Race on display: The ‘Melanian’, ‘Mongolian’ and ‘Caucasian’ galleries at Liverpool Museum (1896–1929)

Abstract

This paper examines a form of evolutionary display that emerged at Liverpool Museum between 1896 and 1929, one based on racial types. It traces the formation and early history of this institution, as well as the development of evolutionary theories in the mid‐late nineteenth century. The paper moves on to analyse the beliefs and exhibitionary practices of Liverpool Museum's director, Dr Henry Ogg Forbes (1851–1932), and the influence of A.H. Keane's work on the organisation of collections. In 1896, notably, the Annual Reports began to list all new accessions under three races – Melanian (or ‘black’), Mongolian (or ‘yellow’), and Caucasian (or ‘white’) – terms closely linked to those articulated by A.H. Keane in his books Ethnology (1895. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) and Man: Past and Present (1899. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, revised and largely re‐written by A. Hingston Quiggin and A.C. Haddon). By 1901, this tripartite racial categorisation was translated to the spatial layout of the museum: the basement was devoted to Melanian objects, in the main entrance were the Caucasian displays, while the upper floor housed the Mongolian gallery. As the collections became reassembled into these new configurations, so the conditions of viewing artefacts also changed. The paper contends that the physical reorganisation of spaces and the implementation of new scopic regimes carried with them ideological messages which reinforced the intended hierarchy of peoples and material culture. It concludes by reflecting on the power ethnographic museums wielded in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain in promoting notions of scientific racism in popular culture.

Keywords:

• Ethnographic museums
• evolutionism
• Liverpool Museum
• racial displays

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Kirkby and Sam Alberti for commenting on the text. I am also grateful to Adrian Allan, Archivist at the University of Liverpool for supplying information on Forbes, and to the librarians at Liverpool Central Library and Record Office for providing access to Liverpool Museum's Annual Reports.

Notes

1. For more recent texts on race in the museum, see Faden 2007 and Lynch and Alberti, 2010.

2. For example, Bristol Museum, Warrington Museum and Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Glasgow.

3. ‘A description of the Liverpool Free Public Museum, including the Derby Collection of Natural History and the Mayer Collection of Antiquities and Art’ (1869: 23).

4. Herbert Spencer, Thomas Huxley, Francis Galton, Alfred Russel Wallace, John Lubbock and Edward Burnett Tylor.

5. Annie Coombes (1991:195) has identified debates in the Museums Association over the classification of ethnographic material in the late nineteenth century: ‘the general consensus delegated geographical displays as the responsibility of the national collections and typological as that of the local museums’. Most museums, however, adopted the geographical approach.

6. A term Pitt Rivers is credited with having introduced to ethnology: see Gosden and Larsen 2007: 107.

7. Henry Ogg Forbes (30 January 1851, Aberdeen – 27 October 1932) was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Edinburgh. He was primarily active in the Moluccas and New Guinea. According to Mackenzie, Forbes's appointment at Canterbury Museum was short‐lived, for he fell out with the board and left in May 1892 (2009: 222).

8. Annual Report 1896: 2.

9. Annual Report 1900: 62. See also Annual Report 1901: 58.

10. Sir Julius Haast (1822–87) was a geologist and explorer, Professor of Geology at the University of New Zealand, and New Zealand Commissioner of the India and Colonial Exhibition in London (1886).

11. Haast, ‘Proposal for Museum Extension’, 1874, in Canterbury Museum Records, 4/1, Folder 10, cited in Thomas, ‘Professional amateurs’. Cited in Henare 2005: 173–5.

12. Two years after Forbes established this system, however, the term ‘Melanian’ was replaced with ‘Ethiopian’, though the areas from which the objects derived remained the same (Africa, Melanesia, British New Guinea, Dutch New Guinea, New Britain, New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Fiji, Polynesia, Micronesia). ‘Ethiopian’ was used until 1901, when ‘Melanian’ was reinstated. The other two terms remained constant.

13. Shelton notes that Haddon's influence continued on after his eleven year tenure (2000, 174).

14. Haddon also worked with the curator at the Manchester Museum in the 1920s: see Alberti 2009: 73.

15. Minutes of the Faculty of Arts, 2 March 1904.

16. Minutes of the Faculty of Arts, 12 December 1906.

17. The chapters were arranged into sub‐races, for example, ‘Oceanic Negroes’ (‘Papuans and Melanesians – Negritoes – Tasmanians’), or ‘Northern Mongols’ (‘Japan, Korea, Siberia etc’). The ‘Negro’ races were subdivided into ‘African Negro: I Sudanese; II Bantus‐Negrilloes‐Bushmen‐Hottentots’, ‘The Oceanic Negro: Papuasians (Papuans and Melanesians) – Negritoes‐Tasmanians’. The Mongol race consisted of the ‘Southern Mongols’ (of which the Chinese were a part); the ‘Oceanic Mongols’ (Malays, Javanese etc) and the ‘Northern Mongols’ (Koreans and Japanese).

18. These were mentioned again in 1900: 59.

19. In her study of Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914, Kate Hill also argues that the racial displays at Liverpool Museum were articulated via distinct display styles with the Caucasian displays emphasising art (2005: 114–5).

20. Frances Larson (2009: 145–6) has noted similar exhibitionary distinctions in the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, which opened in 1913. While the Hall of Primitive Medicine was crammed full of ‘ exotic’ objects, the Hall of Statuary was large and airy with high ceilings, and statues that were widely spaced and elevated on plinths, to allow for ‘considered’ admiration.

21. Bennett (2004: 73) notes that, ‘Visitors were obliged to constantly retrace their steps and visit galleries out of sequence if they were to follow the ascending orders of nature's continuity’. Forbes had been aware of the specific problems of layout. He complained that they are ‘far from being well constructed for the purposes of a museum as they might be’ (Forbes 1901: 5).

22. After Forbes resigned on 31 March 1910, the title changed from ‘director’ to ‘curator’.

23. The Horniman Museum, Warrington Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, Kelvingrove Art Gallery & Museum, Bristol Museum, the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, to name but a few, all created ethnographic galleries based on evolutionary ideas.

24. Warrington Museum's Human History gallery is perhaps the very last to be predicated upon evolutionary ideas.