Growing pressure on European museums to return artifacts taken from Southeast Asia during colonial times could provide soft-power benefits for the EU amid attempts to improve its image in the region, analysts say.
The British Museum (‘BM’) has a collection of 224 objects from or likely from Cambodia, which were acquired across a period spanning from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this figure BM’s collection of banknotes, coins and medals from Cambodia is not included.
The looting of Cambodia’s sacred temples, in the dead of night or under the cover of the fog of war by unscrupulous thieves, took place over many decades up until the 2000s. Now, a host of museums are investigating their own collections.
