Europe in countries which did not participate—or only did so to a very
limited extent—in the imperial venture. In nineteenth-century Europe schol-
arshipXourished (or continued toXourish) in Italy and Greece as well as in
Southern and Eastern Europe. There, academies, universities, and museums
were created. Any further analysis of particular circumstances in each of these
countries is beyond the reach of this volume, but a detailed study of the state
of aVairs of any one of them would reveal a pattern replicating the situation
described in the previous paragraph. This could be called ‘national imperial-
ism’, a state of aVairs in theWeld of archaeology where scholars living in
the state capital acted as a united community of interested members and
dominated others in the provinces. This pattern has been well analysed in
countries such as Spain, where archaeologists living in Madrid regulated
legislation, worked in the best museums and dominated the most powerful
institutions dealing with antiquities (see, for example, Dı ́az-Andreu 2004b).
This situation also took place in the imperial powers, where archaeologists
living in London and Paris dominated the rest of the academic community of
their own countries. In Latin America, the long tradition of European schol-
arship and the close links to the Old World resulted in a pattern widely similar
to that of Southern Europe. In other areas of the world the development of
archaeology needs to be seen as a more pro-active resistance against European
imperialism and as part and parcel of the formation of the modern state.
The acknowledgement of the tactical superiority of Western politics and
science led to the mimicking of Western institutions which, in the non-
colonized world—especially in the countries that had not been colonized by
Europeans in the early modern period—became hybridized to a certain extent
with previous traditions of knowledge and religion. In archaeology this
happened mainly from the 1880s in countries such as Turkey and Japan,
and around the First World War in others, such as China. Certain areas of
study which had developed in the Western world such as the inquiry into
material culture associated with the Islamic cult led, in Islamic countries, to
the transformation of those objects which were formerly considered to be
religious to be also seen as historical objects. Similarly, in countries such as
China and Japan, earlierWelds of study such as Buddhism, and practices of
creating knowledge about the past by the compilation of rubbings of inscrip-
tions, became gradually absorbed into a Western type of scholarship,
although the traditional ways of understanding were, to a degree, maintained.
As will become clear in a comparison between Parts II and III of this volume,
there were obvious similarities between the kind of archaeology undertaken by
the imperial powers with respect to informal and formal colonies. In both,
explorers described monuments and other types of material culture, they
published and created hegemonic discourses about them and, when they
204 Archaeology of Informal Imperialism