Empire’s Display Cases

Since the 15^th century, European exploration and colonization of other continents have combined economic and scientific aims, amounting to both a real and symbolic appropriation of the world. During the 17^th century, European elites were enamored by having samples of animals, vegetation, minerals and exotic objects in their cabinets of curiosities. In the 18^th century, states commanded and organized grand scientific explorations and collections that gave way to the founding of natural history museums in Europe and the United States. Different sciences (astronomy, cartography, botany, medicine) benefitted from this inventory, collection and sampling business. The scientific and narrative publications of these trips contributed to the diffusion of this knowledge.

At the end of the 19^th century, the new momentum of colonial conquest, with the foundation of English, French, German, and Belgian colonial empires, reinvigorated this process. While natural sciences increasingly oriented themselves towards colonial objects and terrains, new human sciences such as geography or anthropology developed within the framework of these empires. At the same time, we see the construction of specifically “colonial” research and teaching in various institutes and universities. Within the colonial context, the sciences serve as a legitimization to colonization and, in return, they progress thanks to the conquests. The race for scientific publication is one of the contributing factors to the competition between rival European states during the process of colonization. These scientific developments also serve the economies of the colonizing powers. Popular consumption products – like rice, cacao, coffee – or products necessary to industry – like rubber, oleaginous materials, coal, phosphates, bauxite – are the result of particularly lucrative cultures and discoveries. The knowledge, objects, samples and products are popularized through colonial exhibitions, botanical and acclimatization gardens, and zoological gardens.

Empire’s Display Case aims to present a selection of different botanical, animal, and ethnographic samples that made up some of the former Colonial Museum of Marseille’s (1893) collection. The museum was founded by the botanist and professor at the faculty of science Édouard Heckel. He was also at the origin of the Colonial Institute of the city, founded in the same year. Marseille’s Colonial Museum was the first museum of this type in France. The collections are made up of his private collections and supplemented by donors (military personnel, explorers, scientists) with whom he had contact. Presented as an institute for applied research and teaching, the Colonial Museum of Marseille is part of Marseille’s network of colonial sciences. The network was closely linked to the local economic and industrial circles, particularly to the Chamber of Commerce, and more broadly to the strategic interests linked to colonisation. The museum was financed by the Ministry of Colonies and private donors.

The cartographic navigation feature allows one to understand the expanse of the regions from which objects were removed. Logically, it’s the geography of the French colonial empire that is drawn, but not uniquely. Certain objects were “acclimatized” in French colonies but originated from other spaces, or they were removed outside of the borders of the Empire by explorers and travellers. Their trajectories tell the story of the exploration and appropriation of the world by scholars, military personnels, and French explorers. The collections of the former colonial museum are still dispersed today. Our selection of objects come from the four institutions who were among the primary inheritors of the samples and objects of the old museum: the Faculté des sciences d’Aix-Marseille Université ( Faculty of Sciences at Aix-Marseille Universite), the Muséum d’histoire naturelle de Marseille (Museum of Natural History of Marseille), the Musée d’arts africains, océaniens et amérindiens de la ville de Marseille (Museum of African, Oceanian and Indigenous American Arts of Marseille) and the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac de Paris (Museum Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris). Reunited and presented here, they allow for a critical return on the colonial sciences and a reflection on the necessity to present “object biographies” in public collections.