Should the British Museum be broken up?

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Is it time to return all treasures and other objects to the countries that they came from. Some were looted and some were bought or genuinely donated but do they belong in London? The ones that are on loan return to the families that have donated and they can be in private collections or go back to the country of origin.

Ive heard the argument that it means visitors can see things from all over the world in one place. I presume that could be achieved by some of them becoming part of travelling exhibitions. Some are very fragile so will need to be moved carefully, but ultimately they are not from the UK.

Its like the old joke
Why are the Pyramids in Egypt?
Because they are too big to fit in the British Museum.

Anyway... Colonialism definitely saved many artefacts but destroyed many others. But thats history, modern museums shouldn't be condemned for it but instead work together.

Countries like Greece and Egypt have amazing museums, it's not like England has all the worlds treasures and no where else has anything worth seeing! - but if the only place you can see any history of a country is in the country itself then i think that would be a shame.

It would be pretty sad not to be able to see anything of Egyptian history in other countries (and many countries have Egyptian artefacts, not just the UK) because it is so fascinating - how many people can just go off to Egypt to see it there? I've been but I wouldn't take my kids.

It's not like these countries don't have huge, wonderful collections of their own. If they didn't then I'd be all for things being returned, but i think it's great that there's a chance to find out about other cultures in the country you live in.

I think museums would be pretty dull if they could only have things from the surrounding area in them. What would be the limit? 50 miles?

Abolish museums is the same as destroy all knowledge about the past.

If we cannot learn from history, then we are doomed to keep making the same mistakes.

Well, they do now, so why talk about what developing countries did in the 30s?

The Acropolis Museum displays the remaining marbles beautifully and I think far better than the BM.
There is an immense thrill in seeing Mughal artefacts in the new Humayun's Tomb museum in Delhi- which I visited this year- not far from where they were made.

I don’t care if it’s called the “We’re really sorry for stealing all your precious artefacts we were just jealous because we don’t have a culture of our own museum”, these items do not belong to us and should be returned to their rightful owners. ALL of them, including the things we made using stolen resources from other countries.

Undoubtedly, there are plenty of exhibits in museums around the world that were freely given or legitimately sold by the owners; but I'm sure there must be many, many more where this wasn't the case at all. There are loads of grey areas - especially when the provenance may go back centuries or even longer.

Was a fair price paid - and was this only 'fair' as in it seemed a lot to a desperate owner in a very poor country, whereas it was peanuts to the rich person in a rich country who bought it?

Did the owner want to sell it, or were they forced/coerced? If person X steals precious items from person Y, and then person X sells them to person Z, has person Z legitimately bought them?

If they were given, was it from an owner who genuinely wanted them to be cared for and preserved by the museum for the public to enjoy forever; or was there a hush-hush 'agreement' made that the owner couldn't be trusted to look after it, so they were pressured to 'give' it to them - in the same way as disgraced politicians are said to have decided to resign, when we all know what would have happened if they hadn't 'made that decision'?

Someone like this won’t even care if they are destroyed. They think these groups have a right to destroy their own heritage (if indeed it is their heritage, very often it is not)

And she’ll not deny this either. Watch.

I would hope that those in the know are working on more sophisticated answers like a more extensive use of inter-museum loans and exchanges between countries.

The issue is in how items have been acquired, not, as some seem to be suggesting, achieving some sort of moral purity whereby everything from ancient China is in China and so on.

There is a clear ethical problem which cannot be ignored, but I’ve no time for the viewpoint that takes shutting down the BM as the ultimate goal and seems to revel in the idea of destroying something. The comment above about gawping at shiny objects in cases is a great example.

What they do with their own precious heirlooms is not mine or your concern though is it? They can throw them all in the Nile for I care, because that is what they have chosen to do themselves. We are not the arbitrators of the world any longer.

There may indeed be a case for the return of the Elgin marbles. But returns should be carefully negotiated on a case by case basis. (I don’t know the particulars on the BM case for purchasing them). Again I am of the opinion that the Rosetta Stone should be given back to France!

We could always have a grand exhibition to celebrate our pride in providing more countries with independence than anybody else has!!

Told ya

Countries like Egypt and India have no shortage of amazing history on their doorsteps.

This is how human history has and still does work, though.
For everything, not just museums. Most jewellery is tainted by slavery, deaths, theft, environmental damage.
We buy things made in other countries by people working for a pittance in terrible conditions.
Do we give everything back, and can only own things that we make ourselves or buy from a truly ethical supply chain?

The British Museum is fantastic .Really something else . We have some of the finest exhibitions in the world .People come from all over 6m visitors.and all free.We couldnt afford a trip to Egypt, when DC were young (still cant TBH!) They have a wonderful display of Mummies there . Please no returns !

I think establishing the actual legal provenance of items in museum may not be as black and white legally as some posters might think. Items often change hands multiple times before reaching a museum. We didn’t have blockchain in the past and often we will just have to accept this and not really know how some things came into a museum or only know the item’s recent history back a few decades or centuries.

I think in some cases the restitution idea is touching on a false modern idea of who ‘we’ were as separate nations and who was a separate group from us. This is a great conversation to have as it should force us to think about the differences compared to today of what nations are and were, what culture is.

There has always been human migration and there has always been human cultural contact and exchange between different groups locally and globally. We know this partly because from very early times, items have been found archeologically that could only have come from very faraway places. Even from other continents or from across the major world oceans. for example we know the Vikings made it across the Atlantic to Canada.

It’s incredible to us to think that earlier people managed to make those journeys, but they did. The modern concept of national borders also came in to being in relatively recent human history. So we need to be careful anplying that. And as we know borders have changed all the time over the last millennium. So how actually far back shouid we go with restitution, if we’re saying that restitution is a matter of ethical importance? It can’t just be restituted to the oldest available historical record can it, that would be a cop out when we know for loads of reasons historical records aren’t always made or they haven’t survived.

Would they be able to see them in their own country?

I’m not sure why it’s insulting, given I’ve said there’s an argument for returning items to some countries that have asked for them…?

Those are good questions, @RobustPastry .
It's like the controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond.
I was reading about the complex issue of it's origin and ownership.
Not a simple solution.

Maybe or maybe not. Even if families could not afford internal museums a lot of countries have school tours. More likely to see them than having to travel far away
internationally.

No. Let’s move forward.

Certainly more of them, I think.

Though as I said upthread, I don't want the whole BM to be broken up.

Fairly obviously because they themselves are British, so feel a sense of responsibility for returning stolen items kept in British museums.

I can well believe you wouldn’t care based on the previous comment about us having no culture of our own.

It isn’t about people in other countries having access to their heritage or about the inherent value of ancient items, is it? Just bitterness and wanting to tear things down.