IN-PERSON: Prague – Section A

Abstract

This paper will explore the heritage preservation efforts of the Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFAA) organization in Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and the Dutch East Indies in the wake of the Second World War. An MFAA Monuments Officer, New Zealander Gilbert Archey, was dispatched to Singapore, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies to assess and report on the condition of monuments, museums and heritage sites following the Japanese occupation and then Allied re-occupation of the region. In Burma, on the other hand, such assessment and reporting tasks were assigned to the British military South East Asia Command, while preservation of heritage sites was left to Burmese custodians. In both cases, though in different ways, imperial priorities dominated preservation efforts: in particular, re-establishing and justifying colonial authority and countering emerging anti-colonial sentiment. As British MFAA officer Sir Leonard Wooley wrote to Archey in 1944, “the justification [for this work] is not primarily to protect objects of art but to protect the Army’s reputation…; the Army cannot afford to antagonize local feeling by maltreating monuments in a country which eventually we have to run, nor … to earn a name for vandalism when it is fighting for civilization. …[T]hat has been admirably achieved in Europe and we cannot make a less good show inside our own Empire.”