In Europe

medieval flute found in the Thames, a piece of the vest of Charles 1 and six ‘figurines from a lost civilisation’, kilned and aged in 1857 by two dredgers who turned a profit on the Cumings’ collectors’ mania.
    A walk through this museum inevitably leaves one with the image of a huge pyramid of bones, knick-knacks, cake crumbs and slices of mummy, and atop it all two neatly dressed London gentlemen. With their museum they hoped to ‘create a storehouse of knowledge’ for ‘the merchant and the manufacturer, the archaeologist and the historian, the painter and the playwright, the military man and the naval strategist, the philanthropist and the philosopher, for the lover of culture in general’. The more they collected, the Cumings believed, the more people would know. And the more people knew about other cultures, past and present, the better they would realise that Britain under Queen Victoria formed the apotheosis of human civilisation, and that the Briton was the pinnacle of creation.
    The Cumings were eccentric, of course, even in their own day. But they did reflect the mentality of the times, and they said openly what many Britons thought. What's more, they had the wherewithal to draw their personal conclusions. As the current curator has rightly noted, it is a collection that flies in the face of all known international agreements. The Cumings could never have hauled in their Indian masks, Roman toy sheep, Egyptian falcon mummies, Pacific scalps and Chinese inkpots so easily had their country not grown during that same period into the mightiest power on earth. Around 1900, the British Empire stretched from North to South Pole: Canada, Egypt, the Cape colonies, India, Burma, Malacca, Singapore, Australia and so on. The British Navy was strongenough to fight two wars at the same time, its fleet could – theoretically, at least – take on the combined navies of Germany, Russia and the United States. The British aristocracy was imitated all over Europe, not only by the German kaiser and the Russian czar, but also by the German nobility, who preferred to marry English girls, the German upper classes, who liked to stroll through town in English coats and trousers, and by the French
haut monde
who organised
le Derby
at Chantilly,
le Steeplechase
at Auteuil and who met at
le Jockey Club
.
    Only in the distance was there the faint rumble of new powers to come: Germany, the United States, Japan. The British coal and iron industries were the factory of the world, the City of London its financial core. The major European bankers had all moved to London after the currency market in Paris collapsed in 1870, and that was where the big money continued to circulate.
    The City was a world unto itself, with its own codes and its own honour system. To a certain extent, the entrepreneurial and the personal mingled there in much the same way as within the royal houses of Europe. The City, wrote Jean Monnet, the son of a French cognac manufacturer and a trainee there in the year 1904, ‘is more than a neighbour-hood of offices and banks: it is also a gathering, socially most exclusive, but professionally open to the world at large.’ Lines ran from the City to Shanghai, Tokyo and New Delhi, to New York and Chicago and back again, and at the same time everyone knew each other personally; from their games of golf, or the hours they spent together, regardless of rank or position, in London's commuter trains. Monnet: ‘It is a closely woven community in which business rivalry is mitigated by personal relationships. Everyone sees to his own affairs, but at the same time to the affairs of the City. An Englishman will therefore not say: “I am sending my son to such-and-such a company or bank.” Instead, he says: “I am sending him to the City.”’
    Outside the City as well, the empire lent British society a certain standing. It imposed a lifestyle in which a number of traits were highly valued: militarism, a pronounced awareness of rank and class, a sort of frontier mentality, a typically British, undercooled machismo. A great deal of travelling was done, all over the world, and at the same time as British cosmopolitism upheld a strong sense of its own superiority. A great deal was learned aboutplants, animals and human cultures, but at the centre of the world stood Britannia. And at the summit of creation stood the Cumings, striving diligently for immortality, at the top of the heap for all time.
    In 1862, the city