The role of the fortuitous, the contingent, the unpremeditated, and the unforeseen in history has always caused significant problems for historians. Cherished theories of linear progression, development and evolution, for instance, are often confounded by them. The chance encounter, the quirk of fortune, the sudden change in the weather, the unexpected discovery – all tend to qualify, if not to undermine, deterministic or evolutionary theses of historical causation and development. Similarly, the study of symbols, symbolism and symbolic communication forms one of the more treacherous areas of both historical and anthropological research. How can we ever know exactly what was typified, represented or recalled, in the minds of contemporary observers, by the use of symbols – not only in their ritual, or ritualised, embodiment but (if they ever played any role in it) in the world of everyday life? Symbolism and ritual could convey meanings that were both ambiguous and unstable and, once chronological, geographical, social or cultural frontiers were crossed, those meanings could change dramatically.

The purpose of this essay is to examine a small, though perhaps not insignificant, example in which these problems – the contingent and the symbolic – come together. It concerns, in part, the manner in which symbolic significance could be attributed, in the setting of one ruler's court, to objects deriving from another court, utterly remote from it in time and place, the original purpose of which had been very different. It may also serve as a reminder to us that any attempt to make fruitful comparisons between cultures must take due account of the profound differences, as well as apparent similarities, between those cultures.

In mid-January 1896, a force composed of British, West Indian and indigenous African troops, all in British service, occupied, and partially destroyed, the palaces of King Prempeh I (Kwaku Dua III, 1888–1931) of the Asante (Ashanti) in the Kumase region of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). Among them were the 2nd battalion of the West Yorkshire Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own) and a unit made up of selected troops from various British regiments, entitled a ‘Special Service Corps’.