Collecting along Shipping Lines: The North German Lloyd Shipping Company and its Importance for the Municipal Museum of Natural History, Ethnology and Trade, Bremen, 1896-1914

Abstract

The Übersee-Museum Bremen was founded in 1896 as Municipal Museum of Natural History, Ethnology and Trade. Its establishment as a museum composed of these three sections traces back to a commercial exhibition organized by the old Hanseatic city’s merchants in 1890 in cooperation with the director of the city’s ethnographic and natural history collections. Together they intended to display not only the commodities that merchants brought from overseas, but also the natural and cultural spaces from which these products came. The exhibition led to the founding of the museum, and the museum staff and the city’s merchants established close relationships. Bremen’s most important shipping company, the Norddeutscher Lloyd, provided special financial and logistic support to the museum, but it also influenced, through its subsidiaries and shipping lines, where and when objects could be acquired in order to extend the museum’s stocks. The company thus had an effect on scientific knowledge production based upon the collecting of ethnographic objects and botanical and zoological specimens. This article will, therefore, analyze the networks and agents linked to the museum and its holdings.

Keywords:
History of Knowledge; ethnographic collections; Museology