Inside the History Lab

Abstract

For more than two hundred years the Elgin Marbles, pictured on the cover of the March 2023 issue of the American Historical Review, have been the subject of one of the longest transnational cultural disputes in the world. Named after the British aristocrat who oversaw their removal from the Parthenon in what was then Ottoman-controlled Athens, they have been in the collection of the British Museum in London since the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s, the Greek government asked the British to return the marbles. Those Greek demands have continued to the present day, but the British have been steadfast in their insistence that the marbles were legally acquired and have refused to return them. Very recently, however, a new set of high-profile negotiations between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin Marbles may finally bring this impasse to an end.1 If the parties do reach a settlement, it would come in the wake of a transformative set of campaigns beginning in the 1970s for the cultural restitution of objects brought to Europe and the United States in and after the era of high imperialism. In Germany, Belgium, France, and the United States, several museums have returned more than a thousand looted artifacts known as the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. French and American museums are beginning to return stolen Khmer antiquities under pressure from the Cambodian government. Protocols have emerged in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and at the United Nations for the return of Indigenous cultural property and remains to tribes and First Nations.2