Our new Collecting and empire trail explores, through 15 objects, the complex histories of how objects came to be in the Museum’s collection.

Curator Alexandra Green takes a look at the life and collections of Sir Stamford Raffles, highlighting his collecting practices in Southeast Asia and his contested legacy.

The way the Museum collects today is incredibly varied – sometimes objects enter the collection directly, in other instances they have passed through different owners, sometimes over a long period of time, before finally coming to the Museum. This blog looks at six key objects from the Collecting histories trail and charts their journey to the Museum.