This essay considers those connections and the entanglement of the museum, the colonial enterprise, and the market for Khmer ‘art’. Three case studies dig deeper into the acquisition histories and provenance of select objects from the collection, which are often only minimally documented.
The relatively small size of the collection, when compared to, for example, the Burmese and South Asian collections, reflects the fact that Cambodia was not a part of the British empire, and that it has not been attributed particular importance in the overall scheme of the BM’s collecting strategy.
The BM provides very little information about their precise geographical origin of the Cambodian objects, and in the majority of cases ownership history is limited to the immediate donor or seller.
Only 99 of the objects have more than one recorded layer of ownership history, and, assuming that ownership dates provided are correct (at this stage, our research has not been able to confirm all such dates), only 42 objects in total have more than five years of recorded ownership history – that is, in the vast majority of cases, it cannot be said with certainty when previous owners acquired the objects and when they were removed from Cambodia.
While this might not be considered problematic, at least from a legal perspective, in the case of objects collected and accessioned to the museum during the colonial period, for objects accessioned around and after 1970, the lack of recorded ownership history merits further research.
