What do we talk about when we talk about cultural restitution? In popular discourse in Britain, returning artefacts to their communities of origin is almost invariably framed as a loss. Minds leap to a vision of our museums violently pillaged: walls bare, sculpture courts deserted, store rooms despoiled – a fascinating reversal of how at least some (albeit, to be fair, a tiny minority) of museum objects in the UK were actually acquired.
There is a constant fear, in this kind of thinking, that the restitution of one object necessarily leads to the restitution of all objects, that après moi, le déluge. Returning the Parthenon sculptures to Athens – to use a not-so random example – “would open the gateway to the question of the entire contents of our museums”, as Michelle Donelan, the culture secretary, put it in a BBC interview earlier this month. It would be, she said, “a very slippery slope to go down”. She described the sculptures as “assets of our country”. Losing the Elgin marbles, according to this kind of formulation, would lead to a kind of asset-stripping of the British soul.
