The Case for Keeping Things Where They Are

If you have only met the universal museum argument in the form its opponents give it, you have not met it.

The weak version goes: these objects are safer with us, the people we took them from cannot look after them, and we own them anyway. That version is easy to knock down and it is not what the serious defenders say.

Here is the strong version.

An encyclopaedic museum is a specific intellectual instrument. Standing in one building, in one afternoon, a visitor can look at an Assyrian relief, a Benin bronze, a Greek frieze, a Chinese bronze vessel and a Mesoamerican sculpture, and the comparison teaches something that none of them teaches alone. You see that monumental sculpture is a thing many unrelated societies invented. You see what each did with the human figure and what each refused to do with it. You see, directly and without anyone telling you, that civilisation is plural.

That experience cannot be had in a museum devoted to one culture, however good. It is a public good, and it is not divisible: you cannot have a third of it. There are perhaps a dozen collections in the world that can deliver it, all assembled in a period that will not recur, and a policy of returning on demand would dismantle them within a generation.

And the beneficiary is not Britain or France. It is whoever walks in, which in the British Museum's case is around six million people a year, free of charge.

That is the argument. It is a real argument about a real value, and the fact that the collections were assembled by the states powerful enough to assemble them does not by itself show that the value is fake.

Now the replies, which are also strong.

The first is the sharpest. Comparison requires the objects to be in a room. It does not require the museum to own them. Long-term loans, renewable, with title held by the country of origin, deliver the stated benefit exactly. When a museum resists that, it is defending ownership rather than comparison, and it should say so, because those are different things to defend.

The second concerns who gets to walk in. Six million visitors a year is a genuine public, and it is a public that can get to Bloomsbury. A student in Lagos has the same claim on Benin's art as a student in London and much worse odds of a visa. Universality that is geographically concentrated in the former imperial capitals is a universality with an asterisk.

The third is about the floodgates. The claim that returning anything leads to emptying everything is a prediction, and the evidence so far points the other way: returns have been specific, documented, negotiated case by case, and in several instances the objects stayed in the building on loan. Predictions can come true. They should be labelled as predictions while they are doing argumentative work.

Here is what strikes me about the whole dispute once both sides are stated at full strength.

Restitution advocates mostly do not want everything back. They want the objects with a documented taking, and they say so.

Museums mostly do not deny the takings. The Benin record is not contested by anyone. They argue about consequences and about legal power.

Which means the actual disagreement is far narrower than the public version, and it is the kind of disagreement that gets settled case by case rather than by anyone winning. That is precisely what has been happening, slowly, in the places where a date, a commander and a receipt exist.