ABSTRACT
The exploratory and explanatory power of a comparative approach will be circumscribed and assessed. The overall purpose is to guide the development of future comparative enquiries into the institutional settings, and epistemological and political negotiations, of national museums with a view to locating variation but also similarities within this institutional diversity. Comparative methodology has a long standing in political science, and in historical and sociological research. The traditional grand narratives of national museums are built out of embedded ideas about the linearity of history, the evolutionary possibilities of institutions and teleological conceptions of state-making trajectories. There are two major research traditions of relevance to the creation of the modern state. The first deals with the establishment of the early modern state, and the second is oriented towards the modernisation period dealing with nation-building. The old empires of France and Britain or new post-colonial states have been the focus of many studies on national museums past and present.
