Items in the anthropology collections of the Horniman Museum in London that originate from those parts of the world which today make up the modern state of Malaysia number approximately 1,200, a relatively small collection built up over a period of about 150 years. In many ways the changing nature of museum collections of ethnographic artefacts reflects the history of the anthropological museum in Britain as well as the changing relationships between Britain and the parts of the world where items have been collected. This article examines the Museum's Malaysian material, whether donated, purchased or collected in the field by curators and considers both how it fitted in with the changing concepts informing museum practice and what it tells us about the views it expresses of 'other' cultures in general, and the Malay world in particular. Drawing on the Museum's correspondence files, registers and handbooks, as well as the collections themselves, the article seeks to explore how ideas about the Malay world were formed and expressed in the way material was interpreted and displayed. The picture revealed, especially in the early period, is one of a network of British people, chiefly academics, with a shared view of what kinds of material culture from the Malay world should be collected and how that material should be interpreted. Underlying this, however, are suggestions of an increasingly wide range of relationships between people of the Malay world and Britons abroad, embodied in the material which found its way for whatever reason into the cases or storage shelves at the Museum.
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