Museums or Crime Scenes: The Contentious History of World’s Most Famous Artifacts

History is often said to be written by the victors—but what does that mean for cultural artifacts in the middle? Between the wheelings and dealings of ancient civilizations and the spoils of war, antiquities have circulated the globe. In recent years, news stories have breathlessly covered the repatriation of looted goods and countries have called for the return of artifacts extricated from their countries of origin.

In Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasure, historian Justin Jacobs walks readers through some of the most well-known—and controversial—instances of cultural exchange in the last 150 years. Plunder? is Jacobs’ second book, after The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures.

Dozens of books have been written about modern ownership of antiquities, which have made their way into museums and private collections over the centuries. Many of those books focus on the illicit movement of those artifacts, but Jacobs charts a different course through an often-frenzied discussion about the rightful ownership of ancient things.

Using his expertise in cultural exchanges between Chinese authorities and western explorers as a guide, Jacobs suggests that most of what ends up in museums got there through fair exchanges between locals and foreigners. Jacobs problematizes the modern lens through which society sees these turn-of-the-century exchanges. With some irony, he notes that in assigning such value to the goods they took home, these early collectors ended up sowing the seeds of nationalism that led to modern associations between antiquity as an extension of the state.

I recently spoke with Jacobs about the new book and his thoughts on cultural heritage, the legality of owning antiquity, and modern perceptions of museums. Below is our conversation, lightly edited for clarity.

The cover of Plunder?, Justin Jacobs’ new book. Photo: The University of Chicago Press

Isaac Schultz, Gizmodo: Can you tell me a bit about yourself and everything in your life that led you to write this book?

Justin Jacobs: My original area of specialty is modern Chinese history. So that was what I did my PhD in. People always ask me, they say “it seems very exotic. How do you get into modern Chinese history?” If you want to go all the way back, there’s a fun story behind that that actually overlaps with a tech interest. When I was 14 years old, I got a video game for my Super Nintendo for my birthday: Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Part III. It’s this strategy game in which you take the role of a Chinese warlord from the third century A.D. and conquer all the others, and conquer China. I knew nothing about China back then, but the game was so much fun. I just played it endlessly. It’s why I always tell my students that it’s not necessarily bad for kids to be into video games—they can be quite educational and inspire a lifelong passion! After that, you just want the experience to continue after you’ve conquered China like 200 times. And I found out in the instruction book that the game was based on a historical novel by the same name. This was the mid-1990s—it was quite an ordeal to get a copy of an English translation of this historical Chinese novel. But we did.

Gizmodo: And that interest persisted.

Jacobs: That low-level interest continued into college. I tried taking first year Chinese language in both my freshman and sophomore year and I found it very intimidating and I dropped out. And then my third year I tried it again and it finally stuck. From that point on, it was, “How do I turn my interest in China and the Chinese language into a salary one day?” Actually, that turned into academia and I went and got a Ph.D. in modern Chinese history.

Growing up a white boy in American suburbia, nothing was cooler and more fun than Indiana Jones. So I thought, how can I turn the fun experience of Indiana Jones as it exists in my mind, into a respectable academic research topic? And what I came up with was: How did the Chinese respond to Western archeologists who came into China in the early decades of the 20th century? It so happened that there were a series of expeditions from various European countries—Germans, French, British—who all went to the northwestern deserts, the Taklimakan Desert area. It’s one of the best places to preserve ancient antiquities outside of Egypt. It’s incredibly dry and there are ruins that go back thousands of years. It’s often referred to as the Silk Road area. And it was controlled by China, the Qing Empire, but the people were Muslims for the most part, ruled by Chinese officials.

So I thought, what can I find in the Chinese source base? It couldn’t just be what Westerners were saying about themselves. Is it possible to find what they thought of these people? I fully expected that when I got into the material, the Chinese archival record, that the sources were going to confirm what we now think of [the Western archaeologists]: That they were thieves, that they took things without permission, and that this was a morally reprehensible act. And that’s not what I found.

Gizmodo: What did you find?

Long story short, I found that the Chinese elites praised them to the skies. It wasn’t just modest praise. It was enthusiastic, and sometimes over the top, where you’re almost blushing when you think about what they’re saying, with almost no negativity at all. As a historian, this needs to be explained because this is so different than what our view is today.

Our view today largely is that you go into a major Western museum and it’s like a crime scene. The mainstream assumption now is that these things were stolen or acquired by immoral imperialist means. And the thing that was really powerful for me is that I didn’t just have Westerners talking about themselves. I had Chinese voices. And that is not so easily dismissed, to have native voices saying these things about these foreigners.

“No country goes to war over archaeologists.”

I’ve actually written two books, one a more scholarly monograph, and then this one. This one was intended for the general educated public to try to understand with case studies mainly coming from Egypt and China. How do we make sense of this? Was it theft? What were the means by which things got into Western museums? And it’s complicated, as everything is in history. I’m trying to make it more simplified and explain it in plain language, with examples that really illustrate what I’m talking about so that it can be easily grasped. Because most everyone I talk to is just very surprised to find out that there were very few people, even in the source countries, who were calling these people thieves 100 years ago. We need to explain why that is the case.

Gizmodo: You mention giving case study examples that people can grasp. A lot of these cases are very familiar, I think, to someone who’s read the news in the last ten years, everything from Elgin Marbles to the Benin bronzes to Cleopatra’s Needle. These are artifacts around the world that people are very familiar with. The Rosetta Stone is another example that’s in a crosshairs sometimes.

You mentioned a bunch of titles early in the book, about these questions of who owns antiquity and illicit trade networks and less-than-legal dealers who were handling antiquities in Europe that came from places outside of Europe. Why do you think there have been so many books from that dramatized perspective and not from many questioning this issue of ownership from from the other side, so to speak?

Jacobs: Very few people who study this topic are looking at non-Western languages to try to see what to the people in these source countries thought about what these foreigners were doing. I think the vast majority of books that you’re going to read on this subject, all the ones that have plunder, loot, and rape in their title, are almost exclusively based on European language source bases—what the Westerners said themselves. When you only read that source base, yes, they explain matter-of-factly what they’re doing. You can reconstruct what they’re doing. But because they’re products of their day and age, they inevitably put in a whole bunch of ugly, pejorative, racist comments about the people and how they don’t care about this stuff, they’re just using it for fertilizer, and they’re rescuing it from [locals]. They sound so high and mighty, they sound like these arrogant imperialists. When all you have is that, the narrative becomes these haughty, arrogant imperialists who are using their considerable power to take these things away.

I think what is important to do is to acknowledge that, yes, those ugly attitudes were there. Yes, the Westerners, the archeologists, the excavators—they usually thought very lowly of the people in the host country. But we need to scratch beyond that. I think if we just take that at face value—what they thought about the people in the source country—then we’re missing what happened on the ground.

Gizmodo: What do the sources on the ground say?

Jacobs: When you go into the source base and you recover native voices—what they’re saying in their own language—or you’re looking at the field diaries on a day-to-day basis, not what the archeologist published for an audience back home, but how they actually interacted, the pejorative stuff sort of melts away. It’s not so much the haughty imperialist anymore. It’s a man who has a lot of financial resources behind him from his patrons doling out those resources in a way that encourages many people to want to work with him. And yes, there’s the racism. Yes, there’s the imperialism. But what I found is that the power imbalance is not what’s responsible for the people in the host country agreeing to let them remove these things. That was there, but that’s not why they let them take these things away. In fact, we have many examples of very un-powerful countries saying no to the most powerful empires on Earth.

Gizmodo: Can you give an example?

Jacobs: One of my favorite ones is the British archeologist Aurel Stein. He did four expeditions to northwestern China from 1900 to 1930, but that was always his backup plan. His original plan was to go to Afghanistan, to trace the steps of Alexander the Great in his conquest in Afghanistan and find art in Afghanistan that would show the influence of the Greek communities that Alexander the Great left behind. He was repeatedly turned away by the Emir of Afghanistan even though Afghanistan was essentially a protectorate—it was heavily under the influence of the British Empire in India. They still had the right to say no.

All it took was people in the host country to say, “I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want to stamp your passport. I don’t want to give you permission. I’m not going to let you hire the laborers or the camels or the donkeys that you need.” If they were willing to say no, that was enough. None of the Western empires were going to send in an army to another country to let their archaeologists get access. Sometimes battles already happened completely independent of archaeology. Then once the soldiers are in, things will enter that community and they’ll be studied. But no country goes to war over archaeologists.

Stein looked for another country that would say yes, and the Qing Empire—the Chinese—said yes. When you get beyond the surface-level imperialist gloss, the ugly stuff that they said and get on the ground and then recover native voices, you realize that that stuff is not as important as we think it is in explaining the relationship on the ground. They [locals] were getting something out of it. They were getting something out of it that they perceived as more valuable than what he was taking away.

Gizmodo: An interesting through-line in many of these cases is many of these cultural exchanges were happening at a time that the world was really rapidly globalizing. You see that sort of cultural exchange. And you mention throughout the book, that there’s lots of diplomatic gifts happening in the form of antique cultural artifacts. In the case of some of the scrolls from China, there’s upcycling of these diplomatic gifts.

Jacobs:  Regifting, to use the modern term.

Gizmodo: And then chopping up that gift, and making more gifts out of out of that original gift! I think one questions readers will have is, let’s take these cultural exchanges of that time as what they were: political gifts. How do we balance that with diplomatic conversations and motivations of nation-states and private individuals today when it comes to cultural heritage ownership and presentation by institutions?

Jacobs: That question goes right to the heart of the matter. The way that I try to address that from a historian’s perspective is that the reason we have such a discord between our understanding of how these things happen today and how they actually happened in history, if you recover the original context, is because the value of the artifacts that have been removed has changed. Key to understanding why so many people were willing to help foreigners remove this stuff 100, 200 years ago was that the people in the host country did not view these things as priceless. They viewed them as, depending on your station in life, if you were a peasant, you probably viewed it as a form of fertilizer, a fertilizer substitute. Perhaps if you were an educated elite, you might have interacted with it in a particular way, but you didn’t see it as an emblem of your nation that was priceless. You didn’t think that if you gave it away or let someone else take it away, or traded it, or re-gifted it to them, that you were betraying your nation. This was before nationalist ideas that we now have today, where the nation is sacred and everything in the ground belongs to that nation before it’s even found.

Gizmodo: So what were attitudes towards those antiquities at the time?

Jacobs: They’re thinking in terms of private property. Finders keepers. These things don’t belong to the nation. Now over time, nationalist ideas take root everywhere. And the Westerners really are the ones who actually seed those ideas as well. They’re actually, you know, sowing their own seeds of defeat, the seeds of resistance in the future. They create that by saying to the people in the host countries, “this is a symbol of your nation. We believe it’s priceless. And if you want to be modern and enlightened like us, you should agree with us that this is priceless.” Well, eventually they [locals] do agree with them. And when those ideas take root in a new generation of Western-educated elites in non-Western countries, they start thinking in the same way: “This is a priceless emblem of our nation, and to let it go is betrayal.” And then not knowing how these things were originally removed and the different value they had in the past, they retroactively see these transactions as theft.

“We’re really twisting and perverting history here to make these cases.”

Today we have countries where now everyone believes that all this stuff are priceless symbols of nation and they have political value. The issue that you have to deal with now is that Westerners are dealing with other people who project the exact same valuation on these artifacts and say, “this rightfully belongs only in the country of the people who are DNA descendants of those who made it.” I have a hard time supporting those arguments simply because I know the original context. I know that this was not viewed as a symbol of the nation. So I always have a hard time with those, like when Greece today tells England, “these are symbols of the ancient Greek nation and the only place that they belong is here.” This was 2,000 years ago. The ancient Greeks spoke a different language than modern Greeks that would be mutually unintelligible today. There is a period of a thousand years, the Parthenon was a Christian church for 400 years, it was a Muslim mosque. There were many different cultural orientations here, and no one thought of this as an emblem of the Greek nation. It was originally a symbol of Athenian imperialism to other Greek city states. We’re really twisting and perverting history here to make these cases.

Gizmodo: So those artifacts didn’t have political value back then?

Jacobs: If these things had political value for the Westerners at the time — if they said, “these are priceless emblems of nations”—there was an imperialistic aspect to that. They were saying that, “we are best suited—our empire is best suited to be the patron, the sponsor, the steward of your ancient past. And, one day in the future, if there’s an opportunity to take over your country, showing that we’re excellent stewards of the material remains of your past is going to be a wonderful sort of precondition to be able to say that we’re also the best steward for your modern country as well.” There’s absolutely a political aspect to that back then.

I try to avoid really taking a stance as to whether, should it go back or should it not go back. I just want to make sure as a historian that everyone who has these conversations acknowledges and understands the complex history, how it was not originally viewed as theft in the vast majority of cases, and that none of these things were originally seen as emblems of any nation back when they were originally created. As long as people acknowledge that and are aware of that, then if you want to use it for bald political purposes today, you know, be my guest.

But honestly, it’s going to proceed in this in the same way that diplomatic gifts proceeded in the old days. If England is ever going to let the Elgin Marbles go back to Greece, they’re going to do it because they’re going to perceive that they’re able to get something back in return, some sort of diplomatic or political capital that is equal to the perceived value of the Elgin Marbles. They’re not just going to give it away for nothing. It’s going to be part of a larger deal, a larger acknowledgment. General public goodwill, something like that.

Gizmodo: What do you think the responsibility is of museums, cultural institutions, in this conversation? Is their responsibility coming down hard when it comes to disclosing provenance histories? Is their responsibility to, no matter how they got into these museums, to be stewards of these objects? What do you think museums should be doing in light of these conversations?

Jacobs: To the extent that museums can reconstruct the provenance of the original removal, how it got there, that’s a very useful thing to do. You know, it will enlighten people. If it’s largely just mysterious, I think especially today, the default assumption that most people bring into a museum is that this must be theft. Lack of information is not in the museum’s interest. It only will help them if they actually are able to reconstruct the original context. But it’s going to be hard for a lot of these objects, because records are not going to be that complete. When I say reconstruct the provenance, I mean, what did the laborers think of this? Were they willingly, you know, a part of this endeavor, or did they have a good impression of their time digging for this western explorer? Did he pay them well? Were they okay seeing this thing leave? What did the local Chinese officials think? Were they okay with this? That’s what I mean by reconstructing the original context. Actually most of the time it’s going to redound to the museum’s benefit to be able to reconstruct that context. My sense from my research is that they’re going to find that most of these things involved the voluntary enthusiastic participation and engagement of people from all walks of life, from many different economic classes in the source country. I would definitely encourage museums to try to find out the provenance.

There’s going to be some ugly things. There’s going to be some dark secrets and whatnot. But on the whole, I think it’s in their interests because mystery and lack of information only leads people to adopt the default knee jerk reaction now, which is going to be theft. And most of it’s not.

Gizmodo: Later in the book, you discuss the example of Priam’s treasure, whose movements at the time were illegal under Ottoman law as it existed. So in some of these cases, it seems like if, you know, modern claims are made, it’s more cut-and-dry that there’s there’s a through-line of a legal ownership issue there.

Jacobs: Priam’s treasure for me is very instructive. If Heinrich Schliemann—the guy who actually organized the expedition—if he respected the Turks, if he was willing to do it the right way, he probably could have removed that treasure from Turkey. But he had so many ugly, pejorative views towards the Turks. He did it all clandestinely and he flaunted Ottoman laws. By that point, the 1870s, the Ottomans had laws on the books that were designed to regulate—not obstruct—but regulate excavations. You can reconstruct the original context and find out that not only were there laws on the books that local elites cared about and enforced, there was an actual attempt to enforce them, and he went out of his way to evade that. I think that’s a wonderful case where I would totally support restitution today for that to go back.

Now, there are a couple more interesting wrinkles here. It was excavated and within the boundaries of modern-day Turkey. One of the reasons why Heinrich Schliemann wanted to remove that is because he thinks it comes from Troy, the site of the ancient Battle of Troy, and he identifies it as Greek. So legally, if you’re going to return that, it should go back to the Turks. And there is a brief period where when he smuggled it out of Turkey, Schliemann had the idea that he would donate it to the Greek nation. What’s so fascinating about this is that the Turks then sued him in a Greek court, and the Greek court upheld the Turkish claim that legally they agreed this actually belonged to Turkey and that Schliemann was flaunting their laws. So then he took it again and donated it to a museum in Germany, his original homeland. He was a German-born American. And then the Soviets took it after they invaded Berlin in 1945, at the end of World War Two. What’s so interesting about that is that the Russians openly acknowledged it when it was found in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in the 1990s. [The Russians] said it was compensation for World War Two and they had no intention of returning it to anyone. But you can see how complicated this gets. But I would support the return of Priam’s Treasure to Turkey today, absolutely.

Gizmodo: Ultimately, what do you hope readers get out of this book?

Jacobs: I hope readers get a more nuanced understanding of the many different ways that art and artifacts got into major Western museums. The default assumption today for many people is that it’s all the result of immoral, imperialist coercion and theft. What I do in the book is I try to account for the various ways that things have got into museums. My research suggests that there are four major ways that objects get into Western museums: from soldiers who engage in military plunder, from diplomats who usually accept diplomatic gifts, from dealers who are essentially businessmen, and from scholars who undertake excavations and expeditions. Those four means pretty much account for everything. Each one of those has a unique moral context that needs to be reconstructed.

Long story short, if you don’t want to read the book, is that the soldiers who engage in military plunder—that’s pretty odious. It was seen as odious at the time that it was taking place. And there isn’t really any defense against that today or then. These things have a pretty good case for being sent back to their country, things like Benin bronzes or things from the old Summer Palace or Forbidden City that were looted in 1900 or 1860 in China. But I go on to say that these get a lot of attention because they’re pretty dramatic military plunder, but they probably account for a relatively small proportion of what you actually see in museums. I think the vast majority of things that you see were acquired by diplomatic gifts, by dealers, and by scholars. When I reconstruct these examples of people acquiring things, I find that most of them weren’t considered morally reprehensible at the time.

My analytical framework for understanding why so many people were so enthusiastic and helpful in letting Westerners remove stuff outside of military plunder was what I call the compensations of cooperation. Essentially: The artifacts were not viewed as priceless emblems of a nation at the time. All the Westerner had to do was exchange something of perceived greater value at that time and that place in order to get buy-in and consent from the people in that country to say, “I’ll help you remove this.” I’m not going to begrudge this because I got something from you, whether it’s economic capital, diplomatic capital, political capital, social capital. We find it so hard to understand that exchange today because we now view these things as priceless and we cannot imagine anything that can exceed a priceless value. And that’s our conundrum today. We need to understand that it didn’t always have that priceless value and things could be exchanged that were perceived of greater value.

Gizmodo: The modern lens is a tricky thing through which to see things!

Jacobs: That’s the job of historians—to reconstruct the original context and explain why people did things the way that they did, and we can understand why they did. And I’m trying to explain why they did according to their own standards of the day.