The Brutish Museums

New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' - Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer'- Economist Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His award-winning research focuses on decolonisation in art and culture, and academic disciplines, and on the role of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence and dispossession.

List of Plates
Preface
Preface to the Paperback Edition
1. The Gun That Shoots Twice
2. A Theory of Taking
3. Necrography
4. White Projection
5. World War Zero
6. Corporate-Militarist Colonialism
7. War on Terror
8. The Benin-Niger-Soudan Expedition
9. The Sacking of Benin City
10. Democide
11. Iconoclasm
12. Looting
13. Necrology
14. 'The Museum of Weapons, etc.'
15. Chronopolitics
16. A Declaration of War
17. A Negative Moment
18. Ten Thousand Unfinished Events
Afterword: A Decade of Returns
Appendix 1: Provisional List of the Worldwide Locations Of Benin Plaques Looted in 1897
Appendix 2: Provenance of Benin Objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (the 'First Collection')
Appendix 3: Sources of Benin Objects in the Former Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham (the 'Second Collection')
Appendix 4: Current Location of Benin Objects Previously in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham (the 'Second Collection')
Appendix 5: A Provisional List of Museums, Galleries and Collections that May Currently Hold Objects Looted from Benin City in 1897
Notes
References
Index