Articles
Saturday, April 19, 2025
This British Museum exhibition dealt with British colonialism and conveyed something of the scale and brutality of Britain’s empire using selected objects, artworks, documents and images, mainly from the British Museum’s but some from other UK collections.
The exhibition showed how colonial power has been asserted through symbols like portraits, crowns, thrones, or coats of arms, which sometimes appropriate objects or images of the colonised themselves; the relationship between trade, armed conquest and various forms of subjugation; and the colonial conversion of objects of veneration or symbolic or simply utilitarian purpose into trophies, treasure, art or trash.