Emerging from a 2009 conference, Curating Empire examines museum practices at several points across the British Empire, including locations in Sierra Leone, England, Zanzibar, New Zealand, Australia, India, and Sri Lanka. This collection changes what we know about museums and empire by asserting a few key arguments.

Curating Empire's most significant point is that colonial museums and exhibitions did not constitute a monolithic projection of British power outward from the imperial center to its peripheries. Sarah Longair's chapter shows how Ailsa Nicol Smith, curator of the Zanzibar museum (1936–42), had a “problematic relationship with the government” (137), hardly the makings for a monolithic imperial message. According to Gareth Knapman, Sir Frederick McCoy at Melbourne's National Museum of Victoria was not on the empire's periphery; rather, he dictated many things back in London. The meaning of museums' messages depended on how visitors perceived them, and Jennifer Wellington problematizes the reception of exhibits by showing how visitors to the Australian War Memorial Museum felt emotions instead of gaining an understanding of the history of World War I. Claire Wintle's analysis of the Brighton Museum and visitors' interaction with empire at provincial museums explains how all sorts of things shaped visitors' contacts with non-European material culture, not just the museum visit itself.

Wintle's chapter and others here provide concrete case studies to inform more theoretically based studies in museology. The book also illuminates the study of colonial museums in Britain's empire by drawing our attention to lesser-known exhibitions and displays in order to complement what has been written about empire at large-scale museums, such as the Pitt Rivers Museum or the British Museum, or the 1924–25 Wembley exposition. Wintle's chapter on visitors to provincial museums makes this explicit, but the point is sustained through most of the chapters, introducing the reader to more unfamiliar exhibits and their curators. In this way, Curating Empire complements John M. MacKenzie's fine Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities (Manchester, 2009), which examines museums in the dominions and colonies.

In another key point, Curating Empire shows how budgets profoundly shaped museums and their messages. Several chapters highlight the perennial challenge of obtaining funding, reinforcing the conclusion that there was not any centralized, powerful British Empire projecting itself by means of museums. As Paul Basu puts it in his chapter on the Sierra Leone Museum in Freetown, “From a Colonial Office perspective, museums were regarded as indulgences of limited value, the expense of which simply could not be justified” (163). The book reveals the many difficulties inherent in founding museums, maintaining them, and managing people's perception of them in colonial societies.

Because of the dearth of both funding and interest from Whitehall, much fell to personal initiative. As Wintle puts it, “This volume seeks to test the impact of the individual curator on the dynamics of empire” (50). Thus, many of the chapters take a biographical approach. This is true even of Sadiah Qureshi's essay, which is not about a curator but an object: “Tipu's Tiger,” a (mechanized) tiger attacking a person that included an organ to create sounds. Qureshi re-creates the life story of one object, which the British captured in India in 1799 and whose meanings changed over time depending on its physical location and display. Because of curators' individual initiative, a personal touch, even idiosyncrasy often marked the making of collections, as opposed to central planning. This was certainly the case with Sir Frederick McCoy's National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. His acquisition decisions shaped later curatorial choices that made it a museum of display rather than research. The biographical approach generally propels the book along despite the inherent risk of dwelling on too many details of any one subject's life. Some chapters are more successful than others in exploring the role of the individual's effects on the dynamics of empire. John McAleer, for instance, relates quite a bit about Thomas Baines and his experiences as an explorer and curator at King's Lynn Athenæum in Norfolk, but McAleer could say more about why Baines matters. This is true also of Savithri Preetha Nair's chapter on Edgar Thurston and the Madras Museum and Philip McEvansoneya's chapter on Sir William Gregory and the Colombo Museum. Some chapters read less like history or museology and more like insider accounts of how curators staffed and paid for museums and put their collections together. This aspect of the book might be more useful to curators and museum professionals than to historians.

Conal McCarthy's chapter on the Māori is the highlight of the book. McCarthy provides a succinct introduction to the main issues and challenges involved in the study of empire and museums before launching into specifics about Māori in New Zealand museums and exhibitions. Through a delightful use of sources, McCarthy shows how indigenous responses to and participation in displays and exhibitions varied a great deal, from enjoyment and active involvement to more tepid reactions. He explains how mixed-race Maggie Papkura organized troupes to travel to and perform in other parts of the empire, showing how many Māori embraced their roles as imperial subjects. McCarthy rightly asserts that “ethnographic exhibitions, favourite targets of critical discourse analysis, reflect the messy process of their production and reception, and uncover different responses from developers, participants and visitors, despite the undoubted ethnocentrism of the day” (71). Put simply, museums and exhibits of non-European cultures in the British Empire were not one-sided Western tools of domination, and their history ought to reflect their complexity.

The essays in Curating Empire are well written, well put together, and complemented by a good number of fine photographs and illustrations. The book will be useful to students of museum studies, curators, and students of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British Empire and culture.