The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum
reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with
Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections
is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa
that were transported to institutions in northwest England between
1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard.
While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped
by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated
people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in
determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant
that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa.
Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's
numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests
and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this
background account, their agendas are examined with reference to
surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within
the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange,
through which they forged new identities and statuses for
themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural
imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of
the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the
Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its
re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of
the energies and narratives behind its creation.
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