Have the British ever returned any valuables "obtained" during colonialism?

Factual Questions
41

Europes population declined by a third because of the Black Death and other pandemics before 1492. Contagious disease regularly culled the human population.

As soon as the first infected Europeans met natives of the Americas a pandoras box of virulent diseases were unleashed upon a population whose immune systems were completely unprepared for the onslaught. A wave of death would have spread rapidly along the lines of human contact at a time long before any understanding of the cause.

Europeans came across lands where the human population was weakened and in a poor state. Little wonder they simply took whatever was valuable.

Later the unfair treaties with native peoples referred to the concept of land as ‘property’ that could be owned and sold. That arose from agriculture, were work is invested in land to produce food surpluses. That concept of land as property just does not arise in hunter gatherer societies.

Property is a concept that is still developing in curious ways. Apple and Samsung battle in the courts over the use of gestures on smartphones. Genetic code sequences are a target as we embrace genetic modification. Who owns the sequences in the treasure trove of genetic material in the remote forests that are home to unique species? These concepts seem strange today, just as the concept of land ownership would have been perplexing to hunter gatherers. Though some native peoples did practice agriculture and organised to be productive enough to support cities. Sadly dense populations were most vulnerable to Euro-Asian diseases and they would have suffered a sudden social and political collapse. Easy pickings for the Spanish.

When the Portuguese went east to find spices, this must have been equally confusing for the locals on the islands where nutmeg grew natively. Imagine a large ship arriving at an island and the local king meeting the dishevelled mariners exhausted after a year long journey.

So let me get this right….you guys built this huge wooden boat, sailed in right around the world just to get some of this nutmeg stuff that grows on trees around here….Well now….maybe we can do business.

What is a valuable in one place may seem quite bizarre to people in another. Certainly the contents of some of the museums hold collections of some very odd items.

I know one researcher who specialises in African leather work and spends a lot of time working with collections in museums. Her work will document this craft and the skills that are often now lost.

Better to return these items to the descendants of the people from which they were obtained 150 years ago. With an apology for the historic injustice of colonialism that allowed these cultural artifacts to be appropriated by collectors of indigenous art? Or is this just a phase of political axe grinding?

I am sure that would lead to a lot of head scratching by the locals as to what exactly is going on with these eccentric foreigners that they felt the need to return something that their great, great grandmother created as if it were a precious relic.

Museums are full of collections that may appear quite worthless to anyone outside of academia.

So I guess there are only some things that have significant cultural value. Ancestral human remains and precious jewels or examples of fine craftwork?

I am sure many museums are pondering this question and trying to develop an ethical policy that is consistent with conservation and access.

It requires more rather thought than would interest a politician looking to score points.

42

Sure, I very much doubt there is any value in pursuing a ‘one size fits all’ policy that will encompass all cases, all geographies, cultures, circumstances and spans of time. The absence of a blanket policy for all cases need not, and should not stop us from thinking about what to do with the cases.

43

We should probably give them back too?

44

I think the tacit moral justification for displaying mummies in museums is not so much a colonialist attitude of having taken them from Egypt, but rather the perception that if a person died a really, really long time ago, we stop thinking of the remains as being those of a human being. We do that also to bodies found in Western countries, such as the Cheddar Man or Ötzi the Iceman.

45

And for years, people in Europe took as medicine a substance produced from Egyptian mummies.

46

I can’t help but read this as a despicable colonial trade in imported Egyptian breast milk, while Egyptian newborns died of malnutrition.

47

No, they really just ground up the mummified remains of ancient dead Egyptians and consumed them as some sort of medicine.

48

I’m generally against that as well.

49

SOME AREAS of the Americas had widespread intensive agriculture (the Valley of Mexico, portions of the Inca Empire, etc.), some areas had intermittent low-intensity agriculture, and some areas were mostly the province of hunter-gatherers. Why are you assuming that every Native American group was the same, or had the same understanding of property and land use?

“Their population was almost the same as Europe”: 60 million people spread over an area over twice the size of Europe, which had more people, is not “almost the same.” Your own cite suggests that of those 60 million, more than half lived in Mexico (29 million) and Central America (3 million); North America north of Mexico, they think, had maybe 4.4 million people, in an area by itself larger than Europe. (And North America is where the buying of land from the native communities, as opposed to simply taking it via conquest, was most common.)

How about just confining ourselves to the various extant humans who bought and sold land and other real property via contract or treaty over the past millennium or so?

50

“Mummy brown” paint was supposed to have been used in many 19th-century paintings, being made from the ground-up remains of Egyptian mummies. It was still available into the 1960s.

Tens of thousands of mummified Egyptian cats ended up sold by the ton as fertilizer in Liverpool.

51

This whole idea that imported mummified cat granules are superior to domestic mummified cat granules is so unpatriotic. Buy British!

52

Well, supposedly, the bones of dead soldiers from the Battle of Waterloo were ground up to use as fertilizer, so, if true, someone was buying British.

53

I don’t see any value in trying to formulate a policy that tries to cover that - it’s just a way to fail to resolve anything.

54

That’s putting it mildly. The cannibalism practiced was more hideous and insidious:

“ “The question was not, ‘Should you eat human flesh?’ but, ‘What sort of flesh should you eat?’ ” says Sugg. The answer, at first, was Egyptian mummy, which was crumbled into tinctures to stanch internal bleeding. But other parts of the body soon followed. Skull was one common ingredient, taken in powdered form to cure head ailments. Thomas Willis, a 17th-century pioneer of brain science, brewed a drink for apoplexy, or bleeding, that mingled powdered human skull and chocolate. And King Charles II of England sipped “The King’s Drops,” his personal tincture, containing human skull in alcohol.“

55

Is this in principle really any more “hideous” than organ donation - provided, of course, that the remains are from natural deaths, and that you have not procured the remains by nefarious means. We now know that organ donation works, and eating powdered skull does not. But they believed that these things worked. The objection that this is the “desecration of remains” is just as much an appeal to magic as the idea that eating skulls will cure what ails you.

56

And the teeth. For making dentures.

57

Yes and depraved too; IMO, especially if you look at the widespread depraved parties opening up mummies.

But Cannibalism in Europe was not limited to Egyptian mummies : (Same link as above)

Blood was procured as fresh as possible, while it was still thought to contain the vitality of the body. This requirement made it challenging to acquire. The 16th century German-Swiss physician Paracelsus believed blood was good for drinking, and one of his followers even suggested taking blood from a living body. While that doesn’t seem to have been common practice, the poor, who couldn’t always afford the processed compounds sold in apothecaries, could gain the benefits of cannibal medicine by standing by at executions, paying a small amount for a cup of the still-warm blood of the condemned. “The executioner was considered a big healer in Germanic countries,” says Sugg. “He was a social leper with almost magical powers.” For those who preferred their blood cooked, a 1679 recipe from a Franciscan apothecary describes how to make it into marmalade.

58

and you immediately point to instances that violate what I had said is obviously wrong

I was questioning your apparent assumption that eating powdered skull is per se depraved. I would happily donate my own for consumption after my death, just as I am an organ donor, if it served some useful purpose for the living.

59

{Bolding mine}
This feels very personal. Apologies - not sure why you are making it personal.

I am going off the observations in the Smithsonian magazine article for the depraved (IMO) comment. Observations such as : ““It looks like sheer hypocrisy,” says Beth A. Conklin, a cultural and medical anthropologist at Vanderbilt University who has studied and written about cannibalism in the Americas. People of the time knew that corpse medicine was made from human remains, but through some mental transubstantiation of their own, those consumers refused to see the cannibalistic implications of their own practices.”
{Bolding mine}
And also :
“The hypocrisy was not entirely missed. In Michel de Montaigne’s 16th century essay “On the Cannibals,” for instance, he writes of cannibalism in Brazil as no worse than Europe’s medicinal version,”

Are you saying that using the adjective gruesome (done by Smithsonian magazine) is okay but my use of hideous and depraved is not ? My use of these words is IMO btw, you are free to use your own words. All my claims above are backed up by citations.

60

That is misleading since most of those “killings” were from diseases.

Right.

But are we getting far afield from returning valuables to the evils of colonialism? Maybe better for iMHO?