Look yonder where the engines toil;
These England’s arms of conquest are,
The trophies of her bloodless war:
Brave weapons these.
Victorious over wave and soil,
With these she sails, she weaves, she tills,
Pierces the everlasting hills,
And spans the seas.
from W. M. Thackeray, “May Day Ode,” 1851Footnote 1
Written to celebrate the opening of the Great Exhibition of the Works of All Nations in 1851, William Thackeray’s “May Day Ode” summed up the hyperbole surrounding the event. But there is a particular moment in the poem that stands out for a strange slip, an elision between form and function that gets directly to the subject of this article. Thackeray frames England’s industrial machines as “trophies,” meaning symbols of success captured on the (figurative) battlefield—the “bloodless” victory “over wave and soil.” To some extent, this usage of the term is familiar to us; we would still refer to a “hunting trophy” or someone’s “trophy” spouse. But Thackeray’s “engines” are not simply the signs of this conquest, they are its means: “England’s arms of conquest,” the “[b]rave weapons” that have created the Empire over which Victoria reigns, with which England “sails, she weaves, she tills/Pierces the everlasting hills,/And spans the seas.” This second, older usage, based on ancient Greek and Roman texts and less familiar to us now, equates the trophies with “England’s arms of conquest,” although such a “trophy” usually meant the weapons of one’s conquered foes. In combining these meanings, and making industrial machines both the figurative symbols and literal means of the British Empire’s victorious war against Nature, Thackeray condensed the rhetoric surrounding the exhibition and the wider project of British industrial imperialism. However, he also referred to a form of display that had taken on new prominence at the Crystal Palace—one that would grow to gargantuan proportions over the rest of the century and become a flashpoint for debates over the very meaning and purpose of industrial empire: the exhibition trophy (Figure 1; note Keith’s Silk Trophy to the left of the fountain and the other large vertical displays of the British section behind it). It is very likely that the reader has never heard of “exhibition trophies” and is imagining something given to prize winners, rather than a form of display. This is not surprising, because trophies have become invisible to most people reading about and looking at images of the world’s fairs. This article aims to make them visible, to show just how much cultural work they were doing, and to explain why many people found them troubling.
John Absolon and William Telbin, “General View of the Interior.” Hand-colored lithograph in Recollections of the Great Exhibition, 1851, Plate 3. London: Lloyd Bros., 1851. Image in the public domain, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Exhibition trophies have fallen out of our awareness because they, and the criticisms they provoked, have received surprisingly little scholarly attention. However, they emerged over the long nineteenth century as an omnipresent display style for the world’s fairs, homes, collections, museums, and shops.Footnote 2 Pamela Simpson has noted that “[t]rophy displays were the symbols of plenitude, the visual representations of the gospel of industrial progress.”Footnote 3 As an element of Baroque architecture, a “trophy” was a reimagined Classical form associated with conquest and plenty, often incorporated as two-dimensional or bas-relief decoration in aristocratic and royal settings (Figures 2 and 3).
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire: Entrance Hall trophies, ca. 1716, by painter John Thornhill. Detail of photograph by Gary Ullah, 2015, from UK, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
One of a set of wall trophies ca.1795, Carlton Palace/Buckingham Palace. Trophies by Jean Prusserot (active 1783–90). Giltwood | 231.14 cm (whole object) | RCIN 2610. Throne Room, Buckingham Palace. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
Exhibition trophies solved the nineteenth-century design problem of representing imperial power, extractive superabundance, and industrial capacity. Nineteenth-century exhibitors and collectors made trophies out of an eclectic array of commodities, animals, raw materials, manufactured goods, weapons, and “primitive” objects. In their ability to bring wildly disparate types of objects into relation, they helped domesticate and normalize industrial empire; like exhibitions as a whole, trophies helped to make consumption a palatable aim for civilization. But by making the pursuit of wealth, consumption, extraction, and power visible, and by carrying with them ancient connotations of high-minded victory, exhibition trophies also inspired criticisms that got to the heart of modern forms of conquest. Divisive in the middle of the nineteenth century, trophies were ubiquitous by the turn of the twentieth. Meanwhile a rival form of displaying imperial power emerged that challenged ethnographic trophies in particular: the new science of anthropology.Footnote 4 What follows begins to recover this lost form and its implications, from disquiet to the acceptance of abundance as a collective goal, even when obtained through violence.
Trophies sparked debates over the meaning of, and the appropriate form for, the extraordinary expansion of material wealth and power in nineteenth-century Britain. However, they could just as often reveal the disenchanting results of this power—the commercial wares, towers of raw materials, or arrangements of “savage” weapons seemed to point to the basic emptiness of industrial, imperial society: Here is all this wealth! But it has created only showy, empty, ugly spectacle, without heart, beauty, or meaning. Such unease over the meaning of material culture was a key feature of nineteenth-century Britain, including disquiet over conditions of production, something that exhibitions selectively both celebrated and concealed.Footnote 5 As Erika Rappaport has noted, the many forms of advertising and displaying “imperial things, places, and people” contributed to commercial desire and to commodity fetishism by “obscuring the labour that produced commodities and empires.” At the same time, many exhibitions transformed labor itself “into spectacle,” in the new (Eurocentric) metaphor of the “commodity chain.”Footnote 6 In his classic interpretation of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Thomas Richards argued that in its “commodity spectacle” the question of “how, when, or where [products] were made … became moot.” Indeed, in his view—seemingly describing exhibition trophies without using the term—“manufactured objects were autonomous icons ordered into taxonomies, set on pedestals, and flooded with light … using … a language of their own.”Footnote 7 Yet the “trophied” objects at the Crystal Palace of 1851 and elsewhere did not speak for themselves—in fact, the message was open to numerous interpretations, and the trophy form provoked responses that raised the issues of colonial violence, extraction, and production.
Exhibition trophies thus show us key aspects of nineteenth-century Britain: both the bombast of rhetoric and design as well as the critique and uneasiness this elicited. Meanwhile, alongside trophies, and often in explicit distinction to them, other methods of exhibition and curation emerged in the nineteenth century that made similar ideas legible in a different form, including anthropological displays to illustrate stadial sociocultural evolution. Designers, journalists, reformers, and anthropologists thus made aesthetic, moral, and scientific critiques of trophies. The tensions between the trophy as a celebratory form and its often-critiqued style, and between the term’s origins and new applications, get at the culture of industrial, imperial extraction in ways that in fact have significance in our own time. What was all this superabundance for? What did it mean? If the creation of wealth and convenience were the goals of this new society, what design or architectural form could demonstrate this? At the same time, what horrors of exploitation did trophies hide and inadvertently call to mind?
A key part of the tension at play here lay between visual culture and textual interpretation. The trophy as a design form and a metaphor leapt into a new kind of physical exhibition display, but the old military meaning hovered around this new usage, provoking much of the dissonance that at first made commentators uneasy. As in Thackeray’s poem, which relies on military metaphors and insists on the “bloodless” nature of Britain’s conquest, trophies called attention to and simultaneously denied what was otherwise hidden: the violent theft and even genocidal results of colonization. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, more people accepted both naked exploitation and overt consumerism as imperial goals to celebrate, and trade, hunting, and imperial trophies triggered little pushback.Footnote 8 To understand why exhibition trophies initially—and disturbingly—brought noble victory and violent conquest to mind for observers, it helps to understand the uses of the term and form before the Great Exhibition.
Trophies before 1851: Stylistic flourish and martial metaphor
An aspect of the trophy design that made it particularly rich, apt, and controversial was how the form combined its ancient Classical use to convey conquest with a Neoclassical reimagining to adapt to both conquest (when arranging weapons) and plenty (when arranging other kinds of natural or human-made goods). The Oxford English Dictionary records the resulting slipperiness of the term, tracing the meaning through fifteenth-century translations of Greek and Roman texts as “a structure erected … as a memorial of a victory in war, consisting of arms or other spoils” to the meanings that emerged in the sixteenth century: as a “representation of such a memorial; (a representation of) an ornamental group of symbolic or typical objects arranged for display”; “a thing taken in war”; or “anything serving as a token or evidence of victory, courage, skill …; a monument, a memorial … a person or thing which is a status symbol.”Footnote 9 As an element of design, trophies became an elegant way to bring together disparate elements in exterior sculptural architectural ornament or interior trompe-l’oeil and bas-relief decoration (e.g. Figures 2 and 3).Footnote 10 As the OED notes, the term also took on the meaning of an object taken as a sign of victory, or the symbol of such a victory. For instance, as Chris Wingfield has discussed, the 1826 London Missionary Society Museum catalogue described the objects it contained—the “idols” given by recent Christian converts—as “trophies of Christianity,” that is, proofs of conversion (a missionary collecting practice that Maia Nuku, Karen Jacobs, and Wingfield have explored).Footnote 11 In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, aristocratic and royal residences incorporated decorative trophies of war and peace (Figure 2, Blenheim Palace; Figure 3, Buckingham Palace, originally in Carlton Palace).Footnote 12 At Blenheim, the martial trophies around the ceiling painting and in between the windows of the grand entrance hall proclaim the military victory that inspired the royal gift of the Palace and elevation of the Marlborough family. At Carlton and then Buckingham Palaces, the trophies of plenty were part of a broader royal refashioning, declaring wealth, taste, and a confident royal power.
Building on such representations, and on the slippery meaning of “trophy” as a symbol of victory, the new public monuments and commemorations of the Napoleonic Wars came to both use decorative trophies and be understood as trophies, sometimes combining multiple meanings and uses of the term (including actual objects taken from the battlefield). In the early 1840s, London saw the construction of new commemorative architecture, notably Nelson’s Column, erected in 1843, and a now-removed monumental equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, installed on top of Wellington Arch in 1846.Footnote 13 Such monuments could become metaphorical “trophies” in textual references, standing for the victories they commemorated; commentators also combined this use with “trophies” in its other senses, that is, either literal war spoils or the representations of war spoils. For instance, an Art-Union article from 1843 argued for the propriety of melting down captured French cannon to create Nelson’s sculpture at the top of the column in Trafalgar Square: “the object is a national one, the hero British, and if the metal be French, it is properly used upon a Nelson trophy.”Footnote 14 Six months later, the Literary Gazette agreed, referring to both the Nelson and Wellington statues: “we congratulate the country on this patriotic disposal of the trophies of war to these legitimate public and national objects,” even arguing that “it is of such stuff as the cannon they have captured in their glorious victories that their forms should be preserved for ever, and not in the old pots and pans of the tinker or factory, which not even the fiery furnace, through which they must pass, can purify enough for so illustrious a purpose.”Footnote 15 The sense that commercial, industrial goods were incompatible with the noble, patriotic purpose of symbolizing military victory foreshadows the debates that exhibition trophies would generate. Indeed, the Gazette suggested that a “few Waterloo or Trafalgar pieces of artillery—for these are their own trophies—should form the monuments of the admiration of a people to a Wellington and a Nelson.”Footnote 16 By the close of the decade, cities could hold a collection of “trophies” that represented both military victory and national pride, where vulgar commercialism seemed out of place.
In the years leading up to the Exhibition of 1851, then, there is visual and textual evidence of the trophy form in aristocratic, royal, and monumental architecture, carrying connotations that combined the arrangement of disparate objects or elements (in the tradition of architectural decoration) with the symbolic representation of celebrations, victories, and patriotism.Footnote 17 There was also a sense that such trophies were incompatible with industrial commercialism. The use of “trophies” as a design or organizing principle in 1851 emerged from the need for vertical displays, the building’s lofty central aisles, and the British Section’s organization in particular. At the same time, this leap from architectural metaphor to a physical construction for displaying manufactures and raw materials drew considerable critique.
Metaphors, monuments, and “monstrosities”
The design of the 1851 Great Exhibition is now so familiar, and Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace so well-studied and iconic, that it can be difficult to see how it and its successors invented new iconography and architectural form. Multiple representations and descriptions exist of the Palace’s large sculptures, fountains, and towers, and many of these were explicitly called “trophies,” raising comment and controversy. Trophies, and the resulting debate about them, reveal in a new way how exhibitions invented new cultural forms, part of the nineteenth-century repurposing of old styles and ideas for new contexts and purposes. In an event that its organizers claimed would be a new model for international cooperation and peaceful competition through industrial progress, explicitly named “trophies” of silk, rubber, fur, stained glass, newspapers, and timber (among others) heralded this new kind of “bloodless” victory.Footnote 18 But over whom, or what? And for what greater goal? Perhaps unexpectedly, however, and because of these connotations with conquest, what was not represented—what became or seemed unrepresentable—occasionally resurfaced in contemporaries’ observations or critiques: the hidden misery and violence that produced the glittering spectacle, the dissonance of the exhibitions’ stated lofty ideas with its quotidian or empty commercial purposes, and the persistent presence of violence in the trophy form itself.
How did so many objects in 1851 (and at subsequent exhibitions) come to be designated as “trophies,” particularly given objections to combining this term with manufacturing? Some of this seems to have begun out of the need to encourage vertical displays, in the allocation of space, and some to emerge after the fact as a way to help visitors navigate the exhibition as a whole. In their 1852 official report, the Commissioners explained that they had originally “contemplated to have arranged the whole of the articles exhibited, both Foreign and British, according to a philosophical classification, without reference to the country of production,” but that the difficulty of arranging the space and ascertaining how much space each exhibitor needed led them to a geographical arrangement.Footnote 19 However, within the British section, which was fully half of the building, the Executive Committee was able to arrange exhibits by weight, machinery’s need for steam power, raw produce, and manufactured goods, deciding that “Classes of Manufacture and Fine Arts should occupy intermediate positions, those of the ground-floor having each some share of frontage on the Central Avenue.”Footnote 20 As Jeffrey Auerbach notes, “articles belonging to the superior manufacturers were brought prominently in view by being arranged all along the center of the building, where their richness and splendor of color and form could be shown to the greatest advantage.”Footnote 21 Indeed, the Executive Committee urged exhibitors to make the most of the Crystal Palace’s vertical space in the high Central Avenue (referred to as the “nave”) and cross aisle (the “transept”), instructing local committees to make this known.Footnote 22
This emphasis on the Central Avenue seems to have led some to understand the objects exhibited there as “trophies.” By April 1851, the London Times reported on the British section that the “trophies selected for illustrating, in the central avenue, the different sections of our native display will present a curious contrast to those in the other half of the building,” being “less of an artistic and more of a practical and utilitarian character.”Footnote 23 The author understood such “trophies” as both “artistic”—“statues and fountains”—but also “practical”: “the prominent objects will be the models of our great public works, the gigantic telescope of Rosse, the Colebrook Dale dome, the display of crystals formed from chemical substances, of Spitalfields silk, of feathers by Adcock, of cutlery by Rodgers, of Canadian timber, and such like” (see Figure 1). Moreover, such “trophies” were apparently a way to achieve the intended thematic organization, at least in the British half, with the Times reporting that “[e]ach section will, as far as possible, be represented by a trophy in the nave, placed, as far as possible, in a position corresponding with that which it occupies in the building.” Such an alignment seems to only have happened very rarely, from the Ground Plan drawn up for the Commissioners’ Report (Figure 4).Footnote 24
Detail of the British section, “Ground Plan to Accompany the Report of the Commissioners,” Commissioners of the Exhibition of 1851, Report of the Commissioners. Image in the public domain, courtesy of the University of Michigan.
It is possible that other exhibitors picked up on the “trophy” designation to describe objects in their submissions to the catalogue, so that what began on the published plan showing fur, timber, and silk “trophies” in the British section led to, for instance, the United States designating its displays of newspapers and rubber in the same way in the catalogue (exhibitors created their own labels and catalogue entries). Some of the uniformity of designating objects as “trophies” may also have come about in the process of compiling the Catalogue.Footnote 25 Designating an object as a “trophy” gave the materials or objects a visual form and rhetorical meaning: here is a display of objects arranged so visitors could make sense of what they were viewing, orient themselves in the building, and relate each exhibit to the broader organizational scheme (see Figures 1 and 4).Footnote 26 At the same time, the concept of a trophy brought with it multiple connotations of conquest—often amplified by other objects on display—that commentators quickly latched onto.
Looking closely at one example from 1851 can illustrate this visual and rhetorical resonance between trophies and conquest, and the dissonance that this could raise for reviewers. The presence of other objects and even people on display shaped how some observers interpreted the United States “Rubber Trophy” (Figure 5): it stood behind Hiram Powers’ famous sculpture “The Greek Slave” (Figures 5 and 7), close to Peter Stephenson’s “Wounded Indian” (Figure 6), and at least some of the time was accompanied by two members of the Indigenous Ioway (Iowa) Nation (see Figure 7).Footnote 27 This confluence of objects and associations led Manchester poet William Gaspey, in his illustrated guide to the exhibition, to approach the rubber trophy with questions of slavery, progress, and extinction in mind.Footnote 28 Gaspey thought the giant rubber trophy was “ugly,” a “frightful edifice of india-rubber [sic],” but he imagined that the United States wanted it “to symbolize themselves, and typify the development to which they are destined.”Footnote 29 Standing next to it were “two poor Indians (Iowas),” whose display he also saw as a “trophy,” reconnecting the term to its Classical sense of the spoils of war. Their exhibition, he wrote, was “cruel and ostentatious … It is nothing but a trophy. They are the slaves chained to the car of the conqueror; they are the shadow of the old races that the victorious and implacable civilization of the West crushes in its progress.”Footnote 30 Here, he reacted to the designation of rubber as a “trophy” and combined it with the nearby Classical allusions to conquest in the modern period: Stephenson’s nearby sculpture “The Wounded Indian” (Figure 6) was modeled on the famous Roman sculpture “The Dying Gaul,” while Powers’ “The Greek Slave” used a Neoclassical form to address both atrocities during the recent Greek war of independence against the Ottomans and conflict over then-contemporary racialized slavery.Footnote 31 While Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures clearly represented the rubber trophy and omitted the two “Iowas” (see Figure 5), John Absolon turned the rubber trophy into something resembling a tent or tepee (Figure 7), seemingly confused by the juxtaposition of the rubber trophy and the two people in front of it.Footnote 32 Rather than omitting the rubber or the people, Gaspey put them together, reacting to this combination of exhibits with a common imperialist narrative: the rubber trophy typified the wealth that settlers extracted through an inevitable process of “development” that would “crush” the “old” peoples. Commenting on the proximity to Powers’ “Greek Slave,” Gaspey asked, “Is it not suggestive that the Americans, proverbially a ‘cute [acute, i.e. perceptive] people, should have so publicly drawn attention to slavery and the extinction of the aborigines of the Far West?”Footnote 33 Gaspey seems to marvel that the US exhibitors had made such violence visible, bringing to the surface what often remained unsaid, and highlighting the trophy as part of a broader Neoclassical language that familiarized and naturalized modern imperialism.
The United States section (Eastern Entrance), showing the “Rubber Trophy” on a railway bridge, with Hiram Powers’ “Greek Slave” sculpture in front of the red velvet curtain. J. Nash, L. Haghe and D. Roberts, Dickinsons’ Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Vol. II (Dickinson Brothers, 1854). Image in the public domain, courtesy of the British Library.
Peter Stephenson, “The Wounded Indian,” engraved by Hollis, from daguerreotype by Beard, in Gaspey, n.p. Image in the public domain, courtesy of Smithsonian Libraries and Archives.
John Absolon, “View in the East Nave The Greek Slave, by [Hiram] Power [sic].” Hand-colored lithograph in Recollections of the Great Exhibition, 1851, Plate 18 (Lloyd Bros., 1851). Image in the public domain, courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
For some commentators, however, such Classical connotations could seem ludicrous when combined with the modern manufactures some exhibitors put into trophy form. While the mood in London in 1851 was triumphant regarding industrial progress (if not artistic taste), the mood in 1862 was far more somber, and manufacturers’ trophies received significant criticism. Following the success of a variety of international fairs after 1851, including in Dublin and New York in 1853 and Paris in 1855, the 1862 London exhibition took place on land purchased by the Commissioners from the proceeds of the 1851 exhibition, next to the new South Kensington Museum (on the site now occupied by the Natural History Museum). Because of this location, Captain Francis Fowke’s much-maligned building did not have the benefit of the old and well-established living trees from the Hyde Park site of 1851, giving new visual prominence to the trophies in the central aisle (Figure 8).
The trophy as design principle at the London International Exhibition, 1862. Interior of International Exhibition, 1862, interior view prior to opening by William England for the London Stereoscopic Co. Science Museum Group 1991-107/1. © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum, London. All rights reserved.
Press coverage of the 1862 event shows some differences in audience, format, and circulation, but also just how striking and even jarring the trophies could be to visitors. For example, the high-brow weekly Examiner’s initial walk-through was underwhelmed: “The north-east transept on our left is furnished by our Colonial Empire, and adorned in the main gangway with those detached structures which it has seemed fit to the Commissioners to designate throughout the building ‘trophies.’ Our colonial trophies are of timber, coal, and bulk of gold.”Footnote 34 (The Examiner continued to put “trophies” in scare-quotes, unused to or unwilling to accept this usage.) Likewise, the serious literary monthly the Gentleman’s Magazine complained that “the commissioners have done their very best to spoil the only good interior view”—meaning down the nave—with “a very considerable number of obstructions dignified by the name of trophies,” including some made “of the strangest materials.” The Gentleman’s noted a “toy trophy,” a “fur trophy,” and one “actually composed of fishing-rods, sponges, pieces of soap and other requisites for the toilet.” The first press viewing seems to have led to some hasty changes before the exhibition opened, at least according to the Gentleman’s Magazine: “Luckily, the public press appears to have had a good deal more taste than the commissioners, and the consequence has been that some of these monstrosities have been removed, while others have been curtailed of their fair, or rather unfair, proportions.”Footnote 35
But it wasn’t just the long-running and expensive literary periodicals that commented on the trophies. The vastly more popular London Journal, a penny illustrated-fiction weekly with a circulation of half a million (compared to the Gentleman’s 10,000), also drew readers’ attention to the apparently new (or newly visible) design.Footnote 36 “The first subjects” that the London Journal reviewer noticed “were a number of erections to which the sounding appellation of ‘trophies’ was given.” The Journal was also struck by the number and variety of objects that had been “trophied” (in the author’s phrase), “from toys to musical instruments, and from pottery to gunnery … even food, cotton, linen, and other peaceful products.” Like the more learned Examiner and Gentleman’s Monthly, the popular London Journal was struck by both the dominance of trophies and the seeming disconnect between the term and this application: “never was there a more abundant and harmless abuse of a well-understood term than is exhibited in the great industrial display.” The Journal also explained the origins of the term, even though they thought that “[a]lmost every educated person” would understand it: “A trophy, among the Greeks and Romans, who created both the word and the thing, was a token of victory in the battle-field. Virgil gives us an exact description of a primitive one.”Footnote 37 We see the newness of the form in the reviewers’ bewilderment, in their sense of impropriety at non-military uses, and in their apparent need to explain the term.
These comments speak to how striking the trophies were, to class differentials among exhibition audiences, and to the looming question of modern design. The London Journal suggested that “trophy” would have been a familiar term to those educated from classical texts. As the examples above help illustrate, the periodical press served a range of audiences but was at this point also expanding to make sense of the new visual and commercial culture of the period for a broad public.Footnote 38 Precisely because of the form’s Classical, military origins, though, a “trophy” of commercial objects could seem particularly ridiculous. Rather than triumph, the language here is often of disappointment, as the Classical battlefield connotations of the “trophy” (and perhaps the inflated rhetoric around the “conquest of Nature”) came back to earth in the midst of everyday consumer goods. Was this disappointing display of cheap homewares the ultimate outcome of all this “progress” and an appropriate show of the British as the inheritors of ancient empire? What was the goal of this expanding industrial conquest? Were piles of products the ultimate statement of British ambitions, proof that they really were, as Napoleon allegedly quipped, just a nation of shopkeepers?
The context of 1862 was certainly different than that of 1851; in the intervening years, Prince Albert had died, the Indian Uprising of 1857 (and brutal British response) had taken place, and the country was in the midst of the American Civil War (and consequent Cotton Famine in the British textile industry). But the shift in trophy design itself also contributed to the strain on the triumphalist narrative. While in 1851 the British celebrated their industrial preeminence, able to amass materials and goods from around the world, and show off their biggest machines, by 1862 their position was less assured, their international exhibition no longer record-breaking, and the question of the limits of British artistry even more glaring. As the London Journal complained, at the original Crystal Palace “so little was attempted” in “decorating the cases” that visitors were not “much shocked at failures.” But in 1862, “trophies are not only to be trophies of manufacture, but trophies of decoration also” and this showed the poor quality of design, as “it is evidently thought that the principal means to that consists in applying gold and colours.”Footnote 39 The problem with decorative trophies showing manufacturers’ skills in art and design rather than trophies of raw materials, machinery, or manufactured goods was a familiar one: the crisis of an appropriate modern style and the British lack of artistic taste.Footnote 40 By 1862 trophies themselves were becoming miniaturized architecture, bringing all of the problems of representation in the late nineteenth century. The power of industry, control over nature, and national power could be easily shown in pyramids of gold from Australia or timber from Tasmania. The style of such power was another and much more vexed question.Footnote 41
Over the next decades, exhibitions expanded beyond a single building and trophies took on ever-expanding forms, continuing as towers and stacks but also growing into rooms or courts, taking on greater and more obviously architectural shape. Trophies grew from individual displays into stylistic embodiments of national cultures; as Pieter van Wesemael has written about the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, “The trophy that, in 1851, had been simply stacked to form a pillar had now grown to form complete façades and rooms.”Footnote 42 The Street of Nations at the Paris 1878 Exposition Universelle displayed national and historical styles, with each full-sized, stand-alone building serving as a showroom to advertise the work of contemporary firms.Footnote 43
One exhibition notable for both the number of different types of trophies and the commentary these inspired was the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, which included trophies of animals, bamboo, grain, timber, paper, rope, Indian carving, Fijian weapons, gold, and mother-of-pearl (for the last two, see Figure 9). While criticism of the trophies in 1851 and 1862 concentrated on the problematic juxtaposition of trophies and conquest, the imperial subject of the 1886 exhibition made such connections even more clear. Moreover, the context of the British Empire’s increasingly violent expansion into Africa and Oceania highlighted for these observers what was not being exhibited: the differential, that is, between the 1886 trophies and the invisible costs of conquest.
Gold Trophy, Victorian Court, and Trophy of Mother of Pearl Shells, West Australian Court, London Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886. “The Indian Section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition,” The Graphic; London 33, no. 859 (15 May 1886): 536. Image in the public domain, courtesy of Green Library, Stanford University.
One author of such commentary was T.N. Mukharji, assistant to the Indian Section in charge of the Commercial Enquiry Office at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and author of the 1889 memoir A Visit to Europe.Footnote 44 Like Thackeray in 1851, Mukharji also explicitly connected British (industrial) control of natural resources and their global power. But Mukharji framed this as the ability to turn the rest of the world into “natives,” a status that he argued was the result of industrial imperialism. “What a world of meaning, for instance,” he asked, “does that word Native contain in it?” He recognized “native” as “one of those magic words of old,” which was “performing wonders in all parts of the land wherever its true significance is understood.” This, he saw, was an extraordinary flattening of difference through colonization: “We were never ‘natives’ before …. We are all ‘natives’ now—We poor Indians, the aborigines of Australia and the South Sea Islands, the Negroes, the Kaffirs, the Hottentots, and other races of Africa.”Footnote 45 For the Brahmin Mukharji, this power did not come from European cultural, moral, or political superiority, but solely from technological, scientific, and industrial power: “which of us two is better able to disembowel the earth for her hidden treasures,” he asked, “span mighty rivers, bore mountains, and bring to the service of man the various substances which lie in all parts of India?” These industrial feats had led to a new kind of power and human hierarchy: “The answer is that the European is able to do these things and the native is not, and practically for that very reason he is ‘native.’”Footnote 46 Mukharji had been led to visualize this power over Nature because of techniques used by the exhibitors at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition that, as we’ve seen, had already been honed at international exhibitions since 1851.
Mukharji mused about the experience of being a “Native” after describing the displays of Australia and Canada in particular, both of which put multiple kinds of both raw materials and finished products into trophies. While he reported that most English visitors found the Canadian and Australian exhibits (e.g. Figure 9) “commonplace,” he wrote that “they formed a subject of deep interest to us.” For example, he wrote, “[m]y countrymen should think and ponder the wonderful progress which Australia has made during the last thirty years.” What illustrated that progress to him was the superabundance on display, the wealth and resources of the settler colonies: “the trophy of produce erected by Canada” and “the golden trophy of Australia … and her silver, copper, zinc, tin and coals, her piles of new wines, specimens of her agricultural and pastoral wealth, and the collections of her forest timber.” While the “people of England and the Continent” might have grown “wearied of the monotony of bottles, tins, iron, steel and the prosaic products of mechanical contrivances,” Mukharji found another lesson, which perhaps they had already begun to take for granted: that such wealth grew out of, and then justified, colonial (and racialized) power relations. Mukharji’s insight combines colonial and industrial power, but also the specific display techniques used to craft that narrative: not only ethnographic displays, but trophies. Mukharji noticed the interplay of these two systems of power that operated together and were mutually reinforcing.Footnote 47
Another sensitive visitor to the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition made these connections even more bluntly. Designer, artist, poet, translator, anti-imperialist, and socialist William Morris concentrated on the same power imbalance, but focused on what was not being shown rather than what was. He sarcastically described the “certain examples of the glory of the Empire which have been, I think, forgotten,” and dreamed up an imaginary exhibition of anti-trophies, or of the kinds of trophies Britain might display in an honest accounting of the cost of empire.Footnote 48 He imagined an entrance with “two pyramids, à la Timour, of the skulls of Zulus, Arabs, Burmese, New Zealanders, etc., etc.,” who had been killed resisting “the benevolence of British commerce.” He suggested putting on display an example “of the wire whips used for softening the minds of rebellious Jamacia [sic] negroes under the paternal sway of Governor Eyre,” along with other colonial artifacts and “other such historical mementoes,” like “the blankets infected with small-pox sent to unfriendly tribes of Red-Skins in the latter eighteenth century.” Pyramids of skulls, specimens of whips, and infected blankets: this is a radical vision of the British Empire, but Morris uses the visual language of exhibition trophies to make his point. In reframing his imagined exhibition in this way, he also mocks the very notions of both “progress” and of honorable British “victory on the battlefield,” describing a fictional counter-exhibition of murder, theft, subterfuge, and cruelty.
Ethnographic trophies, imperial design, and social evolutionism
As Peter Hoffenberg has noted, the exhibitions discussed above often aimed to create a stark opposition between “civilized” and “uncivilized” by displaying “native” goods next to trophies of raw materials and manufactured goods.Footnote 49 The same kind of contrast could also take place within private homes, with the display of ethnographic trophies in the midst of Victorian domestic decoration. Even as these various public and private types of display grew in popularity, and with the increasing professional prominence and interest in ethnology, a rival schema appeared: What Chris Wingfield refers to (following Louis Dumont) as the “grammar of encompassment,” that is, new models of the progress of civilization based on the “evolution of culture.” As Wingfield has shown in the case of the British Museum, this meant that the new (1866) Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography could include the “uncivilized” as “a means of illustrating the long historical process by which the current state of civilization was ultimately achieved.”Footnote 50 At the same time, there were deep connections between commercial exhibitions and indexical scientific displays. As scholars such as Hoffenberg, Paul Greenhalgh, Auerbach, Loren Kruger, and Sadiah Qureshi have documented, the international exhibitions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries combined new ethnographic techniques and theories of stadial development with older forms of the commercial display of “living curiosities,” and they increasingly—and increasingly explicitly—included anthropology, Indigenous material culture, and colonized subjects themselves alongside their commercial products: the new machines, raw materials, manufactured goods, objets d’art, and art galleries.Footnote 51
The rising prominence of anthropology, and the new display techniques that emerged to serve anthropologists’ goals, can be seen in changes to how colonial sections displayed their Indigenous materials at the fairs. Organizers gradually separated out “ethnographic” materials from the overwhelming displays of natural resources, but also reframed and distinguished among various Indigenous cultures as the “disappeared,” the “primitive,” the “peacefully settled.”Footnote 52 Moving ethnographic exhibits into separate buildings or sections banished them from modern consumer society, to the equivalent of European “pre-history,” and separated their products from the goods and wares of colonial settlers.Footnote 53 Exhibitions, private homes, and museums continued both kinds of displays, that is, a binary mode of stark comparisons between “primitive” and “modern,” as well as a mode of showing what Edward Tylor called the “development of civilization” or the “stages of culture” in which industrial society became the end-point of the long slow progress from “primitive” origins. As Tylor wrote in 1871, the “educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life.”Footnote 54 Both a stark contrast (as in Gaspey’s dismay at the “Iowas” displayed next to the Rubber Trophy) and displays showing gradual evolution were forms of Othering. Both depended on and helped to popularize a radical sense of difference between industrial and “primitive” cultures.Footnote 55
Contemporary commentators such as Gaspey, Mukharji, and Morris recognized that exhibition trophies of raw materials and products from British colonies clearly communicated conquest. But another category that became especially prominent in the last decades of the nineteenth century were trophies of “ethnographic” or “primitive” goods, particularly weapons, and this became a style used in private homes as well as in public exhibitions and museums. When applied to weapons, such objects seemed less at odds with the original meaning of the “trophy” form as relating to conquest. Even the London Missionary Society rearranged its collection in 1859 and included trophies of “Native” weapons, arranged into the symmetrical fan shape long used for swords, knives, etc. (Figure 10).
Trophy-style fans of weapons in the upper display area of the newly rearranged London Missionary Society Museum, 1859. “The Museum of the London Missionary Society,” The Illustrated London News 34, no. 980 (25 June 1859): 605. Image in the public domain, courtesy of UCLA Library/SRLF Imaging.
In many ways the end of the nineteenth century was perhaps the high-point for trophies of both hunted animals and ethnographic displays, and both of these repurposed the Classical form to communicate an increasingly powerful narrative about colonizers, hunters, and the fate of both threatening carnivores and “savage” peoples: the inevitable disappearance of a worthy foe.Footnote 56 Commentators found such trophies less problematic in relation to the disjunction between form and meaning, but came to object to them on either aesthetic or scientific grounds.
The early international exhibitions included Indigenous or “Native” objects or even people alongside other goods on display, with the catalogues sometimes pointing these out and drawing conclusions about the spread of “civilization,” as in the Gaspey example discussed above. That said, even as these displays incorporated ethnographic information or materials, they mainly served as points of contrast to modern products. For example, initially there wasn’t a separate category for such objects, as there were multiple places that Indigenous goods could be placed among the early classification scheme of raw materials, machinery, manufactures, or fine art. As Hoffenberg has noted, “Native” objects appeared at international exhibitions as points of comparison with modern manufactures: “The images of Australia and India at overseas exhibitions offered visitors the dichotomy between future and past, settler and subject, raw materials and artisanal crafts.”Footnote 57 Meanwhile, as Qureshi has discussed, presentations of living people in their reconstructed “villages” could serve as both an opportunity for “ethnographic research” as well as entertainment for fairgoers.Footnote 58 Particularly with the “scrambles” for Africa and the South Pacific, trophies of objects (especially weapons) and animals brought with them connotations of victory over a valiant or “fierce” opponent, a rhetoric that many writers employed when discussing both colonial victories and big-game hunting.Footnote 59
All of these various cultural uses and reappropriations of “primitive” goods turned them into a specifically colonial British (and more broadly colonial European) cultural form: not works of art and not commodities, but something else, that is, examples of “primitive culture.”Footnote 60 People in colonial and metropolitan societies used this specific but unstable category of objects for their own processes of self-expression and identity across multiple domestic and public spaces; “trophied” objects often moved from private homes to exhibitions and museums.Footnote 61 Thus, there were many ways and numerous overlapping cultural fields where Europeans turned objects into “primitive culture,” such as performance, naturalistic dioramas, trophies, evolutionary schema, or typological displays (that is, organized by type of object rather than chronology or geography). The proliferation of ways of presenting objects and ideas to the public, including the periodical press as well as exhibitions, museums, illustrated lectures, and other kinds of education, performances, or entertainment, meant that trophies were just one of many options for making “primitive” objects legible to a broad public. Collectors like Augustus Henry Lane-Fox (who later took the name Pitt-Rivers) contributed to the emerging field of anthropology by developing display forms to show off how individual objects fit into a larger narrative of unilinear sociocultural evolution.Footnote 62 At the same time, more naturalistic displays could fit into this kind of narrative, illustrating different “stages” of development.Footnote 63 As a display technique for “primitive” captured art and weapons, we can find evidence of trophies in contexts associated with raw conquest and “booty,” used by colonial officers, amateurs in private settings, or later in provincial museums that maintained their original donors’ arrangement. When was it appropriate to display “primitive” objects as a trophy, what did this look like, and what did people understand this form to mean?
While commentators explained exhibition trophies of raw materials and manufactured goods in relation to the Classical term referring to “victory in the battle-field,” as above, we can see examples of this relating to actual captured weapons in exhibitions and photographs from the Anglo-Zulu wars and ongoing conflicts with the people of Fiji. As seen in Figure 2, trophies of weapons traditionally took the form of crossed flags, swords, or spears with a shield, and this seems to have struck many people as particularly apt for the grand assegai of the Zulu. For example, an 1879 photograph in the Royal Collection, at the time of the first Anglo-Zulu War, shows a formal trophy arrangement, even though the eventual use of the objects or photograph is unknown (Figure 11). Likewise, a ca.1880 brooch in the British Museum shows a trophy form being given to Zulu weapons (Figure 12).
Unknown artist, albumen print of Zulu weapons ca. 1879. Photograph taken from the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879; from the collection of Queen Victoria. Royal Collection Online, RCIN 2501129. © Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2025 | Royal Collection Trust.
John Brogden, brooch in silver and gold, ca. 1875–80. Silver and gold brooch in the form of a Zulu shield. Applied military trophy in the form of spears and clubs in gold and silver on an oxidized and textured ground. Maker’s mark. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.
It is notable that among the many different ways of displaying colonized subjects as well as their produce and manufactures, and the variety of trophies exhibited at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, it was the weapons of the Fijians that were put into this style of display. The people of Fiji had until very recently been understood as “cannibals,” the “fiercest” of the South Pacific.Footnote 64 In 1886, their weapons were part of a display that emphasized the commercial potential of the Pacific Islands; the trophies here are thus of conquered foes, however fierce.Footnote 65 The display of weapons in these contexts, then, spoke of conquest already completed that paved the way for colonial commercial development; these were trophies in line with hunting trophies. The closely related subject of hunting trophies is too large to treat in this article, but it is notable that the 1886 exhibition also included a substantial naturalistic diorama, the “Trophy of Kuch Behar” of tigers attacking an elephant, contributed by the Maharajah of Kuch Behar, and Australia, South Africa, and Canada contributed multiple hunting trophies.Footnote 66
By the 1890s, the trophy of conquered “native” weapons, often alongside exotic big game taken on safari, was reaching its zenith as a design associated with the British Empire.Footnote 67 Visually, the most imposing public instance of this might have been the 1890 Stanley and African Exhibition, a series of trophies representing the huge swath of Africa that Stanley had covered in his celebrated explorations (Figure 13).Footnote 68 With animal trophy heads interspersed throughout, the exhibition was simply one trophy after another; the symmetry of each display is not simply intended to look pleasing, but by this time was a well-established cultural signal of the conquest of each ethnic group.
East Central Africa, Item 10 from Stanley and African Exhibition Folder, Royal Geographical Society HMS/7/1. © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG).
Beyond exhibitions, trophies of “Native” weapons, animals, and goods became a staple of domestic interiors in the colonies and at home. As John MacKenzie has written, it became “characteristic” in British design (and, he argues, part of nineteenth-century medievalism) to bring together “the ethnic and the natural historical” in a “sweeping-up of exotic taxonomies, both human and zoological,” and “such trophies became a ubiquitous feature of the imperial lifestyle.”Footnote 69 One apt example appeared in the Samoa compound of no less an eminent Victorian than Robert Louis Stevenson. As his stepson Lloyd Osbourne wrote in Memories of Vailima in 1902, Stevenson “loved the contrast of evening dress and the half-naked attendants; the rough track that led the visitor through the forest and jungle to this glowing house under Vaea, the juxtaposition of original Hogarths, Piranes’s [sic], pictures by Sargent, work of Rodin and Augustus St. Gaudens, with rifle-racks, revolvers and trophies of savage weapons.”Footnote 70 The illustration “The Smoking Room” shows this contrast, with the crossed weapons echoing the impression of walls of rough woven matting and in contrast to the finish of the European painting, clock, mirror, and other goods (as well as to the formally dressed white woman in the leather armchair; Figure 14).
“The Smoking Room,” of R. L. Stevenson’s house in Papua New Guinea, as illustrated in Field and Osbourne, Memories of Vailima, 157. Image in the public domain, courtesy of UCLA Library/SRLF Imaging.
This would have seemed entirely apt to the interior designers of the late nineteenth century who recommended a colonial (and one suspects international-exhibition-inspired) eclecticism. In 1891 the home decorating authority Mrs. Talbot Coke, who wrote for the magazine Hearth and Home, “recommended armaments for the hallway,” according to Deborah Cohen. As Cohen describes (quoting Talbot Coke, “The Hall”), “[a]mong those ‘quaint savage weapons of warfare’ from which her readers might choose were ‘curved Afghan guns, Eastern scimitars, graceful spears, and quaintly moulded rhinoceros hide shields from the Soudan’; best of all were munitions ‘sent from stirring scenes of strife’.”Footnote 71 Creating an eclectic, imperial, Orientalist home display, such objects “could be ‘carelessly grouped’ with carved oak panels, one or two dark old oil paintings, and hanging brass lamps.”Footnote 72 The desired effect was precisely such overlapping, layered undifferentiation—collecting and household display built on accretion without distinction or classification. The variety was the point.
However, by the early twentieth century, such eclectic domestic trophies were dating badly. John Elder-Duncan—whose guide to household design used a title inspired by William Morris and who believed that “the most modest home” could be a “model of artistic fitness”— reversed Mrs. Talbot Coke’s advice entirely in 1907.Footnote 73 “Make a clean sweep of antlers, spears, assegais, shields, and all the other miscellaneous animal relics and weapons of warfare which can never properly be seen, and which make an already small and poky place appear more crowded and more stuffy.”Footnote 74 As David Jones and Claire Wintle have discussed, such private collections gradually did leave people’s homes for a variety of museums, often bringing trophies with them or leading curators to create trophies out of objects of unknown provenance.Footnote 75 For example, when Frederick J. Horniman turned his London home into a public museum in 1890 (before he gifted it to the London County Council), it included what by then might have seemed to be its requisite “Zulu trophy.”Footnote 76 However, “trophies of native weapons” were increasingly outdated not just from the point of view of interior decorators, but from the perspective of anthropologists, who had meanwhile developed their own exhibitionary forms based on illustrating theories of sociocultural evolution.
A key model for the new, evolutionist approach to ethnographic objects was the 1874 exhibition in Bethnal Green and accompanying lecture by Lane-Fox displaying, as he called it, the “development of the material arts.”Footnote 77 While much has been written about Lane-Fox in the context of the history of anthropology, here it is important to notice how he developed a system that emerged specifically around organizing technical change (and advancement) among weapons, the category of object that had traditionally been shown as trophies.Footnote 78 As Lane-Fox wrote in 1874, he had collected “ordinary and typical specimens, rather than rare objects” and put these “in sequence” to show “the succession of ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed from the simple to the complex, and from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.”Footnote 79 Figure 15 shows how this logic played out in new kinds of progressive displays, demonstrating a theoretical evolution of Australian forms from simple to complex. Such an arrangement illustrates what Wingfield calls the “grammar of encompassment,” bringing the “primitive” into a narrative of gradual technological development.Footnote 80 Collecting and arranging objects into artificially curated sequences of what Lane-Fox would later call (following Tylor) the “evolution of culture” became an influential model for anthropological exhibitions and museums.Footnote 81 Such collections and displays—and the reorganization of earlier collections along evolutionary lines—became a powerful mechanism for bringing sociocultural evolutionism to a broad public.
Weapons of Australians showing a theoretical evolution based on “survivals” of earlier forms, from “The Evolution of Culture” (1875) Plate III, reprinted in Pitt-Rivers, The Evolution of Culture. Image in the public domain, courtesy of UCLA Library/SRLF Imaging.
Over the last three decades of the nineteenth century, organizers of international exhibitions included exhibits like the “History of Labour” (which appeared first at the Paris Exposition of 1867) or separate anthropology buildings (which first appeared in 1876 in Philadelphia) that provided a format for presenting “primitive” objects in broad schemes showing “development.” The separation of “Native” goods into developmental frameworks increased as “ethnology” rose in prominence at international exhibitions through the 1870s and 1880s. At the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the Smithsonian Institution worked with the Bureau of Indian Affairs to present ethnographic material from the United States in a separate anthropology exhibit. New exhibition classes such as “Institutions and Organizations” and “Physical, Social, and Moral Conditions of Man” encouraged separating out various Indigenous objects from around the world (including from many British colonies) into these analytical categories.Footnote 82 The organizers of the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883 included a new “Section K, Ethnology, Archaeology, and Natural History,” and some exhibitors changed their display of Indigenous peoples and goods accordingly.Footnote 83 Hoffenberg notes that the New South Wales Commissioners “collected and displayed photographs of local Aboriginals, samples of their weapons and tools, including boomerangs and shields, and a glass menagerie of an Aboriginal camp and kangaroo chase” in Section K “rather than, for example, with “‘modern’ weapons and tools.”Footnote 84 As European, North American, and colonial states established ethnological museums and collections, and as Anthropology became its own separate Section H of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (in 1884), ethnography and anthropology appeared as increasingly demarcated displays and as separate sections at exhibitions in New Orleans 1884, Paris 1889, and Chicago 1893.Footnote 85 Not surprisingly, ethnography was especially prominent at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1886.Footnote 86 New techniques emerged for showing the difference between, or distance separating, “primitive” and “civilized” through various non-trophy displays, such as ethnographic models, linear systems of showing evolution of form, dioramas, and “Native villages” of performers.
In the wake of the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, British education and urban reformer Patrick Geddes explicitly called for “the total abolition of the ‘trophy’ system of exhibits” and a radical rethink of the very goal of the exhibitions themselves.Footnote 87 He noted that the then-recent spate of specialized international “health” exhibitions represented “a higher wave of contemporary progress than do the exhibitions of mere wealth production; here the progress of well-being is no longer proclaimed by a pyramid of gilt nuggets, or a trophy of blacking tins and preserved meat.”Footnote 88 He was not against celebrating the gains of Empire. On the contrary, he argued that the “problem of exploitation, of extractive industries, of getting hold of our resources, of realising our estate” was not “in proportion to the vastness and heterogeneity of the piles of raw material which lumber up our exhibitions to so little purpose, but lies in a careful stocktaking of our resources, actual and latent.”Footnote 89 Geddes argued that trophies needed to be abandoned “in the interests of utility and beauty alike,” in favor of “the simplest possible show-cases, uniform for each class of goods, and placed in regular rows upon the ground-plan.” Pointing out that trophies “unconsciously, yet absolutely, repeat in construction and colour alike the primary aesthetic efforts of infancy,”Footnote 90 in the form of showy towers or pyramids of goods, Geddes argued in favor of linear and developmental educational cases. This was in part a reaction to shops of the period; commentators frequently made the connection between the great exhibitions and new kinds of increasingly elaborate gas-lit, plate-glass window displays from the mid-century onward.Footnote 91 Indeed, given that context, Geddes recognized that “the total disappearance of the trophies is hardly to be looked for” as the “majority of exhibitors and organisers alike” remained so “juvenile” in their approach to exhibition design.Footnote 92 To Geddes, at least, it seemed that trophies were a lamentable but unshakable part of exhibition practice.
In 1909, nearly twenty years after the Stanley Exhibition, just after Elder-Duncan’s decorating advice to clear out hallway trophies, and as Cambridge anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon was reorganizing the Horniman Museum in London along evolutionary lines, the Museums Journal published an article by F. W. Knocker complaining about the longevity of the trophy form for displaying ethnographic material.Footnote 93 Knocker, curator of the Perak State Museum in Malaysia, noted the problematic colonial origins of objects that left them without clear provenance, purpose, or systematic organization, arranged by aesthetics rather than science.Footnote 94 (Not surprisingly, he did not touch on the imperial power imbalances or theft that such “curios” might represent.Footnote 95) He also noted that such lack of clear provenance led to trophy displays: “what is worse to the serious anthropologist, the officer in charge finding a large number of unnamed and unlocated objects thrown on his hands, resorts to that most revolting method of exhibition—the Baronial Hall Trophy!” He described a nearby museum with “an extensive area of wall-space in the Zoological [sic] Room” that was “covered with, what no doubt the perpetrator would majestically style ‘an artistic and striking arrangement of curios’,” but that Knocker saw (and believed any visitor would see) as “a confused mass of ethnological objects.” For Knocker, such a display privileged the aesthetic over the scientific, noting that many of these objects were “of great value financially and scientifically” but had been “indiscriminately mixed, from such widely distributed parts of the globe as Australia and North America, New Zealand and Persia, South Africa and the Malay Peninsula, and so forth.” What was the goal of such an exhibit? Knocker argued that “[s]uch a display is devoid of instruction to the studious visitor, devoid of any meaning to the travelled visitor, devoid of interest, even, to the casual visitor.”Footnote 96 What would give such objects an interest, for Knocker? A design that made anthropological theories visible and therefore legible.
Like Geddes and his belief that exhibitions should be educational, Knocker advocated for ethnographic museums (even “provincial” ones!) to serve an educational purpose. For Knocker, as for others, this meant illustrating sociocultural evolution from “primitive” to “modern” rather than symmetrical arrangements of objects all deemed equally “savage.”Footnote 97 Even as ethnographic trophies spread as a popular form, developmental ethnographic displays and interpretive materials featured at the international exhibitions over the last decades of the nineteenth century. Both were ways of illustrating progress, and contributed to that popular narrative, even as their forms differed. Evolutionist displays showed linear stages of development from what was perceived to be simple and natural to complex and artificial, while trophies of weapons or “primitive” goods often illustrated a stark disjunction between past and present, conquered and conqueror. But both systems took that stark difference, and resulting power imbalances, as their foundational assumption.
Conclusion: Trophies and the victory of extractive superabundance
On 31 March 1897, Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain gave a speech published as “The True Conception of Empire.”Footnote 98 Speaking to the Royal Colonial Institute, Chamberlain captured the increasingly belligerent and jingoistic tone of the Conservative Unionist government, laughing at “little Englanders” and justifying violence for the greater good. While he could “not say that our success has been perfect in every case” or that “all our methods have been beyond reproach,” he argued that “in almost every instance in which the rule of the Queen has been established and the great Pax Britannica has been enforced, there has come with it greater security to life and property, and a material improvement in the condition of the bulk of the population.”Footnote 99 He acknowledged that “no doubt … when these conquests have been made, there has been loss of life among the native populations,” but this was, he thought, “the condition of the mission we have to fulfill.” Indeed, he said, you “cannot have omelettes without breaking eggs; you cannot destroy the practices of barbarism, of slavery, of superstition, which for centuries have desolated the interior of Africa, without the use of force,” but still rejoiced in recent successful “expeditions” in Nyasaland, Ashanti, Benin, and Nupé.Footnote 100 This historical revisionism had become common, with the “suppression of the slave trade” now a key justification for British and other European interventions in Africa. In contrast to many of the texts I have examined, Chamberlain does not shy away from the cost in human life of “material improvement,” and he was clear that he imagined the benefits to be not only for the colonized but for what he termed “a federation of the British race.”Footnote 101
If material comfort and prosperity once seemed a poor justification for violence, by the end of the century it was close to becoming official policy. There is much to be said for how and why this came about. But it is notable that just under a year later, we can see an example of the triumph of the trophy as a style of commercial display—alongside the absence of any sense of the term’s unfittingness or sense of dissonance in heroic images being made out of everyday products. In a February 1898 article from the immensely popular Strand Magazine, William FitzGerald reported on “Trade Trophies,” including a 127-foot-high Swedish “Monster Candle,” Britannia and the Statue of Liberty carved from salt, roses made of butter, dahlias from lard, Portsmouth Town Hall in sugar, a castle from soap, statues from various types of wax, and a ten-ton Canadian cheese.Footnote 102 Thoroughly accustomed to the concept of a commercial trophy, FitzGerald shows no surprise at this or horror at the designation, and no need to explain the Classical origins of the term. Instead, after complaining that “the average British trader is an unimaginative person,” his article illustrates and describes “a great number of very curious trade trophies” (including mostly British ones).Footnote 103 By the turn of the twentieth century, trade trophies and gargantuan displays of superabundance had become part of the culture of department stores and international exhibitions.Footnote 104 At the same time, hunting trophies had become part of a colonial culture that combined killing with ritual forms of display: stylized “trophied” photographs of the “bag” (Figure 16) and mounted trophies in homes, clubs, and museums, the experience preserved in the ubiquitous hunting memoir.
“Governor Bell of Uganda and trophies of the chase,” from Peter MacQueen, In Wildest Africa (George Ball and Sons, 1910), after 314. Image in the public domain, courtesy of UCLA Library/SRLF Imaging.
The “trophy” thus traveled from a Baroque design element to a metaphor for victory to a new exhibition form, the latter of which provoked a series of criticisms in the second half of the nineteenth century. Exhibition trophies could be made of hunted animals, raw materials, “primitive” objects, or manufactured goods: in that sense, the form was elastic and accommodated the broad sweep of imperial power and extractive superabundance. What had been a figure of speech—Nelson’s Column as a “trophy” to his victory at Trafalgar—became actual monumental objects, celebrating nothing so much as capitalist overabundance, the result of imperial power. Trophies were a cultural form that allowed the visualization—now as much as then—of the interconnectedness of these arenas of power, the combination of factors and driving forces of industrial, imperialist capitalism.
At the same time, the very starkness of the form and concept as a symbol of power at first made many contemporary commentators deeply uncomfortable. In the 1850s and 1860s, critics balked at the combination of naked extraction and commercialism with Classical connotations of military victory, so recently invoked in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century decoration and rhetoric around public monuments. In contrast, trophies of animals or “primitive” weapons seemed more fitting, but new criticisms appeared on the grounds of both aesthetics and evolutionist anthropology. In many ways, the commercial trophy as a form became untethered from its original military associations, and commentators stopped wondering about the tastefulness or appropriateness of trophies of Indian architecture (as at the Paris Exposition of 1900), or of grain (as in the Canadian display at the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908), or the many, many examples at the high point of exhibitions and European imperialism at the beginning of the twentieth century.Footnote 105 As Chamberlain’s speech demonstrated, it became publicly acceptable to embrace imperial violence in pursuit of material wealth.
Even as trophies proliferated in commercial and exhibition settings, increasingly blending architectural ornament and architectural form, anthropologists and others began arguing for different ways of making progress visible through linear, educational, evolutionary displays. However, while nineteenth-century anthropologists distinguished their new discipline by abandoning trophies, they continued to rely on the same assumptions about European conquest and progress that trophies tried to illustrate. For instance, as Haddon was overseeing the rearrangement of the ethnological collections in London’s Horniman Museum, its curator (and Haddon’s former student) H. S. Harrison created a new handbook called From Stone to Steel.Footnote 106 Haddon had been reorganizing the collection along evolutionary principles and the guidebook used familiar tropes about industrial development. From Stone to Steel argued that the “present supremacy of man over the rest of the animal kingdom,” and his ability to use “the forces and products of nature,” could be explained as “due to the combination of dexterity of hand and versatility of brain.” Moreover, Harrison wrote, “a great part in man’s advance from savagery to civilisation” was in fact due to the “invention of new or improved implements of war, of the chase, of agriculture, and of many other kinds.”Footnote 107 Rather than seeing this “encompassing” narrative as a radical departure from the binary opposition between “savage” and “civilized,” such evolutionist models instead created a spectrum of improvement, with “savages” on one end and themselves on the other (as Tylor had noted!). Anthropologists may have disdained “trophy” displays as scientifically useless, but they continued to participate in the same basic logic, that is, that “civilization” was the conquest of nature (and of other people) through industrial development. Despite radical shifts in contemporary anthropology, this remains a popular narrative of modern history even today: that Europeans generally, and Britons in particular, oversaw vast empires and wealth because of technological innovation rather than through violent imperial conquest.Footnote 108 If anything, abandoning the “trophy” designation and form and embracing the language of gradualism, as the new Horniman displays did, only served to obscure the violence involved in modern industrial, imperial economies.
Morris’ invented anti-colonial exhibition, with its anti-trophies, brings us back to the problem of representing the “modern” in a way that would justify the destruction it brought. This question of representation was one of the great problems of nineteenth-century art, architecture, and design, as well as of its politics. What form could people give to the “modern,” understood as both the state of constant change (“all that is solid melts into air”) and the cultural response to that state (whether in the guise of the bourgeoisie or an avant-garde)?Footnote 109 Mark Crinson has recently posed this as the oscillation between the “shock city,” with its “non-architecture,” and the “civic response” to this.Footnote 110 Trophies reveal to us moments of making architecture out of non-architecture; the search for new forms of representation to make sense of the emerging industrial, imperial, commercial, global world; and the interplay of empire, extraction, and early anthropology.
Studying trophies allows us to see a ubiquitous but little-recognized part of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial culture as well as the aestheticization of systems of power. Crucially, trade and ethnographic trophies appeared to people at the time as connected by more than just the term or form; contemporaries understood “trophied” objects as both justifications for and evidence of industrial, imperial power. Trophies were an important part of the cultural work that went into normalizing and naturalizing modern imperialism and its cultures of excess and superabundance: a form that could organize multiple kinds of objects into narratives of conquest and progress, trophies can now illustrate the entanglement of narratives and institutions we often consider separately. If Thackeray initially imagined trophies taken and used as part of a “bloodless” war against Nature, they controversially called to mind and then increasingly openly celebrated the conquest of other people. Most ominously, perhaps, this brief history of trophies illustrates connections between the wide cultural acceptance of materialism and the violence needed to maintain it.
Amy Woodson-Boulton is Professor and past Chair of the History Department at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, USA. She has published on the history of museums and the social role of art; her recent work studies the intersections between art and anthropology that shaped modern, industrial, imperial Britain and a new relationship to the natural world. The author thanks Erika Rappaport, Lisa Cody, Michelle Tusan, Lara Kriegel, Peter Hoffenberg, Anne Helmreich, Andrea Kaston Tange, Elizabeth Drummond, Anthony Perron, the editors of JBS, and the anonymous readers for their feedback on drafts of this article.
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