Who holds the world in trust

A discipline built on a promise

Museology studies the institution most people take for granted, and its ordinary problems are unglamorous: how to catalogue an object, how to keep it from rotting, and how to establish its provenance, the documented chain of ownership from the moment of making to the present.[6] Two further terms carry the current fight. Deaccession is the permanent removal of an object from a collection, whether by sale, transfer, or return. Inalienability is the legal doctrine, old in both French and British law, that a public collection may not be sold or given away at all.[7]

On top of these sits a doctrine the field long treated as settled: the encyclopedic or universal museum, an institution that holds the artefacts of many cultures under one roof and claims to serve not one nation but all humanity.[6] In 2002 eighteen major museums, among them the Metropolitan, the Getty and the British Museum, signed a Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums, which argued that their collections had deepened “universal admiration for ancient civilizations.”[6] Critics read it at once as a defensive wall. The Kenyan archaeologist George Abungu called it “a way of refusing to engage in dialogue around the issue of repatriation.”[6]

The speech that reopened the case

The wall began to crack with a single speech. In November 2017, at the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, President Emmanuel Macron said that African heritage could no longer stay locked in European vaults, and he pledged to return it.[3] He commissioned two scholars to say how. Felwine Sarr, a Senegalese economist and writer, and Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian working in Berlin, delivered their report in November 2018.[2]

Their conclusions were deliberately radical for the field. They estimated that roughly ninety per cent of sub-Saharan Africa’s material heritage now sits outside the continent, and they called for permanent restitution rather than the temporary loans that museums preferred.[2] They also proposed reversing the usual burden of proof, so that an object taken in the colonial period would be presumed returnable unless the holding museum could show it was acquired fairly.[2] A distinction matters here. Restitution means a return that admits a wrong in the original taking, while repatriation means only sending an object back to its place of origin, and the report insisted on the first.[2]

Two curators, opposite verdicts

The intellectual fight predates the report, and it is waged largely among museum professionals. James Cuno, then president of the J. Paul Getty Trust, made the universalist case most forcefully in a 2014 essay called “Culture War: The Case Against Repatriating Museum Artifacts.”[4] Cuno argued that repatriation runs on nationalist rhetoric, that “no culture is a hermetically sealed entity,” and that encyclopedic museums teach the world to itself; his alternative was to expand loans rather than hand objects back.[4]

Against him stands Dan Hicks, an archaeologist and curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, which itself holds part of the Benin loot. In The Brutish Museums (2020) he reconstructs the 1897 punitive expedition, in which British forces sacked Benin City, killed with machine-gun fire, and carried off some ten thousand objects.[5] Hicks argues that acknowledging that history is worthless without action, writing that “without acts of return this means nothing,” and he calls the work of tracing what was taken and giving it back a museum “necrology,” his own coinage.[5] A third figure, the sociologist Tiffany Jenkins, holds the sceptical line in Keeping Their Marbles (2016), arguing that the treasures reached museums by many routes and should stay in them.[8] In March 2025 she was appointed a trustee of the British Museum, which suggests the argument is far from settled.[8]

The real battleground is the law

The decisive constraint is not ethics but statute. The British Museum Act of 1963 forbids the museum’s trustees from disposing of objects except in narrow cases, such as an item “unfit to be retained,” a clause meant to cover things like stray human remains.[7] That is why the Parthenon Marbles cannot simply be handed to Greece: George Osborne, the museum’s chair, has instead floated a “partnership” in which the sculptures would move to Athens on a long loan while London keeps legal ownership.[7] A loan that never ends is the field’s current workaround for a law it cannot repeal.

France ran into the same wall through its own doctrine of inalienability, and it has begun to take the wall down. After returning twenty-six royal treasures to Benin under a one-off law in 2020,[2] the French Senate in January 2026 unanimously adopted a framework bill, championed by Senator Catherine Morin-Desailly, that would let objects looted between 1815 and 1972 be returned by administrative decree rather than a fresh act of parliament each time.[9] Morin-Desailly framed the aim with care: “The idea is not to empty French museums, but to achieve authenticity in France’s response.”[9]

Where it stands

The returns are now real and accelerating. Germany transferred ownership of its Benin Bronzes in 2022, and in 2025 the Netherlands agreed to send back 119 of them, the largest single return so far, in a transfer signed by the Dutch culture minister and the director-general of Nigeria’s museums commission.[11] In 2026 France returned the Djidji Ayokwè, a three-metre talking drum confiscated from the Atchan people in 1916, to Ivory Coast.[10] The universalist position is losing on the ground, not only in argument.[11]

Yet the returns raise a question the field had not fully faced: return to whom. In March 2023 Nigeria’s president declared the Oba of Benin, the kingdom’s traditional ruler, the rightful owner of all returned bronzes, overriding the national museums commission that European institutions had spent years negotiating with.[1] The journalist Barnaby Phillips reported that museums were left “asking, who is our partner?”, and it is still unclear whether objects sent home will hang in a public gallery or pass into the royal palace.[1]

What the fight reveals

On the narrow question of fact, the evidence favours the restitutionists, at least for objects like the Benin Bronzes. Their provenance is not seriously disputed, the 1897 sacking is documented, and the run of returns by Germany, the Netherlands, the Smithsonian and now France shows that the “keep everything” doctrine has lost its institutional footing.[11] My own read is that the universal museum survives, if it survives at all, as a loan network rather than a permanent trust. What is genuinely unresolved is what happens once the crate is opened. The Oba episode shows that “return to the source” conceals a hard question about who the source is, and whether a returned object stays visible to the public or disappears into private hands.[1] Provenance research can prove how an object was taken; it cannot, on its own, decide who should hold it next.