Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa : A Study of Trans-Imperial Cultural Flows

The early collections from Africa in Liverpool’s World Museum reflect the city’s longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa’s Atlantic coast.A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard.While Ridyard’s collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers’ dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa.Kingdon’s study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard’s numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation.Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives