Reappraising Expropriations

Abstract

The attack on Benin City by British forces in 1897 has evolved into a symbol in the twenty-first century of the contested legacy of taking in military colonial conflicts. This revolves around questions of legitimacy of retention and, in a more focused manner, on the question of military looting. A number of scholars have written about the looting activities of British and other European forces concerning Yuanmingyuan (Tythacott 2018), Tibet (Carrington 2003; Harris 2012), and Benin City (Bodenstein 2018, 2020/1, 2022; Eyo 1997; Hicks 2020; Igbare 1970, 2007; Lundén 2016; Plankensteiner 2007; Ratté 1972; Shyllon 2019) to mention but a few. Some historians have provided an overview of the system that British land and naval forces operated to expropriate, and manage the expropriation of, artworks during colonial conflicts in the nineteenth century and prior (Finn 2018; Hevia 1994; Hill 1999; Spiers 2020). As noted in other publications (Lidchi and Allan 2020b; Lidchi and Hartwell 2022), colonial military conventions and codes that historically governed the taking of objects changed over the centuries, and this renders them somewhat opaque regarding what was being allowed and disallowed and how this was implemented. These governance structures, understood and applied by British army and naval forces, as well as such entities as the presidency armies of the East India Company, were obviously part of the “extractive statecraft” (Finn 2018: 17) of British governments that deployed a range of economic and military strategies to constrain and, in many cases, humiliate those who resisted while expanding the boundaries of trade and empire.