Between the mid-17th and mid-19th centuries, Europe's economic prosperity fostered new forms of collecting. The old dynastic cabinets of curiosities gave way to the first great galleries of paintings, antiquities and natural sciences, while ethnographic objects became part of university collections. With very few exceptions, however, the sub-Saharan region remained on the sidelines of this reconfiguration of the heritage landscape, and until the mid-19th century, the presence of African objects in the ethnographic sections of major European museums remained marginal.
It was at this time that the interior of the African continent, in which European powers had previously shown no real interest, began to be explored by explorers whose travel accounts provide extremely valuable evidence for understanding the role of objects in the " discovery " of Africa, and the way in which Europeans appropriated them, whether from an intellectual point of view - through description and/or drawing - or from a material point of view - through the purchase or exchange of certain pieces, sometimes even in a much more violent manner.
This abundant literature shows how, even before the Berlin Conference on the colonial division of Africa in 1884, expeditions helped build the zoological, ornithological, botanical and ethnographic collections that were to form the basis of the African sections of Europe's major museums.
