What happened to museums of world art and anthropology – often known as ‘temples of empire’ - during the demise of European imperialism? This strand of Claire Wintle’s research charts professional practice relating to Euro-American collections of Asia, Africa, Oceania and the Americas in the understudied mid-century period. It reveals the diverse ways in which museums were active in wider political, economic and social change, working as crucial gauges, microcosms, and agents of decolonisation. The project emphasises the role of (ex)colonial subjects and nations in the display of non-European collections in ‘the West’, and the progressive nature of museum practice, long before the ‘postcolonial’ in museums is assumed to have begun.

Claire has published articles on these themes as they played out in both the US and the UK in The American Historical Review and in Museum and Society journal. She is currently working on the first monograph to chart a UK-wide view of museum anthropology between 1945-1980, linking the sector’s development to wider political processes of immigration, nationalism, decolonisation and the Cold War. This will be supported by a Scouloudi Historical Award and a Mid-Career Fellowship with the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art in 2018.

Her interest in these ideas was also the basis for the book and associated international conference, Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-1970, co-edited with cultural geographer Ruth Craggs of Kings’ College London and published by Manchester University Press in 2016. The collection is interdisciplinary and includes contributions on architecture, theatre, museums, heritage sites, fine art, and interior design. It considers institutions such as artists’ groups, language agencies and coin mints in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and Europe. It asks what were the distinctive cultures of decolonisation that emerged in the years between 1945 and 1970, and what can they uncover about the complexities of the ‘end of empire’?

Claire also won funding for an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Project with the British Museum to study British and West African museum collaborations between 1945 and 1980. She was selected to participate in the 2012 International Research Seminar on Decolonization sponsored by the National History Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Library of Congress in Washington, DC, where she worked on these ideas.

Project aims

• To establish how professional practice in museums changed between WWII and the 1979 Conservative government, providing a new context for world cultures collections in Britain. The professionalisation of museum work, changing funding structures, career opportunities for women, the emergence of professional networks (e.g. the Museum Ethnographers Group, est. 1975), and the practical influence of shifts in art history and university anthropology will be scrutinised. Given the connectedness of world cultures to other collections, this project will advance scholarship on mid-century British museums more broadly.

• To examine the ways in which well-known shifts towards ‘postcolonial’ museum practice, usually dated to the late 1970s, were anticipated in the mid-century period. Pilot research has identified several illuminating examples of cross-cultural collaboration, restitution and international exchange in the case of individual museums. This project will investigate how representative these endeavours were, and reconsider when and where the idea of the ‘postcolonial’ in museums and art history began.

• To test the hypothesis that museums acted as political and social agents in a series of broad national and global transformations, 1945-1980. This project will explore the innovative idea that museums extended beyond being mere ‘mirrors’ of society. It will attend to the active role played by museum staff and collections in the wider political and social processes of nation-building, immigration, decolonisation and Cold War diplomacy. The project will afford a place for permanent museums in the literature which usually emphasises the role of temporary exhibitions in political change. Examining the ways in which UK museums explicitly interacted with politicians and their agendas, but also tacitly supported lingering imperial identities and acted as progressive, liberal tools for change, will help shape a burgeoning literature on the role of art ‘after’ empire and offer innovative ways of thinking about political transformation in this historical period.

List of associated publications

Wintle, Claire. "Decolonising the Museum: The Case of the Imperial and Commonwealth Institutes." Museum & Society 11, no. 2 (2013): 185-201.

Wintle, Claire. "Decolonizing the Smithsonian: Museums as Microcosms of Political Encounter." American Historical Review 121, no. 5 (2016): 1492-520. 

Image credit: ‘Sketch for general layout of proposed Ceylon court, Commonwealth Institute. James Gardner, c.1961. Catalogue number: DES-LJG-3-3-2-18. James Gardner Archive, University of Brighton Design Archives.’