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.

Interesting. My husband is from India, a poor rural area. The first time he saw artefacts from his homeland was on a visit to the British Museum.
I don't know how it's possible to make fair and reasonable decisions about this.

I wonder what would happen if another country decided that they needed to step in and send huge lorries accompanied by their military to take away Stone Henge and preserved it 'properly'?

After all, until a little over a century ago, we just had it in some random farmer's field, with animals allowed to graze alongside the stones, with no official protection or preservation processes at all. Then, in the 1920s, we actually polluted the ancient (sacred to many) stones by propping them up with concrete!

I do wonder, if it had been located in a far-off poor country, and treated/dismissed in the same way as we did, would we have accepted that - or would we have demanded the moral right to seize it, claiming that they couldn't be trusted to properly look after it themselves?

What's wrong with colonial mindset?

Have you been to India or Africa?

India is absolutely filthy, every street is full of piles and piles of litter and rubbish. Their national monuments and UN world heritage sites are generally left to decay and suffer from industrial levels of tourism. It's absolutely outrageous how they treat their heritage.

African countries suffer endemic corruption and theft and God knows what's happening to Roman buildings in Libya at the moment.

I don't like the British Museum but don't think anything should be "handed back."

Restitution programmes could even give rise to arguments that we should ask the British Museum to have restituted back to itself multiple items from other countries which have a link to the modern day UK and who lived here in that era and what happened here during different eras.

What is now the UK was taken over by the Romans in huge areas, for example for a few centuries. So at some point they just became part of the national fabric which we know as the UK, as we see through artefacts and records about family and public life in the UK.

In the modern day UK we also had regular invasions from Vikings and others who also then settled here, became part of society here and all of this would have been added to by constant international trade going on. The UK was invaded and colonised as part of different empires. It was going on globally and we also did it to others for centuries. So in this context should the British Musuem go to the many countries that made up the rest of the Roman Empire (and the Empire during what period?)

And should it go to the many countries where Norse and Viking people came from and settled in, and then demand back anything that has relevance to the UK but also that culture because it should be represented in the UK because it’s part of our national history?

And for example what does a museum in a city like Dublin do, that was founded by Vikings? There will be loads of highly relevant items to just that one city’s history scattered all over the Viking influenced countries, which would be of national significance to modern day Republic of Ireland, and the whole island of Ireland.

I think our histories are much more interlinked and much more complicated than we tend to assume as modern people living in today’s demarcations of nations. It’s not so easy or helpful to be try to be rigid about who was who and where things come from.

If we’re looking for more ways to promote global economic and social justice which we should be, then we need to urgently sort out things now like climate change which is going to kill people and destroy current infrastructure and multiple ways of life and as part of that obviously historical artefacts and buildings across multiple countries. Museums are vital to understanding ourselves but also in absolute justice terms they are quite symbolic or abstract and working on climate change and standards of living globally would seem to be a more pressing form of restitution.

Well, how can anyone respond to " whats wrong with a colonial mindset?".

I am out. Must make use of the lovely weather.

It's not completely black and white, is it?

If a rich person in a poor country seizes part of the national (i.e. not just their own family) history and hides it away out of the view of ordinary people; as opposed to them being able to freely view it as long as they can get to London.

why us though and not other countries? I’d bet every museum in the world has some ‘looted’ items. Does it really matter in the grand scheme of things? Maybe if all other museums in the world reciprocated, but I’m guessing there’s bigger fish to fry currently than swapping back ‘looted’ items.

Do you mean destroy everything in the museums?

Plus you’re posting on mn in safety I assume in the UK, no borders and you might not be as self assured on this.

If the countries of origin want artifacts back they should ask for them and be given them. Some arrangement could be agreed to manage the pieces perhaps at a cost.

But why close an entire museum. Also I've never understood the point of private collections. Beautiful and interesting things should be seen not hidden away which is what would happen in a lot of instances.

A border is a "barbaric practice"?
Ok.

It is, yes, just as it would be theirs if we decided to use the stones at Stonehenge to build a fence with. This is because humanity as a whole have an intangible cultural heritage.

But even if one adheres to the argument you're making here, it requires some interrogation as to who 'they' are. Happening to occupy the same piece of land now as the culture that produced an object centuries or millennia ago doesn't mean you're a member of the same group. Sometimes there's substantial continuity, sometimes not. We'd need to talk about what happens when the cultures or groups don't exist any more, lest we simply swap an object from one set of colonisers to another and presume ourselves to be acting ethically.

There are people who have extensive private collections, for themselves only. Sometimes these people buy treasures which are knowingly stolen.

Absolutely bizarre to say that Britain has no treasures or culture. If you are ignorant about something that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

This is a key issue imho. Just because a group lives in a territory that overlaps the geographical boundaries of a long gone civilization, doesn’t mean that they are the inheritors of said civilization.

It is solely a case by case decision. Not a principle.

I think a name change is a good idea

humanity as a whole have an intangible cultural heritage.

100% and if we could really properly take this to our consciousness, of how linked we are and our cultures are, applying that to what we do today politically and economically or how we vote or even just in our own shopping baskets or pension investments made on our behalf, we’d have a much better world.

The fact is that we were just like all these other countries that don’t look after stuff until about 150 years ago. Then we developed the skills and understanding to recognise and preserve these objects. We were a bit ahead of the game compared to other nations in this respect and as a result we’re responsible for the preservation of countless precious objects that would otherwise have been destroyed. So while I see the merits in returning items that were actually stolen, I think our ancestors should also be given huge credit for preserving these artefacts. The narrative is so black and white, I assume because a lot of people are just incapable of understanding complexity and nuance.

My last word.

So many posters on here are completely ignorant of the new efforts made by ' developing countries' to preserve their heritage and have based their comments on a flying visit to see the Taj, without actually spending any time there.

I spend a good deal of time in India and have visited many of the newer museums. Much needs to be done, for sure. But
there are now museums like this in India, almost as good as any here, and trying to be better.
https://www.bdlmuseum.org/ They deserve a loan of looted artefacts.

. .

What tosh.

should the Italians dismantle half of Venice and return it all to Turkey?

You are naïve if you think the world’s poor would see them if they were anywhere else. And you probably underestimate the size of the middle class in India and many African countries. They can and do come to the U.K.

I am Indian and have literally seen this with my own eyes. Not the desperately poor, but certainly many.

It's also a really interesting point that it's much easier to turn our ire onto our ancestors, than to really examine how ethical our own society is in terms of acquisition of objects. How many people scrutinise the provenance of the jewellery or furniture they buy?

For some reason it's also easier to think about how we exploited other countries than to think about the exploitation of our own people. What about the enclosures or the industrial revolution or the First World War? There is injustice absolutely everywhere you look and we shouldn't just be trying to pick the low-hanging fruit because it makes us feel righteous.

And in my side hustle-- a related field- am so sick of attending conferences on African heritage which are wall to wall white, because all the African scholars can't get visas. But hey, what's wrong with colonialism, eh?

So many posters on this thread have no idea about passport privilege and it shows

“Non white countries”??

And all the other museums and galleries in the world, are they going to do the same?

Silly idea.