The History and Legacy of British Colonial Looting

Abstract

This historiographical review surveys the scholarship on British colonial spoils of war, outlining and critically analysing the main arguments and approaches as well as the new directions taken by recent authors. Moreover, it seizes the opportunity to take stock of what we know to address one of the field’s main issues – its disjointed nature. Scholars have mostly focused on a particular object, collection, or war, and so our understanding has developed piecemeal. By producing something resembling a bird’s eye view of British colonial spoils in the long nineteenth century, this review outlines some broader patterns, change over time and across geographies, and identifies areas in need of further study. It does so by structuring the discussion around three key topics/approaches: practices, customs, and law; the social and cultural lives of loot; and the decolonial critique of museums.