The world’s great museums are full of art and artifacts that were plundered during an era when plunder was the norm. Now there’s a push to return these works to their rightful owners. Sounds simple, right? It's not. (Part 2 of “Stealing Art Is Easy. Giving It Back Is Hard.”)

Last episode, we began with a simple question.

How do the artworks and artifacts that you see in a museum wind up in a museum?

For a long time, the entire art world didn't ask questions.

The Met got fooled by not probing deeply enough into the purported history that was given to us.

Museums are now returning dozens of objects every single year.

Even though technically we legally acquired these, the origins of the acquisition was illegal.

So therefore, everything else was tainted as well.

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we will explore 1 dramatic case that isn't settled yet.

The disruption of the attack on the kingdom cannot be over-emphasized.

Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum.

It turns out that stealing art can be relatively easy, but giving it back, that's the hard part.

If the job is to purify yourself by getting rid of the art, yeah, put it in a pit.

The second episode in our series about returning art starts right now.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of Everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

Matthew Bogdanos is a former Marine colonel who now runs the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney's Office.

We do not, under any circumstances, want to denude New York of its cultural treasures.

But if it's illegal, then it should go back to the country of origin.

If a museum or a private collector on Fifth Avenue has a 3, 000-year-old treasure that is found to have been looted or otherwise stolen, the country of origin may not even exist anymore.

Every country treats these differently, but we have yet to have a country who hasn't just been over the top appreciative and extraordinarily gracious.

Wait a second, the US doesn't have diplomatic relations with Iran.

We returned a piece to the Palestinian authority.

Now move the map to Southeast Asia, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Pakistan.

For that area of the world, these antiquities are idols.

And the number of times I have gone into a temple in India, in Southern India particularly, and it's empty.

And they're still worshiping the empty pedestal.

Or they have a photograph of an idol that was stolen, or they have a wax or wooden model.

And now this goes in someone's Fifth Avenue apartment?

So we never lose sight of the fact that at the other end of our entire process, the prosecution, recovery and repatriation, there's a community on the other side.

Bogdanos makes all this sound rather clear-cut and that makes sense.

He's guided by the law and the law, while complicated, is also decisive.

But art is even more complicated than the law.

a place where our deepest spiritual values meet the marketplace.

And strange things happen when you mix the most spiritual with the most commercial.

That is David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

In 2022, he published a piece called Who Benefits When Western Museums Return Looted Art.

when, you know, there's a war in Ukraine and the Russian forces break into a museum in a Ukrainian city and they take the artworks and they put them in crates and they take them back to Russia.

And then the war ends 5 years later and there's a peace treaty.

And we can arrange for the art to come back from Russia to the museum in Ukraine from which it was taken.

years, the whole concept of theft becomes kind of cracked.

The second most famous Greek artwork in a European museum is the Pergamum Altar in Berlin, which is unearthed by German archaeologists.

Pergamum was a city on the West Coast of what is now Turkey.

The artists who made the work were Greek.

The king who commanded the work was of mixed Greek and Macedonian origin.

And the taxpayers who paid for it spoke all the mingled languages of what was then Asia Minor, Anatolia, and some of them were Semitic, and some of them were other vanished groups.

Turkey, Greece, Macedon, Syria, because that's probably the place that is closest to the culture of the people who pay the taxes.

I went back to Matthew Bogdanos, the prosecutor, with David Frum's argument.

Now, there are those who would say that your position is noble but naive in that you are putting a physical piece of property into the hands of someone who may be a generation or 10 generations removed from the origin, from either the creator or the owner.

And there are a number of ways that could be problematic.

Those pieces might be sold into the black market, wind up in the palace of some Gulf state Prince or a Chinese or American billionaire.

So how do you think about those potential bad outcomes?

Let's see, I've been in 3 wars, I've had 6 combat tours, I'm a career homicide prosecutor.

No 1 has ever actually called me naive before.

I've seen mass graves in Kosovo and Iraq.

And that's where I get to say to you, we're not the Acme Judgment Company.

We have a burglary in the Upper East Side.

When we catch the guy, do we get to say, you have 19, you don't need them back.

We're going to keep them or we're going to give them to other people.

And if our victim is a country whose political regime we don't particularly care for, tough.

We actually have a very good relationship with the countries that we operate with on our level.

So I'm talking about the Ministry of Culture or the Ministry of Antiquities, we actually require that these countries sign a document at the repatriation ceremony promising that they will maintain the antiquity that's being returned and, wait for it, publicly display it.

Almost certainly not, but here's how it's enforceable.

The next time you have an antiquity from that country that's looted and you call me, am I really the person you want to piss off?

Do you really want to say, I know we promised Colonel Bogdanoff in the Manhattan DA's office that we're gonna maintain this and we're gonna publicly display it, but you know what, forget that, Oops.

And the next time we have an Iranian antiquity, Mr.

Believe it or not, these countries really honor these requests.

In India, particularly, it's really heartwarming.

They will send us videos of the community receiving their idol back.

Like 50 people screaming and yelling and singing and chanting, and they're holding this, you know, 150 pound idol up over their heads as they march it into the temple.

It's followed from the plane right to its resting place in the museum in Cairo or in Lebanon.

We have ongoing relationships across the globe with all these countries.

It's in their best interest to honor their agreement with us.

So we are not returning stuff that is then getting put on the market or being put in storage rooms.

If you were looking for the single most interesting case of returning art or restituting or repatriating art as various people call it, I would nominate the case of the Benin Bronzes, although that name is a bit misleading.

Some of the pieces are indeed made from bronze, but many are not.

And while there is today an African country called Benin just west of Nigeria, The bronzes came from the historic kingdom of Benin in what is now Edo State in southern Nigeria.

In any case, the Benin bronzes are a massive collection of art, artifacts, and religious objects that have been displayed for years in more than 160 museums around the world, including the Smithsonian in the U.S., the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, the Kelvin Grove in Glasgow, and especially the British Museum in London, which is the mother lode of Benin bronzes and which plays a starring role in our story.

The British Museum is surely 1 of the world's great museums.

Some people consider it the greatest, especially for antiquities, but Others consider it, how shall we say this, a trophy case for the spoils of war.

Here, putting it far better than I ever could, is the English comedian James Acaster.

A long time ago, everyone in Britain got in a big old boat and we robbed and this will sound far-fetched

and we got all the swag didn't we and we took it back to old blighty and we hit it this is the clever part we hit it in a museum Now a few of you are sitting there I can see your angry faces like so what fighters keepers shut up.

Hey man a while ago a lot of your ancestors stole loads of stuff from my ancestors yeah I'm here to take them home let's write this wrong What do you say?

How true to history is James Acaster's version?

Let's find out by doing what we usually do, which is calling up the academic experts.

I work at the University of Oxford as a curator at our anthropology museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum.

So if we wind back to 1884 and Berlin and the meeting of the European nations in the Berlin Congress.

This is where they sit down with a map of Africa and say, you get this, I get that, that kind of thing.

And so what is now Nigeria was part of the pink area for the British, but not part of empire at that point, not turning them into colonies at that point.

There are areas controlled by the companies, in this case, the Royal Niger Company.

The Royal Niger Company was a trading firm that essentially served as an arm of the British government.

So we have to imagine this as a corporate and militarist form of empire.

And really this is all about the palm oil, it's about the rubber industry.

In 1892, the Royal Niger Company signed a trade treaty with the Oba, or king of Benin.

Within just a few years, it was decided that the Oba wasn't as cooperative as Britain would have liked, and they sent an expedition to Benin to work things out, headed up by 1 James Phillips.

The group was attacked and Phillips and most of his men were killed.

The British response was what came to be known as a punitive expedition.

And of course, it's 1 of so many other expeditions that happened in these late 1990s years.

This expedition to Benin involved 10 Royal Navy ships and 1, 400 soldiers armed with the recently invented Maxim machine gun.

The Benin defenders had machetes, pistols, and muskets.

The British forces had no trouble taking the Kingdom of Benin.

They massacred the population, burned the city.

They captured the Oba and sent him into exile.

The disruption of the attack on the kingdom cannot be overemphasized.

Aichamonor is from Edo State, the historic location of the Kingdom of Benin.

He is 1 of the artists who represented Nigeria's debut in the Venice Biennale in 2017.

They kind of created a vacuum for us, you know, by removing an entire people's history.

This is what we will consider Our library, a visual library for that Macta, was completely razed down and what they did in Bonn, they looted.

What the British didn't burn, they looted.

Thousands of objects from the ceremonial halls of the Oba.

These included bronze and brass relief plaques that told the story of hundreds of years worth of Benin history, commemorative brass heads that had adorned the shrines of royal ancestors.

They took carved ivory tusks, coral beads, brass bells, figures, and gaming boards.

Even household items like flasks, cups, bowls, spoons, salt shakers.

The Western colonizers were kleptomaniacs.

They stole keys to the doors in the palace.

In the 19th and 20th century, there were 4 European countries accumulating African art.

It was France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany.

That is Bénédicte Savoie, a French professor of art history at the Technical University in Berlin.

Most important pieces went directly to the British Museum, but the rest has been sold on the art market and the art market around 1900.

All these avant-garde are interested in African art and the art market in Europe made a lot of money with all these objects.

And the richest museums at that time in Europe were the German museums, because German was a Reich now.

And if you are a Reich, an empire, you need a museum.

It was absolutely normal in Europe at that time to have huge museums in the capitals of empires, like British Museum, et cetera.

So, the Germans said, okay, we have only Cameroon, Tanzania, Togo and Namibia right now, and let's buy things from Benin City, these very, very important, beautiful culture, and they bought a lot of bronzes, 600 only in Berlin.

Within weeks of this attack, the bronzes were on display in London, Oxford, Berlin, and elsewhere.

And they were displayed, if we go back to the British Museum, they were displayed in the Assyrian saloon alongside objects from ancient Egypt, objects from the Bronze Age, from the ancient Near East.

We have blown your culture back into the Bronze Age.

♪ I'm not sure the narrative is as absolutely obvious as Dan Hicks says.

Still, the British Museum has been for a few centuries now a physical archive of 1 nation's enthusiasm for conquest and empire building.

That era, as you know, is long gone, and yet the evidence, even the bloodiest evidence imaginable, like the Benin bronzes, is still proudly on display.

After the break, who is in favor of returning the Benin Bronzes to Nigeria and who's against it?

I'm Stephen Dubner, this is Freakonomics Radio, we'll be right back.

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We've been speaking with Dan Hicks, a professor at Oxford.

So I think I'm the world's first, well I am the world's first, professor of contemporary archaeology.

I mean it's tautological in some ways but I think it underlines something really important about all archaeology.

Archaeology in some ways is the inverse of history.

So in this case, in terms of the thing that we're talking about, the idea that empire, you know, actually isn't over.

It's here with us in locations that include our museums.

Hicks, remember, is also a curator at Oxford's Pit Rivers Museum.

We are responsible for 1 of the larger collections of the Ben and Bronsons.

I know there was a tweet sent out in 2015 by a grassroots student movement.

It said the Pitt Rivers Museum is 1 of the most violent spaces in Oxford.

Tell me your response when you first saw that tweet.

You know, I heard at that point, I'd simply never seen it that way.

I mean, this is 1 of those, you know, marmalade dropping moments of your career, right?

And, oh, right, let's think this through.

So for me, it's all about learning from a new generation.

I mean, I'm now 50 years old and it's the people who are in their 20s who are reading this material so differently and are showing us things that have been sitting in plain sight for so long.

JS As Hicks began to think things through, as he puts it, his views shifted and hard.

Today he has a zeal that may remind you of a religious convert.

It's called the brutish museums, the Benin Bronzes, colonial violence, and cultural restitution.

The sacking of Benin City in February 1897 was an attack on human life, on culture, on belief, on art, and on sovereignty.

In just a few years, Hicks had become a flag bearer for the movement to repatriate the Benin bronzes to Nigeria.

Nigeria, by the way, had been trying to reclaim the bronzes since the 1930s.

They began asking more insistently after gaining independence from Britain in 1960, but not much happened.

In 2010, a consortium of Western museums joined a few Nigerian institutions to form the Benin Dialogue group.

The idea was to establish a new museum in Benin City, Nigeria that would display the bronzes once the Western museums decided to return them.

As David Frum wrote in his Atlantic article, the George Floyd protests of 2020 jolted the group into hyperactivity.

It might seem strange that the murder of a black man by a white police officer in America would trigger a global sentiment to return art looted from Nigeria by Britain some 130 years earlier.

The parallels were, as Dan Hicks might say, hidden in plain sight.

Now, today, in the 21st century, France, the UK, Belgium, and Germany are, yes, like Olympic Games for restitution.

They are fighting for, or they are struggling in order to be the first to restitute important collections.

Savoie herself has played a significant role in this restitution drama.

In 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron visited several former French colonies in Africa.

Like the British, French colonizers had sacked and looted their way through sub-saharan Africa and sent home thousands of treasures that are still on display in French museums.

During a speech at a university in Burkina Faso, Macron said, I cannot accept that a large part of cultural heritage from several African countries is in France.

Savoy, who was already sympathetic to returning African art, wrote an article calling Macron's speech a revolution.

And Macron promptly appointed Savoy, along with the Senegalese economist Felwin Sarr, to push the revolution along.

Savoy and Sarr visited museum directors and government officials in 4 African countries, and they wrote a nearly 200-page report that Macron apparently found so persuasive that he immediately promised to restitute thousands of objects to the country of Benin and to loan money to build a new museum there.

But returning a massive collection of art and artifacts so weighted with history is not simple.

Critics said the report was too ambitious and too academic to be realistic.

Furthermore, French law prohibits the removal of artwork from public collections, at least for the time being.

The British Parliament had similarly passed laws making it hard to deaccession works from their public museums, although recent legislation has given museum trustees more leeway.

At the moment, several museums in several countries have at least begun the process of repatriating African art.

And I think the most competitive tandem is between Germany and France right now.

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542. Is a Museum Just a Trophy Case?