Booty contest

THE IRONICAL QUESTION MARK OF THE title of Justin Jacobs’s Plunder? is a courageous gesture of defiance against the all-pervading backdrop of postcolonial discourse; his book succinctly demolishes the anachronistic concept that museum artefacts are acquisitions of imperial theft. On these shallow misconceptions largely rests our current obsession to rectify the past and return objects to their countries of origin. Jacobs’s work is a critical study of great value, restoring historical context about the complex routes by which artefacts were transferred to museum collections, and a powerful corrective to the scolding dogmatism of decolonisation. The past has always been repurposed to fit the current of the age. Our revisionist zeitgeist reads history backwards, seeks atonement for historic wrongs and restricts interpretation of the past to the values of today. A Sinologist…