Great Grey Kangaroo, from the Animals of the World series (T180), issued by Abdul Cigarettes 1881

This is a chromolithograph of a Great Grey Kangaroo, made by Abdul Cigarettes around the turn of the century. It was a commercial product, designed to be collected and traded. But what can it tell us about society at that time? Well, the very idea of collecting and categorizing animals reflects a Victorian obsession with natural history and taxonomy, an attempt to order and understand the world through scientific means. It was also a period of intense colonial expansion. And this image participates in that project by turning an exotic creature into a commodity, divorced from its native Australian habitat. We should note the institutional context too. The Metropolitan Museum, like other encyclopedic museums, was founded during this period to display such collections and educate the public, reinforcing a sense of Western cultural dominance. To fully understand this image, we might consult company archives, museum records, and colonial-era scientific literature. Each of these can help us consider how cultural and economic forces shape what we see, even in something as simple as a cigarette card.