Dan Snow's History Hit - Loot? Spoils? Artefacts? What to Do with Our Museums

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

Our museums are full of stuff taken, bought, stolen and gifted from foreign countries. It feels like we face a reckoning. What shall we do with it?I talked to two authors of new books that wrestle with this. Christopher Joll is a former soldier who deals specifically with the spoils of war, while Alice Proctor thinks more generally about all objects and where they are best placed and how best to interpret them. For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. Ordinarily, this time of year, the Easter weekend, the Easter vacation, Easter holidays, is a time when our museums will be gearing up for the start of their busy period of the year. Lots and lots of people, tourists, families, rushing in and therefore it's so painful that during this lockdown many of those institutions will be facing an existential threat to their existence. Another threat to museums or opportunity for museums is around the things in their collections, the artefacts inside.

Are they loot? Are they the spoils of war? Are they purchased or bought legally from other countries? purchased or bought legally from other countries. Lots of these objects come from abroad and lots of them have been sourced under circumstances that today seem unethical. What are we going to do about the stuff in our museums everyone? It seems like this is a question we can't darken the void for much longer and I've got two authors on this podcast. They have slightly different takes on it partly because they're talking about slightly different types of artefacts and objects in our museum's collections. But Christopher Joel, he's a former soldier and he's just written a new book on the spoils of war. These objects that have been captured on the battle or in some way are wrapped up in the peace treaties that ended wars. And I've also got Alice Proctor. She is a

brilliant writer. She's just written a book called The Whole Picture, and she has got a very thought-provoking argument about what we should do with many of the objects in Western museums. If you like museums, we've got a lot of museums on History Hit TV. We've got a lot of exclusive tours around some of the world's best museums all over the world from Timbuktu to the USA back to Europe we're offering a special discount this time because people are locked down at home and need all the help they can get all the history fire support they can get so you can get the Netflix for history history hit tv for just one pound euro or dollar if you use the code pod one you get a month for free and you get the second month after that for just one pound euro or dollar. So it will see you through hopefully the rest of the lockdown. Fingers crossed. Before you go and log on to History Hit TV, enjoy this podcast with Christopher Joel and Alice Proctor. I love museums. Some of my happiest memories are walking around the Asian Weapon Gallery

at the Wallace Collection in London with my grandma, my nine. We used to call her, she was Welsh when I was a kid. Looking at all the elaborately jewelled scabbards on the walls and the cases. I loved going to the astonishing, I spent the whole day walking around the Metropolitan Museum in New York when I went for the first time as a student to New York. And now I love taking my kids, obviously. I don't know what anyone else does with their kids. I take my kids to a lot of museums. The other day I took them for the first time to the mummies in the British Museum, a sort of rite of passage if you live near enough to have the fortune to go.

But now it seems those museums are at the centre of controversy because we all now know that the objects in them are often taken from other places. That was almost a sort of foundational concept which you get right at the beginning of all these great museums. Some of the objects in them were gifted, others were bought, stolen, looted, captured, rescued. There's been many paths to entering the collections. The question people are now asking is, should these museums, via them, all of us, because many of these are publicly owned, should we all be thinking about giving objects back? What does that even mean?

Alice Proctor is a historian. She's a museum guide. She's author of the new book The Whole Picture and she believes that we should be open to this. I met her and asked what proportion of objects in big well-known museums are problematic? It's so hard to say. I mean most museums you've got maybe like two to five percent of the collection on show especially with the big national ones. It might be a little higher than that with a smaller collection

and of that most museums will only have a handful of really controversial pieces on show or at least pieces that are currently up for debate. There will be more controversial stuff in the stores, there'll be other things that have maybe a more violent history but in terms of things that are currently like sought for repatriation or discussed in that sort of context it's really not that many. It's a pretty small percentage and you could basically empty most of these museums and fill them out again and again which is why then we get into this weird conversation but if we repatriate stuff they'll all be empty and that's just not true. Alice is pretty clear about the category of

objects that ought to be repatriated. I would say the stuff that's taken very clearly in a violent circumstance so that might be something that's taken very clearly in a violent circumstance. So that might be something that's plundered after a battle. It might be something that is very clearly described as stolen, even by the people that are taking it. You know, when you have an object that's taken after a conflict or in a kind of moment of invasion or something like that, they're the pieces that are most obvious to me as objects that should be repatriated or subject to restitution. The author and former soldier Christopher Joel has done a lot of thinking about the particular subset of objects. He calls them spoils of war. And in his recent book called Spoils of War, he likes to divide up these objects into various categories.

OK, so let's break everything down here. Things that you might see in somebody's house or museum. Yeah. What we got, things that were purchased legally on eBay. A spoil of war, loot. How do you differentiate between all these words? The way that I deal with it in the book, and I think it's a pretty good way, is that in my view there are essentially four categories. There are what I call battlefield detritus, so a cap badge picked up from the battlefield

of whatever and shoved in a soldier's pocket, or something that he removed from the body of a dead opponent. Those things have very, very little intrinsic value, but they probably have quite high emotional value. The idea that they should be repatriated is just ridiculous. I mean, who would you repatriate them to? Great-great-uncle Fred has got a spear hanging in his front room with a little bit of rusty blood on it. He took it omdurman. Who are you going to give it back to? Why should it be given back? It's a perfectlydeman. Who are you going to give it back to? Why should it be given back?

It's a perfectly legitimate spoil of war. The second category are those, the legal system then operated by the army and the navy, and that was prize auctions. So what would happen was at the end of a battle, all the stuff of any value was collected together. It was then auctioned off, turned into money, and the money was distributed amongst the soldiers who'd taken part in the battle according to rank. So if you were a general, you got a lot of money.

If you were private, you didn't get very much, but you got something. So the generals quite liked that system. I think everybody quite liked that system. If you were earning a shilling, if you'd taken the king's shilling and you got 10 bob as a result of the Battle of Waterloo, you were probably quite happy. So that's the second category. And some of those items that now come up for sale have enormous value. I mean, the best example I can give you is Captain Gunter's snuff box, taken from the Yuan Ming Yuan in 1860, the sacking of the old Summer Palace. And that went to auction for £400,000 the other day.

Now, it was valuable for two reasons. First of all, it was a beautiful 18th century European-made snuff box. But secondly, its provenance was absolutely spot on. It actually had engraved in the lid, you know, taken from the Summer Palace 1860. So those items, a lot of the items that come through the prize auction system, now do have great value. And we cover a number of them in the book. The third category are what I call trophies. Now these have no intrinsic value. For example, a Napoleonic French eagle,

or an American colour taken during the American War of Independence. These things are just bits of bronze or scraps of cloth. So they have no intrinsic value, but they have huge emotional value. And for that reason, if they ever do come up for sale, they go for a fabulous amount of money. I mean, three American Colours that have been taken during the American War of Independence by Colonel Bannister Tarleton. Sold for multi-million pounds in New York about four or five years ago. You can understand why. Those things, however, I think are the true spoils. They're to the victor the spoils.

I think are the true spoils. They're to the victor the spoils. You know, a Napoleonic Eagle which was defended by three officers and a platoon of men. To lose an eagle was to disgrace the unit. To capture an eagle was to bring glory upon the unit. I mean look for example at Prince Harry's regiment, the Blues and Royals. They wear on their left arm the Napoleonic Eagle of the 105th Regiment of the Line. Why? Well, the Royals, as they then were, captured it at Waterloo. In the morning. In the morning. And it was tremendously important. And Wellington, in fact, collected together all the captured eagles, I think there were three at Waterloo, had them sent haste post haste back to London where they were literally laid at the feet of the Prince Regent.

So that tells you a lot about the emotional attachment to these items. Now, should they go back? Well, the French have from time to time asked for the loan of the eagles. And I tell you two small stories. One was the Royal Hospital Chelsea when General Jeremy Mackenzie was the governor there and he received a request from a French regiment whose Eagle was sitting in the collection at the Royal Hospital. Would the Royal Hospital lend it? And he said yes but be very aware of the fact that we'll come and collect it if we don't get it back. Not quite the

same sort of story the Eagle of I think it's the 45th Regiment, which was captured by the Scots Greys at Waterloo. They repeatedly get requests from the French to return it. And you know what they say? Come and get it. The implication being very clear. And then the fourth category are things of enormously high value. And they're generally the subject of treaties that end wars. And just one example of that is the Koh-i-Noor Diamond. Koh-i-Noor Diamond is the subject of Article 3 of the last treaty of Lahore. So if you're going to say things like the Koh-i-Noor Diamond should go back, what you're effectively saying is that the whole international rule of law, treaties written and entered into at the end of a war, can be invalidated just on a whim. And I don't think that's credible.

But is there a fifth category which is loot? I mean, straightforward. There is a fifth category, but I would not call that spoils of war. Because, again, let's just look at the way that Duke of Wellington approached this. Duke of Wellington absolutely deplored looting. The reason he deplored it was twofold. First of all, he thought it was not much better than theft. And indeed, you could be hanged for looting in the 18th, even in the 19th century. And secondly, it impeded the course of the battle because soldiers would break off to loot instead of pursuing the enemy.

Yes, at the end of the Battle of Vitoria, Napoleon's brother was the King of Spain. They discover his extraordinary convoy of where he's just looted Spanish treasures and they all pull it apart. That's loot. That's loot. Those items never went through a prize auction. They ended up in an awful lot of people's pockets. Most of the gold, incidentally, ended up in Spanish peasants' pockets. So Christopher is fairly clear.

Because they're spoils of war, you say they are the property of their current owners. Yes. And that's it. Yes. And it's not just me that says it. That's well recognised in international law. I want to know if there was anything that Christopher thought that should be returned. I think that looting, I think it's reasonably straightforward, where possible loot should be returned. That was Wellington's view. In fact, 50% of what Napoleon had looted across

Europe was sent back to their countries of origin. 50% wasn't. There's still quite a lot of Venetian loot sitting in the Louvre. Wind forward to the end of the Second World War, and of course you've got the Monuments Men, this commission that returned stolen Nazi art treasures. And if you know, there's a staggering statistic. In fact, of course, it wasn't really Hitler. It was Goering who was at the centre of the whole thing, who said I intend to plunder and to do it properly, took 25% of the art in occupied Europe and returned it to Germany. 25%, that's an enormous number. And of course of that 25%, only a relatively small fraction has found its way back. There's a reason for that too. I mean quite a lot of it was destroyed, a lot of it was destroyed. A lot of it was traded on. The stuff that's hanging on museum walls is easy to identify, but that's only the tip of the iceberg.

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There are new episodes every week. But that's loot. That's loot. But if Goering had gone through some hastily organized legal process that would have made it... isn't that the problem? That is a problem although of course when you come to dealing with anything to do with the Third Reich you could argue everything that the Third Reich did was legal because they passed laws. The Holocaust was legal but it was deemed to be illegal by the international

community because it breached every known tenet of acceptable behaviour. So I think even if Goering had legitimised his, this mass looting of occupied Europe, I still think it would have been undone at the end of the war. But for me, this is where the problem comes in. This is the big issue. And Alice Proctor points it out. It comes down to consent, really, in terms of where they've been taken from. So it's all very well to say that something like the East India Company had their own systems for distributing plunder after conflict, and they had their kind of loot fund and that sort of thing.

And to their mind, their systems were legal. But they're still taking these objects without consent. So that's part of it. In some cases, you've got objects that were considered legally acquired during the time, but there's a kind of context of coercion around it, if that makes sense. It's not a fair transaction because there's someone with so much more power than the other side, and that kind of imbalance is really profound. There's also the really weird one, as you're saying that, about like success estates because

the Elgin Marbles, famously sold by the Turkish authorities who at that stage occupied Greece, it is argued that they did not have the same visceral cultural connection to 5th century BC Athens that the Greeks might have done, although they would argue anyway, and diamonds that came from Punjab that no longer exist. So that is another layer of complexity, that the people transacting the agreements, if that entity no longer exists. So this is where it's kind of useful to think about

the difference between repatriation and restitution, because repatriation is the idea that you're returning it to the kind of nation state that now has control over that region or that place and that sort of thing, whereas restitution is more about returning it to a community that have a kind of cultural authority over these objects. It obviously gets really, really tricky with moving political borders and that sort of thing. And for example, there are objects that are taken, you know, whilst the place of origin is under the control of the country that now holds those objects. So that brings out this totally other

messy political situation. But when we talk about restitution, it has this sense that maybe it's not so much about, like, where do these geographically belong or what does the sort of current political climate say about these objects. It's more, where is the most appropriate and kind of considered an ethical home for them?

What does it mean to say, give something back to the community that created it versus saying okay well we're sending all of these objects to the entire country of for example India and they can decide which museum it's going in. It's kind of a different balance if that makes sense, it's a kind of power dynamic. Christopher is aware of the complexities of this response, and he used the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond as an example. Known as the Mountain of Light, this is a 105.6 carat diamond. It's one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, and it's now part of the British crown jewels. It was once

attached to the Mughal emperor's famous throne in Delhi. And it ended up, after a very torturous journey, being sent to Queen Victoria after the conquest of Punjab in 1849. You could equally well say what they are saying, again we come back to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, that the Treaty of Lahore was signed under duress. Well, I would have thought that every single treaty at the end of a war was signed in effect under duress. And then you get the question, which in a sense is almost a more important question. The Indian government is asking for the return

of the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a very obvious spoil of war. But it came from the Punjab, which is now part of Pakistan. The Pakistanis are claiming it back as well. But guess what? So too are the Afghans, because it was taken from Afghanistan. And so too are the Iranians, because originally it came from a Persian treasure trove. So who is the rightful owner of it? When it comes to the Rock of Gibraltar, it's easy. But when it comes to a rock like the Cone or Damard it's not nearly as easy to work out where it should go if it should

go back. Alice is very realistic she doesn't think it's easy either but she thinks we should be more willing to try. I think the thing to look for is what community does this mean most to and sort of who is best placed to care for it and consider it and understand it in a modern setting. It's kind of a question of different types of expertise, right? Museums and academics and historians have a particular type of expertise that they can bring to the care of these objects. But the descendants of the makers and the communities that could still be using and

kind of activating these objects are going to have a very different kind of knowledge and power and command over them. Something I worry about is that objects may not survive if they're sent to places where they cannot be cared for. Christopher enlarged on this. The Belgians have said they're going to send back to the Congo all of the stuff that was taken when it was the Belgian Congo.

But who's going to go to the Congo to see it? And then there's another question. If the stuff does go back, what happens to it then? It may be, as I've already mentioned, in a war zone, in which case no one will see it. But far more likely the local warlord or whoever happens to be running the country at that time will regard it as his personal possessions and it will get sold off. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, triggered the first Gulf War, he removed the entire contents of the Islamic Museum in Kuwait and took it back to Baghdad. An awful lot of that stuff now is on the international art market. Now when it pops up, the museum in Kuwait does its very best to get it back. So this whole question of, oh well, the right and proper thing is to send stuff back,

that's what I call the politically correct view, is probably not the right thing to do in most cases. However, Alice said something that never really occurred to me. What if the conservation of the object is not the most important thing at stake here? I mean nine times out of ten the instability has got its roots in colonial power as well and that's something to consider. I would also say that with a lot of these objects there's this real kind of fixation on conservation and keeping things perfect forever and I understand the desire to protect something

and make this art kind of last for a long time and preserve it and that sort of thing. But in a lot of these cases, I don't think conservation should be the ultimate goal. I think it's not necessarily the best aim to say, we want this object to survive in as close to its original state forever as possible. That's not really reasonable.

That's not how time works. One of the examples that I think of with that is objects being sent back to a community of origin that might decide that they don't actually want to preserve this in a museum space. They want it to be ceremonially destroyed or something like that. And it's worth respecting that and considering that when you're talking about repatriation, this idea that maybe not everything has to last forever. It's understandable to want to keep things and protect them. But there are more ways for objects to live than in just a sort of perfect fish tank stasis kind of state. She is obviously mindful of the dangers of this approach.

It's a terrible, terrible risk to these objects in some cases if they're repatriated but the way that they're currently being displayed and understood in museums is also not really adequate to representing their histories and doing justice to those narratives. It's impossible to kind of perfectly solve this right now which is why I think the thing that matters to most, matters to me most about this is the idea that museums should be changing the way that they're displaying these objects in the meantime. When we talk about repatriation, it's not tomorrow everything in the British Museum is going to go back to its place of origin. It's actually about saying our long-term goal should be to repatriate and restitute as much as possible and we should

be working really hard to create the sort of appropriate climate and situation for these pieces to be kept in those in those new or original locations and in the meantime we're going to make sure our audiences actually understand these objects rather than just seeing them as trophies or seeing them without any informational context at all to me that's kind of just as violent in many cases as the way that these objects are taken, because you're still dismissing the stories, you're still saying that that point of origin, that kind of original meaning and context has no value, it has no significance. What we're doing in these museums is coming to look at beautiful

things, and we don't need to understand them any more than that. And that's really dismissive and really damaging. I guess ultimately, Alice wants to see the process begun. The hardest thing is the fact that at the moment we have basically this precedent where museums just don't repatriate anything and don't have this conversation. And it's so closed off. And it makes sense because obviously museums have a vested interest in keeping their collections intact and continuing to hold and control these objects. But the consequence is that you can't talk about it at all because there's this real deep fear that you're going to set a precedent and suddenly everything's going to be emptied out. And that's not really practical or reasonable.

And interestingly, while Christopher is no fan of it, he points out that it's already happened on certain occasions. I think it would be a very dangerous road to go down. But having said that, Dan, the road is travelled. I mean, the idea that restitution or repatriation is a phenomenon of the 21st century is a nonsense. Because in fact, we've been sending stuff back ever since we took it in the first place. But the reason it's been done was not political correctness, but political expediency. And again, I can give you a couple of very real examples. The Abyssinian expedition, in which it took five days to bring the loot down from Magdala, or the spoils of war, I should say, down from Magdala to the prize auction.

That stuff went all over the world, including a crown, Tordoros' crown, that ended up in the V&A. In 1923, the future Emperor Haile Selassie, who was then Crown Prince, did a tour of Europe and at the 11th hour and 59th minute he announced that he was going to come to London. Oh, panic! This wasn't expected and he would of course expect a gift for his mother who was the reigning empress but in whose he was sort of traveling in loco imperatrix, if I can put it that way. What on earth could they give him to give to her? So they immediately thought, well, we'll give her the Order of the Garter. You can't do that because in 1923 the garter couldn't be awarded to a woman unless she

was the consort of the sovereign. Well, that was a problem. So well, give her the Star of India. Well, no, no, that would cause huge offence because actually that's a lesser order. God, what on earth are we going to give her? Then some bright spark remembered that sitting in the V&A

was this crown, one of Emperor Tudros' crowns. Oh, we'll give him that. Very appropriate. So they go to the V&A and say, can we have that crown please? They say, I'm terribly sorry. It can't be deaccessioned without an act of parliament. Well, it's coming next week.

We can't get an act of parliament through in that time. And then somebody remembered that there was a second crown sitting in the vaults. And that crown had never been accessioned to the V&A. It was on loan from the India office. So Ramsay MacDonald puts in a quick call to India office saying, oi, I want that crown. And the crown was duly given to Haile Selassie to take back to Abyssinia with him. So that's political expediency. That's not political correctness. Well, we're all going to have to confront this over the years to come. I think we'll be hearing a lot about repatriation. The debate is going to heat up. I found my discussions with Alice Proctor

and Christopher Joel very stimulating. You can check out their books. Alice's is The Whole Picture and Christopher's is Spoils of War. They are both out now. Thank you for listening. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request.

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