The British Slave Trade & Public Memory, and: India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, and: Wondrous Curiosities: Ancient Egypt at the British Museum (review)

Europe continues to be haunted by the ghosts of its past, whether those are memories of the Shoah, slavery and the slave trade, and, among other nightmares from which it has yet to awake, overseas conquest and colonial rule. Tony Judt recently noted that post-1945 Europeans lived in a “House of the Dead” after the horrors of Fascist and Communist rule, genocide and the two World Wars, a continent dominated by Hannah Arendt's twin focal points of memory and evil.¹ That remains the case today for many reasons on both sides of the English Channel and the Elbe, and whether one walks the streets of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, or Sarajevo. But reactions to such ghosts vary among and within generations, nations, and classes. Whereas only a few years ago French school teachers were required to teach about the virtues of French imperialism, their colleagues in Germany are prevented by the law from denying the Holocaust. Monuments to the murderers of local Jews are raised in some of the Baltic States while no English grammar school’s curricula is complete without lesson plans on the “Middle Passage.” It is as if William Faulkner were as correct about the Europe and Britain of today as he was about his beloved and tragic South half a century ago: the past is not even in the past and some people have too much history. Or, as German historians would add, where in Europe have men and women truly mastered or come to terms with their past, as the Germans continue to struggle with their own Vergangenheistbewaltigung? Apparently not in England, where its own “History (if not Culture) Wars”' continue to be fought, as they have, perhaps, been for several centuries.

The trinity of well-written and provocatively-argued monographs under review are each in their own way about England’s struggle to master its own and others’ pasts, as well as that struggle on the part of those living in independent countries formerly under England’s informal, or formal hubristic grasp. Readers will better understand how English men, women, and students wrestle with their histories, as well as how South Asians, Americans, and Egyptians, among others, grapple with similar if not the same living ghosts. In the cases of these three books, those pasts continue to resonate in various sites of memory about slavery and the slave trade, British rule in South Asia, and the preservation, if not outright theft, and display of Ancient Egypt’s material culture. Such discussed sites of memory include the British and South Kensington Museums, major department stores, popular monuments and festivals, guided walks and, among others, the visual and performing arts. They can even include the televised version of a prominent eighteenth-century novel. Each in their own way addressed and continues to address the powerful and contested relationship to a constantly moving past, if not an equally dynamic present. That was the case with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archaeologists and “the antiquities” of Ancient Egypt; it is also true today with museums displaying the artifacts of the slave trade. Readers interested in topics such as the politics of display, tourism, memory and representation will not be disappointed; nor will those more attracted to the study of the ideas and practices of race and, for want of a better term, “Orientalism.” The three books contribute to not only how the English thought about and represented other people, but also, not surprisingly, how and what they thought about themselves. As slavery was an often distorting mirror reflecting English liberty; traditional India was a complementary mirror for modern Britain. As Saloni Mathur reminds us, such mirrorings overflow with powerful and at times tragic ironies.

Mathur’s India...