ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the key characteristics of nineteenth-century national museums in Britain: that of mapping the world, geographically, epistemologically and socially. It begins with a brief exploration of the notion of the museum as map by examining the use of cartographic technology within the context of institutional collecting and display of material cultures. Through discrete but sometimes interrelated instances of practice and discourse, the chapter focuses on various museum mappings: of knowledge, of the past, of self and other of society. There is an argument that the national museum provided an institutional technology for mapping, while in its morphology it was, literally, a multi-dimensional map which constructed knowledge spatially, connectively and divisively, to represent cultural and natural hierarchies and relations and differences between things and between people. The chapter concludes with an account of the apparently weak expressions of nationhood in mid-century national museums, enabling a view of Britain as cultural cartographer rather than as obvious cultural territory.
