UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s world is bleak. Polls show that the Conservative Party is on track for an historic loss. One recent poll by Electoral Calculus, found that if the UK general election were held today, the Labour Party would win 353 seats (up from 204 seats today), the Conservative Party would win 228 seats (down from 365), the Scottish National Party would win 50 seats (up from 43 now), and the Liberal Democrats would win 37 seats (a healthy increase from today’s16 seats). That’s pretty much what all the polling is showing. And it’s confirmed by a series of by-election losses for his party, including in strongly Conservative districts. All that is a symptom though. What’s really dooming Sunak is that the economy’s in the toilet and that the health service is falling apart. The Conservatives are getting blamed, and rightfully so.
He can’t fix any of that stuff, so instead he’s fighting with Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the prime minister of Greece over the Elgin Marbles— more recently, commonly referred to as the Parthenon Marbles. That’s part of the collection— housed in the British Museum since Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, stole them from Greece and then sold them to the British Government. Here’s a brief history of the Marbles:
They were sculpted by a team led by Phidias between 447 and 432 BC for the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens. The Ottomans conquered parts of Greece all during the 15th Century and Athens fell in 1458. The Ottomans showed little interest in preserving or protecting ancient Greek ruins. In fact, they often used them as quarries for building materials or as sources of scrap metal. Eventually they realized they could be sold for significant amounts. Süleyman the Magnificent became a collector himself (mid-1500s) and that changed the attitude of the empire. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Ottomans began to take steps to protect Greek antiquities. In 1798, Sultan Selim III issued a firman— a decree— that prohibited the export of antiquities from the empire.
However this same Selim III issued another firman, this one specifically allowing Thomas Bruce, the Earl of Elgin to steal the sculptures and take them back to England for several bribes. One was for £5,000 to Yusuf Agha, Selim’s Foreign Minister. In today’s money that would be something between $240,000 and $300,000, a very good deal for the Brits. It’s assumed that he spread more money around to Ottoman officials in Athens but there is no record of how much beyond the £5,000 he gave Selim for the firman.
And the Marbles have been in the British Museum ever since. The Greeks have asked for them back. Sunak refused to ever meet with the Greek Prime minister. Yesterday, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins wrote that the British Museum has too much stuff and they should return the Marbles. “The nation yawns— polls show over half are happy to see the marbles returned and just above 20% want them to stay. Any civilised Briton knows they should be displayed where they belong— in their former home of Athens… The marbles issue is simply about the integrity of one of Europe’s greatest artistic compositions. These statues came from the fountainhead of European culture at its most formative moment, in the 5th century BC. That fountainhead was on the Acropolis in Athens, gazing out over the sunny Aegean with marble from the adjacent mountain, not imprisoned in a cold, grey chamber in Bloomsbury.”
Science could satisfyingly replicate the Parthenon marbles in both Athens and London. But to the Greeks— far more than any Britons— this is indeed about authenticity. The Parthenon is their ancestral temple and the marbles their crown jewels. They badly want them back. And surely a cultured country such as Britain should have the dignity to oblige. It has the power to restore integrity to this stupendous composition in the land of its creation. Instead it humiliates itself by taking umbrage over a cup of tea.
Bringing empire into these arguments is rarely helpful. But a post-imperial arrogance has crept into the marbles debate. Britain’s government is telling the rest of the world: you may have got your independence back, but you are not getting your stuff. You Greeks, it seems to say, were too weak to stop the Ottomans giving away your marbles, so that is tough on you. Britain may not have its empire but it has the echo of one in the inviolability and “global context” of its British Museum. So tell the Greeks they should be proud to see their relics sit alongside the finest of Africa and Asia. They should thank British taxpayers for being able to see them for free.
The great collections of antiquity are more or less confined to a few grand museums in Europe and America, products of national aggrandisement in the 19th century. These institutions are fanatically reactionary. They want to deny newly emergent countries the scope to acquire similar collections by refusing to dispose or de-acquisition their vast reserves. Many have the vast amount of their works in store, as if they were the private property of their custodians. In the 1970s, the British Museum even declared itself primarily a research resource for scholars.
None of these millions of objects was created to be locked away in perpetuity in a London basement. Most were made in far-off countries whose citizens might be proud to display them in public. There is nothing sacred about a museum. It is an unnatural place to leave thousands of objects frozen in time and place, vulnerable to theft and decay.
Museum walls are now crumbling ideologically if not physically. France has a major programme of repatriation of imperial objects, whether looted or not. So does Germany. Despite concerns over security, African bronzes are returning to Africa, ceramics to south-east Asia, tribal treasures to Polynesia. This does not mean the death of the Louvre.
The V&A’s director, Tristram Hunt, this week floated a reform of the 1983 National Heritage Act that at present curbs certain museums from “de-acquisitioning”. He wants them to grow up and take charge of their own business. The truth is that most museums have too much stuff, far too much. They should distribute it to the rest of the world. Returning the Parthenon marbles might indeed be a precedent, and an excellent one.