The Returns That Happened Were Decisions

The great encyclopaedic museums of Europe and North America were assembled during a period in which taking things was straightforward. That period ended; the collections did not move. Over the last decade the argument about returning them has shifted from a fringe position to the operating reality of several national museum systems, and a visitor walking through those galleries is now walking through a live dispute rather than a settled arrangement.

The categories of claim

They are not all the same, and conflating them is the commonest error in the public argument. Objects looted in an identifiable military action, with documentation of the taking, are the clearest case and the one where returns have actually happened — a punitive expedition with well-documented takings leaves very little room for interpretation, even where the loot itself was dispersed so thoroughly that tracing it has taken a century.

Objects removed under colonial administration, where a transaction of some kind occurred but under conditions that make consent meaningless, are the largest category and the most argued. A purchase from a person with no authority to sell, a gift to an official whose refusal was not an option, a permit issued by an administration to itself — these are not thefts in the ordinary sense and are not acquisitions in any sense a modern institution would accept.

Human remains and sacred objects sit apart, because the claim is not about property at all and the ordinary museum vocabulary of ownership, provenance and title does not apply to it. Many institutions that resist restitution in general have moved quickly here, which is a tell about what they think the arguments are worth.

And material excavated and exported under permits issued by a colonial authority raises a narrower legal question: whether that authority had standing to issue them, and whether a permit granted by an occupier binds the successor state.

The legal position rarely resolves any of it. Most acquisitions long predate the conventions that would govern them today, and those conventions are not retrospective. National museum statutes in several countries prohibit deaccessioning without primary legislation. Limitation periods have long expired. Almost every actual return has therefore been a political decision rather than a legal one — which is why they cluster around anniversaries, state visits and changes of government.

Almost no colonial-era object has been returned because a court ordered it. The returns that happened were decisions, and the law was the reason they took so long.

What has actually changed

Several European states have made structural commitments and begun transfers, some to national museums and some directly to communities or traditional authorities. Long-term loans in both directions have become common, sometimes as a substitute for transfer and sometimes as a step toward it — and the distinction between those two intentions is usually visible in whether title passes.

Digitisation and provenance publication have moved fastest of all. A considerable number of institutions now publish acquisition histories they previously did not, and that is the change with the most consequence, because a claim cannot be made against a collection nobody can see. Researchers in claimant countries have found objects they did not know existed.

The counter-arguments made by retaining institutions have narrowed correspondingly. The claim that objects are safer where they are has aged badly — it was always partly a statement about who was trusted — and is now made rarely and quietly. What remains is the encyclopaedic argument, that a museum assembling the world in one place lets a visitor see connections a dispersed collection cannot, and the practical question of where a returned object goes.

Where the objects go

That second question is being answered by a wave of museum building in claimant countries, some of it explicitly designed around anticipated returns. The buildings are among the most interesting curatorial projects anywhere at present, and they are frequently doing something the encyclopaedic museum cannot: showing an object in the context of the living practice it came out of, with the community that made it involved in how it is described.

It also complicates the picture in useful ways. Not every claimant community wants an object in a national museum in a capital city, and the question of who within a country receives a return is a real dispute in several cases. Restitution to a state is not the same as restitution to a people, and the states know it.

What it means for a visitor

Read the labels, and notice which ones state how the object arrived. An institution that publishes its provenance — including the uncomfortable entries — is telling you something about itself, and an institution whose labels begin at the moment of acquisition is telling you something too.

Visit the new museums in the countries making claims. And treat the question as open rather than decided in either direction: the collections you can see today are, in a number of cases, arrangements with a term on them, and the gallery you walk through this year may not contain the same things in ten.