museum combined with the National Gallery attracts more people than Barcelona.
This multitude is perfectly reflected in the pristine political correctitude of the Enlightenment Gallery as the entire cultural, religious and ethnic spectrum is virtually covered, allowing any visitor, however specific, to form some kind of identification. Yet this imperialist hierarchy – British explorers collecting objects from all over the world – oddly reflects the museum's larger structure. Marc O’Neill, head of Glasgow museums, interprets MacGregor’s description of the British Museum as a ‘collection that embraces the whole world [that] allows you to consider the whole world’ as a defensive agenda against repatriation claims. The universal values celebrated by the museum and embodied in the Enlightenment Gallery appear credible only as long as one believes that cosmopolitanism must radiate from Britain. ‘Meanwhile the displays continue to communicate their old message – the superiority and untainted goodness of the collecting, displaying, appreciating, judging civilisations.’
The fame, power, and influence of the British Museum also allows it to broadcast its own ideologies, of which the theme of the Enlightenment Gallery is particularly topical. Although restoration of the gallery started before the September Attacks, the perceived threat to western values has been steadily mounting and Britain’s role in the international arena diminishing. It is common to tighten up when under threat, to ossify beliefs and present them as monolithic. In this political context, the Enlightenment Gallery serves as gentile vindication of western beliefs, to which many visitors are exposed to. Only a couple of months after its unveiling and one year after the Invasion of Iraq, MacGreogor stated ‘the British Museum was founded with a civic purpose, to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threat to our liberty’. Despite the achievements of the Enlightenment and the Enlightenment Gallery, their eurocentricity disclaims any similar values expressed elsewhere.
by Leo Shearmur