Discovering Cook's Collections

Discovering Cook’s Collections focuses on the collections of art and material culture brought back from the Pacific on Captain Cook’s voyages and contains essays by some of the world’s leading and most innovative historians and anthropologists. The book celebrates the richness of Pacific Island cultures in the initial years of European contact as well as the collections’ contemporary relevance to historians and the Indigenous communities who produced them. The essays in this book explore the history of the collections, their dispersal through the museums and private collections of Europe and the different ways in which they have been interpreted over time.