Author: Carsten Stahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269412X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Confronting Colonial Objects
Author: Carsten Stahn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269412X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019269412X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 593
Book Description
The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.
Shooting a Tiger
Author: Vijaya Ramadas Mandala
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199096600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
The figure of the white hunter sahib proudly standing over the carcass of a tiger with a gun in hand is one of the most powerful and enduring images of the empire. This book examines the colonial politics that allowed British imperialists to indulge in such grand posturing as the rulers and protectors of indigenous populations. This work studies the history of hunting and conservation in colonial India during the high imperial decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this time, not only did hunting serve as a metaphor for colonial rule signifying the virile sportsmanship of the British hunter, but it also enabled vital everyday governance through the embodiment of the figure of the officer–hunter–administrator. Using archival material and published sources, the author examines hunting and wildlife conservation from various social and ethnic perspectives, and also in different geographical contexts, extending our understanding of the link between shikar and governance.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199096600
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
The figure of the white hunter sahib proudly standing over the carcass of a tiger with a gun in hand is one of the most powerful and enduring images of the empire. This book examines the colonial politics that allowed British imperialists to indulge in such grand posturing as the rulers and protectors of indigenous populations. This work studies the history of hunting and conservation in colonial India during the high imperial decades of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At this time, not only did hunting serve as a metaphor for colonial rule signifying the virile sportsmanship of the British hunter, but it also enabled vital everyday governance through the embodiment of the figure of the officer–hunter–administrator. Using archival material and published sources, the author examines hunting and wildlife conservation from various social and ethnic perspectives, and also in different geographical contexts, extending our understanding of the link between shikar and governance.
The East India Company at Home, 1757-1857
Author: Margot Finn
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787350282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540
Book Description
The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
Publisher: UCL Press
ISBN: 1787350282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 540
Book Description
The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain. The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
The Afterlife of Used Things
Author: Ariane Fennetaux
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317744977
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327
Book Description
Recycling is not a concept that is usually applied to the eighteenth century. “The environment” may not have existed as a notion then, yet practices of re-use and transformation obviously shaped the early-modern world. Still, this period of booming commerce and exchange was also marked by scarcity and want. This book reveals the fascinating variety and ingenuity of recycling processes that may be observed in the commerce, crafts, literature, and medicine of the eighteenth century. Recycling is used as a thought-provoking means to revisit subjects such as consumption, the new science, or novel writing, and cast them in a new light where the waste of some becomes the luxury of others, clothes worn to rags are turned into paper and into books, and scientific breakthroughs are carried out in old kitchen pans.
Tracing War in British Enlightenment and Romantic Culture
Author: Gillian Russell
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137474319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
This volume argues for the enduring and pervasive significance of war in the formation of British Enlightenment and Romantic culture. Showing how war throws into question conventional disciplinary parameters and periodization, essays in the collection consider how war shapes culture through its multiple, divergent, and productive traces.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137474319
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 270
Book Description
This volume argues for the enduring and pervasive significance of war in the formation of British Enlightenment and Romantic culture. Showing how war throws into question conventional disciplinary parameters and periodization, essays in the collection consider how war shapes culture through its multiple, divergent, and productive traces.