End of the second Elizabethan age, within which I and many other have lived all our lives.

I have to wonder how just how hard it was for her, still in her mid-twenties, to take on such a hugely public world-wide role.
Her husband helped, she was obviously tolerant of his pecadillos, and very much in love with him.

I wonder what she thought of Charles, him going down a similar route, but with a far less tolerant wife, Diana being a modern woman brought up with a rather different outlook.

Certainly a moment for reflection, looking back over the last 70 years of change, to see what we may learn.

I am feeling incredibly conflicted about her death. On one hand, Canada obviously has ties to the Royal Family and so she is a part of our collective consciousness. The Royal Family also has always fascinated me as a really interesting glimpse into part of history that really doesn’t exist anywhere else. The pageantry and ceremony is fascinating. She was a stable global presence for my entire life.

On the flip side, Indigenous folks and those who have lived under Colonial rule have suffered greatly at the hands of the British Monarchy. While Queen Elizabeth II certainly demonstrated progress in her thinking over time, she still was at the helm for some horrific events - and for the most part the Royal Family has been unapologetic.

Her passing, for me, is like that of an abusive family member. There are reasons to mourn and reasons to be glad. Those feelings can, and do, co-exist.

From the former colonies:

https://www.vice.com/en/articl...inoor-india-pakistan

May as well say we had all better give everything back from every museum etc and have only local archaeology/ethnic museums.
And of course give the true wealth, the land, 'discovered' or 'colonised' or 'bought', back to the first human inhabitants.

It should stay where it's safe.

QED.

quote:

Originally posted by Daniel:
It should stay where it's safe.

Your watch is arguably safer if stored in Putin’s vault, yet you don’t necessarily want it there.

Maybe there will be a heist movie made someday about a band of skilled, high tech, patriotic Indian operatives returning the crown jewel to Mother India followed by a geopolitical legal drama about a corp of clever, principled, patriotic Indian diplomats shaming Western world leaders into letting Mother India keep it.

(Any Bollywood director/producer/writer reading this? You are welcome!)

Well, I believe that these artifacts of civilization belong to humanity.

I also believe that the primary goal should be preservation instead of ownership.

This is not to say that the British did not loot (the certainly did) nor that the British always knew how to preserve (rather than to destroy) what they took.

I guess I should have said, "safest." The nation state argument doesn't persuade me.

Putin would not want my broken down Rolex. I assure you.

It's definitely an issue for any colonizing power (oh yoohoo, USA's Smithsonian Institute). From a strict moral standpoint, I suppose everything should just be returned to the original owner, but as AD points out, who exactly is that? For antiquities, the original owner may no longer exist as a viable entity capable of receiving things.

Then there's the issue of items being looted during wartime, as what was seen during the Iraqi War. There's no simple solution to the problem.

At least the items in the British Museum are accessible to the public and to researchers, rather than locked away in someone's private collection and lost forever.

Take India, for example. If an item has been looted from India, just return the item to the government of India. Ditto Egypt, ditto any place that has a functioning government.

Yes, there are items whose original owners no longer exist, cannot be found, and has no functional nation-state government representing the looted people to receive the looted items. But just because there are items that cannot be returned do not mean the looter should keep the looted items that can be returned.

There is no reason to believe that the Museum of England can make an artifact available to scholars and researchers while the Museum of India cannot.

And the royal crown jewel? How often does the royal family or the British government make the royal crown jewel available to scholars or researchers?

If the world can figure out a way to return Nazi looted treasures to Holocaust surviving Jews, the world can figure out a way to return Empire looted treasures to post-colonial peoples.

Who knows, hundreds of years from now, Hindustan may become a greater power that Britania and they may take the crown jewel back, and pick up few more items along the way, and the world will argue about whether the national gallery of Hindustan should return a few things to the British museum.

Haven't watched all of this 1992 documentary, but so far it's been quite interesting. A lot of behind the scenes with HM The Queen.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t46lIVwij5w

quote:

Originally posted by Axtremus:

...Maybe there will be a heist movie made someday about a band of skilled, high tech, patriotic Indian operatives returning the crown jewel to Mother India...

Along the lines of the discussion of returning riches looted from the colonies (and questioning to whom they would be returned... There's a great deal of discussion (for a single example) about India now wanting the famous Kohinoor diamond returned to India.

Out of interest (I'd never heard of it), I read about its history. It's changed hands over the centuries so many times, it would be impossible to say just what nation/ethnicity has the most rightful claim! "Mother India" is only one of numerous other claimants (and who in India, for that matter?)

Athens has built a state-of-the-art museum with spaces reserved for the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles. The safety issue is now moot, and yet the British Museum holds onto them, despite claims to legally removing them from Greece that are murky indeed.

I remember the issue with air pollution in Athens in the 1970s that would have, it was said, greatly damaged the stone, so the damage argument had some justification before the new museum was built, but this is no longer the case.

In the 1930s, the British used copper brushes scrub the patina off the Parthenon/Elgin Marbles to suit their own aesthetics, greatly damaging them. I'm not sure if anyone knows whether that stupid move did more or less damage than leaving them to survive a few decades of worsening pollution would have done.

There's less justification for giving back the Koh-i-noor diamond, as it changed hands so many times within India through war and violence that it's hard to point to a true owner, but my non-expert view of the Parthenon/Elgin marbles is that they should go back.

The safety argument pales a bit when one considers the art from all over the world that was destroyed, endangered, damaged, and looted from Europe during WWII, during living memory. The lives of the kind of art that is held by museums tend to be long.

I think repatriation of looted items has to be done on a case-by-case basis, considering the safety of the items and their history of creation and ownership, but it should be done. Some items could remain where they are on long-term loan, and it's easier to negotiate that when both parties approach the process in good faith. Items that leave museums where they've been held long-term, like the Rosetta stone, could still be represented with exhibits created with current scanning technologies. A wealthy institution that has held a looted item for decades or centuries could acknowledge this "loan" by helping with the expense and training needed to safeguard returned items.

The procedures for return of art stolen by Nazis offers a roadmap, or at least a starting place, and there are many ways to mediate such things. There is a painting at my institution's art museum that spends time in the US and time with its owner. (I'm not sure I'd have played that kind of hardball with a Holocaust survivor or their heir, but that's the way it played out.) The museum still holds some Benin bronzes, but the floodgates seem to be opening worldwide on returning those, so it may just be a matter of time.

The solidly packed streets of Edinburgh as the cortege passed shows the regard and affection in which she is held