Vox
1 HN recommender · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2022
9:33 · 6.7M views · Aug 5, 2020
A Vox explainer on how many of the British Museum's treasures were taken during British imperial rule, focusing on the Benin Bronzes and requests for their return.
Cited as an accessible overview of the looted-artifacts debate around the British Museum.
3 comments from Hacker News
I agree with you. I enjoyed this Vox video about how the British Museum holds many artifacts that were stolen. [0] this video
This is great. When is the British Museum returning all its 1000s of stolen artefacts to their rightful owners? Vox: The British Museum is full of stolen artifacts - this video Here is a snippet from: Dalrymple, William. The Anarchy (p. 21). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition. "The last hereditary Welsh prince, the memorably named Owain Gruffydd ap Gwenwynwyn, built Powis Castle as a craggy fort in the thirteenth century; the estate was his reward for abandoning Wales to the rule of the English monarchy. But its most spectacular treasures date from a much later period of English conquest and appropriation. For Powis is simply awash with loot from India, room after room of imperial plunder, extracted by the East India Company (EIC) in the eighteenth century. There are more Mughal artefacts stacked in this private house in the Welsh countryside than are on display in any one place in India – even the National Museum in Delhi."
I recently heard about Benin and the British "punitive expedition" that looted the country in a Vox video, of all things, about the world's largest open crime scene - the British Museum this video