Looted items: Return them from whence they were stolen
Consider for a moment that if in a deliberate attack, Buckingham Palace had been destroyed and its contents looted by the marauders, and kept as private collections in their homes. Imagine if the Crown Jewels had been taken by a military power, and stored in their own museums so if you wanted to see them, you’d have to travel to that country yourself. Imagine if someone had shipped the stones of Stonehenge away from British shores. Imagine if Magna Carta had been taken, and left in some archive gathering dust.
As a British person, would you not want these priceless items symbolising British identity returned?
In a nutshell, that is exactly the case being made for returning the looted items being held in museums across Europe and the United States. As a result of empire, colonialism, and imperialism, a horde of culturally significant non-western artefacts are housed in western “universal” museums such as the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
No doubt the aforementioned museums are incredible places of knowledge spanning numerous peoples and stretching across thousands of years. But this is because some of their most important collections have come about due to Empire, and the moral case is being made to return these priceless items back to their rightful owners.
The Elgin Marbles, so-called after Lord Thomas Bruce of Elgin, is perhaps the most famous example. Lord Elgin struck a deal with the Ottomans to transport the marbles, a significant symbol of Greek identity, to England. If ever visiting the Acropolis Museum in Athens, you may be struck by the big gaps in-between the Parthenon marbles. This is because the marbles that would complete the frieze are kept in museums around the world, including at the British Museum where it is a popular attraction.
The Benin Bronzes are another example, plundered by British forces in 1897 from the Kingdom of Benin (modern day southern Nigeria). The largest collection of looted antiquities from Benin now reside in Ethnological Museum of Berlin, with the second largest in the British Museum. Aside from Berlin and London, more of the bronzes can be found in museums across Europe and in the US. With the current status quo, Nigeria is denied its cultural history.
The British Museum did express interest in temporarily loaning the items back to Nigeria last year. But loaning looted items back to its rightful owners seems somewhat insulting.
Consider also the feast trough from the Solomon Islands, looted in the 19th century by Captain Edward Davis and now owned by the British Museum. The trough, along with other artefacts, feature in the Royal Academy of Art’s current Oceania exhibition. Such artefacts represent the last remaining remnants of cultures either disappearing or extinct, and are to be found in Western museums rather than in their own countries. Without these artefacts, such certain civilisations their connection to their own history is all but lost.
The argument has been made that if these artefacts are to be returned, then it opens the floodgates to several other artefacts to be returned also. In other words, where does the repatriation stop? But this argument does not hold water; what right has a country/institution to artefacts they have stolen? Surely, they should be returned? The argument is not to empty out Western Museums leaving its selves empty.
Of course, in some cases working out whether something was stolen, or who the rightful owner can be a difficult task and in these circumstances, some sort of framework needs to be developed which may require cross museum cooperation. This framework could involve long-term loans, training new curators and conservationists, offering expertise, and the rightful owners occasionally loaning back the artefacts to Western museums. Such an agreement could take years to fully negotiate. Nonetheless, the moral argument for repatriations cannot be side-lined to these lesser concerns. The first step is to acknowledge stolen items must be returned, the details can then be hammered out.
Britain in particular has a tough time coming to terms with its imperial, colonial past, often simply airbrushing colonial history as a product of its time. The desire for Western museums to retain their looted artefacts, which is some cases are denying certain communities of the last remnants of their history, is a testament to such colonial apologetics.
Western museums are full of stolen and looted items from the colonial era, and it is about time they were returned from whence they are stolen.
