Introduction: dividing the spoils – Henrietta Lidchi and Stuart Allan

Part I Ideologies of empire and governance
1 Spoils of war: custom and practice – Edward M. Spiers
2 The agency of objects: a contrasting choreography of flags, military booty and skulls from late nineteenth-century Africa – John Mack
3 Collecting and the trophy – John M. MacKenzie

Part II Military collecting cultures
4 Soldiering archaeology: Pitt Rivers and collecting ‘Primitive Warfare’ – Christopher Evans
5 The officers’ mess: an anthropology and history of the military interior – Lt Col Charles Kirke (Rtd) and Nicole M. Hartwell
6 Seeing Tibet through soldiers’ eyes: photograph albums in regimental museums – Henrietta Lidchi with Rosanna Nicolson
7 A regimental culture of collecting – Desmond Thomas

Part III The afterlives of military collections
8 Military histories of ‘Summer Palace’ objects from China in military museums in the United Kingdom – Louise Tythacott
9 Indigenising folk art: eighteenth-century powder horns in British military collections – Stuart Allan and Henrietta Lidchi
10 Community consultation and shaping of the National Army Museum’s Insight gallery – Alastair Massie
11 Mementoes of power and conquest: Sikh jewellery in the collection of National Museums Scotland – Friederike Voigt

Afterword: material reckonings with military histories – Henrietta Lidchi

Archival sources
Bibliography
Index

At this time of heightened international interest in the colonial dimensions of museum collections, Dividing the spoils provides new insights into the motivations and circumstances whereby objects were appropriated and acquired during colonial military conflict.

Over 130 military museums in the United Kingdom preserve the historical collections of British regiments, corps and services including artefacts taken by British servicemen during colonial campaigns and on imperial garrison duties across the globe. The phenomenon of collecting in theatres of war is primarily associated with looting. Combining approaches from the fields of material anthropology, imperial and military history, Dividing the spoils argues for a deeper examination of the motivations and circumstances that created these collections, operating within a range of intercultural histories that include diplomacy and enquiry, as well as expropriation and cultural hegemony.

As a contribution to the wider debate about the post-colonial legacies of museum collections, the research collected here considers how the amassing of objects was understood and governed in British military culture and how these objects have functioned in museum collections thereafter.

The discussion crosses generational boundaries and disciplinary fields, with distinguished contributors including imperial historians Edward Spiers and John M. MacKenzie, material anthropologists John Mack and Louise Tythacott, and archaeologist Christopher Evans.

Dividing the spoils suggests new avenues for sustained investigation in a contentious field, which will appeal to students, researchers and practitioners working on colonial and military museum collections as well as the wider fields of social and cultural history, anthropology and archaeology.