Amsterdam Museum(s): In Search of a History, an Identity, and a Future

This report was developed within the Horizon2020 project ECHOES: European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities as part of its work package 3 on ‘City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.’ This work package conducts in-depth, qualitative, comparative analyses of three city museums, each representing distinct positions within colonial history. The Amsterdam Museum forms one of these three case studies. The aim of this first report on the Amsterdam Museum is to reconstruct the evolution of the museum and illustrate the current state and positionality of the museum. This analysis is placed within the context of the history of the city of Amsterdam and consists of research into the museum’s position, priorities, policies, problems, and opportunities, which are shaped by both external influences (e.g. relationships to city authorities, national or local politics, developments within the national museum sector, or the particular features of the city) as well as internal processes and values. Thus, this report provides a preliminary case study of the Amsterdam Museum from a post-colonial perspective in order to understand how the museum is positioned within the colonial pasts of Amsterdam and how, in turn, these pasts are represented in the museum.

The Amsterdam Museum provides a case study from a city museum located in Western Europe.
The first reports on the Shanghai History Museum/Shanghai Revolution Museum (Pozzi 2019) and the Museum of Warsaw (Bukowiecki 2019) prepared in parallel present case studies of city museums from two different geo-political zones (East Asia and Central and Eastern Europe). The research on all three of these case studies is on-going and will result in two more sets of reports, which will jointly form a nine-part final report of the research conducted on city museums within ECHOES. As the research is still in progress, the results presented in this report should be treated as preliminary and may be changed or expanded due to new findings.

The report begins with a brief history of the city of Amsterdam, which focuses on the development of the city and in particular the colonial framework in which this development should be placed. After illustrating the context of the history of the city of Amsterdam, the report sketches the current state of the museum sector in the Netherlands and the position of museums in Dutch society and politics. The core of the paper is formed by an analysis of the Amsterdam Museum. This analysis begins with a history of the museum, from its foundation as the Amsterdam Historical Museum in 1926 until its rebranding as Amsterdam Museum in 2011. After discussing the history of the museum, the current state of the museum is investigated, including its current organizational structure, its staff, its mission, its strategic partnerships, the collections, the permanent and temporary exhibitions, and the visitors. Finally, the report presents preliminary reflections of examples of (dis)engagements with colonialism at the Amsterdam Museum, based on the ECHOES methodology centered on four modalities for practicing colonial heritage: removal, repression, reframing, and re-emergence (Kølvraa 2018).