Who Owns History? by Geoffrey Robertson

Author:Geoffrey Robertson [Geoffrey Robertson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785905421
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

By the turn into the twenty-first century, the self-styled ‘universalist’ museums of America and Europe were being rocked by restitution claims and needed a good argument to rebut them. The British Museum was particularly shocked by the force of submissions about the ‘Elgin Marbles’ made to the select committee in 1999 and by that committee’s recommendation for changes to the rule against de-accession. In 2002, a number of big Western museums came up with a public relations strategy: they would make a legal-sounding ‘Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums’, in which they declared that objects acquired in the past had become ‘an integral part of the museums that have cared for them, and by extension part of the heritage of the nations that have housed them’. The Marbles, in other words, should now be regarded as part of the heritage of the British nation!

This ‘declaration’ fooled nobody and was widely condemned as an arrogant post-colonial ploy by overendowed elite museums in the West, which wished to protect their decontextualised displays from repatriation on the novel ground that they really ‘belonged’ culturally to the colonisers. They had not thought to enlist even the great museums in Cairo, Istanbul or Shanghai and seemed to be suggesting that they had a morally superior mission to that of smaller museums in underdeveloped and undervalued countries. Many smaller museums objected: the head of Glasgow Museums condemned the institutions which issued the ‘declaration’ as exclusive, elitist and serving the interest of smaller groups of intellectuals and wealthy patrons.156 They could have added amorality to their list of criticisms: the ‘declaration’ insisted that ‘objects acquired in earlier times must be viewed in the light of different sensitivities and values reflective of that earlier era’ – in other words, the values of imperial greed and colonial aggression and looting. The ‘declaration’ was published on the official website of the British Museum, but was later removed – presumably because this patronising proclamation had been so widely derided.157 It nonetheless had been the platform for Neil MacGregor to tell the BBC, ‘The Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum are in the best possible place for them and they must remain here if the museum is to continue to achieve its aim, which is to show the world to the world.’158

The aim can only be to show the ancient world to the modern world and it must be the humanitarian values of that modern world which decide what gets shown, and where.

* It may well be that resort to Raschid Aga came after the ‘leak’ of the Robertson, Palmer and Clooney report in 2015, which reflected arguments based on the so-called firman.

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