‘Exploitative’ British Empire on show at New York museum
THE dark side of the British Empire and its foundation on slavery and cheap labour is being emphasised in a revamp of one of the world’s greatest museums.
New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has redesigned its British galleries to highlight the troubled history of the empire as a way of illustrating this country’s tradition of arts and crafts.
The galleries, which open to the public tomorrow as part of the Met’s 150-year anniversary programme, hold a rich display of British decorative arts, design and sculpture from the 400year period between Henry VII and Queen Victoria, including a large collection of teapots and china figurines.
The museum says it has made its collection “relevant to a contemporary audience” by stressing the development and growth of the British Empire “with all of its systems of exploitation”.
Wolf Burchard, the Met’s curator,
‘For all the beauty of these objects, [the] funds made to produce these things are in part due to the slave trade’
told artnet news: “For all the beauty of these objects, the British Empire was the backbone of the British economy and the funds made available to produce these things [are] in part due to the empire and the slave trade – and that.”
One gallery, devoted to “Tea, Trade, and Empire”, explores the period with 100 English teapots displayed in a pair of 10ft tall semicircular cases.
In another section an anti-slavery medallion made by the Wedgwood pottery workshop, showing a man in shackles, appears alongside an 18thcentury plan of a slave ship.
The explanatory caption reads: “Much of the wealth of this period [was] built on the labour of enslaved Africans and on the appropriated resources of other countries.”
Another display is a figure from 1719, produced in China by Amoy Chinqua, showing an East India Company entrepreneur whose imports from China, India, and the West Indies included tea, sugar, coffee, and chocolate, as well as porcelain, cotton, mahogany, and ivory, “produced at great material and human cost, and then transported thousands of miles” for the benefit of Britain’s new middle class.