The museum decolonization movement has recently made the headlineshighlighting the rarely legitimate acquisitions of cultural gems from different civilizations by colonizing peoples and, first and foremost, the English, who set a standard in this area.
This is why the television version of the Australian podcast (available on the CBC audio platform) Stuff the British Stole falls on time. This documentary production with an undisguised ideological bias reveals the “not so polite” story behind the acquisition or usurpation of works of art and other objects with an important symbolic value for the peoples who lost to the British. Journalist Marc Fennell travels the world to meet experts from various backgrounds, mainly historians, to better understand the context in which these treasures ended up in the bosom of the empire and how they were returned or could be returned. to be… or not.
The first episode, devoted to the particular fate of the Koh-i Nor diamond, which today adorns one of the crowns of the royal family, shows the full complexity of the subject of the series. This huge exceptional pebble, passed through the hands of several emperors and kings of Asia to end up at the court of Queen Victoria, made it possible, by its notoriety, during the Universal Exhibition in London in 1852, to finance in large part of many museum institutions where British colonial acquisitions are exhibited. Today, it would be difficult to determine to whom it could be returned…
To see in video