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In April 1868, British troops attacked the fortress of the Ethiopian Emperor Tewodros II at Maqdala, in the country’s northern highlands. The British army very quickly overwhelmed the Ethiopian troops with enormous firepower, and Tewodros took his own life. After the Emperor’s death, the British army ransacked Maqdala and took away vast quantities of material culture. Many of these were subsequently accessioned into museum collections across Britain. This paper will examine a selection of objects taken from Ethiopia during the 1868 expedition, considering why particular objects were sought after by collectors, and how new layers of meaning were ascribed to them through the collecting process. It will demonstrate how a wide range of objects collected during the expedition came to serve as ‘trophies’ of the British army’s victory over the Ethiopian emperor.

Alexandra Watson Jones is a museum curator and provenance researcher who completed her PhD in Art History at the University of St Andrews in 2024. Her doctoral research, a collaborative project with National Museums Scotland, explored the collecting of Ethiopian material culture by British individuals and institutions, from the earliest British explorer to visit Ethiopia in 1769 to anthropological collecting in the 1960s. For the past year she has been working as a Project Curator on the British Museum’s Recovery Programme, carrying out focused provenance research to assist with an ongoing investigation into thefts from the museum’s Greek and Roman collections. From 2015-19 Alex worked at the V&A from in various roles including Assistant Curator of Metalwork and Director’s Researcher. In 2018 she curated the V&A's Maqdala 1868 display, highlighting Ethiopian objects in the V&A collection that have long been the subject of controversy, debate, and calls for repatriation. Before joining the museum world Alex worked as a software engineer, and she enjoys exploring new technologies and innovative approaches to her research.

 


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