Monument Preservation and the Vexing Question of Religious Structures in Colonial India

The principles of conservation spelled out in the first law on preservation for the whole of India — the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904 — were indicators of the ways in which conservation policy was made in colonial India: determined by the state, and heavily influenced by principles of preservation derived from Europe, based on a specifically colonial understanding of India's history and heritage, and of the ‘guardianship’ role of the colonial state. Yet attempts to implement pre-colonial religious structures could have unforeseen results, as local, indigenous religious groups began to utilize the opportunities for funding opened up by the new Act and succeeded in using the provisions of the Act in ways that best suited their own interests. This chapter looks closely at the interface between preservation policy and practice in colonial India in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, and calls into question colonial hegemony as an explanatory framework for understanding a complex process of cultural practice.

Unity Out of Diversity? The Making of a Modern Christian Monument in Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

The landscape of Khartoum was changed when in 1906 a British Arts and Craft architect was commissioned to build the Anglican Cathedral of All Souls — partly as a memorial to General Gordon. The design was exhibited in 1909, and described as ‘A very curious piece of architecture, the style of which we presume is suggested by local associations’. The finished church, it is argued, was the masterpiece of the architect Robert Weir Schultz, an evocative blend of his earlier studies of Byzantine architecture in Greece, and medieval buildings in England and Cairo, and an impressive response to local conditions and materials in Sudan. The building has survived to today, but as the Museum of Sudanese History. Its fine furniture has been moved out, but can be tracked down. The original ensemble can be re-assessed as an evocation of an early Christian environment in a developing country.

Of Doubtful Antiquity

This chapter examines the ways in which Britain's campaigns in the Crimean War (1854–56) became entangled in the ancient world. During the conflict, British officers in the Crimea went in search of ancient sites to excavate — while newspapers in London reported avidly on their finds. The chapter centres around Duncan McPherson, a military doctor who carried out several strikingly ambitious Crimean excavations in collaboration with Robert Westmacott, son of the neoclassical sculptor Sir Richard Westmacott. It explores how difficult and frustrating the search for the ancient world became, for Britain's soldier-archaeologists — and how frequently their pursuit of the past was thwarted.

Dying Americans

Early modern writers had long noted the apparent decimation of some indigenous peoples. However, such discussions took on a new and urgent form in the nineteenth century as a new scientific understanding of extinction as an endemic natural process was established. Many scholars have explored the notion of dying races in histories of colonial contact, modern land rights, or genocide; yet most have overlooked the new epistemological status of extinction as a mechanism for explaining natural change. This chapter explores how this scientific shift became combined with notions of wilderness in the American context to rationalize policies of Indian dispossession, forced removal from their traditional homelands, and the establishment of the world's first national parks. In doing so, it highlights fruitful directions for future histories of heritage, endangerment, and conservation.

Representing Ancient Egypt at Imperial High Noon (1882–1922)

During the height of Western imperialism in Egypt from 1882 to 1922, the British ran the country and the French directed the Antiquities Service. Two contemporary artistic allegories expressed Western appropriation of the pharaonic heritage: the façade of Cairo's Egyptian Museum (1902) and Edwin Blashfield's painting Evolution of civilization in the dome of the Library of Congress (1896). The façade presents modern Egyptology as an exclusively European achievement, and Evolution presents ‘Western civilization’ as beginning in ancient Egypt and climaxing in contemporary America. The illustrated cover of an Arabic school magazine (1899) counters with an Egyptian nationalist claim to the pharaonic heritage. A woman shows children the sphinx and pyramids to inspire modern revival, and Khedive Abbas II and Egyptian educators, not European scholars, frame the scene. The careers of three Egyptologists — Gaston Maspero, E. A. W. Budge, and Ahmad Kamal Pasha — are explored to provide context for the allegories.

Appropriation to Supremacy

This chapter studies a particular moment in the emergence of the idea of the ‘native’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By considering the role played by Pacific islanders, Asians, and Africans in defining territorial identities, bonds of attachment to rulers, and patterns of settlement prior to contact with colonists, it argues that the ‘native’ emerged partly out of extant traditions. The British empire recontextualized mutating extant senses of culture in global maps of heritage and thus minted a new sense of the ‘native’. Throughout this process, what appears is not an unproblematic concept of the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’, but a notion of how claims of a separate heritage arose in contexts of hybridity and creolization.

Plunder or Preservation? Negotiating an Anglo-American Heritage in the Later Nineteenth Century in the Old World and the New

This chapter locates issues of heritage and preservation in broader debates about ownership of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ property and its stewardship (or conservation) as an emerging representation of good governance. Phases of this relationship are considered at three ‘site-museums’. Initially, some in the United States saw Shakespeare's Birthplace as its own heritage and tried to acquire it. Secondly, Britain, which still spoke for Canada in matters of foreign policy, cooperated with the United States to protect monumental and scenic interest at Niagara Falls. This took place as national parks were emerging as a form of representational culture. Finally, British and American voluntarist groups come together to protect Carlyle's House, London, with government backing behind the scenes as a form of cultural diplomacy.

The Cotswolds in Jerusalem

This chapter investigates the city-planning of Jerusalem under the British Mandate in light of changes of thinking about the urban in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In particular, it explores how Charles Ashbee, the first civic adviser, could enact his Garden City and Arts and Crafts principles, developed twenty-five years earlier, because of the specific conditions of imperial governance. The privileging of the medieval city, in contrast to the contemporary — a principle deeply indebted to artistic ideals of a previous generation — deeply influenced decisions of what to restore, destroy, or preserve. The chapter discusses how religion, empire, and urban planning interlock in a key site of cultural conflict.

Publication as Preservation at a Remote Maya Site in the Early Twentieth Century*

This chapter concerns the concept of ‘remoteness’ in early Mesoamerican archaeology as a factor in site preservation. Throughout the nineteenth century, Maya sites were academically and popularly conceived of as beyond ‘preservation’ in any realistic sense. However, the late nineteenth-century emergence of archaeology as a science and the growth of North American academic interest in Central America forced a situation where ‘preservation’ was incorporated into professional archaeological identity. Using the Guatemalan site of Holmul as a case study, the chapter presents publication as a form of preservation for logistically challenging archaeological sites in the early twentieth century. Publication is conceived of as an obligatory process that not only produced a textual ‘preserved site’, but served as an homage to advances in the development of North American-style archaeology as a scientific enquiry.

Unholy Water

The first Aswan Dam was the most controversial civil enterprise of the early British Mandate in Egypt. It was also one of the most ideologically loaded projects of a British-dominated government, which wished to be seen as both modernizing force and guardian of Egypt's heritage. In this conflicted situation, lobbies for and against the construction of the dam do not follow predictable patterns. Engineers, seeing themselves as modern parallels to the biblical Joseph, often expressed greater discomfort with the drowning of monuments than did those, including Egyptologists, whose professional concerns were with Egypt's ancient past. Initially centred around biblical imagery and the iconic temple of Philae, the debate was transformed by the emergence of concern for Egyptian prehistory and consequent attraction of new anthropological interests.