The thesis explores how Danish and British museums disseminate the colonial past in different ways. The comparative analysis is based on qualitative fieldwork undertaken at some of the biggest and most influential museums in the field of cultural, imperial and maritime history in Denmark and the UK. The thesis highlights how the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool have proportionally larger focus on non-European cultures than the National Museum in Copenhagen and the Maritime Museum in Elsinore. The two British museums further have another way of disseminating the parts of history, where few original objects exits than the two Danish museums. As a result of the missing objects related to the lives of the enslaved Africans the exhibitions on the Danish museums tend to focus on the nobility and borgeous tradesmen of the European elite rather than the African and American cultures disseminated in the British museum displays.

The thesis argues that the differences observed in the four museums can be seen in relation to the two countries' different level of multiculturalism in their populations, but also as a result of the fact that the international colonial trade was a bigger part of British history and therefore arguably has had a larger impact on the national identity in the UK than in Denmark. The thesis further argues that although an increased focus on the inclusion of non-European voices in the exhibitions can be observed in all four museums, improvements can still be made.