Natural historian museums are often portrayed as benign and charming facts about the natural world, but in reality natural history collecting was shaped by, and contributed to, British imperialism.
Natural history became an ideological tool of empire to justify colonial dispossession and displacement and propagate theories of race. Like art and other museums, and botanical gardens, natural history museums were built as expressions of imperial power.
Museum collections often came from the colonies of the empirial power. Coersion and colonial violence was employed to mobilise the labour required for natural history collecting, while the expertise of Indigenous people was exploited without giving them credit. Collectors commonly stole the ancestral remains and cultural artefacts of Indigenous people, and some of these materials were put on display.
In the past, natural history museums used Indigenous human remains to convey pseudoscientific ideas about human racial differences, including white superiority.
We are working to produce a virtual “uncomfortable natural history tour” of the University of St Andrews’ Bell Pettigrew Museum, which will shed light on the colonial context of the collection.