Provenance, Repatriation and Dutch Colonial Heritage in the Digital Space: The Colonial Collections Consortium

Debbie McCollin

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The Colonial Collections Consortium is a digital project established in 2022 in response to two critical issues emerging from 21st century Caribbean historiography, namely the disturbing scarcity of historical material on non-anglophone regions and the challenges of colonial object ownership in the age of repatriation. The project, supported by five renowned Dutch heritage organisations, hosts an extensive object archive and collective called the Datahub, which provides services and a networking platform for researchers interested in curation, provenance research, and collections establishment. Though inevitably weighted by imperial legacies that impact its efficacy, the Consortium and its Datahub project nobly endeavor to create an accessible space to advance historical scholarship and heritage preservation through provenance research within the context of Dutch coloniality.

As its name suggests, the strength of this project is the partnership of the five diverse Dutch organisations on which it is grounded. The institutions, ranging from private to government, offer the Colonial Collection Consortium an expansive reservoir of expertise and object collections. The five organisations, the Museum Bronbeek, the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, the Cultural Heritage Agency, the Rijksmuseum, and the Wereldmuseum, inject a wealth of knowledge and depth of skill in critical areas into the initiative. The Museum Bronbeek, for instance, represents some of the most dominant imperial actors in the Dutch colonial project – the military forces – and houses objects collected by veterans from military encounters throughout the Dutch empire. The Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, however, offers an excellent counterpoint, as its collections are focused on the consequences of imperial and military engagements – the “social impact of world wars, large-scale violence and genocides,”^[1] for example. Furthermore, the inclusion of government agencies in the partnership guarantees legitimacy and oversight over the heritage services offered by the Colonial Collections Consortium. The Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, for instance, is a part of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and is responsible for heritage “laws, regulations and policy, [and] provides advice and develops practically applicable knowledge for those who manage heritage.”^[2]

Central to the Colonial Collections Consortium project is the Datahub, which is designed to definitively address the underrepresentation of the Dutch colonial experience in the digital space. It employs digitization as an alternative to physical repatriation, evading to an extent the problems of legitimacy, legality, and logistics that surround the physical restitution of Dutch colonial objects.^[3] Researchers can access the collection via the Datahub, the digital object collection database, a colossal digital museum of images of artwork, household and everyday items, jewellery, and religious objects, as well as photographic and document collections from across the Dutch colonial world. The contribution of the national museum of the Netherlands, the Rijksmuseum, is arguably the most significant, as it adds 100 million objects to the archive, including “art and objects with a relation to former colonised territories, including Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Suriname and the Caribbean part of the Kingdom.”^[4]

Despite its name and the introductory statement on its homepage, which imply a more universal collection; the project is distinctly Dutch and its focus, by its own admission, is to collect, preserve, and provide access to Dutch colonial objects and their provenance through digital platforms. It is precise in its mandate. It engages solely with objects strictly or directly produced by or acquired in the Dutch colonial world, whether procured during or after the imperial enterprise. Within these rigid parameters, the Datahub combats the anglophone bias that pervades colonial history and opens access to Dutch colonial material that would otherwise be inaccessible or difficult to access for researchers who are resident in colonial and former colonial territories.

In addition to this extensive searchable object database, the Datahub facilitates knowledge sharing with groups involved in provenance research through the Communities area where persons or organizations with similar heritage interests can gather, network, and “make lists of objects and records that are meaningful to them, and provide them with context and perspectives.”^[5] Additionally, the incorporation of the Research Guide proffers “various research aides that can assist [researchers and organizations] in conducting (provenance) research into Dutch colonial collections.”^[6] In providing digital material collections, community spaces, and training aids, the Datahub makes innovative use of digital technology to create a multifaceted platform for sharing knowledge toward mitigating the injustices that remain ingrained in colonial heritage systems.

As intimated, a significant issue that the project highlights and with which it fundamentally wrestles, is the question of ownership and repatriation of colonial objects. With its focus on provenance research, this digital project naturally draws attention to the means by which European museums acquired colonial objects and opens the controversial discourse about current ownership of colonial materials. Though there has been a concerted effort to produce comprehensive metadata for each digital object, the Consortium website is careful to include the Local Contexts Collections Care Notices under each entry, so to acknowledge the fact that for most objects located in these museums there is “incomplete, inaccurate, and/or missing attribution.”^[7] The Consortium carefully initiates dialogue about the physical repatriation of colonial items, “question[ing]… whether collections from colonial contexts in their care have been acquired in a just manner.”^[8] The website categorically states that the Consortium “recognize[s] the historical injustice this period marks and … are committed to rectify[ing] it as far as possible.”^[9] Furthermore, two of the Consortium partners, The Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies, which runs the Restitution Expertise Centre, and the Wereldmuseum group that specifically handles objects with obscure provenances, directly provide support for repatriation initiatives.^[10] Additionally, the Consortium’s Knowledge Exchange and Grants programmes (which it promotes on its site) facilitate training in museum operations and provenance research for heritage professionals from across the world, thus encouraging the sharing of knowledge with colonial stakeholders in a reparatory exercise. The project’s commitment to heritage community building is also reflected in its relatively up-to-date News Forum and Events sections.

The project struggles, nonetheless, to decisively divorce itself from its innate imperial leanings. The digital heritage partners, for instance, continue to exert control over the colonial objects collections, their accessibility, and the narratives that are created about them. This certainly marks the initiative as imperialistic in nature. The Consortium, undoubtedly, attempts to correct colonial injustice and dispossession but remains a remnant of an imperialist past in which control of colonial historical material ultimately rests in imperial hands.

Overall, the Colonial Collections Consortium is an ambitious undertaking with immense capacity for growth. It supplies crucial and abundant support in provenance research for an underrepresented community – namely, colonial heritage and collections managers—and, through its immense digital database, the Datahub, provides easy access to a rich archive of well-documented Dutch colonial primary sources for these stakeholders worldwide. Fundamentally, the Colonial Collections Consortium meets its objectives in its design, implementation, and services, and indubitably confronts the troubling issues of autonomy and cultural dispossession that continue to engulf colonial historical scholarship in the 21st century.

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1. “About,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/about-the-consortium/ ↩︎

2. “About,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/about-the-consortium/ ↩︎

3. Leila A. Amineddoleh, “Cultural Heritage, Galleries and Auction Houses,” in Irini Stamatoudi, ed. Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Cultural Heritage, Northampton: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited (2022), 474-475. ↩︎

4. “About,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/about-the-consortium/ ↩︎

5. “Communities,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://app.colonialcollections.nl/en/communities ↩︎

6. “Research Guide,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://app.colonialcollections.nl/en/research-guide ↩︎

7. For information on Local Context Notices, see "Collections Care Notices", Local Contexts, https://localcontexts.org/notices/cc-notices/ ↩︎

8. “Collections from Colonial Contexts,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/collections-from-colonial-contexts/ ↩︎

9. “About,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/about-the-consortium/ ↩︎

10. “About,” Colonial Collections Consortium, https://www.colonialcollections.nl/index.php/en/about-the-consortium/ ↩︎