THE BRITISH STATE AND THE ANGLO-FRENCH WARS OVER ANTIQUITIES, 1798–1858

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to a revisionist account of the role of the British state and the nation in building the British Museum's early antique collections. Traditionally, there has been a perception that, in contrast especially to France, the British national collections of antiquities were formed primarily by private individuals donating objects, while the state looked on with indifference, or, at best, occasionally bought antiquities on the cheap from enterprising travellers or diplomats. Yet, the scale and quality of the British Museum's collections owe much to the power and reach of the British military and imperial state. The harnessing of political, diplomatic, and military resources to archaeological work, the dovetailing of private and public efforts, and a strong element of international, especially Anglo-French, competition added up to a substantial programme of public patronage. This is easily ignored by approaches that only consider (continental European) ideal types of public patronage, such as Napoleon's Egyptian Commission on the Sciences and Arts. The article sketches the chronological and geographical unfolding of state-supported archaeological activities around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and considers the connections between archaeology and diplomacy, the different modes of collection building, and the origins of debates about preservation and spoliation.