Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/4841
Title: The Making of 'Great Benin': Felix Norman Roth and Henry Ling Roth
Contributor(s): McDougall, Russell John  (author)
Publication Date: 2008
Handle Link: https://hdl.handle.net/1959.11/4841
Abstract: The 1897 punitive expedition against Benin City was arguably one of the key events in the history of the British Empire and certainly pivotal in West African history. Ola Rotimi's tragic drama depicting the episode, 'Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (1974), is one of the best-known plays within Nigeria; there is also the pageant, 'Oba Ovonramwen' (1996), Emwinma Ogieriakhi's dramatisation of the fall of Benin. The story has been told variously by European as well as Nigerian historians (Egharevba 1960; Ryder 1969; Home 1982). This chapter, however, is concerned with the contribution to the historical and ethnographic record by Henry Ling Roth (1855-1925) and his brother Felix Norman Roth (1857-1921). They had a major influence upon late Victorian and early Edwardian British and European understandings of the history and culture of the Niger River peoples, the effect of which is subtly continuing. Felix worked with the Medical Service of the Niger Coast Protectorate, and took part in the sacking of Benin, while Henry was what we would now consider a 'salvage anthropologist', curator of the Bankfield Museum in Halifax (Yorkshire), and author (six years after the sacking) of an apparently exhaustive study of the traditional culture of Benin, which he wrongly believed to have been totally extinguished by the British invasion (HL Roth 1903[1968]).
Publication Type: Book Chapter
Source of Publication: The Roth Family Anthropology and Colonial Administration, p. 73-92
Publisher: Left Coast Press
Place of Publication: Walnut Creek, United States of America
ISBN: 9781598742282
1598742280
Fields of Research (FoR) 2008: 160104 Social and Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Economic Objective (SEO) 2008: 950599 Understanding Past Societies not elsewhere classified
HERDC Category Description: B1 Chapter in a Scholarly Book
Publisher/associated links: http://www.lcoastpress.com/book.php?id=60
http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an42714557
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=E3yAAAAAMAAJ
Series Name: Publications of the institute of archaeology, University College London
Editor: Editor(s): Russell McDougall and Iain Davidson
Appears in Collections:Book Chapter

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