Colonial Histories of Heritage: Legislative Migrations and the Politics of Preservation

Abstract

In recent years there has been an increasing body of scholarship concerned with the history of heritage legislation. Whereas such archival forays have typically provided merely contextual background for the discussion of current heritage resource management policies, 1 the historical analysis of heritage legislation also provides insight into the broader social, political and, indeed, economic values codified in such laws. 2 Most often this work is framed within a national context. 3 This reflects the fact that these laws necessarily passed through specific national legislatures, but it also reinforces the close relationship between heritage and nationhood, patrimonie and patria , which has been explored at length in the academic literature. 4 Some authors have argued for the value of a more comparative, international framework for the analysis of heritage histories. Swenson, for example, notes how the development of heritage legislation in Europe between approximately 1870 and 1914 constituted an arena both for collaboration and rivalry between nations, while the protection of a nation’s monuments became an index of its civilized state. 5 The transference or ‘transplanting’ of legislative solutions from one national context to another had long been central to the process of drafting new laws, and the field of heritage law was no exception. To these ends international surveys of legislation were undertaken and disseminated, such as that published in a British parliamentary report of 1897 concerning ‘the statutory provisions existing in foreign countries for the preservation of historical buildings’. 6 While the principles of legislative transferability remain matters of debate among legal scholars, 7 through such practices there was a clear diffusion of underlying attitudes and ideologies relating to heritage from one nation to another.