The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions

ALSO BY ADAM KUPER

Culture: The Anthropologists’ Account

Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth Century

The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth

Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England

Copyright © 2023 by Adam Kuper

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Profile Books Ltd., London, in 2023.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Name: Kuper, Adam, author.

Title: The museum of other people : from colonial acquisitions to cosmopolitan exhibitions / Adam Kuper.

Description: First American edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2024.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023039861 (print). LCCN 2023039862 (ebook). ISBN 9780593700679 (hardcover). ISBN 9780593700686 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Ethnological museums and collections—History. | Ethnological museums and collections—Moral and ethical aspects. | Museums—Acquisitions—Moral and ethical aspects. | Cultural property—Government policy. | Cultural property—Moral and ethical aspects. | Cultural property—Protection. | Cultural property—Conservation and restoration.

Classification: LCC GN35 .K87 2024 (print) | LCC GN35 (ebook) | DDC 305.80075—dc23/eng/20231019

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023039861

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2023039862

Ebook ISBN 9780593700686

www.pantheonbooks.com

Cover photograph: Noire et Blanche, 1926, by Man Ray. © Man Ray 2015 Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris, 2023. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, N.Y.

Cover design by Jenny Carrow

ep_prh_6.3_148355204_c0_r0

There is no document of civilisation that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

—Walter Benjamin

Contents

Acknowledgements

1. The Museum of Other People

Part 1: Faraway People

2. Inventing the Museum of Other People

Jomard in Paris—Siebold in Leiden—Thomsen in Copenhagen

3. Civilised and Uncivilised: The British Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum

Prehistory, evolution and ethnography—the challenge of Pitt Rivers

4. German Museums and the Cultural History of Humanity

Humboldt’s Legacy—Klemm in Leipzig—Bastian in Berlin

5. The Rise and Fall of the Musée de l’Homme

World’s Fairs—the Trocadéro Museum of Ethnography—the Musée de l’Homme—Surrealism—Second World War

Interlude: An American in Paris

Part 2: Native Americans, Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism

6. The Smithsonian Institution Goes West: Or, How the West Was Spun

Origins—the Western Frontier—the Bureau of American Ethnology—the U.S. National Museum

7. Franz Boas Challenges the Smithsonian

The Boas myth in American anthropology—the great debate—evolutionary and regional models—Boas as collector

8. Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology

Origins—Darwin and Harvard’s scientists—Putnam and prehistory

9. The World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893

The Chicago Fair—the Smithsonian vs. Putnam and Boas—the American Museum of Natural History—the end of the Museum Age in Anthropology

Part 3: Divesting and Reinventing the Museum

10. Bones of Contention

Collections of body parts—race studies—repatriation and burial

11. Trophies of Empire, African Court Art, and the Slave Trade

Wars and looting—the history of restitution—the Benin Bronzes—the politics of restitution

12. But Is It Art?

The invention of primitive art—from Paris to New York—museums of primitive or tribal art in the twenty-first century

13. National Museums and Identity Museums

Culture and civilisation—European folk museums—identity politics in the late twentieth century—tribal museums and the National Museum of the American Indian—the dialogical museum

14. Show and Tell

Exhibits, permanent and temporary

15. The Cosmopolitan Museum

Notes

Index

_148355204_

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Two old friends of mine made their careers in the Museum of Other People: Igor Krupnik, chair of anthropology and curator of circumpolar ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and Enid Schildkraut, curator in the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1973 to 2005, and then director of exhibitions at the Museum for African Art in New York City until 2011. They were always ready to talk about museums, to discuss my findings, to challenge my judgements; and they read (and sometimes reread) all the chapters in the book. I also had a home team of experienced and equally uncomplaining and indefatigable readers: my older son, Simon Kuper, who is a wonderful writer; my cousin, Richard Kuper, who was head of a publishing house; and my partner, Jytte Klausen, who did her best to ensure that I didn’t disappear down some rabbit hole.

Other colleagues came to my aid when asked, with information, criticism and, really quite often, encouragement. I am grateful to them all: Mary Jo Arnoldi, curator for African arts and ethnology at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC; Nigel Barley, assistant keeper of ethnography, British Museum; Margit Berner, curator, Museum of Natural History, Vienna; Lissant Bolton, keeper of the department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum; Laura van Broekhoven, director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Patricia Capone, curator, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University; Nélia Dias, professor at the Centre for Research in Anthropology, Lisbon, Portugal; Rudolf Effert, Institute of Area Studies, Leiden University; Benoît de L’Estoile, CNRS, Paris; Carlos Fausto, professor of anthropology, National Museum, Federal University Rio de Janeiro; Thomas Fillitz, professor of anthropology, University of Vienna; Michael Fisher, former editor for science and medicine, Harvard University Press; Jonathan David MacLachlan Fine, head of the Ethnological Museum, Berlin State Museums; David Gellner, professor of social anthropology, University of Oxford; Clare Harris, curator for Asia at the Pitt Rivers Museum and professor of visual anthropology, University of Oxford; Kirsten Hastrup, professor of anthropology, University of Copenhagen and president of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, 2008–16; Karl-Heinz Kohl, professor emeritus of ethnology at Frankfurt Goethe University and former director of the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology; Christine Laurière, CNRS, Paris; John Mack, keeper of ethnography at the British Museum, 1990–2004 and, since 2004, professor of world art at the University of East Anglia; Jonathan Marks, professor of anthropology, University of North Carolina; Pierre de Maret, emeritus professor of archaeology, Université libre de Bruxelles, former rector of the university, and president of the scientific commission of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren; Malcolm McLeod, keeper of ethnography at the British Museum, 1974–90, director of the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, 1990–99; John Picton, emeritus professor of African art, University of London; Barbara Plankensteiner, director of the Museum am Rothenbaum World Cultures and Arts (MARKK) in Hamburg; Alexis von Poser, deputy director of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art at the Berlin State Museums; Gina Rappaport, head archivist, national anthropological archives, Smithsonian Institution; Antonio Saborit, director, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City; Anna Schmid, director of the Museum of Cultures in Basel; Robert Storrie, keeper of ethnology, Horniman Museum, London; Anne-Christine Taylor, director of research and education, Musée du quai Branly, 2005–13; Han Vermeulen, research fellow, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany; and Sarah Walpole, archives officer, Royal Anthropological Institute.

1

THE MUSEUM OF OTHER PEOPLE

Since at least the fifteenth century, Europe’s 1 per cent collected Greek and Roman antiquities, Renaissance art and Chinese ceramics. Their gardens flaunted exotic trees. For entertainment, perhaps instruction, they had cabinets of natural curiosities and artificial curiosities with freaks of nature, bizarre devices, instruments of torture, titillating images.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century a few grand collections were put on public show. The venues came to be known as museums: shrines of the muses. At first only select visitors were admitted. The Hermitage insisted on court dress. The Louvre gave privileged access to artists. As late as 1808 anyone who wished to enter the British Museum had to submit a written application. Gradually more and more museums opened to the public, though children were not welcome.

In 1848 two Chinese scholars were dispatched to examine these new institutions. They reported that there were jigulou, buildings for collections of bones, wanzhongyuan, gardens of everything, huage, pavilions of paintings, jibaoyuan, courtyards of treasures, and junqilou houses of military equipment. After visiting the British Museum, a Japanese delegation coined a new term, hakubutsukan, mansion of boundless things.[1]

This book tells the story of yet another kind of museum. Benoît de L’Estoile identified it as le musée des autres. I call it the Museum of Other People.[2]

Conceived in the 1830s and 1840s, the Museum of Other People put on display an exotic world of primitive or tribal peoples who lived far away or long ago. Its golden age began with the wave of European colonialism in Africa and Oceania in the 1880s. It then went into decline in the era of decolonisation in the 1960s. Museums of ethnology and anthropology in the U.S.A. followed a similar trajectory, emerging at the height of colonisation of the territories west of the Mississippi (Indian country), and giving way to identity museums in the 1980s. By the twenty-first century the Museum of Other People confronted a full-blown crisis. This may be terminal.

—

The first plans for the Museum of Other People were drawn up in Paris, Leiden, Copenhagen and Dresden. In 1845 the British Museum installed an ethnographic gallery. In 1846 the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, established a department of ethnology. At the same time, societies of anthropologists and ethnologists were founded, part of a new wave of learned societies that were coming to terms with an industrialising, urbanising, imperialist Europe.

Governments assumed responsibility for education, poor relief, public health and policing (functions once left largely to parish authorities). For reasons of state and commerce, European powers began a new round of land grabs in faraway lands. Modernising bureaucracies found themselves in urgent need of facts and ideas. In 1836, Lord John Russell, who served twice as prime minister of Britain, declared: We are busy introducing system, method, science, economy, regularity [and] discipline.[3] A new breed of statisticians delivered the data. Positivists in France and Utilitarians in England proposed methods and theories—and a cluster of new sciences emerged. Michel Foucault called them human sciences, while admitting that he used the term sciences loosely: the body of knowledge (though even that word is perhaps a little too strong: let us say, to be more neutral still…the body of discourse) that takes as its object man as an empirical entity.[4]

As the philosopher and historian of science Ian Hacking remarked, the new human sciences were making up kinds of people.[5] Ethnologists and anthropologists began to investigate the character, habits and customs of a very particular kind of people. Once known as savages, they were now, in a scientific era, identified as primitive: stuck in an early stage of human development. These primitive people were distinguished by their race, culture, or degree of civilisation, terms coined in the last decades of the eighteenth century.

Anthropologists distinguished populations by race. Ethnologists concerned themselves with culture or civilisation. However, disciplinary labels were expansive, overlapping and often a matter of contention. William Edwards, son of a Jamaican planter, who founded the Société ethnologique de Paris in 1839, claimed that the term ethnology had the double advantage that it lent itself to generalisation and designated indifferently the study of races or of peoples.[6] In 1843, James Cowles Prichard, author of the first English textbook in the field, defined ethnology as the study of the history of peoples, and laid down that it must be mainly founded on the relations of their languages.[7] In 1859, Paul Broca, a professor of anatomy at the Sorbonne, set up the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, the first learned society to adopt the title anthropology, an old term for the philosophical contemplation of the human condition. He dismissed the ethnologists as do-gooders, obsessed with slavery, their motivation not truly scientific. They were, he complained, deplorably reluctant to acknowledge the radical importance of biological differences.

Armed with eighteen signatures of potential members, Broca approached the Ministry of Public Education for permission to form his society. The minister hesitated. As a historian, Francis Schiller summed up official concerns: Worse than ethnology, which smacked only of anti-slavery, anthropology suggested subversion and the spirit of 1848; something vaguely degrading to man’s immortal soul, possibly in conflict with the teachings of the Church and the interests of the Empire. Permission was granted, but on two conditions: First, they must never talk politics or religion. Second, a plainclothes officer of the Imperial Police must be present at each session and report to headquarters.[8] (Broca enjoyed reminiscing about the time the attendant policeman asked whether he might be excused. There will be nothing interesting to-day, I suppose? May I go? No, no, my friend, Broca replied, you must not go for a walk; sit down and earn your pay.)[9]

In London too, ethnologists and anthropologists were at daggers drawn. In 1842 the Aborigines’ Protection Society resolved that the best way to help native peoples was to study them.[10] This was contentious. The missionary element in the society resisted. A year later the secretary of the APS, Richard King, and two Quaker physicians, Thomas Buxton and Thomas Hodgkin, formed the London Ethnological Society. The members were anti-slavery and committed to the doctrine that all human races had a common origin.

In 1863, in the heat of the American Civil War, a frankly racist faction broke away and set up the Anthropological Society of London. A year later its leader, James Hunt, published On The Negro’s Place in Nature, in which he asserted the separate origin of the various human races and defended slavery. The inner circle of the Anthropological Society formed The Cannibal Club, which was called to order with a gavel carved in the shape of an African head.[11] Hunt was even more dismissive of the ethnologists than Broca had been. These opponents of comparative anthropology suffered arrested brain growth and from what I will call respectively the religious mania, and the rights-of-man mania.[12]

Hunt died in 1869. In 1871, the year in which Darwin’s The Descent of Man was published, the feuding London societies merged under the leadership of Thomas Henry Huxley, John Lubbock and General Augustus Lane-Fox (later Pitt Rivers). They were all Darwinians. Indeed, one commentator complained that the new society promised to be little more than a sort of Darwinian club.[13] The choice of a name for the society was a final bone of contention. Lubbock, intervening in a heated debate at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, said that he looked upon anthropology as an ugly name for ethnology…[Ethnology] was an older word and a prettier word than anthropology.[14] But after much heart-searching, and despite a rearguard action by the fervently anti-racist Lady Lubbock, the new association was named Anthropological.[15]

—

Museums of Civilisation (the Louvre, the British Museum, New York’s Metropolitan Museum) embodied the Enlightenment theory of history. All human societies progress from a lower to a higher condition, some more quickly than others. Progress can be measured by the advance of reason in its cosmic battle against raw nature, instinct, superstition and traditional authority. The goal towards which all must travel is what French philosophers in the late eighteenth century began to call Civilisation. Civilisation had three peaks: ancient Greece and Rome, the European Renaissance, and, well, obviously, the great city in which is found the premier Museum of Civilisation—Paris, or London, or New York. The antithesis of civilisation, its foil, was represented by Stone Age or primitive societies. Their crude arts and artefacts belonged in a Museum of Other People, if not in a Museum of Natural History.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the English philosopher Herbert Spencer proposed that societies were like living organisms. As they evolve they become more complex and efficient. The term evolution duly entered the vocabulary of speculative historians, alongside progress and civilisation. Spencer’s evolution was, however, radically different from Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Darwin repudiated the idea that the development of natural organisms, let alone societies, follow the same path everywhere. Challenges are local and changeable. Particular adaptations cannot be foreseen. Outcomes are unpredictable. What a chance it has been…that has made a man, Darwin mused. Any monkey probably might, with such chances be made intellectual, but almost certainly not made into man.[16]

Yet Darwin pointed out that as human beings became tool-makers they were less exposed to a changing environment. Gradually they developed the means to engineer their own progress. At that point, Darwin did buy into the civilisation narrative. He wrote, in The Descent of Man, that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained by him in knowledge, morals and religion.[17] And while he hated slavery, Darwin believed that there was a hierarchy of races. It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing & clearing off the lower races, he wrote to the Christian Socialist, Charles Kingsley, in 1862. In 500 years how the Anglo-saxon race will have spread & exterminated whole nations; & in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.[18]

In 1871 the father figure of English anthropology, E. B. Tylor, wrote in his Primitive Culture: The educated world of Europe and America practically settles a standard by simply placing its own nations at one end of the social series and savage tribes at the other, arranging the rest of mankind between these limits according as they correspond more closely to savage or to cultured life.[19] Perhaps Tylor was being ironic, but this way of thinking had an obvious appeal to imperialists, though not necessarily to the foreigners over whom they ruled.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, as European powers were busily assembling tropical empires in Africa and Oceania, most Europeans were themselves living under imperial rule, subjects of the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman or the Russian empires. Central European intellectuals invoked the notion of Kultur to challenge the imperialist cult of Civilisation.[20] The identity of a Volk derived from its particular culture. This was rooted in blood and soil, fitted to a local environment. The Volksgeist, the national spirit, found expression in rituals, folk tales, music and crafts. Appeals to a universal civilisation were imperialist propaganda. There was no hierarchy of cultures, no universal historical dialectic leading peoples everywhere onwards and upwards to a civilised condition. What does ‘progress of the human race’ mean?, demanded Johann Gottfried von Herder. How are we to measure so many different periods and peoples, even with the best of outside information?[21]

Proponents of local culture feared that their very identity was threatened by foreign powers and the insidious appeal of modernity. Suspicious of science, industry and commerce, they looked to the past for reassurance and inspiration. Champions of civilisation were full of optimism, confident of moving forward, making progress, certain that they were on the side of history. Civilisation trumped barbarism. Progress had its costs, no doubt, but resistance was futile.

And yet the opposed poles of Tylor’s series—savage or cultured life—do not correspond to objective, readily specified historical conditions. Remarkably little is known about the way of life and beliefs of hunter-gatherers in Upper Palaeolithic times. We cannot say with any confidence what these societies had in common, apart from a dependence on hunting and gathering. (Who knows whether they had families, leaders, shamans, music?) Since they were first documented, pastoral nomads and many foraging peoples associated with farmers and even with city folk, and had done so for many generations, in some cases for millennia. Far from being very like the ancient Stone Age peoples who lived in a world of hunters and gatherers, they have more in common with their farming neighbours than with foragers and herders in other parts of the world.

Civilisation, the Enlightenment antithesis to savagery or barbarism, is almost as hard to pin down. The term was applied at first to ancient Greece and Rome. In the nineteenth century, European scholars extended its range to include ancient Egypt and Israel, Babylon, Persia, China, Japan and Moghul India. Yet while all civilised peoples, ancient and modern, are assumed to share common features, there is little agreement about which features are decisive. No civilised society would— Fill in the blank according to taste.

In 1883, the English historian J. R. Seeley remarked that civilisation was associated with all sorts of conditions—sometimes the softening of manners, sometimes mechanical inventions, sometimes religious toleration, sometimes the appearance of great poets and artists, sometimes scientific discoveries, sometimes constitutional liberty. However, these qualities did not necessarily occur together. Nor were they produced by a single cause. And civilisation certainly did not explain, let alone excuse, the remarkable expansion of the British Empire. (We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind, Seeley famously remarked.)[22]

Britain’s medals to honour veterans of the First World War were inscribed The Great War for Civilisation 1914–1919: but after the horrors of that war, the differences between civilisation and barbarism seemed less apparent. The father figure of American anthropology, Franz Boas, wrote in 1928:

Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries…will agree that there is no such thing as a primitive mind, a magical or prelogical way of thinking, but that each individual in primitive societies is a man, a woman, a child of the same way of thinking, feeling and acting as a man, woman or child in our own society.[23]

Yet even in this passage Boas wrote unselfconsciously about primitive tribes. The idea of a primitive kind of people still cast a long shadow when I was a graduate student of social anthropology at Cambridge University in the 1960s. British, French and Belgian colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific were in the process of becoming independent states. And yet we were given to understand that out there, in the tropics and the antipodes, in countries that had until very recently been European colonies, functioning tribes could still be studied. To be sure, those people were now mostly Christians or Muslims. Their children went to school. But perhaps a residue of the old system could be discerned. Despite missionary disapproval, people sacrificed to their ancestors and tabooed animal totems. Tribal chiefs insisted on traditional prerogatives, even if they had to be propped up in office by colonial commissioners. Everyone had access to money and markets, and yet they practised barter and gift exchange.

Anthropologists did adapt to the post-colonial world. They dropped the fantasy of bounded tribes, each with its pristine culture, and began to study globalisation, hybrid religions, ethnic relations, urban life, the legacy of colonial structures. Some were drawn into projects of modernisation or development in the newly independent states. The description primitive was avoided. Indigenous might be preferred, though that term was applied to the same roll call of hunters and pastoral nomads whom the Victorians regarded as prototypical primitives.

Meanwhile, the Museum of Other People remained stuck in its ways. In 1969, William C. Sturtevant, long-serving curator of North American ethnology in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, asked his colleagues to admit the minuscule role and the low prestige of museum work in present-day ethnology.[24] This was fair enough. Many museums continued to purvey timeless images of exotic ways of life (dioramas of waxwork figures hunting, praying, carving, weaving, cooking and sitting around camp fires). The mood music was no longer imperialist, however. Exhibitions communicated a benevolent universalism. Look at funeral practices around the world, beliefs in spiritual beings, music, dance, initiation rituals. See what we all have in common!

The prototype was the blockbuster Family of Man photographic show that travelled the world in the 1950s. Even at the time it was derided as a happy-clappy, all-in-it-together, Kumbaya family show. The critic Roland Barthes pointed out the ambiguity of its message:

the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest, the image of Babel is complacently projected over that of the world. Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way…Of course this means postulating a human essence, and here God is re-introduced into our Exhibition.[25]

The Family of Man was a huge success. It helped that the United States Information Agency funded a tour through thirty-seven countries that attracted over 7.5 million visitors.

—

The Museum of Other People gradually lost its moorings, drifting away from the new centres of research in anatomy, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and history of art. In the 1920s and 1930s, ethnographers began to do long-term fieldwork. Studying social and cultural processes, drawing on a range of social science theories, they lost interest in what came to be called material culture—the sort of things to be found in the museums. In the second half of the twentieth century, racist, typological thinking was replaced by a statistically based population genetics. There was no longer a good reason to display skulls and skeletons. Yet while the old paradigms were abandoned in the universities, they had a half-life still in the museums, where dusty showcases and dioramas continued to purvey timeless images of exotic ways of life.

In the 1960s the Museum of Other People sailed into troubled waters. European colonies in Africa and Oceania became independent states. Indigenous peoples’ movements emerged in the Americas and in Australia and New Zealand. In the late twentieth century, identity museums along the Mall in Washington, DC, called into question the very idea of a Museum of Other People. Curators of ethnographic and prehistoric artefacts were thrown, unprepared, into a cauldron of controversy about race, colonialism, cultural appropriation and the very nature of scientific authority. And to cap it all, by the twenty-first century they were themselves in the dock, charged with sequestering other peoples’ heirlooms.

The trustees of the British Museum have become the world’s largest receivers of stolen property, and the great majority of their loot is not even on public display, claims Geoffrey Robertson QC, a human rights lawyer.[26] Dan Hicks, a senior curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, insists that European museums must atone for their colonial past, transform themselves into sites of conscience and take action to make the 2020s a decade of restitution.[27]

An activist theatre group BP or not BP (a reference not only to Hamlet but to British Petroleum, a controversial donor) runs stolen goods tours of the British Museum. An Australian Aborigine man, resident in London, demands the return of a shield that was taken by Captain Cook in 1770. He claims that 250 years ago it belonged to his own ancestor, a warrior identified by Cook as Cooman. Next up, a woman introduced as a Maori calls on the museum to return 2,300 Maori artefacts. Then a British man with Greek Cypriot parents testifies that the Elgin Marbles belong back in Athens.

In a superhero film released in 2018, Black Panther, a visitor from a fictional African country, Erik Killmonger Stevens (played by Michael B. Jordan), confronts a curator in the Museum of Great Britain. He tells her that a seventh-century war hammer on display with other African artefacts is wrongly labelled. It wasn’t made in Benin. The British took it from his own people, the Wakanda. Now he is going to take it back. She protests that it isn’t for sale. How do you think your ancestors got these?, he replies. Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it…like they took everything else? Killmonger poisons the curator’s coffee, kills the guards, and makes off with the hammer.

—

Iconic museum pieces were acquired by force or shady dealing in the heyday of European imperialism, usually from rival empires. Famous examples are the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone and Qing dynasty treasures looted from the Chinese emperor’s summer palace, which together are the pride of the British Museum.[28] (Even the word loot was appropriated. It comes from lut, the Hindi word for plunder.)

A corps of scientists accompanied Napoleon’s military expedition to Egypt in 1798. They carried off antiquities, a number of which—including the Rosetta Stone—were seized by a British expeditionary force, shipped to London in a captured French frigate, L’Égyptienne, and ended up in the British Museum. In 1812, Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, arranged for half the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon to be removed and sent to his private home in England. Bonaparte has not got such a thing from all his thefts in Italy, he boasted.[29] In 1816 he sold his trophies to the British Museum. The imperial summer palace in the north of Beijing was plundered and then razed to the ground by British and French troops in October 1860 in revenge for the capture and torture of thirty-nine Europeans during the Second Opium War, only eighteen of whom survived. When the looting began, the soldiers were given a free hand. About one and a half million precious objects were taken from the palace complex. A great many found their way into European and North American museums.[30] The whole forty-acre imperial estate was then torched on the orders of the British high commissioner to China, Lord Elgin (son of the Lord Elgin of the Elgin Marbles). We, Europeans, we are the civilised, and for us, the Chinese are the barbarians, Victor Hugo wrote to a correspondent. Now see what civilisation has done to barbarism…One day I hope that France will return these spoils of war to China, cleansed and polished.[31]

—

Throughout history, soldiers have claimed the spoils of war, and the plunder and sacking of cities has been as common as the practice of forcibly requisitioning food from the countryside, according to Sir Richard Evans, regius professor of modern history at Cambridge University.[32] Not only was looting a common accessory to warfare: it was regarded as right and natural. In his classic account of the laws of war and peace, published in 1625, the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius recognised the right to appropriate for oneself what one has taken from the enemy.[33]

Napoleon Bonaparte elevated looting to a patriotic duty. Following the example of the Roman Triumphs, he ritualised his appropriations. In 1798, on the anniversary of the fall of Robespierre and the end of the Terror, Paris celebrated a two-day Festival of Liberty and Triumphal Entry of Objects of the Sciences and the Arts Collected in Italy. Among the prizes on show were four gilded Corinthian horses that a Crusader force seized from the Hippodrome in Constantinople in 1204 and carried off to Venice. French soldiers removed the horses from the porch of the cathedral of St. Mark and they were paraded through Paris beneath a banner that read: Horses transported from Corinth to Rome, and from Rome to Constantinople to Venice, and from Venice to France. They are finally on free soil. A song written for the occasion had a refrain: Rome is no more in Rome/It is all in Paris.[34]

Much of the plunder of Napoleon’s campaigns ended up in the Louvre, renamed the Musée Napoléon in 1803. After the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington insisted that the victorious allies could not do otherwise than restore [works of art] to the countries from which, contrary to the practice of civilised warfare, they had been torn during the disastrous period of the French Revolution and the tyranny of Buonaparte.[35] Richard Evans notes, however, that only about 55 per cent of the looted objects were returned; the rest had been sent out to provincial museums, beyond the ken of the occupying Allied armies.[36]

The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 were the first international instruments to ban pillage. This in no way inhibited the Nazis from plundering masterpieces from museums and from Jewish families. As a young man Hitler dreamt of being an artist. In his last years, in the midst of a world war, he was planning a Führermuseum, to be built in Linz, near his birthplace in Austria. It would be a museum of looted art.

Following the defeat of Nazi Germany, the U.S. imposed a temporary embargo on trade in works of art and set up a mechanism for the collection and return of stolen goods (but that did not prevent Soviet troops from carting away truckloads of antiquities and works of art). Discussions in the United Nations and UNESCO led to the promulgation of the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. At the time of writing, 133 states are party to the convention. (The United States signed up only in 2009, and insisted on a waiver where nuclear weapons are deployed.)

This convention affirms that institutional and individual owners of stolen works of art (and their descendants) have the right to reclaim them, but it can be very difficult to recover treasures looted by the Nazis. In many cases, the original owners were dead, and sometimes their heirs had been killed by the Nazis as well, writes Evans, an authority on the Third Reich.

Entire families perished in very large numbers at Auschwitz, and while institutions, museums and galleries possessed the knowledge, the resources and the evidence to mount actions to try and regain what they had lost, the same was seldom true of individuals. As a result the number of restitution actions and claims fell sharply during the 1950s, at the same time as new international agreements protecting cultural property came into force.[37]

UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property urged buyers to require proof that antiquities were acquired legally. The United States ratified the treaty in 1983, but it took Britain until 2002 and Germany until 2007 to sign it. In the meantime, countries rich in antiquities—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria—were ravaged by invasions and civil wars. Rare and wonderful pieces soon appeared on the world market.[38]

Reviewing international conventions governing the ownership of cultural property (which he defined as objects of artistic, archaeological, ethnological or historical interest), the jurist John Henry Merryman distinguished two opposing points of view.[39] One school of thought treats cultural property as a shared endowment of humanity. Merryman dubbed this the cosmopolitan principle. An example is the preamble to the Hague Convention of 1954, which states that damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world. The other approach is nationalist. This underpins the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property. The thrust here is on the retention of cultural property within national boundaries.

Whether nationalist or cosmopolitan, the status of these international conventions is uncertain. The International Court of Justice has not tested whether there is a duty under international law to return cultural property even if it was illegally acquired. James Cuno, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust and former director of the Harvard Art Museums, the Courtauld Institute and the Art Institute of Chicago, is disparaging. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to see these many conventions as a bouillabaisse of good intentions and bureaucratic ambitions, he writes, all of which are, in the end, unenforceable, except insofar as the States Parties themselves have imposed internal laws and sanctions governing the activities addressed by the Conventions.[40]

Some national legislatures did institute procedures for restitution. In New Zealand, Australia and Canada laws were introduced to protect the heritage of Indigenous peoples. In 1990 the U.S. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). This provided a legal framework for the repatriation of Native American human remains and ceremonial objects held by museums. And social movements around the world demanded redress for the injuries of slavery and colonialism.

In July 2013, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter kick-started perhaps the largest protest movement in the history of the U.S.A.[41] The killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis on 25 May 2020 sparked massive demonstrations in nearly 550 locations across the United States. Halls of residence, lecture theatres and libraries donated to universities by slave owners were renamed. In June 2020, the statue of Edward Colson, a philanthropist who profited from the Atlantic slave trade, was toppled and thrown into Bristol harbour.

A spotlight then turned on museum collections, and in particular on West African court art that had been looted by British and French armies in the 1890s. In August 2016, the newly elected president of the Republic of Bénin, Patrice Talon, demanded that France restore trophies looted by a French expeditionary force in 1894 from the ancient kingdom of Dahomey. France’s Foreign Ministry made the customary response: objects deposited in French museums are inalienable national possessions. However, on 28 November 2017, during a visit to Burkina Faso, the newly elected president of France, Emmanuel Macron tweeted: African heritage cannot be held prisoner by European museums.

Macron’s intervention resonated with a general shift in public attitudes to race and imperialism. Veteran staff at the British Museum recalled with horror the campaign for the return of the Elgin Marbles to Athens launched in 1982 by the Greek film actress Melina Mercouri, her country’s minister of culture. But Macron’s démarche was more troubling, its potential constituency larger and more radical. The cultural establishment was thrown off balance. Some museum directors were dismissive. Others issued pious mission statements. A few proclaimed their solidarity, but did not undertake to surrender prized collections.

Parodying Macron’s tweet, the former head of the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, Stéphane Martin, declared that museums should not be held hostage to the painful history of colonialism.[42] He pointed out that one of the items demanded by the Republic of Bénin, a statue of the Dahomey god Gou that is in the Louvre, was sculpted by a man from a neighbouring country while he was a prisoner of the Dahomey king. The statue was found on a beach by a French sailor. Exhibited in the Louvre for 150 years it became an icon of modernism, revered by Picasso and Apollinaire.[43] Nevertheless, Martin came out in favour of the circulation of artefacts between museums. He added that African governments should be urged to treat curators with respect and pay them decent salaries.

Directors of other European museums were more diplomatic. Harmut Dorgerloh, the director-general of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, promised that in future, labels would contextualise colonial artefacts and reveal their sometimes troubling provenance. This will be done in a manner that displays the power relations between the colonists who brought the objects to Germany and the colonised, he declared.[44] The British Museum moved the bust of its founder, Sir Hans Sloane, from a pedestal near the entrance to a cabinet in the newly unveiled Enlightenment Hall. A text identifies him as a slave owner whose work was enabled by the wealth and networks that grew out of European imperialism. "The British Museum has done a lot of work—accelerated