This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

The ironical question mark of the title of Justin Jacobs’ Plunder? is a courageous gesture of defiance against the all-pervading backdrop of postcolonial discourse; his book succinctly demolishes the anachronistic concept that museum artefacts are acquisitions of imperial theft. 

On these shallow misconceptions largely rests our current obsession to rectify the past and return objects to their countries of origin. Jacobs’ work is a critical study of great value, restoring historical context about the complex routes by which artefacts were transferred to museum collections, and a powerful corrective to the scolding dogmatism of decolonisation. The past has always been repurposed to fit the current of the age. Our revisionist zeitgeist reads history backwards, seeks atonement for historic wrongs and restricts interpretation of the past to the values of today. A Sinologist and professor of history, Jacobs finds “Manichean stories of light versus dark to be exasperating … Military plunder was not the norm.” 

Instead, his assessment of the methods of the movement of antiquities are framed under three areas: diplomatic gifts, trade deals and archaeological excavations. His analysis of the historical evidence for the narratives of non-Western figures who engaged with collectors unearths voices of officials, workers, tradesmen and administrators, each conveying how differently they thought about the ownership of art compared with today.

When the Hungarian-born archaeologist Marc Aurel Stein travelled to China on behalf of the British Museum, he brought back thousands of ancient manuscripts from the secret cave library of Dunhuang in the north-western deserts. Jacobs documents how scrolls from the cave were exchanged as gifts in the hope of reciprocal aid for restoring Buddhist temples. 

The French Orientalist Paul Pelliot was also gifted a thousand-year-old manuscript from Dunhuang. Far from seeing the acquisition of art and antiques by outsiders as immoral, Jacobs sheds light on how Confucian elites held these scholars in the highest regard and viewed the removal of antiquities from the desert as key to China’s own enlightenment and progress. 

Yet the ethos of today portrays the dispersal of the treasures of the secret cave as acts of corruption and colonialist theft, and Stein is depicted as an agent of Western cultural imperialism. Last year the Chinese tabloid Global Times demanded the return of “all Chinese cultural relics acquired through improper channels”. The publication also denounced the author for using “colonial-era thinking” for his thesis on plunder and declared that Aurel Stein was “unrecognised by modern Chinese scholars”.

Probably more has been written on the Elgin Marbles than any other museum collection in the world, but their reputation as a form of plunder is a perversion of historical fact. The gratitude of the Ottoman sultan (who cared more for his Egyptian province than millennia-old pagan sculptures) to the ambassador Lord Elgin at the defeat of Napoleon was expressed in diplomatic gifts “which posterity has long forgotten about”. The only gift still talked about is the permission given by the Ottomans to remove the sculptures from the Parthenon. 

Earlier this year, a Turkish official provocatively announced that the existence of a firmin — Ottoman authorisation — could not be proved. In reality, there are numerous witnesses (including Elgin’s arch-rival Lord Byron) to the multiple permissions necessary to take and transport more than a hundred tonnes of stone, whilst significant historical authorities who have examined the archives testify the firmin was real. 

What is not real is our modern conception of the eternal Greek nation for which the Parthenon is the crowning symbol — a distortion fostered by the nationalism which arose in the decades after Elgin. 

It was only when the West’s own valuation of “priceless” works of art was used to construct a new national identity that archaeological exchanges came to an end. Thus, the Chinese nationalist Chiang Kai-shek in the 20th century transferred thousands of artefacts to Taiwan to lend legitimacy through cultural symbols. 

The odyssey of “Priam’s treasure”, the jewellery collection excavated by Heinrich Schliemann, claimed by Ottomans, donated to Greece, deposited in Berlin and seized by the Red Army such that it now resides in Moscow, illustrates the perils of identifying plunder. Jacobs does not advance moral arguments for restitution debates but sets out to rebalance ahistorical narratives of how museum collections were constructed. 

From the ideal of enlightening the public, museums have expanded our understanding of human civilisation. Regressive arguments for restitution dispense with knowledge in favour of nationalistic agendas and the veneer of virtue. Civilisations of the future will not applaud us if we give way to philistines.