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krpalmerWhen I visited London, England a few years ago, I made a point of going to the British Museum. In looking up information on the artifacts of world culture on display there (I particularly wanted to see the Rosetta Stone and the Lewis Chessmen, but there were plenty of things I was pleased just to happen on), I picked up there had been a BBC radio series a few years before that had selected one hundred objects from the museum and used them to tell a history of the world. Copies of the companion book were displayed in the museum shops, but I only had so much spending money on me and had already packed my luggage pretty full. Instead, I eventually managed to download and listen to all hundred fifteen-minute instalments of the series, which made for an interesting but time-consuming tour (although probably still less time-consuming than going back to London). With thoughts of revisiting the history in a somewhat different way but saving time doing that, I finally ordered a copy of museum director Neil McGregor's book from my area bookstore.
I wound up clocking myself able to read through five chapters in the time it would take to listen to one of their audio versions, which I suppose ties into why I don't often listen to podcasts for all that I recognize it takes me longer to write something than it does to read it. With the first few chapters, I could think of bits of the audio instalments left out of them just as there were bits of writing that hadn't been included in the radio series, but with time that feeling seemed to fade. One advantage that the book had was that there was a picture of every object, but as there aren't enough colour plates to show everything that way it may still be necessary to look up larger images online.
I've at least heard of other "histories in one hundred objects," although on smaller topics. With this one, I was interested to see the repeated theme of the world being more connected and interacting than you might think at any point. However, some sub-Saharan objects being presented as "encountering them made Europeans realise Africa had to be viewed in a different way" had me realising I hadn't quite heard of them myself. On the other side of things, I counted up four objects from Japan and wondered about certain impressions a country's built-up reputation can change over mere decades; most of them could be seen, though, as "the country is in a position where it could back off from the rest of the world and then engage with it again more than once, but even that 'isolation' might not have been so complete as imagined." (There are ten objects from China.)
Eventually, I got to thinking a lot of the objects seemed to have been for the well-to-do up to royalty; a collection of broken pottery from East Africa illustrating how much trade was carried across the Indian Ocean did seem to stand in opposition to that. Of course, there's the possible point that even these "royal" objects drifted away from their privileged possessors over time, although that might then start to bear on a point McGregor admitted to a few times, that these days people from where some objects were taken from back when they could just be taken are saying they want them back. Some of the objects in the book were acquired much more recently, dug up or bought, but I got to wondering a bit about the British Museum itself now being something of an "artifact" itself.
I wound up clocking myself able to read through five chapters in the time it would take to listen to one of their audio versions, which I suppose ties into why I don't often listen to podcasts for all that I recognize it takes me longer to write something than it does to read it. With the first few chapters, I could think of bits of the audio instalments left out of them just as there were bits of writing that hadn't been included in the radio series, but with time that feeling seemed to fade. One advantage that the book had was that there was a picture of every object, but as there aren't enough colour plates to show everything that way it may still be necessary to look up larger images online.
I've at least heard of other "histories in one hundred objects," although on smaller topics. With this one, I was interested to see the repeated theme of the world being more connected and interacting than you might think at any point. However, some sub-Saharan objects being presented as "encountering them made Europeans realise Africa had to be viewed in a different way" had me realising I hadn't quite heard of them myself. On the other side of things, I counted up four objects from Japan and wondered about certain impressions a country's built-up reputation can change over mere decades; most of them could be seen, though, as "the country is in a position where it could back off from the rest of the world and then engage with it again more than once, but even that 'isolation' might not have been so complete as imagined." (There are ten objects from China.)
Eventually, I got to thinking a lot of the objects seemed to have been for the well-to-do up to royalty; a collection of broken pottery from East Africa illustrating how much trade was carried across the Indian Ocean did seem to stand in opposition to that. Of course, there's the possible point that even these "royal" objects drifted away from their privileged possessors over time, although that might then start to bear on a point McGregor admitted to a few times, that these days people from where some objects were taken from back when they could just be taken are saying they want them back. Some of the objects in the book were acquired much more recently, dug up or bought, but I got to wondering a bit about the British Museum itself now being something of an "artifact" itself.