The British Museum is everybody’s idea of a museum, but at the same time, it is hardly like a museum at all. It is more like a little state. The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it: the museum is not the contents of its display cases. It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency. “We’re not a warehouse, [or] a mausoleum,” its chair, the UK’s former chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum’s annual trustees’ dinner in November. On the contrary, it is both these things, and others beside.
It is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain’s psyche over 300 years: its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism; its pugnacious superiority complex; its restless seafaring and trading; its cruel imperial enrichment; its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism, its postcolonial anxiety. All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects: a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that, in any human, would be regarded as a kind of illness. The museum contains, in total, 8m objects. Or maybe 6m, depending on how you count them. (A collection of 1m cigarette cards bequeathed in 2006 is counted as a single item, for instance.) Either way, the collection is vast and grows every year. Add together everything owned by the Louvre, the National Gallery and the V&A, and you still have fewer than half the objects possessed by the British Museum.
It is not the oldest museum in Britain, but in essential ways it is the ur-museum, the one that set the pattern for all Britain’s national museums. Founded in 1753, it is the result of the decision of Sir Hans Sloane, an 18th-century Anglo-Irish doctor and collector enriched by, among other things, the labour of enslaved people in Jamaica, to leave his remarkable collection to the nation for “the improvement, knowledge and information of all persons”. Unlike its nearest counterparts overseas – the Louvre, the Hermitage – it was not established as a monarch’s projection of power, or, like the Metropolitan Museum, as an act of philanthropy by the super-rich. Instead, it was set up by, and is ultimately answerable to, parliament. Its aim was to shape the citizens of a newly united country, in the wake of the Jacobite attempt on the throne of 1745.
