> In other cases, though, the items could easily have ended up lost to time (or political, economic, social turmoil)

That's a hard sell when the country that winds up with the artifacts was also the primary agitator of political, social and economic turmoil (you know, the usual colonial stuff). An arsonist shouldn't get to keep victims' heirlooms to "save them from the conflagration".

>The labeling of things in museums as "stolen" is lacking, IMO. In some cases, yes... straight up looted items are in museums.

If the best place to hide a lie is between two truths then the best place to hide a stolen item is between two that were legitimately acquired. This debate always seems to acknowledge that there are items completely illigitmately acquired but then shrug shoulders that nothing can be done because there are other items that were legitmatley acquired and somehow that's supposed to be convicing.

It's an idictment against the British Museum and by extension the UK that these items we do agree are stolen simply aren't returned.

> Additionally some of these places would not have had the means to care for antiquities back in the day.

This is a bad argument, because it's irrelevant.

Imagine getting your car stolen, and the thief says it's justified because he is rich (partly due to stealing a lot of cars) and he can afford to send the car to the shop for maintenance more often.

The object belongs to the original owner. Even if that original owner would choose to destroy or damage their object on purpose that would be up to them.

And in some cases, the items were lost because they were put in museums. Europe was not exactly a stable place in the 20th century. Many things were destroyed in the wars, and many items were stolen from museums by conquerors, individual soldiers, and looters.

I like how museums in Berlin look at this problem. Once I visited an exhibition that was fully dedicated to provenance research and it did label some items, although with less straightforward language (I don’t remember seeing the word „stolen“). https://www.smb.museum/en/research/provenance-research/

And of course this has happened: https://www.smb.museum/en/museums-institutions/ethnologische...

> political, economic, social turmoil

I can see a happy medium, where (ex)colonizers return artifacts to neutral safe harbor near the home country.

If Indonesia is unstable or if museums don't meet standards, then let artifacts be held in Australia. If Egypt is too unstable, then have the artifacts returned to Dubai. With the frequency of 'just stop oil' vandalism, I'm not sure if the west is the safest place for these artifacts anyway.

Alternatively, national embassies also make for great safe harbor. This way the artifacts are nominally returned to the home country, without needing to cross borders or jeopardizing the artifact's safety.

>In other cases, though, the items could easily have ended up lost to time (or political, economic, social turmoil) if they had not been taken and put in museums outside of the places where they originated. Additionally some of these places would not have had the means to care for antiquities back in the day.

You don't seem to be disputing that the items were stolen but rather claiming that some of the theft was justified.

Many artifacts were stolen from legitimate kingdoms / village councils / etc that no longer exist, so for these artifacts returning it to the corresponding modern government is fairly appropriate.

Otherwise, unless there is a clear claim of individual/familial ownership vis descendancy, then returning artifacts to a legal national government is still a least bad option. In this case the artifact belongs to the people and is stewarded by the peoples' government - the government doesn't "own" it in the way King Charles owns the Crown Jewels. (Ideally this government would be democratic, but international legitimacy should be enough for the UK to hand over the goods.)

There are a ton of exceptions - Rohingya artifacts shouldn't be sent blindly into Myanmar - but I promise the people involved are taking this seriously. It seems condescending and arrogant van Bommel really failed to "think through" her usage of a metonymy.

This is spot on. Why should a “mosern country” be the owner of an artifact? I wonder honestly, I am not just whining.

> isn’t the rightful owner.

And who is qualified to determine the "rightful owner"? The current government of the nation from which the items were taken is the one in charge of policy regarding their cultural and historical artefacts.

- the artifact is likely to be seen by significantly more people and serves a much greater purpose to expose/educate those people (from other cultures) to/about the culture from which it came

And massive return of artifacts (as opposed to one or two once every decade) will open some very inconvenient flood gates, like the fact that Britain was not the only empire in the history. And some "non-western" countries were or are empires too. Imagine that after India get their stuff back, Afghanistan comes next to India and asks for their share. That would be very bad optics. While without actually receiving stolen or gifted stuff, countries can keep their moral high ground and common external enemy (which is conveniently very far away).

Acaster’s brilliant, funny bit on this:

https://youtu.be/x73PkUvArJY?si=eRB3RIuR7rjXvw_i

The UK government occasionally does give things back on the understanding that they can be returned for a bit when required...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_of_Scone

I just learned about how in 1890 a ship filled with 19.5 tons of unwrapped cat mummies sailed from Alexandria to Liverpool, and the cargo was sold mostly as fertilizer.

Now I also learned that Egyptian authorities have since found even more mummified cats, perhaps even millions. But it's still a very striking example of the plundering mentality of the big naval powers.

https://www.bbc.com/reel/video/p0jr4z6k/why-tonnes-of-mummif...

There literally was an curator of the British Museum that stole 1800 artifacts and sold them for personal profit. Don't pretend this doesn't happen to the British.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/26/british-museum-s...

Seems to be a major bias in this perspective against the British. The contemporary Egyptians at the time of collection had even less interest in preservation.

Do you even know that the gold was removed by the British, and not some enterprising locals? The British were not cultural outliers in their graverobbing. They were outliers in that they saw historical value in items and chose to preserve them, instead of deconstructing them.

Hacker News is comprised almost entirely of privileged people from colonizing cultures, and tech culture has been going through a neo-reactionary renaissance for a while, so it shouldn't be surprising. It is weird how aggressive this specific subject makes them, though.

Why not just accept the situation as part of the ebb and flow of history? They certainly weren’t the first empires in history. I think a lot of the objection is more about nationalistic sentiment than anything else and I don’t feel it needs to be done to reclaim cultural heritage.

How often and can you give some examples in recent history?

While London is indeed a global city, access is very much not equal.

Immigration/tourism requirements are always the strictest against the very countries who were plundered during colonial times, in comparison to rich countries with an imperial past/present.

Most of the world will never visit the UK. Most of the value that the British museum supplies goes back to the UK in the form of tourism and to close allies of the UK in terms of exposure to these artifacts.

This assumes global cultural value matters more than the native cultural value of the people to whom the artifacts belong.

I think the default should be to return to the native country wherever possible. Although it does beg the question of what to do if the native countries have changed significantly due to imperialism/colonization, idk.

But I do appreciate the value of cross cultural sharing so perhaps museums could have a rotating selection that they can borrow for some time from the native country, as long as the transport does not have negative impacts on the artifacts.

> British Museum, […], is located in a global city, given completely free access to its huge collection on display and pays for preservation.

It grants free access to British citizens and those few who can afford to travel to the UK. The grand majority of the world’s population cannot afford this.

Most important, the locals living in cities that were pillaged by the British can’t access cultural items at all. Sure, the museum entry might be free, but they can’t afford to travel to an island far far away.

> After all, the British Museum, the main example for restitutions, is located in a global city, given completely free access to its huge collection on display and pays for preservation. The global cultural value it adds is much larger than individual museums all over the would could provide.

Most of the collection of the British Museum is not on display at any given moment (if ever). They could lose 90% of their inventory and the display would be exactly the same.

But that's beside the point. Museum entry may be free, but London is pretty expensive to go to, especially if you are from a place where the items in question were plundered (ie poor third world countries). In some cases it may even be illegal. Most of the people whose cultures those items belong to cannot afford to go visit the museum.

I agree with the sentiment, however in some ways it should be something that is permitted to move.

The UK has been very stable for a long time, however they are profiting indirectly from the museums, since it s a driver of tourism.

Should the UK become less stable, we should have a hard look at ensuring the continuity of the collection. As others have mentioned, a lot of these things would have been destroyed or forgotten had the British not decided it was important to keep it - and as time goes on, those things become even more irreplaceable.

Looting and pillaging is fine, as long as you build an entire economic / social system around it? Because that is the only semblance of logic I can take away from your statements. These museums didn't just pop into place for the artifacts to reside in; they were built to show off their spoils.

It would be sort of interesting, maybe if there was some sort of right to visit these artifacts, the idea that the UK was preserving their cultures for these countries would be a little more defensible. What percentage of a country’s population should be given a museum-funded trip to the UK, before we can say the museum is actually living up to that promise, I wonder? Half or so?

> Abused children are taken away from their parents, but artefact are to simply be given back to whatever state has jurisdiction over some area they were in way back?

The reason why children are protected from abusive parents, is because they are protected by human right laws. A child is legally entitled to an upbringing safe from abuse, so a state is obligated to remove children from abusive housrholds.

Of course antiquities aren't people so they don't have any human rights. That is why it's stupid to compare artifacts to abused children.

> complex questions of what "rightful owner" after hundreds or thousands of years even means

I think that's besides the point.

To me this means a goodhearted effort to right past wrongs.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@rygorous/113219189748801451

> art project idea: "The British Museum", which is housed somewhere outside the UK and will accept and display any donations from anonymous donors into its collection that were provably stolen from Great Britain

> After all, the British Museum, the main example for restitutions, is located in a global city, given completely free access to its huge collection on display and pays for preservation. The global cultural value it adds is much larger than individual museums all over the would could provide.

Firstly, as others have pointed out, the British Museum is not freely accessible to the vast majority of the world population. The world is larger than WEIRD countries and the richer sections of formerly colonised countries countries

Secondly, it is not the British Museum's decision to make about whether the cultural artifacts of other people is more valuable to "global culture" than it is to the culture it originated from. Let's take an example: India and China both have a population more than double that of the EU. Which means a museum located in either country provides visa-free access to billions of people with relatively cheap travel.

Would that be an argument to move the Girl With the Pearl Earring from The Hague's Mauritshuis to New Delhi or Beijing? Would it be an argument to move the painting to the British Museum? Indeed why not move the entire Mauritshuis to the British Museum? After all London receives far more visitors than The Hague does. Surely the global cultural value of those artifacts is greater than the value that the Dutch place on it.

Consider that you apply this logic to extract all Dutch artwork from that country and place it in a second country. Consider that the second country was largely responsible for such extraction, which included not only cultural artifacts but also wealth. Consider that the second country now places visa restrictions that make it harder for Dutch people to visit the country and even if they did, the cost of actually doing so would largely exclude most Dutch people. What effect would this extraction of cultural heritage have on the Dutch?

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I know some of the museums aren’t the right place to keep some of the artifacts, but I also feel that in general they have been good stewards.

My counterpoint is wondering how many would have been destroyed by ISIS or civil unrest in some of the less stable regions of the world.

Even plundered and looted is often a misnomer.

In many cases, they could be replaced with collected, saved, and preserved.

Our current sense of historical preservation was not as pervasive in the past. In many places these materials would have been consumed or destroyed by locals who had more pragmatic concerns and no interest in the past.

As always, the world doesn't owe you or anyone the artifacts of its cultures. They can be shared, but no one has the right to take them by force.