Commemorating Slavery 2007: a Personal View from Inside the Museums

The commemorative events for the 200th anniversary of Britain's outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade have been surprisingly numerous and varied. Eighteen months ago few cultural commentators would have predicted that the anniversary would generate such institutional and media interest. Now, at the time of writing in March 2007, the commemoration of the Abolition anniversary seems likely to overwhelm the coverage of all the other anniversaries competing for attention in this remarkable year: the English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707, Ghana's independence in 1957, the Falklands War in 1982, and a multiplicity of dates for India (the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the Mutiny in 1857, and independence in 1947).

As a historian of British imperialism who works as a museum consultant, I take a keen interest in how the anniversaries of major historical events are noticed in museum exhibitions and by the media. I am also interested in how university-based scholars, especially historians, interpret the success of museum exhibitions and how they see their work in relation to museums and similar cultural institutions. In particular, I am concerned about the exchange of information between universities and museums and whether this can be speeded up or facilitated in any way.

My observations in this article are informed by my half-dozen years' experience as a historical consultant with the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol (BECM) and, more recently, a stint at the Natural History Museum in London. In both of these institutions I have worked on slavery-related projects for 2007, including a year spent on the initial development of BECM's 'Breaking the Chains' exhibition, which opens at the end of April. My comments are personal ones and at the same time general in their scope. They do not relate solely to those institutions and they should not be read as either a critique of them or a statement of their policies and approaches.

Curating by Committee

Before looking at the relations between museums and academics it is worth considering the peculiar conditions that attach to attempts to put a controversial or 'difficult' subject such as slavery on show in a British museum. Ideally, of course, slavery would not register as a difficult subject for our museums or indeed any other cultural or educational institution, but that presupposes a considerable advance in how we view our past. The 2007 events are a step in the right direction, but they also show that there is a way to go before the transatlantic slave-trade becomes a standard chapter in the public's reading of British history.

Given that money in museums is usually tight, big anniversaries such as the 2007 Abolition one are helpful in enabling proactive curatorial and outreach staff to claim funding priority for a tie-in exhibition or associated activities, such as museum-trails, public debates, workshops, education-packs, and websites. When, as with 2007, a degree of external political pressure is applied as well, this can ensure that a museum that might otherwise have ignored a difficult topic has to find meaningful ways of exploring it. But that is where the advantages stop. Any potentially controversial project draws in numerous decision-makers from the very beginning of the development process, so that the curatorial and design team will not enjoy the same freedom of interpretation as they would in an object-led exhibition generated by a particular strength in their collections – say, East Asian ceramics or Tudor metalwork. The other interested parties internal to a museum will include senior management, the press and marketing people, the legal and ethics advisers, the outreach department, the web team, and possibly commercial departments such as the image-library. In addition to this increase in internal brokers, many more outsiders will be brought in to advise on the project's development too. In particularly high-profile projects, these advisers may be vetted by senior management and there may be a degree of competition between different museums and galleries within a city or region over who can secure the most respected or the most...