The case for the British Museum’s continued ownership of the Elgin Marbles is laughably flimsy, while the aesthetic and moral grounds for their repatriation utterly overwhelming.
But as we direct our attention to the evidence of Britain’s once-rapacious imperialism, we should remember that Ireland is not absolved of all sin.
The Elgin Marbles – sculptures and friezes torn off the Parthenon in Athens by Lord Elgin and sold to the British government in the early 1800s – flit in and out of the public consciousness with semi-regularity.
But since the UK recently rejected Unesco’s request to reconsider its position on the sculptures, and since the Greek prime minister made fresh demands for their restitution, they’ve returned to the zeitgeist with renewed moral urgency.
We cannot reduce the philosophical question of ancestral ownership to equations of foot traffic
The Elgin Marbles are not the sole objects of these debates, and tides seem to be shifting. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, has been a pioneer in arguing for the repatriation of artefacts stolen from Africa by Europe’s former imperial powers.
In the 1890s thousands of items were taken from Benin, a Nigerian city, after a violent siege. Twenty-one of those are held in storage at the National Museum of Ireland.The artefacts – some referred to as the Benin bronzes – are central to global debates about looted goods.
Some have already been returned by Cambridge, Aberdeen, Germany and France. And the National Museum has declared itself committed to a “restitution process” for the bronzes too.
Morally flaccid arguments
Despite this the UK government has held firm on keeping the marbles in London. Their reasons? They have been here for so long, they were acquired legally at the time (a disputed claim), they may be damaged or inadequately looked after in Greece, more people will see them in the British museum. They are all morally flaccid arguments.
But the obvious case for sending them back can avoid murky debates about who history belongs to and whether it can be owned in the first place. The aesthetic argument on its own is sufficient: half of the marbles sit in Athens in a museum at the base of the acropolis they were taken from, reflecting Greek sunlight in the way they were always intended to.
The other half sit off to the side of the British Museum’s foyer, in an artificially-lit room near Tottenham Court Road, utterly devoid of context and displaying no appreciation for beauty.
It would be ludicrous to suggest every tiny pot and statuette across the continent needs to be re-litigated
Prior to the Acropolis Museum opening in 2009, perhaps the UK had better reasons for holding on to the sculptures. They are safer in London, so the argument went, where they can be looked after properly and avoid the damages wrought by poor technical care and pollution.
Unfortunately, upon the erection of the purpose-built museum in central Athens, that argument fell apart. It might be true that more people will see them if they remain in the British Museum. But we cannot reduce the philosophical question of ancestral ownership to equations of foot traffic.
As for how they were acquired? The UK government has argued it was by legal means. Though it may not be unreasonable to suggest the acquisition came with a smattering of deception, in the very least.
There certainly is not an academic consensus on the question. But getting lost on the finer details here feels a convenient diversion from the overwhelming moral case for their restitution.
It should be an easy argument to accept for anyone who adopts a relatively anti-imperialist position – even in the vaguest and most ill-defined terms. It is certainly a political and intellectual vantage point from which Ireland likes to speak. And therefore it is hard to conceive of much objection at all.
Unique position
But Ireland is in a curious and unique position in this debate. It has been a direct victim of imperialism. But we cannot willingly obscure the fact that it has also – on a much lesser scale – been a participant too. Ireland is in possession of an abundance of looted or ‘collected’ artefacts from Asia and Africa.
When Fintan O’Toole wrote A History of Ireland in 100 Objects nearly a decade ago, he picked what he described as an anomalous object: a small buddha on display at Collins Barracks. It was stolen from a Buddhist temple in Burma by Sir Charles Fitzgerald, an Irish officer in the Royal Navy, and donated to the museum in 1981.
Jane Ohlmeyer, professor of modern history at TCD, pointed out in The Irish Times last year that two Irish officers played bloody roles in the Amritsar massacre in India. “Stories like this,” she wrote “challenge the master narrative of the Irish as victims of empire, not active perpetrators of it.”
The resurgence of the Elgin Marbles debate and the announcement last April of Ireland’s intention to repatriate its Benin bronzes serve to remind us of this complicated relationship Ireland has with empire. Those who stole artefacts from foreign lands may have done so under the British empire, but they reside in the Republic of Ireland now.
It would be ludicrous to suggest every tiny pot and statuette across the continent needs to be re-litigated. And none of it approaches the scale of the seismic gesture that the repatriation of the Elgin Marbles would be. But it has opened up questions across Europe about whom history belongs to and has helped us think about our complex associations with the past. Send back the marbles, and embrace the conversations they have engendered.