The comparative historical investigation of imperialism through the lens of collecting practices, museum archetypes and museums proper, helps shape our understanding of contemporary aesthetics and diversity management as well as helps identify what is imperial about our own approaches to material culture.
The creation and dissolution of empires has been a constant feature of human history from ancient times through the present day. Establishing new identities and new power relationships, empires also irrevocably altered social structures and the material culture on which those social structures were partly based. The political activities of empires are materially reflected in the movement of objects from periphery to center (and vice versa) and in the formation and display of collections which represent the potential for the production and the dissemination of knowledge. Imperial collecting practices tell stories that are complementary to and go beyond the classical sources of official history, the statistics of social history and even the narratives of collective or individual oral history. Building on previous work on European and Colonial object histories, this collection of essays—for the first time—approaches the subject of collecting and empires from a global and inclusive comparative perspective by addressing selection of the greatest empires the world has known from Han China to Hellenistic Greece to Aztec Mexico to the Third Reich.

Table of Contents
Alain Schnapp, Collection and Power in the Near Eastern World

Zainab Bahrani, The Biopolitics of Collecting : Empires of Mesopotamia

Michèle Pirazzoli-t’Serstevens, Princely Treasures and Imperial Expansion in Western Han China (second/first century bc)

Caroline Vout, Collecting like Caesar : The Pornography and Paideia of Amassing Artefacts in and after the Roman Empire

Nadia Cannata & Maia Wellington Gahtan, From a Culture of the Intimate to a Culture of the Remote. A Latin Epigram Collection between two Universal Powers : Papal Rome and the Holy Roman Empire

Enrique Florescano, The Mexica Empire : Memory, Identity, and Collectionism

Ebba Koch, Jahangir’s Hazelnut and Shah Jahan’s Chini Khana : The Collections of the Mughal Emperors

Thomas Da Costa Kaufmann, Global Aspects of Habsburg Imperial Collecting

Michael North, Collecting in the Dutch Colonial Empire, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Dominique Poulot, The Musée Napoléon as an Imperial Louvre

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Object Flows of Empire : Cross-Cultural Collecting in Early Colonial India

Ruth B. Phillips, The Other Victoria and Albert Museum : Royal Souvenirs, Victorian Science and the Itineraries of Empire at the Swiss Cottage Museum, Osborne House

Edhem Eldem, The (Still)Birth of the Ottoman ‘Museum’ : A Critical Reassessment

Katia Dianina, The Ruin and Restoration of the Russian Art Empire

Eva Maria Troelenberg, Collecting and the ‘Visual Evidence of Events’ : Exemplary reflections on Berlin between the Imperial and Post-Imperial Age

Christoph Zuschlag, Looted Art, Booty Art, ‘Degenerate Art’ : Aspects of Art Collecting in the Third Reich

Daniel J. Sherman, The (De)Colonized Object : Museums and the Other in France since 1960

Wendy Shaw, Signs of Empire : Islamic Art Museums from European Imperialism to the Global Empire of Capital

Krzysztof Pomian, Afterword. The Imperial Style of Collecting