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 that accompanied their donations and within the context of
broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged
new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter
expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study
concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the
Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in
which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs
of the energies and narratives behind its creation.