.

An Introduction ...to Repatriation and the British Museum

This webpage addresses repatriation, which is the returning of art and artifacts to their countries of origin. The goal and purpose of this webpage is purely informational. Our goal is to provide you the user with comprehensive analysis of various repatriation cases, allowing you to draw your own inferences and come to your own conclusions. Because repatriation is such a broad topic we have chosen to narrow our focus to the British Museum. The British Museum houses a variety of artifacts gathered from around the globe primarily during the time of British colonialism. These artifacts come from a variety of different periods within history and all have ended up in the hands of the British Museum through different means. Because of this it offers us a perfect cross section of repatriation cases that have been, resolved, are currently unresolved and still debate and those that fall in between the two. However since the British Museum houses such a large scope of artifacts from around the globe we have chosen to focus on three of the most famous cases: The Benin Bronzes, The Elgin Marbles, and The Rosetta Stone. In addition to these three famous cases we will provide a general overview of three other smaller repatriation cases facing featuring the British Museum: The Feldman Drawings, the museums collection of human remains and The Lewis Chessmen. These six cases provide a great deal of insight into the debate surrounding repatriation, its advantages and disadvantages and are perfect examples of the complexities surrounding each and every repatriation case. [+]


Before one can truly understand the repatriation cases discussed in this webpage they first must understand how the British Museum was able to acquire such a wide variety of artifacts. The artifacts discussed in this webpage were almost all acquired during the time of colonialism. Britain during the late seventeen and eighteen, and part of the nineteen hundreds had a great deal of colonies around the world, in the cases of these particular artifacts they controlled modern day Nigeria, Egypt, and Greece. While in control of these regions British forces took a massive amount of historic artifacts, and sent them home to Britain. Through various means these artifacts found their way into the hands of the most important museum in Britain the British Museum. Once these colonies gained freedom they wanted to create similar museums of their own demonstrating their own cultures, however a variety of the artifacts desired by these nations were in the hands of the British Museum. Thus Nigeria, Greece, and Egypt found/find themselves engulfed in a bid for the repatriation of artifacts with Great Britain. The examples used in this section will all be explained in detail on different pages of the website.

Larger version of one of the smaller images above

1 2 3
Credit This website was built for HIST381/2 in 2008 and presented to Prof. Gavin Taylor. All coding was created by Katrina Cohen-Palacios with the help of Rebecca Cohen-Palacios. The text was written by Kale Scottwell, Amy Spooner, Katrina Cohen-Palacios, and Audrey Bouzaglo. All photographs of the museum and its artifacts are copyright of the British Museum.