It’s fun to say this, but at least BM is really able to do their main job and preserve the artifacts.
There’s dozens of cases where the original sites have been looted or destroyed by the origin country’s own leaders.
Storing the artifacts outside of the influence of an area’s internal issues is actually really wise. The BM’s real wrongdoing is not paying anything for the artifacts they’ve took. I argue they’ve done enough good to offset that a little. They’re bad but not the worst.
That’s a lot of words to make the exact same excuses used not only to steal the art in the first place, but to colonise the countries it came from too - that us “civilised” people need to take care of their things because they are too “savage” to do it themselves.
Spoken like a true coloniser.
Fun Fact:
European society decided at one point that eating mummies was a great and healthy idea.
Previously it was quite easy to find mummified remains in Egypt, that’s what a 6,000 year old tradition will do, but the by the time the British Empire went through its Egypt Fever phase they had eaten so many corpses there was a supply shortage.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-of-eating-corpses-as-medicine-82360284/
British Museum gets a lot of hate but there are plenty of museums that’s have walked off with others countries treasure. The Pergamon museum in Berlin took literal chunks of ancient cities
Germany is returning stolen artifacts, and even getting criticism for it when it backfires like it happened with the Benin Bronzes (which the Nigerian government gave to the former royal family and are not available to the general public in any country now).
But the Benin Bronzes were stolen from the royal palace. They weren’t available for the general public before they were stolen. It’s up to the royal family if they should be put up for display since it is their property.
How about we make them all give it back or make reforms to show them in host countries while the origin country retains ancestral ownership? Kinda like loaning art out.
British museum is truly terrible, but tbh the only reason people know about it and know to tag on it is because they try to reckon with their existence. Just over the channel in France is Musée du Quai Branly, which was originally going to be called “museum of the primitive arts”, that first of all costs money (BM is free) but also does a terrible job of explaining what the items are and who stole them from whom. BM tries to contextualiza what they stole and when and from whom, Quai Branly is a straight up colonial museum (there are other worse museums in Europe)
