It would be but to enter into the spirit of Robert Aguirre's work to describe it as a curiosity. Museums and collectors are accustomed to their roles as guardians of the past; it is refreshing here to see them cast as subjects of historical enquiry. This book focuses predominantly on British perceptions of Mexico and Central America in the first half of the nineteenth century—perceptions formed in large measure by men who went out to search for pre-Columbian remains, sent them home, and then displayed both the excitement of their travels and the fruits of their archaeology to a British public eager for spectacle and for confirmation of their own global mastery. Aguirre's thesis, broadly, is that such cultural possession was both an aspect and an affirmation of Britain's wider control: that politics, trade, and investment went hand in hand with what he refers to as imperial science and the appropriation and subjugation of another's identity. Needless to say, digging for empire has its conceptual limitations. Aguirre bolsters his argument, though, by demonstrating how showmen and the museums of North America soon came up with the same idea. Within decades the mesoamerican past had become a sort of battleground for entrepreneurial antiquarians and well-funded repositories on both sides of the Atlantic. Buffalo Bill was the working man's equivalent.

Early Victorians, of course, did not need to demonstrate their superiority by excavating barbaric cultures; their technology and their economic might were plain for all to see. Not only that, but the same exhibitions were held with similar appeal in other European capitals that had few pretensions to international power. The British also brought home fauna and flora from wherever they went, yet it is hard to brand Kew Gardens as a symbol of informal empire. Furthermore, they dug up their own island with equal zeal. In short, amassing and studying exotic remnants was part of the intellectual discovery so characteristic of the age. One institution above all, the British Museum, bestrode this rarified world of cultural acquisition with a timeless message: give me your fallen gods, your scripts, and your huddled fragments yearning once more to breathe. They would never, of course, breathe free—but they did survive. This book is welcome testimony to that.

It is difficult not to share Aguirre's sympathy for these native peoples of the Americas. Decimated and degraded by Spaniards, what was left of their inheritance thereafter fell increasingly into the hands of others from the world beyond who depicted both them and the relics of their forebears as degenerate curiosities. Yet by the nineteenth century even the creole descendants of the Conquistadores had come to realize that the past of those whom they had downtrodden for three centuries was perforce incorporated into their own; from the 1820s onward, to its credit, the Mexican government did try to halt the widespread traffic in Aztec and other remains. But stopping a lucrative export trade in art and artifacts, then as now, was no easy matter—particularly if the foreigners who conducted that trade had at times support from governments abroad and could all too often rely on the tacit complicity or corruption of local officials. Today, the chain saw gives power to despoil and plunder beyond the imagination of previous generations. Nevertheless, even in the early nineteenth century, treasures, ornaments, statues, and human freaks fed an extensive entertainment industry in Europe and North America long before the advent of the cinema and professional sport. Aguirre argues that this was the price the political and economic elites of the region had to pay for the inward investment and economic benefits they derived from doing business with the British. The argument is plausible, though not always persuasive. The relationship between personal and national acquisitiveness is indeed difficult to demonstrate, and even the documented plot to dismantle whole sites and ship them back to London seems a little overblown as serious endeavor. Readers may question some of Aguirre's interdisciplinary judgments, though the subject matter and his own evident enthusiasm will always draw them on. Interdisciplinary all too often being an excuse for no discipline at all, the question may arise whether Aguirre entirely escapes the trap of becoming too reliant on an introspective vocabulary. For the most part he does escape, though there is a further slight tendency toward “citationary authority” with perhaps too many references to other luminaries in his text. These minor observations notwithstanding, the book has an overriding virtue in that it gives a form of cohesion to material that is varied and fragmentary. Informal empire is the device for so doing; the phrase thereby comes to serve a purpose even if the problem of definition never goes away.

This research masters detail and conveys erudition. It also provokes and addresses some complex questions, the responses to which reveal as much about the present as the past. How do perceptions of objects change when they are set as trophies in an alien context? Why does the archaeology of some lost civilizations uncover art and cultural splendor while amid others it throws up detritus fit only for departments of ethnography? For the British, of course, Greece, Mesopotamia, and the lands of the Israelites would always yield scraps more worthy of academic acclaim than anything originating in the New World. Perhaps, as Aguirre suggests, the past is defined by those who physically possess it, though it might equally be said that it is defined by those societies whose educational antecedents, as well as their institutions, have developed an active interest in it. The indigenous inhabitants of Central America may well have revered the ruins that lay around them in the nineteenth century, but, by the standards of the time, an overriding qualification for ownership was knowing what something was. Those who revered did so in silence: it is the records, the writings, and the museums of those who knew, and who could catalog, which have survived. It was the latter who yoked the relics of ancient peoples in faraway places to their own sense of nationhood and destiny. Aguirre's work is worthy of the long scholarly tradition that, in part, it explores. He reveals its darker side. He speaks for those who had no voice and wrote no history.