Art histories of corporate imperialism and racial capitalism

Abstract

‘It is only by means of art that a permanent revolution can be achieved’, claimed socialist and anti-imperialist art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy during a lecture to Newcastle art students in 1913.1 Born to a Tamil father and English mother in Ceylon, then a British colony, Coomaraswamy moved to the UK as a child – later graduating with a degree in geology and botany from University College London in 1900. After spending years documenting Sri Lankan and Indian material culture through a number of highly influential books, he became the first Keeper of Indian art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1917. During his Newcastle address, he advised his audience: …any deep and lasting revolution can only be founded upon a re-education of the sense-sensitiveness of the whole race…It is your task as craftsmen to undertake this long neglected education of the senses, nowadays so much despised, and everywhere sacrificed to the purposes of trade, empire.2