Description:

Abstract: For millennia the Indian Ocean has been an arena of cultural and economic exchange through the movement of people, objects and ideas. By the late nineteenth century, British control extended across the Ocean and material culture continued to play an important role, not only as commodities but collected as objects representative of local cultures. Colonial officers, their wives and other British figures acquired significant collections through archaeological excavation, ethnographic collecting in the field, gifting, seizure or purchase. Local translators, assistants and scholars acted as mediators in the transmission of cultural knowledge associated with these objects, which were then displayed locally and globally, privately and publicly, in residences, exhibitions and museums. This paper will investigate the ‘colonial moment’ in the lives of objects in Zanzibar and other western Indian Ocean colonial territories to shed light on British engagement with and representation of the region. Using islands as a comparative geographical frame, it will demonstrate how objects and their biographies are a rich source for exploring imperial entanglements across the western Indian Ocean.

Bio: Sarah Longair received her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London in 2012 and is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the British Museum. Her research explores colonial history in East Africa and the Indian Ocean world through material and visual culture. Her current research project examines imperial collecting in the western Indian Ocean between 1850 and 1930, with a focus on islands. The monograph based on her doctoral thesis, Cracks in the Dome: Fractured Histories of Empire in the Zanzibar Museum, 1897–1964, was released in 2015. She has also published several book chapters, articles and edited volumes, including Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (2012), co-edited with John McAleer. She has worked at the British Museum for ten years both as an educator and as a researcher in the Africa section, where she led and designed a training programme for East African museum professionals in 2010–11. She recently curated an exhibition at the British Museum entitled Connecting continents: Indian Ocean trade and exchange. In June 2016, she will take up a position as a lecturer in the history of empire at the University of Lincoln.