Imperial Nostalgia and the Colonial Museum

When a Florida treasure-hunting company dredged up half a billion dollars’ worth of gold and silver coins from a Spanish colonial frigate rotting on the ocean floor, Spain went to war — not with cannons, but with lawyers, curators, and museum lighting. In “Imperial Nostalgia as Patrimony: Shipwrecks and Treasures in the Colonial Museum” recently published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (open access), I examine the exhibitions that Spain staged after retrieving its sunken treasure from Odyssey Marine Inc., showing how hundreds of thousands of glittering coins — minted by coerced Andean laborers and enslaved Africans — were quietly transformed from colonial plunder into patrimonial heritage. Aesthetic choices as seemingly innocent as stacking coins in pyramids or bathing them in dramatic light do the ideological work of severing silver from slavery and reattaching it to a redemptive story of Spanish national glory. The result, I argue, is a case study in how the national museum form is structurally bound to reproduce legitimating narratives — and why decolonizing gestures, however sincere, cannot fully overcome that constraint.