Chris Upton: Global view serves our history well
Feb 11 2010 By Chris Upton
Not so long ago the collections of our great museums appeared to be under threat.
First there were the Greeks, making it abundantly clear that they would like their marbles back. With a new Acropolis museum in course of construction in Athens, it was surely the perfect moment to repatriate all those sculptures and reliefs that Lord Elgin had carted off.
On top of that, there were other groups who were demanding the return of the bones of their ancestors, which had long since been lying in a glass case, instead of in hallowed ground. One such Native American was indeed allowed to leave Liverpool and go home.
The stage was set, it seemed, for a vast repatriation of artefacts back to their country of origin. It was not easy to put forward a legal or a moral case against this, other than the argument of “finders keepers”.
This was an especially worrying prospect for the British Museum. It has perennially surprised foreign visitors to that great temple of culture in Bloomsbury that, despite the name, there is almost nothing that is British in it. It was the perfect place to discover the ancient civilizations of Assyria, Egypt and Greece, but it was not so hot on the UK.
Fittingly it was Liverpool museum, in the run-up to being Capital of Culture, that devised the best defence against the repatriation lobby. Liverpool Museum, said its curators, was not a Merseyside museum at all, but a world museum, a repository of stuff from all over the planet.
Once this position had been formulated, the British Museum was quick to adopt it too. The BM was a place to study, not the narrow confines of a single culture, but the whole of human achievement, and all up one single set of steps.
Suitably re-branded, the BM has turned a defensive argument into a media crusade. Neil McGregor’s concept of “A History of the World in 100 Objects” has taken the TV and the radio, national and local, by storm. We can now be proud of what we have, and from where we have it, instead of feeling shifty about it.
I don’t necessarily disagree with the position, but – as with all media campaigns – it’s worth bearing in mind where it’s coming from.
* Dr Chris Upton is Senior Lecturer in History at Newman University College in Birmingham.
