Gain Or Loss

According to Charlotte Higgins, the "chief culture writer" at the Guardian, "In popular discourse in Britain, returning artefacts to their communities of origin is almost invariably framed as a loss." This is surely wrong. To take the most famous example, and the chief subject of Higgins's article, 55% of people favoured the return of the Parthenon marbles to Greece when polled by YouGov in 2017, and only 21% favoured retaining them in Bloomsbury. That majority probably aren't particularly worked up over the issue, so a charged term like "loss" is irrelevant to their feelings. Where emotion runs high is not among the populace at large but among those sections of the commentariat who see British museums as a national patrimony under threat externally from grasping foreigners and internally from woke curators and politically correct trustees. Rather than addressing those rightwing commentators' beliefs head-on, Higgins opts for a third way in which restitution is framed as an ethical gain: everyone's a winner; there is no loss.

But the idea that Britain restoring the marbles to the Parthenon would be a magnanimous gesture is no different to the self-congratulation of manumission. It seeks to avoid the shame of a past wrong by the spectacle of present virtue, and expects the bonus of admiration into the bargain. The parallel with slavery is not over-the-top. In both cases the root of the issue is the treatment of property. Today we are appalled by the idea that people could be considered as such, but our attitudes towards cultural artefacts, and in particular the idea that they should be freely tradeable across the globe, has not changed one iota in two hundred years. They may seem conceptually miles apart now, but slavery and collecting clearly overlapped, most obviously in the imperialist discipline of ethnography. For this reason it's worth considering the vexed issue of historic collections using the three Rs often rasied in the context of slavery: recognition, restitution and reparations.

Viewed thus, it is clear that the British Museum and the UK state remain stuck on the point of recognition, i.e. the admission that the marbles should never have been separated from the building (the claim that this was done to protect them from damage and was sanctioned by the Ottomans is special pleading, not to mention lacking in proof). For that reason, the hope of Higgins and other liberals that some via media can be found to address restitution is premature. Indeed, her suggestion that "perhaps to see the surviving portions of the Parthenon frieze and pediments reassembled, it will need Greece and Britain both to lend their sculptures to a third country" indicates the extent to which such schemes are mere day-dreaming, as if Greece could realistically be expected to compromise to avoid upsetting the feelings of the Daily Telegraph. Restitution cannot precede recognition, and once that recognition is conceded, there can be no negotiation - a point I'm sure both the British Museum and the government are only too well aware of.

In laying out the problem, Higgins instinctively reaches for the apocalyptic language of conservatism, even if she frames it in terms of a historical irony: "Minds leap to a vision of our museums violently pillaged: walls bare, sculpture courts deserted, store rooms despoiled – a fascinating reversal of how at least some (albeit, to be fair, a tiny minority) of museum objects in the UK were actually acquired." This elides the manner in which the vast majority of exhibits were acquired while simultaneously highlighting it. They were not the product of violent seizure but of purchase. However, this was in no sense the operation of a "free" market. Rather artefacts were acquired at knockdown prices through coercion, in the same way that labour power was acquired in the domestic sphere through enclosure and punitive poor laws, or agricultural commodities and raw material are acquired today through global cartels. There's also a tendency to forget how many were the result of trades between imperial powers, which distanced the original theft or seizure, or of the operation of a rapacious comprador class acting as agents for those imperial powers. Empire was a system of permanent exploitation, not occasional looting raids.

The argument against the restitution of the Parthenon marbles to Greece was long an example of the "gish gallop" - that is a set of uncoordinated claims, tendentious in isolation but intended to overwhelm the debate by sheer numbers. Thus you cannot undo history (an argument familiar in the recent debate over statues); you risk setting a precedent (an argument wheeled out by the current Culture Secretary, Michelle Donelan); the artefacts can be cared for better here than there; and more people will see them in a major museum in a "world city". All of these have been repeatedly knocked down. No one would now seriously claim that the marbles, or the study of Classical Greek statuary more generally, would suffer by being returned to the purpose-built Parthenon museum in Athens, or that returning them would result in the British Museum being denuded in double-quick time (though if that resulted in more displays of actual British artefacts, would it be such a bad thing anyway?) One argument that remains implicit, because it would obviously prompt a riot if articulated today, is that we are better able to appreciate the marbles, but this was an argument that was once explicit and unashamed. Indeed, Elgin's original defence was precisely that he was rescuing these artefacts from local neglect.

Who is best qualified to advance the understanding of a people's culture and history? The idea that it is the current descendants of that people is relatively novel, and obviously tied-up with the twin ideas of  nationalism and decolonisation. The arrogance of imperial powers towards subject peoples sat alongside another form of cultural appropriation, that of the claim to be the favoured inheritors of the classicial tradition. To be, in other words, the modern Athens or Rome. Britain's retention of the Parthenon marbles and the Benin bronzes are categorically different in this respect. The former were secured as a legitimation of empire and enlightenment, that is a reflection of Britain's historic role as the most developed nation in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and thus the trustee of civilisation. With Greece still under Ottoman rule and Hellenism the height of fashion, the idea that Britain was the natural inheritor of the Athenian Golden Age was common. The transfer of Classical art from the Mediterranean to Britain through the vector of the Grand Tour was a tangible tribute to Britain's geopolitical status, much as it would become for rich Americans in later centuries.

In contrast, the Benin bronzes were seen at the time as a penalty paid by those who resisted Pax Britannica. Again, we easily forget that for most of their time in the British Museum these artefacts were not considered to be of civilisational significance, certainly not on a par with the statuary of Classical Greece and Rome. 60% of the bronzes (which were mostly brass and thus not instrinsically of great monetary value) looted during the 1897 expedition were distributed among the soldiery as spoils or war or sold at auction (many to foreign museums, such as in Germany). It was only with the interest shown by European artists in African sculpture in the early twentieth century that they acquired a greater cultural cachet. Even then, the British Museum continued to sell small numbers back to the Nigerian government up until the early 1970s, indicating their treatment as mere commodities. 

The Parthenon marbles should be returned to Greece, and the Benin bronzes to Nigeria. And if any other country wants any other artefacts currently housed in the British Museum returned, then that should happen without any quibble too. (It's worth noting that most countries won't go to the trouble, any more than the UK will be demanding that all Beatles memorabilia be repatriated). Far from dressing this up as an ethical gain, the UK should have the courage to accept it as a justified loss and therefore a proper restitution. The importance of this is not simply in the proper treatment of the artefacts themselves but in the signal it would send in respect of the three Rs, namely that the UK was now at a point where it could seriously address the issue of reparations. But that is obviously a step too far, not just for the conservatives who still cling to the belief that the British empire was a force for good in the world but for those liberals who believe that the empire was dismantled through the virtuous enlightenment of the British people.