| This dissertation examines the origins and evolution of cultural property debates in Britain, locating museum practices such as repatriation and deaccessioning within the prewar crisis of Liberalism. This study offers a new view of the decline of Liberal ideology and practice, asking what happens if we look at George Dangerfield's classic account of the "strange death" of Liberal Britain through the lens of culture rather than through politics alone. Throughout the prewar period, different groups--namely, socialists, feminists, and Celtic nationalists--struggled to formulate museum practices that would promote their political goals. Their efforts were grounded in a uniquely British formulation of the relationship between property and citizenship, and centered around redefining the key terms of "culture" and "property." These debates on the ownership and redistribution of artifacts both upheld and challenged the Liberal model of culture as a form of property. This project explores a series of disputes among and within the museums of Dublin, Edinburgh, and London in order to investigate the histories of "Britishness," Irish and Scottish nationalism, European colonialism, feminism, and urban identity. Drawing on contemporary exhibition reviews, Parliamentary debates, annual reports of public galleries, professional journals on curatorship, private correspondence of amateur art collectors, and "art adventure" novels--a hybrid genre of advice literature and fiction that flourished in prewar Britain--this project seeks to orient the developing field of museum studies towards its own cross-cultural history as well as ongoing culture wars. The history of cultural property is used to illuminate the varieties of British nationalism, particularly the ways in which these controversies transcended existing models of national identity and difference. Finally, this dissertation draws on the historical intersection of Liberalism and museology in order to interrogate such seeming dichotomies as institution/critique, high culture/mass politics, private property/patrimony, and colonial/postcolonial. |
