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his thesis identifies and examines the practice of leisured colonialism in the lives of the Keith-Falconers, an aristocratic Aberdeenshire family, from 1873-1945. Distinct from more formal kinds of colonialism, leisured colonialism is presented as an intergenerational family practice, characterised by the privileged mobility, object acquisition, and social relationships of affluent Europeans at leisure. These practices are evident in the Keith-Falconers' extensive archive and museum collection held primarily in the University of Aberdeen Museums and Special Collections with some papers in the National Library of Australia, including around six hundred and fifty objects as well as travel journals and scrapbooks written by women in the family. Drawing on sustained fieldwork with this collection, the institutions and people associated with it in Aberdeen, Australia, and Aotearoa New Zealand, this thesis offers an ethnographic engagement with the Keith-Falconers' lives. Centred on moments of object acquisition, it poses a challenge to collecting as an individual-centred catch-all term for the acquisition of objects which end up in museums. Instead it interrogates the diverse and specific ways in which the Keith-Falconers acquired objects together. In chapters framed around objects from the collection, the family's travel, shopping, natural history collecting, and documentation are emphasised as active, skilled, learned, and shared practices of leisured colonialism. Following the stories of taonga Māori and secret-sacred Aboriginal Australian objects beyond the Keith-Falconers' accounts also illuminates the harmful effects of the Keith-Falconers' leisured colonialism on people and objects from the nineteenth century to the present day. Demonstrating how an ethnographic approach to the families behind large museum collections can bring new colonial practices to light, this thesis situates the harmful practices of leisured colonialism firmly within the sphere of intimate and everyday material and social lives.