While museums across Europe and North America are increasingly engaging with repatriation claims, the British Museum continues to hide behind the British Museum Act of 1963. This domestic law prohibits trustees from permanently disposing of collections except in narrow circumstances, a convenient shield repeatedly invoked to block meaningful returns under the guise of acting in the “public good.”
Similarly hypocritical is the museum’s loan policy, which refuses loans to exhibitions displaying stolen or illegally exported objects, while demanding guarantees — including immunity from judicial seizure — that any loaned object be returned. This stance is especially ironic for an institution long criticized for retaining and refusing to repatriate looted cultural objects.
As a result, the British Museum has increasingly become the subject of outrage and ridicule: an international symbol of imperial privilege and institutional stubbornness, where visitors “feel at home” because looted objects from almost every corner of the world are on display.
In its latest attempt to completely ignore societal progress — after hosting a tone-deaf gala earlier this year — the British Museum has now unveiled what its director, Nicholas Cullinan, called an “innovative,” “new” long-term loans program to “decolonize” its approach.
As the inaugural loan under the new program, the British Museum sent 80 Greek and Egyptian antiquities to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) museum in Mumbai, India Cullinan told the Telegraph that the new model was “a much more positive one of collaboration rather than this kind of zero-sum, binary, all-or-nothing model that people put forward.” In reality, this model is neither new nor decolonial.
It is a rebranding exercise that preserves colonial power structures while pretending to dismantle them.
Art historian Victor Murari wrote a similar piece: Loaning objects extracted through colonial violence does not challenge the logic that keeps them under European custody; it reinforces it. A loan presupposes legitimate ownership, curatorial authority, and the power of revocation. In other words, this is mine, but I may grant you temporary access to it.
