Why we shouldn't see museum artefacts as 'stolen'

Summary

History Extra Podcast Summary: “Why We Shouldn't See Museum Artefacts as 'Stolen'”

Podcast Information:

• Title: History Extra Podcast
• Host/Author: Immediate Media
• Description: Delivers gripping historical stories and conversations with leading experts, exploring everything from famous figures and events to lesser-known aspects of global history.

Episode Details:

• Episode Title: Why We Shouldn't See Museum Artefacts as 'Stolen'
• Release Date: March 30, 2025
• Guest: Professor Justin M. Jacobs, author of How Museums Got Their Treasures

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I. Introduction to the Debate on Museum Artifacts

Matt Elton opens the episode by highlighting the ongoing debates surrounding the repatriation of museum artifacts. He introduces Professor Justin M. Jacobs and his book, How Museums Got Their Treasures, which challenges prevailing narratives about how artifacts arrived in Western museums.

Key Discussion Points:

• The mainstream view often portrays museum artifacts as products of Western imperialism and theft.
• Jacobs argues for a more nuanced understanding, emphasizing the importance of the source cultures’ perspectives.

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II. Justin M. Jacobs' Counter-Argument: Nuanced Acquisition of Artifacts

Timestamp [02:27]: Jacobs counters the prevalent assumption that museum artifacts were predominantly acquired through illegitimate means. He emphasizes that historical contexts differ significantly from modern interpretations.

Notable Quote:

"It's becoming increasingly common for many people to simply just sort of assume that museums are essentially crime scenes now... I'm trying to show that if we look at historical evidence, people 100, 200 years ago thought quite differently."
— Justin M. Jacobs [02:58]

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III. The Five Pathways of Artifact Acquisition

Jacobs outlines five primary methods through which artifacts have historically found their way into museums:

1. Military Plunder
2. Diplomatic Gifts
3. Dealers (Antiquities Dealers)
4. Scholars: Stationary Excavations
5. Scholars: Mobile Expeditions

Notable Quote:

"Each piece has its own context that we need to understand."
— Justin M. Jacobs [04:42]

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IV. Contextual Misinterpretation of Historical Transactions

Jacobs argues that modern interpretations often overlook the intentions and perceptions of the source cultures at the time of acquisition. He stresses the importance of understanding how these cultures viewed the artifacts and the transactions themselves.

Notable Quote:

"We are stripping away their historical agency by not allowing them to speak."
— Justin M. Jacobs [26:28]

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V. Agency of Source Cultures in Artifact Acquisition

A central theme of Jacobs' argument is restoring the agency of source cultures. He contends that many societies willingly engaged in the exchange or gifting of artifacts without the coercion often implied in contemporary discourse.

Notable Quote:

"They were enthusiastic about participating in this enterprise to get what they felt was more valuable at the time period."
— Justin M. Jacobs [13:35]

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VI. Case Studies: Chinese and Egyptian Artifacts

Jacobs delves into specific examples to illustrate his points:

• Elgin Marbles: Initially not viewed as national symbols by Greeks or Ottoman officials. Their removal was part of diplomatic negotiations rather than outright theft.

  Notable Quote:

  "The permission to remove these crumbling pagan marble... was given away for Egypt."
  — Justin M. Jacobs [13:35]

• Modern Chinese History: Discovery of Chinese documents in Oral Stein's archives revealed that Chinese officials often cooperated willingly, countering the narrative of resistance.

  Notable Quote:

  "The Chinese who interacted with these people... were enthusiastic about participating."
  — Justin M. Jacobs [18:16]

• Egyptian Artifacts: Many objects were acquired without negative sentiments from the local population, as they didn’t perceive these artifacts as national symbols.

  Notable Quote:

  "They do not regard it as a symbol of the nation. Therefore, there's nothing traitorous about allowing it to leave."
  — Justin M. Jacobs [26:36]

---

VII. Antiquities Dealers and Their Role

Jacobs examines the role of antiquities dealers, revealing a complex supply chain where local participants willingly engaged in the sale and export of artifacts for economic benefits.

Notable Quote:

"Dealers are not going into the countryside with guns and an army... they're making their daily pound and profit off of it."
— Justin M. Jacobs [18:16]

He emphasizes that while dealers play a part in the removal of artifacts, the broader supply chain involves multiple stakeholders who viewed the transactions as economically beneficial rather than coercive.

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VIII. Indigenous Artifacts and First Contact

Jacobs touches upon the acquisition of indigenous artifacts, particularly during the first contact period. He differentiates between the initial exchanges, which were often voluntary and symbolic, and the post-contact era marked by disease and power imbalances.

Notable Quote:

"First contact... most of the things that were collected are not morally nefarious, are not illegitimate. They were willingly given."
— Justin M. Jacobs [35:43]

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IX. The Chime Museum: A Non-Western Museum of Western Art

As a compelling example, Jacobs describes the Chime Museum in Taiwan—a Western-style museum housing exclusively Western artifacts. This case challenges the assumption that non-Western museums acquiring Western art involves imperialist force.

Notable Quote:

"Appearances are not always what they appear, and it's the job of historians to explain why things are the way they are."
— Justin M. Jacobs [41:07]

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X. Concluding Thoughts on Museums and Historical Narratives

Jacobs concludes by advocating for a balanced view of museums. While acknowledging that some artifacts were acquired through questionable means, he argues that the majority were obtained legitimately and with the consent of the source cultures at the time.

Notable Quote:

"We've gone too far in essentially viewing museums as crime scenes... it's a historical disservice."
— Justin M. Jacobs [39:27]

He urges historians and the public to reconsider preconceived notions and to allow source cultures to voice their historical perspectives without projecting modern agendas onto past events.

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Final Reflections

Matt Elton wraps up by promoting Jacobs' book and referencing another episode featuring the Benin Bronzes, encouraging listeners to explore alternative perspectives on museum artifacts.

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Key Takeaways:

• Nuanced Understanding: The acquisition of museum artifacts is a complex process influenced by historical contexts, economic factors, and the agency of source cultures.
• Restoring Agency: It's crucial to acknowledge and incorporate the perspectives of the cultures from which artifacts originate to avoid oversimplified narratives.
• Balanced View of Museums: While recognizing the imperialist history associated with some artifacts, it's important to appreciate the legitimate and consensual acquisitions that have enriched museum collections worldwide.

---

For Further Exploration:

• Book Mentioned: How Museums Got Their Treasures by Justin M. Jacobs
• Related Episode: Discussion on the Benin Bronzes with Bronwyn Efrel

You can access the full episode and subscribe to the History Extra podcast here.

Transcript

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[Matt Elton]

Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Debates about whether museum artifacts should be returned to the cultures that made them have repeatedly made headlines in recent years. But can calls for their return overlook the wishes of those very cultures people seek to champion? Well, Professor Justin M. Jacobs, the author of How Museums Got Their Treasures, spoke to Matt Elton about the voices that are ignored and why these debates need to be more nuanced.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Justin, thank you so much for being with us today to talk about your book, How Museums Got Their Treasures. And by reading out that title, I need to make sure that I put a question mark after plunder because this is a central point of the book. Before we get into the arguments that you want to make and that you outline in the book, I thought it was worth getting into the points of view that you want to push back against. What is it that you're saying is not the case when we talk about museums and artefacts that have been moved from one part of the world to the other?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Right. So the argument that I'M pushing against is it's becoming increasingly common for many people to simply just sort of assume that museums are essentially crime scenes now, that they are crime scenes of a Western imperialist past, and that the things that were acquired in the museums that you see on display were acquired by illegitimate means, by morally odious means. And I'm trying to show that if we look at historical evidence, that we might find out that people 100, 200 years ago thought quite differently and had very different assumptions than what many of us now bring to the modern museum.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

And we'll get into some of these arguments as we go. I think it's really interesting that you write in the book that it's time to stop telling the story of Western collectors in non Western lands as if it unfolded out of the pages of a comic book. Do you think that debate and discussion about this issue has become too overblown, has become too lurid in a way?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

I do, I do. I think that it is characterized by a lot of hyperbole and embellishments and large claims that are not necessarily backed up by specific historical evidence. I want to make sure that it's understood that. I'm not saying that there is nothing that appears in a museum that was acquired by nefarious means. I'm saying that it's complicated, that it's nuanced, and that oftentimes, I think what happens is that one object, one very prominent object, say the Elgin Marbles, perhaps, will be characterized in a certain way, and then people will have a tendency to sort of use a very broad brushstroke and say, well, everything in the museum was acquired this way. And that's really what I'm pushing against, is that we need to understand there's a lot of nuance, and each piece has its own context that we need to understand.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

So to get into some of that context, I think I'm right in saying that you write in the book that there are really five ways in which artefacts can find themselves in museums. Could you just briefly, to start, sketch out what those five ways are?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Right. So the way that I've designed the book is I was trying to think about, you know, everything you see in a museum. What was the means of acquisition, if you were to trace that back to an agent of acquisition, who actually was responsible for taking this from its source country and transferring it to a Western museum?

[Movie Advertiser]

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Who was that person? And so I've come up with a list that I think accounts for this. And so the first one is Soldiers, which I believe are responsible for military plunder. And then I look at diplomats who essentially engage in diplomatic gifts. Well, they're the recipients of diplomatic gifts. Then I look at dealers who are essentially businessmen. And then I move on to scholars. And scholars have two means of acquiring things. Either stationary excavations. Think of just your standard excavation in Egypt. You're in a fixed site and you stay there for a long time. Or mobile expeditions in which you are traversing, you know, hundreds, thousands of miles over a year or two and collecting things in that way. And I do believe that in one way or another, almost everything you see in a museum can be traced back to one of these collecting agents.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

So to start with the first one in the list, which is military plunder, I suppose that's the method with which people would most associate the active violence that is sometimes ascribed to the way that these artefacts, some of them, ended up in museums. Are there case studies? Are there famous examples of where you do legitimately think it is right to say that these objects were taken by force?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Absolutely. So military plunder is the means by which that. I think that is the example that most often gets used and abused. That's the one that people extrapolate from and say, this looks really bad. And so, by extension, perhaps everything in a museum was acquired by a certain degree of coercion and violence. There's very famous examples. The one that gets a lot of attention today, the Ben and Bronzes, that was absolutely soldiers shooting their way in and bringing things back. And then in my own original area of study, modern Chinese history, there's two very famous ones. The plunder of the Old Summer palace by Anglo and French armies in 1860. And then we also have, during the Boxer War, you had eight empires, actually, including Japan, that all invaded Beijing and plundered the Forbidden City. And there's absolutely no doubt. I don't try to defend those at all. That was military plunder. It was bloody. People lost their lives and. And the only way that they could have acquired what they took was by coercion and force. Then I also go on to try to put that in its proper context and say, yeah, this is bad. And I look at the pedigree of this has been going on for thousands of years. But I want to emphasize that that is a minority of cases. Military plunder was relatively rare and cannot account for the majority of what you find in a major Western museum, even if it's often quite prominent and gets a lot of media attention.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Before we move on, then, let's get into that context. What is the context that you think can sometimes get stripped away from popular tellings of stories like those of the Benin Bronzes.

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Right. So the context that is often stripped away, and I'm trying to recover is what did the people in the source country think about what was going on? What did they say? And, you know, did they feel that they were compelled to let this item leave their country? Did they feel that it was under duress and force? Did they participate in any way? How did they view the object that was being removed? Did they view it as we often view it today? We often view these things today as priceless emblems of the nations that they supposedly represent. That is the standard view. That's why we think they're priceless, because they literally represent nations now. And we. So then we project that view back in time and we think, well, the only way that anyone would have ever let a priceless object leave their grasp is if it was under coercion and duress. So this must have been plundered in some way. And the context that I try to recover is, well, I say no. If you go back and you try to recover the original voices, you find out that they did not view it as priceless emblems of their nation. They viewed these things as alienable commodities that were either privately owned by named individuals, usually, or owned by nobody. And you could try to exchange these things for something that you perceived as greater value than the object that was being removed and at that time and place, according to their value system, and that's the major historical context that I'm trying to recover by one means or another, is the native voices. Essentially, what did they think about all this that was going on?

[Justin M. Jacobs]

And is it the case that in some instances, actually these artifacts weren't regarded as belonging to everybody because they belong to specific people and they were out of the grasp or the access of the wider populace?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

That's right. In fact, you'll find that it's extremely rare to find anything from the old days that was regarded as belonging to everyone. That is a very modern notion. You have to get to an age in which the vast majority of people are starting to subscribe to the ideology of nationalism before they begin to be persuaded in certain contexts of their lives that these things represent your nation and you're a part of that nation. That is largely an alien view to the majority of people who are living in and around these objects at the time that they were being removed or exchanged. We have many examples. If you look at the dealer industry, private collectors, in which private Collectors in the source countries could say, oh, this is very valuable, I treasure this. And then they could turn around and say, I do treasure this, but I also treasure my relationship or perceived benefits that I can get from having a relationship with a wealthy Western collector or an archaeologist celebrity. And they're willing to trade it, exchange it, sell it, gift it away for something that they perceive as greater value at that time period.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Could you, I suppose, next then talk about the ways in which these artefacts could in some cases be gifted? What was the process by which diplomatic gifts, for instance, would work?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Right. So diplomatic gifts is the second example that I explore in the book, and it's responsible for some pretty famous ones. I sort of characterize the Elgin Marbles as one of the quintessential examples of a diplomatic gift. So essentially with diplomatic gifts, what you have is you'll have high ranking officials. They're often ambassadors, consuls, state department type foreign affairs officials. And they develop relationships with people in the country that they are staying in and working in. And oftentimes what you find is that the people in the host country will usually have a lower evaluation of an object that the foreign officials will value quite highly. This was the case with the Elgin Marbles. And so it will come to their attention that they will realize, the host officials will realize that we can turn this object that this person values very highly into a gift, a diplomatic gift from one official to another. And this will help ease, smooth other sorts of diplomatic relationships that they perceive as being more valuable. So, for example, with the Elgin Marbles, the way that I sort of characterized that at the time, it was not perceived by the people living in Athens or in Greece as a symbol of the Greek nation. Again, you have to wait several decades until after Elgin has removed these things before that view is going to be popularized. So the local people who we would now identify as Greek, they're Greek Orthodox Christians, they don't worship Athena anymore. The buildings that were built 2,000 years ago to represent that don't mean that they don't have that same meaning to them anymore. So you don't see any objections among the people. And then the rulers at that time are the Ottoman officials. They are Muslim, usually, and they also don't view this, it's viewed as pagan marble that's crumbling away and that almost no one has tended to for a very long time. And so when they realize that Elgin, for his own agenda, wanting to sort of revive classical Greek arts in Great Britain, values them very highly, they don't see this as a very Big conflict. They rightly conclude that no one, the Greeks themselves, none of the Ottoman officials are going to object to this. And in return, what are they getting for this? They are getting an opportunity to sweeten a relationship with the most powerful military on earth to help them dislodge Napoleon from Egypt. Napoleon has invaded Egyp. The Ottoman sultan wants it back. He does not have the military capability of defeating Napoleon in Egypt. The British do. And for their own selfish reasons, they're interested in kicking Napoleon out. What is it? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. They realize that this is just one of many gifts that they give to him. The permission to remove these crumbling pagan marble of no value to them, that no one will object to. And what is the price? What sort of valuation are they projecting onto this diplomatic gift? Nothing less than the return of Egypt, an entire country, a province and all its economic revenue. That's the true value that was exchanged for the Elgin Marbles. It was not given away for a song. It was given away for Egypt.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

What would you say to people who might argue, I suppose that as you've alluded to there, there are still power imbalances at play here, even if they're not explicitly military ones.

[McDonald's Advertiser]

There are absolutely power imbalances. And the way that I address that is I want to emphasize that, yes, there can be power imbalances, there can be coercion, but I don't think that that should make us stop paying attention to the voices of what people are actually saying on the ground at that time period. Oftentimes I'll look at the situation and I'll say, yes, we today see a powerful empire, agents of the most powerful empires on earth, going into China and being able to use their prestige, their wealth, the offer of diplomatic assistance to get what they want. And that is true to a very large extent. But I don't want to stop there because I think then that we are ignoring the voices of the people who live in these countries and doing them a disservice by not listening to them. They were intelligent, rational, reasonable people, and they made a conscious decision whether or not that they wanted to engage in this negotiation, in this sale. And what I'm looking for is evidence of coercion on the ground. When I can recover their voices, are they lamenting that this has been taken away? Are they expressing some sense of, no, I didn't want this to happen. I was really forced into it. And when you don't find that, then I think it's important to revise our assessments of the original nature of the transaction. Not only did I not find that expressions of regret and lament from people in the source country, I actually found the opposite. I found voluntary and enthusiastic cooperation to help the foreigner take these objects away. And so I think that should give us pause. It's not just indifference difference. It's not passive being bullied around and coercion. They were enthusiastic about participating in this enterprise to get what they felt was more valuable at the time period. And I think when we ignore that and we just say, ah, it's, you know, the big bad Western imperialists using their power to push people around. We are missing the voices of the other people in these countries. And I think that's a historical violence all on its own to not listen to them, what they thought about this.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

And I want to get more into listening to these voices in a bit before we do. Just to stay on the subject of the Parthenon sculptures, the Elgin Marbles, would it be your view then that the opinions that are sometimes put forward that because it's a complicated story and that these sculptures are bound up with Greek identity, you think that too much emphasis is placed on the idea of a subsequent Greek identity and we're ignoring the earlier story? Is that fair to say?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yes, I think we're ignoring the fact that these were not viewed as symbols of the Greek nation at the time that Elgin was taking them away. The Ottomans did not view them that way and the Greek Orthodox population that was living in Athens did not live them that way. There's actually abundant evidence of how they interacted with it. They often quarried the building for their own construction purposes as well. It is important to understand what those original views were.

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[Justin M. Jacobs]

Later to return to the idea of listening to the voices of these other these other peoples, these other civilizations, the next section is about antiquities dealers. And I think this is an area in which you believe that's particularly important, is that right?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

That's right. Because antiquities dealers also get a very bad reputation. And I went into this study also prepared to criticize and sort of regurgitate the same critique of antiquity dealers that is very prevalent. And I came out of my research feeling very differently. I actually felt somewhat uncomfortable for a while with my ideas and what I was discovering. But essentially it was this is that I was trying to understand how they operate. What is their supply chain? Once again, when we trace these things all the way from the object in its original context, how did it get to the dealer? And then what circumstances allowed the dealer to sell these things and to go abroad? And very quickly I realized that the supply chain was extensive. Dealers are not going into the countryside with guns and an army and coercing their fellow countrymen to give things up. You have an enthusiastic, very long supply chain that involves a lot of different people from all walks of life in the host country that are all enthusiastically participating in this supply chain to make their daily dollar, to make their daily pound and profit off of it. And they're doing so quite enthusiastically and the dealer is doing so as well. And at a certain point I realized, yes, we can blame the guy who wrote a check. Okay? Yes. And plenty of people do. They're not blameless for that. But it's uncomfortable then to say, well, wait a second, what about the 95% of the supply chain that was composed of people in the source country who willingly and voluntarily engaged in this? And so what I realized is, how do I explain this? As a historian, I want to say, how do I explain this, and it's a very simple answer, actually. You realize that no one in the source country at this time period is truly subscribing to nationalist ideologies. Once again, the same point I made earlier, that tells them these are symbols of the abstract nation that you are a part of. It's your heritage. And if you do anything to let these things leave the country, you are a traitor to your nation. That is a very modern idea. And even today, I would submit that it's an idea that most of us only subscribe to at particular solemn moments when we go to a sports event and we're all told to rise and sing our national anthem, you know, things like that, big state rituals and whatnot. Suddenly at those moments we think, oh, I'm an American, I'm English, I'm French, whatever it is. And then those moments pass and we go back to our daily lives. And I don't think that those are our most salient identities. Through our daily lives, we want to get ahead, we want to make money, we want to advance our careers, we want to network, we want to raise our kids. And that is how the antiquities were viewed by most people in a pre nationalist age. And I would submit today as well, you can't stop dealers because dealers and their supply chains still don't see nationalism as more important than making their daily bread. And you're never going to stop them as long as there are people who say, I'd rather make money off of this than subscribe to some abstract, abstract idea that this is part of a nation that I belong to, that my wealthy political elites are trying to tell me that it is. And so that's why the dealers flourished and continue to flourish to this day. So I did come out of this with a very different view of dealers that I did not expect to have.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

That's really interesting. Were there any other preconceptions you had going into this project that were similarly overturned?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

So, yes, when I first started this research, I absolutely assumed that I would find evidence that would just confirm my overall view, the prevalent view at the time, that the vast majority of people in the source country, they must have resisted this. They must have resisted this in some way. And that's simply not what I found. And so my original area of research is modern Chinese history. So I began there. And really what allowed this project to flourish and maybe continue it for another decade was a very specific moment. I went to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in the summer of 2013, and I went to go see the archives of the Hungarian born British archaeologist Oral Stein. He has like 400 boxes of materials in the Bodleian Library archives. And when I was there, there was one box, one out of like 400 boxes that was just said Chinese documents. I think it was box number 341. I still remember it. Chinese documents was all that was written on it. I opened it up and it was an enormous stack of well over a hundred documents that he had kept. They were letters from Chinese officials. And this was miraculous as far as I was concerned. Because when you want to recover native voices, non Western voices, oftentimes documentation doesn't exist in the non Western language. You have to sort of read between the lines of Western archaeologists and collectors. They're writing their letters and stuff in English and they'll sort of summarize the views and you got to kind of control for their biases. Is this published? Is it unpublished? Can I take this at face value? You can recover some really good nuggets there, but it's hard but to have original voices in their own language. And that's what I found. I found unmediated Chinese documentation of what Chinese officials and scholars thought about it in their own words, not summarized by Westerners. And that was the smoking gun. That was a smoking gun. When I realized, oh my goodness, the Chinese who interacted with these people and saw them firsthand remove all these tens of thousands of objects over years and years, they themselves, not only did they not regard it as theft or a morally odious act, you should see these things. I translate some of them in the book, in chapter three, they're gushing over him. It makes your face blush to see how enthusiastic they are. And once you realize that, wow, 100 years ago, Chinese officials loved the Western explorer, wanted to meet him, gave him gifts, did everything they could, bent over backwards to facilitate the expedition, maintained a written communication with them for years afterwards. That begins to change your mind, thinking, I think we've missed something. And that was a smoking gun. That made me realize, now that I'm aware that this sort of view exists, I'm going to look for it more. And then I started to see it all over the place. But to find the very first one, that's the most important because until then I'm just thinking like everyone else thinks, you know, the messages that I've received, museums or crime scenes. The natives must have resisted. And it was imperialist force that forced them to give up things they would otherwise would not have given up. But then I had the smoking gun of non Western voices in their own unmediated language. And that really is what set me off to research this for another decade.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

And it feels to me as if your view is that instead of painting these cultures and these peoples as being passive or in some way taking the agency away from them, what you're saying is that actually they had a very active role in this story that sometimes gets overlooked.

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yes, I believe that. I am trying to. The evidence that I'm presenting is actually restoring agency, restoring agency to these historical characters, allowing them to speak for the first time. This is the ironic part of many of the modern critiques is that oftentimes they are motivated by a very admirable desire to want to say that these people in the countries that were often colonized by Western powers, we view them as victims by and large, and we want to sympathize with them and to sort of build them up and show that they were not just these passive victims, but the discourse that all museums are crime scenes and everything was taken away by force and no one wanted it, and to ignore their voices is actually doing them a great disservice, I think. And we are stripping away their historical agency by not allowing them to speak. And when we hear them speak, they say things that are shocking to us today. They are not convenient for the current narrative of how museums got their treasures. So I think it's extremely important to recover those voices. And I often, you know, will give the example to my own students when I teach this at my university. You know, just imagine what people 100 years from now are going to be saying about our day and age and the things that we said and thought. And, you know, we will be judged in ways that we can't possibly anticipate. And the only way to give people their due is to allow them to speak in their own words and try to recover that and not project our own present day agendas backwards in time. What I refer to as historical ventriloquists, we're being historical ventriloquists when we're putting our own words and ideas into the mouths of people who lived 100, 200 years ago to support, support our modern day agendas. And when we let them speak, we realize they have their own words to say and maybe they don't like having the words put into their mouth.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Another set of people whose voices you explore is that of the Egyptian culture. Can you talk a little bit more about the examples and the stories from that side of things?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yeah, so in the book I have examples from all over the world. But the two areas from which the bulk of my case studies and evidence will come from are going to be China and Egypt, because that's where we have the most documentation. Those are the two places where the most collecting activities have been going on and extensive for the longest period of time as well. So the case in Egypt, this is a part of the world in which you have what I refer to as a perception of cultural discontinuity among the majority of the population, which is to say that most people in Egypt subscribe to a culture, to a religion that is vastly different than that which is represented by the ancient Pharaonic era. So to convince people who have a perception of cultural discontinuity with the objects that are being targeted for removal to convince them to part with those objects, very often you don't have to go very high in exceeding the local valuation, because there is no substantive cultural identification with things being removed. There might be local folklore about various supernatural entities that might live in and around the ruins. There's often stories about maybe there's gold to be found inside and whatnot, but they're not seen as representing your religion emblems, material emblems of the afterlife that you're going to go to these sorts of things. And so, generally speaking, Westerners in Egypt find that it's very easy actually to trade for antiquities, to buy antiquities from dealers, to hire a local team of falaheen peasants to come do your dig with you, because they're all eager to make money off of an enterprise that they do not view as morally odious in any way whatsoever. Really, the only competition, the only obstacle that Westerners are going to have in Egypt to removing things is the effects of their own acquisitive nature, the effects of their own greed. When they start paying for things, the price will gradually go up. Even though the locals don't have a substantive cultural identification with these objects themselves, once they realize how much you value it, they'll still raise the price because they know you're willing to pay it. So the value will still go up over time, but it's a value that the Westerners have sort of created themselves. You know, this is all in contrast to a place like China in which you have what I call a perception of cultural continuity, where the educated Chinese perceive that anything that is from the past 3,000 years is indeed a part of their culture and they identify with it. But nevertheless, even in a situation where you have a perception of cultural continuity, there's no difference in the ability of Westerners to be able to remove things, it just means that the price of acquisition goes up because the locals project a higher valuation on the object. Not priceless, but more valuable than you find in Egypt. So you got to pay more, you have to do more to get it. But they'll still let you take it, ultimately, because they do not regard it as a symbol of the nation. Therefore, there's nothing traitorous about allowing it to leave.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

It's really interesting to think about it in these terms. Another aspect of this story that I wanted to ask you about is whether you've mentioned a couple of individuals. You've mentioned Oral Stein. There's obviously Howard Carter, who people might have heard of. Does framing these stories in this way shift in your view, how we should see those individuals?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yes, I do think that the research that I presented here should change our views of many of the people who were responsible for bringing so many objects into Western museums. You start to realize that, you know, it's a very obvious point, and I almost feel like I'm insulting, you know, my audience when I make these obvious points. But even a cursory examination of the photographs, the documentation, the books that are associated with these excavations and expeditions, you realize these are scholars. They don't have weapons, they don't have armies behind them. And scholars, especially like Howard Carter Orl Stein, were exceedingly easy to obstruct. If anyone in the host country truly wanted to, all they had to do was say no. Why? Well, this is what I examine. Why? I have three chapters in the book that examine the context of who the agent of acquisition is. Because scholars alone are almost always associated with institutions of higher learning back home. Those institutions of higher learning back home have. They want to uphold their pretensions to be acting in the interest of humanity. They have very noble aims. Even if they don't always achieve those aims. They have very noble aims, and they need to uphold that standard and their credibility. If people in the host country don't want your agent in the field to take things away, it reflects very poorly on you. And it's harder to say that you're acting in the interest of all humanity. And what I found is that when you get to the. What I call the age of obstruction after World War I, when many foreign explorers start to be turned away from host countries, it was unbelievably easy to stop these people. Howard Carter, when it was. When you finally had Egyptian officials who said, no, King Tut is a symbol of the modern Egyptian nation, which has a view very much at odds with the majority of Egyptians. But the Westernized officials, they subscribed to this. All they had to do was walk in, close the tomb, and take the key away. And Carter had to leave. He gave in. The British isn't going to send the army in to protect a scholar. He's not going to shoot his way back into King Tut's tomb. He left. The Egyptians won. When Orl Stein was finally obstructed, when they were finally Chinese, who said, you know what? We don't like what he's doing anymore. That happened in 1930. All they had to do was say no, cancel his passport, and he left. He didn't try to shoot his way back. He didn't call on the British army to come help him in. It was incredibly easy. All you had to do was say no. And if anyone had said no earlier, then they also would have been obstructed then as well.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

What do you think led to that shift, to the rise of people stopping this kind of thing happening?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

To put it simply, again, it almost sounds too simple to be true, But I explore its complexity in the book. But it's as simple as this. When some people in the host country started to become westernized, they then adopted the Western views of the value of the objects that were being removed. This usually happens among officials and scholars first. Egyptian officials were starting to get Western educations throughout the 19th century. And when they start to get this Western education education, they will start to believe, too, that, oh, we should have our own museums just like they do, because that's what it is to be civilized. Civilized people have museums. They protect and preserve and put on display the heritage of their nation to educate their populace. So when they start thinking like a westerner, they treat the objects, like westerners do, as priceless emblems of the nation that these objects supposedly represent. Now you've got a situation in which both sides are projecting priceless valuations on these objects as symbols of the nation that they represent. On both sides of a priceless valuation, there's no budging. By definition, neither side is going to be able to come to terms on what's going to happen there. And that's the age of obstruction. When native officials and scholars become westernized, they then turn the Western discourse of priceless antiquity back on the Westerners.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

The fourth and the fifth methods by which artifacts end up in museums that you outline of the list of five are stationary excavations and mobile expeditions. Some listeners might not be familiar what we mean by those two things, so could you just briefly start by outlining what Those two things are.

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yes. So the fourth and fifth means of acquisition are both carried out by the same agent of acquisition, that is scholars. Essentially, most of them are going to be archaeologists. Sometimes they're historians, philologists, Egyptologists, but regardless, scholars. So stationary excavations. This is going to be like Lord Elgin, the removal of the Elgin Marbles or the Parthenon Marbles in Athens. It's in one place. You stay there for many days at a time. You're often hiring a local workforce who goes back to their homes each day. They live nearby, and then you remove these objects from the area. Most of what scholars do are going to be stationary excavations. Very rare, but getting a lot of disproportionate attention in literature and media are expeditions sort of like Indiana Jones type stuff. Expeditions are rare, but essentially, you know, my. My classic example is these is the guy who started it all for me, Orlstein. He does four expeditions to the northwestern desert regions of China, known as Xinjiang. Today. That's an area that preserves things in a way very much similar to Egypt. And from 1900 to 1930, he does four expeditions. These expeditions regularly lasted over two years. So he is moving, they're mobile. He is moving from oasis to oasis. He is staying there a very long time. He can't take the entire labor force with him. He'll have a corps of, like a guide, a translator, a surveyor, a cook, these sorts of things, and they stay with him. But every time he comes to a new site, he has to recruit a local labor force from scratch all over again, which requires assistance of the local Chinese official. And he's taking his objects with him. He often, you know, he'll have a train of camels, hundreds, thousands of pounds of antiquities and crates. He'll have to store them in oases at some time and then come back a year later when he's leaving the country. So very exciting, very logistically complicated. Very rare, too. There aren't many expeditions.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Before we take a step back and start to draw some of these arguments to a close, are there any case studies or stories or artifacts that you'd like to talk about that we haven't previously highlighted?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yes, actually. In fact, there is a whole separate category of objects, artifacts that I haven't actually really examined deeply in the book. And I'll explain why. And this is essentially indigenous artifacts, what many of us would refer to as indigenous artifacts, things that were produced by peoples, you know, mostly in the Americas, Australia, by the indigenous peoples who met the first European settlers when they came to these areas. The Pacific Ocean, Polynesia as well. And I do have one example in the book of a very prominent one. And I'll sort of use this as an example of a classic case study that sort of shows how instances of exchange during first contact occurred. When Captain Cook arrives in Hawaii for the first time, 1778, he meets with one of the Hawaiian chiefs on the big island, Kalani Opuu. And Kalaniopuu very enthusiastically comes out in a canoe and gives him a gift of a magnificent bird feather cloak known as an ahu ula. It's made from tens of thousands of feathers of this Mamo bird on Hawaii. And it was. It was a cloak that could only be worn by high ranking chiefs. It was the most valuable thing that he could possibly give to someone else. And it's a classic instance of a diplomatic gift. This ahu'ula is on display, it is in this collection of the British Museum today, extremely valuable. But it's also. We have lots of documentation, we have a whole description exactly of how Kalaniopuu comes out, puts the cloak on Cook. It's a magnificent gift, willingly given, in hopes of creating a mutually beneficial diplomatic relationship with a powerful foreigner who comes in the ship with cannons and whatnot, and the Hawaiians and the chief who wants to defeat his other enemies in the Hawaiian Islands. The fact that this diplomatic relationship did not really bear the intended fruit is irrelevant ultimately, for the nature of the original acquisition, because the Hawaiians end up killing Cook the very next year. It didn't work out, but that the original motivation was there. Now, I think that's emblematic of how exchange of indigenous artifacts occurs during what I would refer to as first contact, when the indigenous peoples have not yet been devastated by disease and warfare. And so I think at first contact, most of the things that you're going to find that were collected are not morally nefarious, are not illegitimate. They were willingly given. Something was usually exchanged. The indigenous peoples had the ability to retain their consent for the most part, if they didn't want to trade something or give it away. The foreigners at that time were few in number. They were vulnerable. They didn't know the land. You know, you had home field advantage, so to speak. But that changes. That changes. And something that I think needs a book all of its own, that I did not, I do not feel I have the expertise and the training to actually explore in detail, and I hope someone else does, is the nature of how that changes after first contact, when you do start to see the effect of disease. And eight and nine out of every 10 people in villages are dying from disease and warfare and settled, you know, new settlers and whatnot. Then the power imbalance changes to a point that I think is important to take into account. Then you do have to evaluate what was the moral status of acquiring this beaded necklace from a person whose village was devastated and has been moved to a reservation a thousand miles from their home. I do think that's a very different power dynamic at that point, but it's very complex and requires an entirely separate book. So with indigenous artifacts, I think you have to distinguish chronologically. There's first contact, which I think fits nicely into my framework, my analytical framework. And then there's after first contact, and I think that's very different afterwards.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

Having sketched out some of that complexity and some of those contours across time, how do you think we should now view museums and their relationship to the past, to history?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

I think museums, to a large extent, are living up to the aims, the lofty aims. We don't. We know they're institutions of higher learning and they want to do good for the world. Yes, some things were acquired by means that we don't look too kindly on today, but I do believe that those are in the extreme minority. And the vast majority of what you see in museums was acquired legitimately and was perceived as such by all interested parties at the time period, both the collector and the people who were in the host country. And as a result, you know, yes, they are implicated in their own imperialist history, obviously, and it's good to pay attention to that and try to revise the explanations and the way, you know, exhibits are curated and whatnot. But I do believe we've gone too far in essentially viewing museums as crime scenes and as a place where we should all be atoning for imperialist sins of the past. I think that is too extreme a view, and I think it does a disservice, a historical disservice, to the many people in the host countries who fully subscribe to the Western lofty agenda. Many of the educated elites in the host countries, like the Chinese officials that I've been studying, they enthusiastically said, take this home, put it in your museum, and educate the people of the world. And I think by ignoring that, we are effacing their historical voices from the record. We're not giving them agency, we're taking it away. And I really do believe that my research is trying to give them their agency back, finally.

[Justin M. Jacobs]

A lot of your book is about questioning our preconceptions of this Topic and perhaps having an open mind, are there any final examples or stories that you'd like to leave listeners with that would help us do that?

[McDonald's Advertiser]

Yeah. You know, a few years ago I was in Taiwan. I often go to Taiwan for research and whatnot. And I remember seeing a very strange museum that I didn't expect to find on a subtropical island. It's called the Chime Museum. It's in the southern city of Tainan. And what's amazing about it is that when you are dropped off on its grounds, it's very extensive grounds. You could, if not for the oppressive humidity, you might easily mistake yourself for being in Rome. You know, that's like you're at the Trevi Fountain or something and there's this beautiful Greco Roman white sculpture of an ancient Greek God driving horses in a fountain. There's white colonnades and whatnot. It looks like you're in a Roman palace. And then you go and inside. And I was thinking, okay, well this is very interesting to find something like this on Taiwan. Inside there was no Chinese art at all. It was filled with Western art. It kind of blew me away that it was filled with Western Renaissance and medieval art. And I remember at one time I thought, oh, I got to do a research project on this. I got to find out how they got these things. And I didn't make it much headway in that museums that are private don't necessarily have to open up their archives and whatnot. But then I started researching this fascinating phenomena of non Western museums that nonetheless appear to be carbon copies of Western museums. But then they're holding Western artifacts, they're sort of flipping the tables. It kind of blows your mind a little bit. These exist in Japan as well. There's several well known museums in Japan that are filled with Western art. And you think about this and you think, well, wait a second. But when you think about the common assumption about museums today that everything inside was acquired through imperialist forcing coercion, can you apply that to these museums? It sounds absurd to even say it right. The Taiwanese didn't have recourse to a single ounce of imperialist force. And yet this museum was created, established, and everything in it was collected by a rich Taiwanese billionaire in the past 50 years, where laws are even more restrictive than they were 100 and 200 years ago. How did they acquire this? It couldn't have been by imperialist force. And that's sort of, sort of a parting thought that I put in the book as well. Just to kind of think about that. That Appearances are not always as they seem. Here you have a non Western museum that itself is aping the ideals of what the Western museum can be. They see it as an admirable thing. They're not seeing the Greco Roman style museum as something to be ashamed of. They aspire to build a brand new one and be just like the Western museums in our own day and age. They're quite proud of the Chime Museum as well. And then somehow they filled it with culturally alien art. Culturally alien to them? Culturally alien art in the past 30 years? Well, clearly it's possible to build a collection of culturally alien art even today. And yet then when you look at some museums in China, you'll say, oh, it's a Chinese museum catering to a Chinese population, built and curated entirely by Chinese with Chinese objects. This all must be legit. No, actually there's some good scholarships and historical work that shows that a lot of stuff you see in Chinese museums was forcibly taken and confiscated and definitely coerced from the Chinese population itself in the 1950s by the Communists. So appearances are not always what they appear, and it's the job of historians to explain why things are the way they are. I really don't like putting present day agendas into the mouths of historical actors and using them to support our causes today. So I hope my book, if it does anything, it will get people realizing that we need to look at mutual museums with a different lens.

[Matt Elton]

That was just in. M. Jacobs Plunder How Museums Got Their Treasures is out now, published by Reaction Books. And if you're interested in hearing an alternative take on museums and the objects that they own, check out our episode on the Bennin Bronzes with Bronwyn Efrel. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. This podcast cast was produced by Jack Bateman.