The museum artifact, like the zoo animal, occupies a curious epistemological position: mustered forth as the physical evidence for a historical or cultural claim, the artifact's only authority stems from the interpretations that are bestowed upon it, as it is identified, collected, catalogued, labeled, and exhibited. Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange offers an examination of the cultural uses to which artifacts have been put in the colonial histories linking Scotland and New Zealand from the late eighteenth through the late twentieth century. The author's research took her to the storerooms of museums in Scotland and New Zealand, studying those objects in whose changing fortunes and interpretations the shifting histories of British imperialism can be seen.

Captain Cook's voyage frames one end of the work; the Museum of New Zealand and the Museum of Scotland in the 1990s, the other. The resulting discussion charts the development of museums in Scotland and New Zealand as a reflection of British colonial expansion. Amiria Henare begins this examination in chapter 2, turning her attention to the Endeavour in 1769, at that moment when, in the company of Joseph Banks, James Cook first encounters New Zealand and the Maori. Collecting, in Henare's account, was the prompt result. She describes the Maori participation in these exchanges with the British and the twin motives of fascination and utility governing exchange on both sides. Once these moments of transaction with the Maori are concluded, however, Henare follows the artifacts themselves back to Britain and the translation of these objects into British cultural, literary, and artistic conventions.

A similar voyage to Scotland forms the subject of chapter 3, with the account of Banks's 1772 voyage to Iceland and, along the way, the west coast of Scotland. Here Banks and several colleagues from the Endeavour—among them, Daniel Solander—made the less epic but ethnographically perhaps no less interesting voyage to Mull and, on their return, the Orkney Islands and Scottish Highlands. Having botanized, commentated on the domestic habits of the Highlanders, and enthused over the haunts of Ossian, Banks bore his observations and artifacts back to the intellectual circles of Edinburgh and London.

From Banks's botanical specimens and “Cook cloaks,” we move to the goods carried with them by the nineteenth-century British settlers in New Zealand. Of particular interest is Henare's discussion, in chapter 5, of Edmund Gibbon Wakefield and the colonization efforts of the New Zealand Company in the 1830s and 1840s. Henare describes the success of the Otago Association in Scotland, recruiting settlers to New Zealand in the wake of the agricultural and economic transformation of the Scottish Highlands in the 1840s. The Nelson Institute, a museum or learned society founded by the New Zealand Company, reflects this shift from exploration to settlement: the artifacts were intended to educate the settlers in natural history and indigenous culture. Multiple displays, and multiple museums, could offer competing artifacts and interpretations of New Zealand culture, as in the New Zealand displays in the Great Exhibition of 1851.

Over the course of the book, Henare introduces several of the successive iterations of the museum from the eighteenth through the twentieth century: the work of individual collectors, such as Banks; a utilitarian or educational “learned society,” as with the New Zealand Company; a “storehouse of science,” in which artifacts could be arranged as evidence underpinning arguments concerning, for example, the aboriginal status of the Maori in New Zealand. In the late 1990s, Henare argues, a parallel can still be discerned between the museum culture of Scotland and New Zealand. In the local history museums of the Scottish Highlands and New Zealand, the Scottish diaspora can be narrated and romanticized with displays of artifacts regaling tourists with the story of the scattering of the romanticized Highland clans to the colonies or the arrival of the early Scottish and British colonial settlers. By the end of the twentieth century, the museum has taken a new form, as community archive, history exhibit, heritage center.

This book offers a long overdue foray into the study of the role of Scotland and the Scots in the history of collecting, museums, and imperialism. Lucid, elegant, beautifully written, the work is a fascinating examination of the always shifting role of the collected object, the artifact, in the negotiation of power and identity between Britain and its imperial objects from the eighteenth through the twentieth century. Not least interesting in the work is Henare's glance at the Scottish Highlands as an imperial object, in the observations and interpretations of Highland culture from Banks to the Clan Gunn Heritage Centre.

The work is intended as a historical ethnography and is at its best in its ethnographical moments, in particular the passages in which Henare details her own observations. It is not Henare's intent to provide a history of the development of museums and museum culture from the eighteenth century, but it is also not always clear how the author distinguishes between historical ethnography and history. Henare relies heavily on secondary sources and printed primary accounts to construct a historical narrative, and she does not seem interested in engaging with the ongoing discussion of collecting and museum culture found in the literature of history and the history of science and medicine.

The book, however, is not intended to be a history, much less an account of the Scottish diaspora and the colonial settlement of New Zealand. Instead, Henare has taken the history of museum culture in Scotland and New Zealand as a case study for an examination of the artifact as historical evidence. In her analysis of the artifact as idea—as an object that is endowed with significance through being collected, identified, displayed, and cited as evidence for a particular historical interpretation—Henare has made an interesting and original contribution to the study of the relationships between imperialism and cultural identity.