[article ID:211]

List of countries that have been considered to be colonised by the UK or 'part of the British Empire' for the purposes of these statistics

In Part 1 are listed all the countries of the world with their British colonial status clarified. In Part 2 is a table showing this information graphically.

It is hard to define the colonial status of many countries as there were definite degrees of colonialisation. It was surprisingly late in the history of the British Empire before the Empire, as we commonly think of it, was established and even more close to present before the legal status of some countries was clarified in a way which makes sense to us today. For this reason we have decided to think of the British Empire in its widest sense, that of the British sphere of influence. All the countries at some point were formally administered from the UK in some form or another but not all of them remained in the same status throughout the period 1884 - 1945. However, for all of them we would argue that one could argue that throughout this period they were within the British sphere of influence. For this reason we have included such countries as Iraq, which became independent in 1932 and was not administered at all until 1921, and also Canada, New Zealand and Australia which had Dominion status. All of this is, of course, highly debatable, but this is the widest possible definition we can take. Because it was easiest that way the total number of objects from each colonial country have been included in the following statistics. A more refined, but much more time consuming, method for each country would be to define exactly when each country's colonial status began and ended and then adjust the figures accordingly either by the exact years or by decade. For some of these countries this process would make no difference as they were part of the British Empire, without question, throughout this period.

** There is an argument that Canada ([mostly] declared a Dominion in 1867, Australia (declared a Federation and a Commonwealth from 1901), New Zealand (declared a Dominion in 1907) and South Africa (Union of South Africa formed in 1910) were all independent and therefore not colonial during this period (or during the majority of this period in the case of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa).

[article ID:212]

Figures which show the 'most colonial' influence:

These include UK either within the colonial status or separately identified , Australia, Canada and South Africa are also included:

Figures that show the 'least colonial' influence:

If you exclude Australia, Canada and South Africa from the figures (because by 1910 they were all of Dominion status and therefore had at least a measure of independence), the statistics change:

The same figures shown a slightly different way (that is with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, here known as the Dominions, shown separately rather than included as non-colonial countries):

It would be quite arguable that other countries should also be excluded from the statistics, for example Iraq whose total figures have been included even though it was at the most a colonial state for 10 of the 60 plus years. Therefore, depending on how stringent your definition of colonial becomes and the more you apply specific shorter time periods to these statistics, the more the level of the collections that came from colonial areas decrease.

[article ID:213]

(Note that these statistics are lifted from each continent's report and the originals can be found in the separate continent folders):

Africa:

Americas:

Asia:

Australia: 100 per cent colonial (or not)!

Europe:

As the largest single country by size of collection it was bound to make a big difference to these figures adding the UK to the 'colonial' size of the equation (rather than, as happens in the first graph) they are included in the non-colonial figures which is probably as misleading. The following graph is probably the least misleading:

Oceania:

Even in the light of the global picture the Oceania collections are very dominated by colonial collections. Removing New Zealand from the colonial category changes the statistics as shown above.

Warning: these two graphs have been created using the figures in the table above, we are somewhat unsure about them as we feel they might be slightly misleading, caution should be taken in using them to extrapolate any conclusions. For example they exaggerate the Oceanian collections because the double counting between Irian Jaya and PNG is included twice thus overstating the total number of Oceanian collections, this is true of most if not all continents

Given the surprise of the size of the UK collections (and the fact that these are included in the European colonial total) it is surprising that Europe colonial only ranks thirds behind Africa and Asian collections. Having said that the ranking matches (more or less the overall global pattern of size of general collections from each continent which ranking goes:

Africa - 47,113

Europe - 41,898

Asia (including SE Asia) - 40,232

Australia - 18,465

Oceania - 17,088

Americas: 15,715

Although Europe and Asia have swapped ranks (2nd and 3rd).

Note that, of course, the totals of the colonial and non-colonial countries of a continent , if added together do not necessarily add to the total number of objects from that continent (because of double counting).

Appendix 3 show the figures which were used to build up the above tables.

Caveats about statistics

As usual, when presenting these statistics we wish to remind you of the problems of taking these statistics as being accurate or too seriously. For example in the above statistics there are the problems of which countries should or should not be included as within the British sphere of influence (the above tables include Canada, Australia etc which were at least nominally independent before 1945) but also the problem of double-counting between countries. For the benefit of readers who have not read the detailed statistics for each continent, we should explain that many entries on the PRM collections management database for objects are not clearly provenanced and several countries are suggested (for the same object) as the provenance. This element of double counting cannot be easily removed (where it can be we have done, hence the category of 'British India' as a separate country) so one object can be counted several times. For some objects they may even be counted both as a colonial and a non-colonial object though we think this is rather unlikely. Therefore these statistics are an indication only and not an exact science.

'Relational Museum' project team

October 2003

[1] Note that there are a lot of items from N America which are not provenanced very exactly and could be from either USA or Canada (or less likely, Greenland), this figure is definitely an underestimate

[2] Note that PNG and Irian Jaya figures include double counting, this is because there is a good deal of unspecifically provenanced items between the two countries ie only provenanced to New Guinea. In these cases they are included in both figures and in effect cancel each other out

[3] see footnote 2

[4] See footnote 3, note that in other appendices 3 figures are given, definite PNG and Irian Jaya and a third category for the unspecifically provenanced items

[5] see footnote 2