'Colonial Loot' & Modern Museums

This is something which has been bugging me for a while now. The question of colonial loot and museums. It is a question which features in our newspapers, TV and social media with increasing frequency these days. Its prominence began with the rise of the ‘Rhodes must fall’ movement in South Africa. It is an issue which primarily a rising younger generation is promoting to our wider social consciousness. I have worked in the museum sector for over twenty years and I’ve seen the slow rise of this consciousness coming to the fore and it has a lot to do with this generational shift. 

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When I began work in this sector the museum where I work was still very hierarchical, still run according to old and seemingly long established Civil Service rules. Junior staff were expected to be deferential to their senior colleagues in a far more rigid and inflexible way than they are nowadays. Over the years I’ve watched this mindset relaxing itself. There are still elements of the old school, the Museum Director is still king (and more often than not, still a man), but we no longer have to doff our caps and be mindful of using the appropriate honorifics of our heads of department in quite the same way as we used to. Academia has been democratised. I’m now witnessing both my contemporary and my junior colleagues (i.e. – those younger than me, who have graduated or got their PhDs long after I myself graduated) rising to the positions of senior curators and even heads of department. And with this transition of one generation succeeding the one before, change is inevitable. It may seem like traditions are falling by the way, but as any anthropologist knows all traditions evolve. Culture isn’t static. Hence formal colonialism is no longer an active foreign policy, at least not on the broad blanket scale that it used to be. But that colonialism which went before is undoubtedly the foundation of our current world system. Globalisation began with colonialism. Without it we probably wouldn’t have the kind of trade deals we have today, nor global institutions such as the World Bank, The World Trade Organisation, The United Nations, etc. In many parts of the world the social and geographical concept of the modern nation state was an idea in and of itself which was exported with the imposition of empire on other parts of the globe, later taken up by the resistance movements which eventually succeeded in gaining independence for those peoples who had been colonised.

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Colonial expansion in the modern era (i.e. – from the late 1600s onwards) was a big project which spanned several centuries. It was not always a coherent project however. It often evolved as an ad hoc, contingent and improvised thing. In some places where colonialism took hold it set down roots and grew, in some places it managed to cling on for a while before either fading away or being fought off (think of India, the republics of Latin America, the old Ottoman domains), or in some places it managed to reshape the entire region and so morphed into something entirely its own (think of Singapore, the USA, Australia). It wasn’t always invading armies which set the process in motion either. Independent traders were often the first to make contact with other cultures (for instance, it’s been suggested that European whaling ships may well have reached many of the Pacific islands and Australia before Captain Cook), and these first contacts could often be mutually profitable, but as with any kind of social interaction disagreements, disputes, instances of fraud (real or perceived) could lead to conflict and the desire for restitution. Hence the next European to reach a particular Pacific island might unwittingly reap the knock on effect (quite literally) of his unknown predecessor’s wrong actions and thereby find himself koshed on the head, or alternatively he might be welcomed wholeheartedly had the last European visitor been more benign. In the case of the former situation such a ‘tit for tat’ might well have escalated out of proportion if a European gunboat was dispatched to ‘teach the natives a lesson.’ In the case of the latter, a trading post might thereby be established which then evolved over time into one of today’s major trading cities. All such interactions however involved the exchange of things and this for me, as an academic researcher, is the crux of the ‘colonial loot’ debate.

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I say ‘debate’ – but is it really a debate? … Many of the news media articles currently appearing on this topic highlight an increasingly black and white view of the past. Undoubtedly some aspects of the past can be read in such terms. It is impossible to countenance the Amritsar massacre or the Holocaust as anything but unquestionably bad. But other historical incidents and individuals constitute more of a grey area. Take Cecil Rhodes for example. He might not have been a particularly nice character, but should he (or the lingering evidence of the sway he once held over our societies), like Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s cigar, be airbrushed from our history? – Part of the calls made by the ‘Rhodes must fall’ campaign is that it is time for the public statues of Rhodes to be moved from the centre of our towns and institutions into our museums as a way of making things historical history. 

Some of the responses to the Guardian headline posted on Twitter

Museums are good repositories for this kind of baggage. By putting Rhodes’s statue in a museum we can categorise it, label it, explain who he was, why a statue of him was made, and why it stood for so long where it did, as well as why it was high time for it to be moved, re-contextualised, re-thought, and re-positioned. But what then of all the other things already in museums? Museums have long been the repositories of colonial knowledge, as colonial institutions themselves they are often freighted with just such baggage of their own. The British Museum being a straw man par excellence of this kind. Even its name – British rather than World or Global – deeply rankles some people. There are now increasing calls to ‘decolonise our museums.’ Hollywood recently highlighted this in what will probably come to be seen as an iconic cultural moment in cinema – the scene in which an African colonial-era descendent questions the legitimacy of a present day European curator’s assumption of custodianship of the past in the Marvel comics blockbuster, Black Panther (2018).

This is a debate which in many ways is only just beginning. And I for one feel that the media acting as a catalyst are very much goading this movement to run before it can properly walk. In saying so, as a museum professional, I don’t mean to be defensive. In some ways I think this is a good thing and long overdue at that. And I have certainly noticed these issues coming to the fore very rapidly in the curatorial forums I’ve attended more recently within the museum in which I work as well as at study days, conferences, and exhibitions which I’ve attended at other museums and universities over the last few years. The hidden stories behind museum objects – the history of collecting – is definitely coming to the fore. For many years I have been fascinated by this hidden history. One of the first things I ever did when I began working in the museum was to leaf through the departments' catalogues with the question at the forefront of my mind as to how did this object arrive in the museum? Not just who found it, but also how was it bought, dug up, found, discovered, traded, inherited, donated, acquired, deposited? – All of these words add layers of nuance to an object’s history. They can alter its meaning and its value, both symbolically as well as financially. Provenance is key to museum work.

Label in the British Museum (Room 33) describing the 'forcible' taking of objects during the British Invasion of Tibet in 1904

Some of the responses to the Guardian headline posted on Twitter

Without a provenance an object can only tell us so much about the past – a good provenance (i.e. – not just knowing where it came from, but how it was acquired and by whom, etc.) can reveal a wealth of information which simply seeing and recognising what the object is won’t do on its own. But here too can arise the post-colonial complications which the decolonise museums movement tend to gloss over. ‘All colonialism and its effects are bad’ is a black and white view which negates the nuances of how the world actually worked and functioned under colonialism. Everyone within the colonial world (both coloniser and colonised) was making his or her way through that system within the parameters which colonialism laid down around them. They negotiated their world just as we negotiate ours. Individuals travelling within the bounds of empire bought, traded, and collected – interacting with one another just as we do today. If you go on holiday and buy a tourist souvenir are you exploiting or ‘culturally appropriating’ any more from the local population than someone who similarly travelled within the British Empire and bought souvenirs 100 or 200 years ago? – If you slip that piece of tourist tat into your bag and manage to leave the shop undetected, not having paid for it, you most definitely are – hence the analogy of objects ‘collected’ from the sacking of the Summer Palace in 1860, to give but one example. Queen Victoria famously had the audacity to call a Pekingese dog she was given as a result of this incident ‘Looty.’ 

Did you keep the receipt? - If you did, is that good enough?

But even then such instances aren’t always quite so cut and dried if we dig down into them a bit more; as for instance in the minds of those colonial types who did such looting it was an entirely justified punitive act, reparation for the wrongs they felt they had sustained beforehand as informed by their world view at the time. Similarly Lord Elgin paid for those marble sculptures he removed from the Parthenon (even though that payment went to the Ottoman authorities then in control of Athens), he even got a receipt (or firman) to prove it.* Today we probably (hopefully) don’t wholly agree with the Victorian world view, but how then do we deal with its definite legacy; the fact that it happened and this is why that particular object or artwork is where it is today? – It is perhaps easy to argue outright that such objects should be returned – but sometimes even the black and white of such situations cannot be redressed. Think of some of the traditional societies which colonialists encountered, for instance in Tasmania or Tierra del Fuego. What if the people who were robbed have no direct descendants? Who do you give that loot ‘back’ to? – To the descendants of colonists who replaced them?

There’s no simple answer to this conundrum because it is inherently more complex than it at first appears. Not all objects have a clear history. How many receipts have you kept for the tourist nick-nacks you’ve bought on all your travels? – But that’s not to say nothing should be done in this regard. It’s important to acknowledge the perceived wrongs of the past, to explain how and why they happened, and to suggest ways we should reflect and act upon those wrongs in the present. That’s the debate which needs to happen now. It is part of the evolution of museums and museum practice, part of how we engage with our collective past. Otherwise there is a real danger of present faddism only promoting a superficial engagement with the past.

A small 'skull house' standing in front of a larger building in the Solomon Islands

The Skull House on display in the British Museum (Room 24)

Last Friday I attended the first of a series of short gallery talks at the British Museum which is endeavouring to meet this debate and facilitate this kind of reflection. This is something which has been in development for a while, but the initial coverage in the Press is painting this as a defensive response to independent initiatives to highlight the colonial aspect of museums and their histories. In this talk the curator circumnavigated a single showcase in the Wellcome Trust Gallery of Living and Dying (Room 24) – looking at a number of objects from the Solomon Islands, and thereby highlighting the ambiguity of the historical record. For instance, a skull house, an object which the museum records describe as “having been found under a cairn of stones.” – You don’t just find something under a cairn of stones, you first have to remove the stones to get at the object which is a deliberate act of seeking it out, with no mention of whether or not permission was sought from the local population who had originally placed the object under the cairn. And even if such permission was given, how are we (or even the collector at the time) to know that the person giving permission was in a legitimate position to do so? … Similarly that object – though it wasn’t actively sought by, or collected on behalf of the museum – may have been traded or handed down through several different hands or generations, then from one museum to another before it eventually reached the museum it is currently stored or displayed in. Does that make the current owner complicit in its initial theft, appropriation, or acquisition, whether that initial collecting method (extraneous to the museum itself) was documented and so is provable as being legitimate or otherwise? 

Some of the responses to the Guardian headline posted on Twitter

In most cases it’s a can of worms. But that’s not to say these questions shouldn’t be asked. They undoubtedly should be asked. But what we need to debate is how we respond and deal with such questions collectively. Maybe some of the answers will indeed prompt clear cases for restitution claims to be made and upheld. But also, for those objects of more ambiguous / unascertainable backgrounds or those legitimately collected when judged by today’s standards, perhaps we can view their being preserved in a museum as being a good thing? – There are many instances of museum curators working with local communities to better understand the objects held in their care, understanding the contexts from which these objects originated, as well as feeding back into those communities, who, in studying these objects for themselves, might re-learn lost techniques and skills of manufacture, and so on. The skull house mentioned above could well be an important example of this type of cultural survival. A British colonial official, Arthur Grimble, writing in his memoir, A Pattern of Islands (1952), gives a harrowing account of how Christian missionaries in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands (today's Kiribati and Tuvalu) compelled the local peoples to destroy this type of ancestral shrine which he says the zealous missionaries and their equally zealous indigenous converts found offensive in their ardent intolerance of what they perceived as superstitious 'paganism' and so destroyed in an unequivocal act of colonial violence.

This beneficent vision of the museum as resource as well as repository is a view which all museum scholars tend to agree on, after all knowledge is nothing if it is not shared. Perhaps in the past, knowledge – particularly in the colonial context – was power, hence in many ways the museum was both a functional database and a symbol of conquering and possessing other peoples, places, and resources, thereby being an implement of control; but in similar ways the knowledge which museums contain today can be reverted into something which goes deeper than simply giving back the material things of the past. They can be the means of giving back and growing that knowledge, refracting it in ways the old colonials could never have imagined! 

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And while we are thinking along these lines, it’s also worth bearing in mind that not all curators today are necessarily the direct descendants of those nasty old European colonial overlords, and those that are their descendants (asides from the nuance that not all colonials were imperialists) don’t necessarily hold the same opinions as their forebears did in this respect. Modern museums are recalibrating – but they are huge lumbering oil tankers not zippy speed boats, it’s difficult for them to comprehensively change direction overnight. But if you look closer, as this new series of gallery talks at the BM show, this generational shift is beginning to assert itself. The BM will look like a very different place in a few years’ time, because that’s what it does – it reflects the world which created the museum back then, as well as the world which continues now to create it over anew.

The modern museum is in one sense and memory bank, but it is also an active mind which is there to be collectively and individually engaged with by everyone who cares to use it. Automatic assumptions are exactly the kind of things which need to be challenged on multiple levels for any debate to have a constructive and meaningful outcome. There is no point being reductive about these questions, otherwise we are no better than that which we condemn. Broad brushes sweep both ways, but in sweeping out the bad we need to ensure we don’t inadvertently sweep out the good as well. Rhodes mustn’t simply fall, he must be reassessed, re-categorised, re-positioned, and above all – he must be remembered – otherwise the past has no future. Perhaps our minds need decolonising as much as our museums do?

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Please note the views expressed in this article are mine alone and are not intended to represent the official position of the British Museum.

* NB - For more detailed information and informed discussion concerning Lord Elgin's firman, see: Dyfri Williams, 'Lord Elgin's firman,' Journal of the History of Collections, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2009), pp. 49-76

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Pomp & Circumstance - Struggling with Empire

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