Ritula Shah
Welcome, everyone, to Chatham House and welcome to this event: Understanding Decolonization in the 21st Century and this is, of course, part of a series to mark the Chatham House Centenary in 2020. This conversation is very much on the record and we’ll be hearing from our three panellists and there will, of course, be time for all of you to ask questions. We’re joined also, by representatives from the Ethiopian Embassy, including the Ambassador. Welcome very much to you all. And if you want to tweet about this event, the hashtag is #CHEvents and whether you want to tweet or not, please put your phone on silent. Also, we’re being livestreamed today, so, if you shouldn’t be here and you should be somewhere else, now’s the moment to put on your false beard. In the event of an emergency, there are Chatham House people around, they will show us the way out, they’ll know what to do.
So, the issue of decolonization and the dilemmas it raises has presented itself, in many forms, in recent years. There’s Rhodes Must Fall, obviously, the debate around the ownership of objects in museums and questions about the content of our history courses and literature courses in universities. And it’s interesting, in international relations this week I was speaking to Ambassador Wendy Sherman, who some of you, I’m sure, will know. She was one of the key negotiators, from the American side, in the Iran nuclear deal. And at one point she was talking about the personal cost of being involved in those negotiations for the Iranians, who were, you know, directly involved, who were at these talks. And she was saying to me, “Well, for them, the failure could mean losing their jobs, but also, possibly even their lives.” There was, you know, these serious sort of things at stake here. But, obviously, that meant things were very tense, but she said, “There was another layer to the tensions, which was that the Iranians really didn’t like being told what weapons they could and couldn’t have by representatives of their former colonial powers. What kind of weapons they could have was something they should decide for themselves. They hadn’t, essentially, gotten over the overthrow of Mosaddegh. The events of history loom large in discussions that people are having, important discussions, today.
So, let’s begin today’s conversation. On our panel Dr Meera Sabrana – Sabranatnam, I’m going to say it wrong, Sabaratnam, Sabaratnam. Let me start again, Dr Meera Sabaratnam, a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at SOAS. Her research focuses on the colonial and post-colonial dimensions of international relations. Dr Katharina Rietzler, a Lecturer in American History at the University of Sussex. Her main research interest is internationalism for the 1910s to the 1960s. And Tristram Hunt was a Labour MP, Shadow Education Minister. He’s a Historian, Broadcaster and Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Welcome to you all. Each of you are going to speak in turn and at the end of it, we’ll open up the conversation to all of you. So, Meera, do you want to begin?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
Sure, thank you very much. So, I’m going to say a little bit about what I think decolonization means in the context of universities and I want to start by asking about what are universities for? And I think one of the complexities that’s come about with the decolonization debate is that the multiple purposes of universities have become obvious. So, I would suggest that there are at least four, sometimes competing, sometimes complementary, understandings of what universities are for.
One is a, sort of, conservative vision, so universities are for the preservation and the transmission of knowledge and traditions through generations. So, we have canons, which we pass on and we understand that some thinkers in the past, kind of, continue into the present. Second is a more liberal vision, that universities are for free enquiry, they’re for innovation, they’re for critical thinking, they’re for opening up and tearing down received wisdom, in various kinds of ways. There’s a third vision, which is what we might call a neoliberal vision, which is universities are for training workers for the knowledge economy and they should be oriented towards employability and the sort of, the economic power of the country. And fourth, I would argue is a, sort of, justice oriented vision. Universities should, in some ways, contribute to social progress, to the improvement of humanity, somehow a more equal, less violent kind of world.
Now, I would suggest that the arguments for decolonization can contribute to the last three elements of these vision. Whilst I would see myself and my work as routed in probably the last one as my primary objective, I think it’s compatible with the ideas of university as a challenging critical space and even compatible with the idea that universities are somehow preparing graduates for that world.
So, then the question arises: what does it mean to say that university curriculums are colonial in some kind of way? So, we’ve discussed this quite vigorously amongst the, sort of, movement, amongst the people who are doing this work. I would say, again, there’s several different things that are meant by this. The first way is that there’s a narrowness of sources, literatures, cases and viewpoints, which are at the heart of most university curricular, in particular, subjects. This is, obviously, most visible in places like English literature or history, but even social sciences, such as politics or economics tend to have a very limited set of reference points. And this is a problem because it’s an argument about the self-referentiality or the narcissism of these fields, that often, particularly historically, the experiences of the West are being seen to be the primary things that you should be studying, that they’re somehow universally relevant to experiences more broadly and that this is somehow adequate for thinking about history or politics, not Western history or Western politics, but history or politics.
A second way in which we can understand university curriculums as colonial is through the kind of reductive, or sometimes quite insulting, portraits which are made of the rest of the world, by contrast with the rather developed and rich understanding we might be given of the West. Often, some of the attitudes that are reflected in the academic literature reflect, or are embedded in, or are informed by, a, sort of, notion of the West as, sort of, vanguardist, maybe more civilised and the rest of the world as a bit backward and, kind of, catching up or failing to do so, in various kinds of ways.
The third way in which we might think of university curriculums as colonial is, actually, through their own erasure of the imperial and colonial conditions in which a lot of these issues or economic development or historical events took place. And so, one of the things that we’re finding, when we look at what people are actually taught, is that they’re taught very little about the role of empire and colonialism in the construction of the modern world, a modern world which we all think it’s very urgent to understand.
Fourth, compounding these problems, there’s a lack of alternative viewpoints and standpoints. So, a lack of alternative interpretations of the same material, but particularly those which are grounded in spaces and traditions of thought, which come from outside the classic spaces.
And finally, these generate, overall, not just an intellectual narrowness, but a specific kind of alienation amongst particular groups of people whose presence, or whose relevance to history, or to the development of the modern world is side lined. And we see this particularly in discussing university with staff and students from minoritized backgrounds.
So, what do we do about this? So, for me, decolonizing means seeing and challenging those limitations. So, what we need is more variety and depth in our syllabuses. This not just gives us better critical thinking, but it also gives us more challenging material with which to examine our baseline assumptions. One could argue that this gives us a more global understanding of world history and Britain’s place in it and more possibilities for creativity, for dialogue and if innovation is your thing, even for innovation. There’s also the ethical dimension to it that, arguably, by opening up these conversations, by seeing these patterns, by seeing these exclusions, you have more scope for the university as promoting human justice, human equality, progressive values of various kinds.
So, I’ll just conclude by saying a few, sort of, reflections. Some people do see decolonization as a loss. I think they are fearful, in some respects, of the loss of authority or structure, or prestige, or the canon that they treasure and the works that they love and the literatures that they’ve grown up with. And I understand that fear and I think it is destabilizing once one starts to open the doors and realise that one doesn’t know all the things that one thinks one knows, that is a destabilizing experience. And I think we’ve seen that in some of the reactions to the decolonization project.
I would argue that rather than seeing it as a loss, I think we gain so much by reorienting ourselves in this way, both intellectually, in terms of the breadth of materials that we have to draw on, the ways in which we can understand the world from different standpoints, and also politically, the ways in which we understand ourselves in relation to others. We may lose control or possession of objects or, you know, canons, but what we gain is a deeper sense of relationality to the world around us.
It is hard work, we do have to push ourselves to learn new things and universities are currently under assault from all kinds of forces, which make carving out the time and the labour necessary to do this kind of deep rethinking quite difficult and there’s also the personal challenges that that involves. But, ultimately, I do think it’s worth it and I think it’s necessary in a world which appears, unfortunately, to be closing more doors than it’s opening. Thank you.
Ritula Shah
Thank you, Meera. I wonder if, when you break things down in the way that you describe, you talk about more variety and depth and syllabuses gaining breadth, do you lose, though, the idea of universal narratives, an idea or a way of seeing something that is viewed by many people from the same starting point, is that a loss? Does that make conversations harder?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
So, I actually think it enhances our possibility for – if we think of universal things as the things that bind us, it’s not saying we’re all the same, but things that we can relate to each other about, I actually think it expands that possibility, rather than closes it down. Because if you say some group of people’s thinking is universal and others is particular, what you’re actually doing is putting them on a very uneven and often unjustified, kind of, ledge.
Ritula Shah
Okay. Katharina?
Dr Katharina Rietzler
Thank you very much. My name is Katharina Rietzler and I teach at the University of Sussex and I’m coming here as a higher education practitioner, so, somebody who’s really at the coalface, so to speak, teaching students, producing curricula, etc., etc. I’m also a Historian of IR think tanks and I’ll make some remarks about that and I’ll try to imagine what a decolonized history of IR think tanks might look like.
But first of all, I’d like to say a few things that really follow on from what Meera has already elaborated. To my mind, as somebody who is teaching quite a lot, I’m doing a lot of undergraduate teaching, decolonization, decolonizing the curriculum, it’s very much on the agenda. I was just in a school meeting yesterday, where a first year student asked us to try harder to decolonize our curriculum. So, this is, really, very much led by student demand and indeed, there are some hard metrics here, hard metrics that are important to anybody teaching in higher education. There is the unexplained attainment gap between White and Black students, regarding degree outcomes that was identified by the Office for Students. So, there really are some important metrics that should induce us to look at our teaching critically. And again, just to reflect on what my own university, Sussex, has been doing here, and we had a decolonization workshop about our curriculum a few years ago and we’re currently trialling a new way of co-producing curriculum materials with students, who are then also being paid for their time. That is another issue to ask, especially BAME students, to just share their time and expertise, without any form of compensation, also seems quite exploitative. And I’m sure that there is some good practice here that universities can discuss and share.
So, to my mind, as a Teacher, a University Lecturer, there are some – there are two issues, really, at stake, when it comes to curriculum design. One is obviously what we’ve already heard, the issue of representation. Our reading list just consisting of White male Europeans. Have we thought about the ways in which our canons are shaped by assumptions about quality that can be dubious? And in my own work I’ve looked at the exclusion from IR canons of women and some of these assumptions that are at work there in canon formation.
And the second issue is curriculum content. Again, are the topics that we teach global enough? Do we actually equip our students with the knowledge that they need to understand challenges in the world today, whether that relates to the ways in which imperial domination has shaped societies, both on the British Isles and abroad, etc., etc.? So, it’s really about equipping students to become global citizens in the modern world. There are some familiar criticisms of decolonizing the curriculum. There is the danger, maybe sometimes, of tokenism, of a, kind of, additive approach that doesn’t go deeply enough. Decolonizing is sometimes used as an umbrella term for all sorts of equity issues and there’s a danger that addressing concrete problems, such as the attainment gap, becomes harder if we don’t think very specifically about specific equity issues. There are, obviously, other axes of oppression.
Then there’s the issue of expertise and language barriers. The majority of our students, in my department, are from South East England, which is very much not ethnically diverse, and although we do our best to challenge our students, including material that is not in English is sometimes difficult. If decolonizing means listening to non-European voices, I think languages expertise, sort of, specialist expertise, is important and, unfortunately, government funding for specialist language studies has also been slashed. So, there are some practical issues here that pertain to decolonization in the context of curricula. And it seems to me that there’s definitely more scope for conversation, for sharing good practice, because I also think there is some good practice out there in the higher education context.
But to take us back a step, what I think is also important is reflecting on the coloniality of knowledge producing institutions and again, I’m really following on here from Meera. And, of course, I’m making these general remarks about higher education in a space that is, itself, producing knowledge that has, in fact, been in the business of knowledge production for 100 years, Chatham House, which, since the 1920s, has invested huge amounts of financial and intellectual capital in international relations expertise. And I’ve studied Chatham House, from its founding, to the 1940s. It was obviously a site of dominant thinking, it was designed to generate knowledge for policymakers. And because it was founded in the years after World War I, when the British Empire was at the peak of its power, it was certainly going to promote a certain kind of view or to produce a certain kind of knowledge and, again, this is very obvious to Historians of IR think tanks. The Founders of Chatham House were very much invested in reforming the British Empire to help it respond to challenges, not to abolish it. An important figure here is Lionel Curtis. He was also important in the making of the Union of South Africa. So, he was invested in translating the British experience of liberal imperialism to other contexts, maybe to international governance.
Chatham House was extremely innovative. It spread its institutional model throughout the British Empire, but also to Continental Europe. There was a French think tank that was founded in its image, the Centre d’études de politique étrangére, which was then collaborating with Chatham House, in the 1930s, to study problems of imperial governance. So, this is the kind of baggage that comes with the Institution. Chatham House is also famous for producing expertise on British colonies and an important example here is the African Research Survey of 1938, which has studied – which has been studied very closely by Historians. And what is interesting about that survey is that it produced both knowledge that justified empire, but that also destabilised it and that recognised, to some extent, African autonomy and agency. So, in some ways, knowledge produced under Chatham House created critical debates in the certain kind of pluralism, within an overall framework that was imperialist and colonialist.
And why is that important today? I think it is important to understand coloniality as a first step before thinking, or maybe at the same time as thinking about decolonization. And I think a, sort of, history of Chatham House that will take into account current debates in this area would also try to situate it, situate the space, the space of knowledge production within a broader history of anti-colonial thought. London was the inter-war capital of anti-colonial thinkers in the Western world.
So, to come to a conclusion, really, I think in the context of current debates about decolonizing the curriculum, decolonizing knowledge production more broadly, I think it’s important to create, really, a fine grained analysis that is really founded on good empirical research of important institutions, such as think tanks, as a basis for critique and then to also, shift the focus from leading figures, such as Lionel Curtis, to the second tier and even the tier below. Thank you.
Ritula Shah
Katharina, thank you. Just to pick up on that very last point you made, for somewhere like Chatham House, is it enough to simply acknowledge the past, perhaps situate it, that context within any history that it presents of itself? There is no sense in which you’re saying it would affect the work it does today?
Dr Katharina Rietzler
That wouldn’t be for me to say, but I would hope that a critical engagement with an institution’s history informs the work that is done today. And to maybe suggest one example and one criticism that is sometimes raised, in the context of decolonizing universities, is the way in which actors from the Global South are seen as a source of knowledge, but not co-producers of knowledge. And I think a critical history of that in the past might inform approaches today. But I’m a Historian, not a think tank employee.
Ritula Shah
Thank you. Tristram?
Dr Tristram Hunt
Thank you. Well, good afternoon, everyone. It’s a great pleasure to be at Chatham House. ‘Cause I work in a museum, I’ve got some slides, so I hope you’re able to see some of the images. I want to move the conversation in a slightly different direction, to talk about the decolonization debate within the world of museums, which begins, in some ways, to focus on the question of provenance of objects in Western European collections. And the image you can see up above are two great academic scholars: Savoy/Sarr, who produced this report commissioned by Emmanuel Macron, on what should happen to the collections of colonial origin within French museums. And this was a very clear report, which said that every item, essentially, within a French collection, for which there was not clear evidence that it had been acquired legally between circa 1880 and 1960, should be returned to the country of origin. And this was published some 18 months ago and one can’t say that the response of the French museum world has been overwhelming to the demand of that report, nor, indeed, the energy of the French Government behind it.
What you also see up there is a picture of the, what was the Royal Africa Museum outside Brussels, which has been transformed from a celebration of King Leopold’s, “civilised admission” in the Belgian Congo, into an account of the horrors and atrocities of Belgium in the Congo, a complete reversal of what that institution was about. So, this is a very, very live debate, quite rightly, it seems to me, across cultural institutions and I think this is one of the issues we should thrash out this afternoon is the range of understanding of what decoloniality and decolonization means and I think that’s one of the opportunities and one of the challenges.
Let me say a bit about the own institution I have the privilege to lead, which is the Victoria & Albert Museum. The V&A has many foundations, as initially the South Kensington Museum. One of those is around education and design education, one of those is around the Great Exhibition of 1851, but one of those is implicitly and explicitly colonial, that the East India Company, which was the vehicle for British colonialism, as all of you know, in South Asia in the 18th Century, the psychology of colonialism was also about collecting and acquiring. And they brought it back to Britain to create something called the East India Company Repository, which was the museum of the East India Company, which became the India Museum, which formed part of the South Kensington Museum.
So, the origins of the V&A are embedded in the British imperial and colonial story and this is why I think to decolonize the V&A, in many ways, doesn’t make sense, because you can’t. That the colonial story is embedded within the entirety of the museum and in a sense, you decontextualize that story. And it’s not a question of loss, I don’t think, ‘cause I agree that we gain so much by thinking in different ways, but I think a frame which says you have to decolonize this institution doesn’t understand that the history of it is totally embedded in the colonial story and the colonial experience. So, that’s why, for example, we have, as you can see there in the Fabric of India Exhibition, some of the world’s greatest textile collections from South Asia.
Now, a lot of people will say, “Well, this is loot, this is booty, this is stolen,” and it’s not. It was acquired by actors within South Asia in the 19th Century, many of them connected to colonialism and many of them with much greater power than those with indigenous source communities. And so, yes, there was inequity in the colonial transaction, which produced these collections, just as there is inequity today amongst the acquiring Gulf collections or the Chinese museums, who are buying up huge amounts of work because they are wealth – more wealthy and more powerful. In 150 years of provocation, will we be saying to the Gulf collections and the Chinese collections, “These were acquired at a time of growing Chinese imperial power and growing Gulf power and do we now need to think about them being returned to their countries of origins?” my question.
What we also have, though, within the collection, is booty, items taken by the British Army. Here you see the so-called man tiger organ, which was commissioned by the great ruler of Mysore, Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, commissioned for his children, who were being held hostage by the British. And it was an account of resistance to the British, because what this is, is a tiger mauling the neck off a British Officer and Tipu Sultan is saying, “Have faith, because I will rescue you and we will beat the British.” And in fact, with the storming of Seringapatam in 1799, Tipu Sultan was killed and this was taken from the palace and then was paraded in Britain as an account of British colonial power. And so, what had initially been a source of resistance became, actually, a source of colonial prowess and this remains in the collection today, interpreted now in multiple different ways.
The collection grew in the latter half of the 19th Century, beyond the South Asian collection. Here you see our Korean collection, our Chinese collection, our Japanese collection and our great Islamic Middle East and North African collection with the Ardabil Carpet and this is a global story, as much as a colonial story. Actually, this is the opening up of Japan, in the latter half of the 19th Century. This is the opening up of trade to the Islamic Middle East and North Africa and the V&A acquired collections during that process. And yes, that was an account of British global power, but not all of it, as we would understand, colonial.
As we’ve discussed, there is a multiplicity of narratives around the decolonization question and whether it’s the Rhodes Must Fall campaign in – led in universities and thinking about the curriculum, or what comes out of New York, initially, and is now moving around lots of other institutions, of the Decolonize This Place movement. And on the one hand, this is around curriculum and it’s around provenance of items and collections. On the other hand, it’s about housing costs in Brooklyn and it’s about pay levels of staff and it’s about hiring practices. And it seems, for me, as a Historian, words matter and meanings matter and when you’re talking about decolonization, how you embed housing prices within Brooklyn as part of that seems to broaden the context, often unnecessarily. Decolonize This Place, in their initial demands of Brooklyn Museum, also had very specific demands about any interaction between the museum and the State of Israel. And again, that seemed, to me, to move the conversation away from thinking about the colonial origins of collections in that history, to a much broader political conversation, which is totally fine and interesting, but again, has broader ramifications.
We have, within the collection, other items, which have an imperial, rather than a colonial, past, and one of those is our Ethiopian collection, and it’s wonderful to see the Ambassador and colleagues from the Embassy here today. This was taken as booty by the British Army in 1868, at the Magdala Campaign, by Napier and after the fall of Emperor Tewodros it came back to Britain. It was sold off by the British Army to pay for their, kind of, bonuses and it was allocated across the British Museum, the South Kensington Museum and the British Library. And at the time William Gladstone said, “These items should not be in UK collections,” and in our display we had Gladstone’s speech saying that. And over the course of the 20th Century, some items have been returned, by the Royal household and others, to Ethiopia. And we’re now in a conversation, with the Embassy and with the Ethiopian Government, about how we take these items on long-term loan to Ethiopia. And quite rightly, Politicians and Commentators in Ethiopia say, “Hold on, you want us to borrow from you items you took from us?” And at the moment, that’s all we can do, because under the terms of our foundation of the 1983 National Heritage Act, just as with the British Museum, Trustees of the organisation are not allowed to deaccession items from the collection and that can only be changed by primary legislation.
So, what we do is seek to build partnerships and relationships around this. And we’ve had a long-term loan on – to an institution in Spain, with a similarly disputed artefact, and in the long run, it’s yes about the collections, but actually, it’s about conservation partnership and curatorial partnership and intellectual exchange and that sense of gaining more from a conversation around the colonial and imperial past, than a sense of loss and I’m very happy to speak about this further. But this is, in terms of restitution requests to the Victoria & Albert Museum, this is an active one and our only active one and we’re seeking to engage on it.
What we’ve also recently put on display are items from our Ashanti Gold collection. These were taken in another colonial raid by Sir Garnet Wolseley in the mid-1870s and they were displayed almost as a, kind of, the fruits of a colonial raid, rather than the history of design, which is what the Victoria & Albert Museum is about. And we explain all of that in our display and it seems to me when we think about the colonial past, transparency is a key and an understanding of the history is the key and being brave about the history and being open about it, whilst then going to the next stage of thinking about the partnerships and the relationships and the programmes into the future that take us into a different place.
We’ve also been researching the slave owning history of the collections and what you see there is the great Mazarin Chest, owned by Cardinal Mazarin, incredibly beautiful Japanese lacquer-wear, which was then bought by Beckford, William Beckford, massive slave, huge Jamaican plantations. And so, that – its origins are not slave, but actually, the transmission of it to the museum went through slaveholding hands, and we’ve also worked with Artists to think about the collection. We worked with an academic called Dr Hannah Young to research our slave owning collection and with Victoria, a brilliant Filmmaker, who spoke about the loss and the lost voices within the organisation. She produced a series of brilliant films, of silent films, of what is unspoken within the organisation.
Two final things: we have to be an open and accessible museum, as part of a conversation around audiences and staff. We live in an incredibly diverse environment. Our museum belongs to the people of Britain. The taxpayers support it and we need to be open to all parts of it and just as most museums have more work to do, we have more work to do in ensuring we are as diverse as possible in our staff, but also, we’re bringing diverse communities into the museum to see what belongs to them. And we’ve recently appointed Gus Casely-Hayford, who is going to be our Director of our new museums in East London. And as you can see from the data up there, we’re doing pretty good on ensuring that those are figures of Black-Asian Minority Ethnic visitors to national museums. And we have to keep working hard to ensure that we are as open and accessible to everyone to think about these global connections.
Finally, within the conversations around museums and provenance and restitution and repatriation, I still maintain the importance of museums as global collections. In an era when we’re seeing more chauvinism and more nationalism and more particularism, the story museums tell are the stories of multiculturalism, of exchange, of adaptation, of interaction. The story of the object, the story of the material culture, is a multi-layered account of races, ethnicities and peoples creating works of wonder and beauty. And we have to be clear that some of those were done in different power relationships, which we need to expose and analyse, but we also need to ensure that that diversity within the collections, in an age of chauvinism and nationalism and populism, is held onto.
Ritula Shah
Thank you. There’s so much to talk about. I’m going to ask…
Dr Tristram Hunt
But if I…
Ritula Shah
…one quite narrow point, really, and hopefully, the questions will address some of the bigger points. But the idea of a long-term loan versus giving objects back, you talk about the law, but presumably, the law can be reinterpreted, just as it was with objects that were looted by the Nazis, say, during the Holocaust. Isn’t there a way in which, if you really believe that the right thing, something has been stolen, booty of war, it should go back to its rightful owners, to where it came from, that the law could be reinterpreted?
Dr Tristram Hunt
The law was changed with the Nazis. That was primary legislation, that’s the difference. It wasn’t a reinterpretation, it wouldn’t have been allowed to be reinterpreted. It was primary legislation, which changed the law around restitution to families whose items had been stolen by the Nazis. And so, that, then, allowed the V&A Museum, the British Museum, and the other institutions, where there was a really specific provenance and a really clear, a property ownership within a family. And we’ve, actually, hired a recent Provenance Researcher in the museum to look at, again, not only some of our colonial collections, but also, the Nazi collections. And what’s so interesting is that you sometimes find that items which had been stolen by the Nazis from Jewish families, which we feared were, you know, were, kind of, Nazi loot, actually, had been returned to those families after the war and then, the, kind of, third generation didn’t like them and put them back on the market. And the importance of that is to understand that you begin with the object and the history of the object. And my, kind of, reservation, in a sense, about the Savoy/Sarr totalising report is that is a political response to a historic role about colonialism built around collections, rather than beginning with the story and the account and the history of the items in the collection.
Ritula Shah
Okay. Meera and Katharina, I want to give you a chance to respond to some of that, but I also want to ask you about the very word Tristram said, ‘words matter’. Is it – are we in danger of taking too literal an interpretation of decolonizing? Is it about erasure, is it about taking things away, or is it about expanding understanding? There’s a danger that decolonizing can feel as if it’s about taking things out, about giving things back, so that the hole actually becomes smaller. Meera?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
So, I think it’s difficult, because in terms of the conversations that I’ve been in with educators and museum activists and so on, none of us understand decolonization as decontextualizing or de-historicising objects. It’s actually adding more history and making it more visible. So, I mean, I visit museums, I love them and I love them for the reasons that, you know, people love to see things from around the world, which expand their minds and so on.
But the issue for me is that when you go to Britain’s museums, it’s actually not obvious. The colonial and imperial origins are not manifest in the, you know, the architecture and in the presentation of the objects, their disputed origins are not explained in the, you know, in the, sort of, descriptions. And so, I’m not sure to what extent I disagree with Tristram about, you know, actually, we need to make it very clear that this is an imperial institution. We need to make it very clear that these objects came through this particular way and I, actually, I’m much more relaxed about the ownership question. I think we should change the law, if the law is wrong and then, those should reflect our values, ‘cause museums are political spaces. One upon a time it used to be acceptable to go around the world collecting things and showing them off and, sort of, parading them as your trinkets. It’s not acceptable anymore, because we understand that the dignity and respect of other peoples and nations is contingent, in part, on them having ownership of their heritage.
Ritula Shah
I’m not giving up my plastic gondola, though. Katharina?
Dr Katharina Rietzler
I agree with that. I – it’s hard for me to understand how decolonizing can be some – can entail something being taken away, I mean, certainly not in the context of university curricula. It is about adding things, but also, really about reshaping some of those categories and really trying to rethink some abstract concepts, such as, I don’t know, sovereignty, from different points of view, to challenge our own received thinking. So, in that sense, I would agree with that, but I also think and I alluded to that a little bit in my remarks, there is a danger that the concept itself gets diluted, that, as I’ve said, all sorts of equity issues, such as economic inequality, are just bundled in and then, it becomes all a bit sloganistic and tokenistic. So, I do think it’s important to be very specific about what it is that we’re actually talking about and I think that is also important in a higher education context. We don’t want this to be a, sort of, fashionable thing to do and we want this to be reflected and, sort of, based on good arguments and evidence.
Ritula Shah
Brilliant. Well, it’s time for you to all join in this conversation. There are a couple of people with microphones about the room, so, please put your hand up and then, wait until the microphone gets to you before you ask your questions. So, a gentleman there, yes?
Duke
Yes, I’m Duke…
Ritula Shah
Just, if you could take the microphone, please?
Duke
Sorry, my name is Duke, a Member of Chatham House. My questions are directed to Dr Hunt. You describe the colonial acquisition of artworks as equitable and compared it with current acquisition by China and the Gulf States. Firstly, does this comparison take into account the power structure that existed between the parties? And secondly, who controlled the narrative, I mean, is it just the West, or both parties?
Ritula Shah
Okay, Tristram?
Dr Tristram Hunt
I mean, I think the point I was seeking to make with Duke was that the – there’s a – there’s one level of criticism about booty and loot and the forcible acquisition of collections by military forces. There’s another criticism, which says – you know, what scholars call the informal empire of European economic and political dominance in the latter half of the 19th Century and the first half of the 20th Century, gave them the wealth and the power to acquire items. And whilst that’s certainly the case, I suppose my question is, you always have global inequities in power. Art and culture often follows power and money and today we are seeing, you know, the incredible rise of China, just as we saw the Americans strip bare the English country houses in the early 20th Century of their – of, you know, many beautiful interiors and works of art. Today, we’re seeing China and the Gulf States build up incredible museums and incredible collections, not through formal imperial power, but through an informal economic empire. And that, I think, is probably going to be reflected in their collections in the future.
So, when we think about the V&A or other British or European institutions, in a sense, they are a reflection of the power Europe had in the 19th Century. Will the collections we see in the China and the Gulf today be a reflection of the power that those parts of the world had in the early 21st Century? I was just trying to, kind of, contextualise, in a sense, the growth of collections in museums and galleries, relative to economic and political power, if that makes sense.
Ritula Shah
Do you think they will be placing those objects, though, within a different narrative, given the time that we’re in now?
Dr Tristram Hunt
Well, that’s what’s what so interesting. What – in a sense, many of the new museums being established in the Gulf and China, both private and public, consciously follow European models of display and understanding. And the – I mean, the museum that I have seen, which most, sort of, brilliantly and controversially, completely dispenses with all that, is the Museum of Native American Art and Culture on the Smithsonian, which consciously doesn’t take any of those, kind of, what might be regarded as, kind of, Western rationalist models of knowledge, and approaches the history of tribes – of tribal First Nation America and their cultural artefacts in a totally different way. But I think the new museums often consciously follow the traditional European ones, actually.
Ritula Shah
Interesting. Yes, should we just take gentleman there and the gentleman there? We can take two.
Barry Murphy
Hello, Barry Murphy with PwC. Just, it’s a massively intellectual conversation, which is brilliant, but colonization also brings with it a very, very deep emotional aspect. So, I don’t need to see trinkets in museums. What I need to do is go and experience the culture somewhere, to find out what it really is and the trampling on those cultures is what means colonization always comes with a very long memory. And particularly in the comments about universities and curricula, I get what you’re saying. How far further do you think we need to go, so that students, over the next number of years, really get that emotional aspect to colonization, so, we never think that just because someone else is going to be more powerful next year, it’s okay for what we did last year? That’s the bit that worries me.
Ritula Shah
And there was a gentleman there, as well. Be lovely to hear from some of the women.
Paul Ramsbottom
Paul Ramsbottom, Wolfson Foundation. It’s been fascinating to hear the discussion about curriculum and about collections and I wondered whether the panel might also reflect on the source of wealth underpinning UK cultural and academic institutions? Thinking, perhaps, particularly, of the Glasgow case study and the extent to which, particularly for the longer established organisations, the philanthropy underpinning a lot of their evolution came from sources with direct links to colonialism and also, on occasion, to slavery, how problematic that is and what the contemporary response should be to that, when there isn’t anything as concrete as a curriculum to change, or an item to debate, discuss.
Ritula Shah
Meera, do you want to go first?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
Sure. To the question on the right side of the room, in terms of how much further we need to go, and I think the question about the emotional dimensions of colonialism is something that we really needed to unpack and, in some senses, is a much harder conversation than the intellectual who did what to whom, when? And we can, actually, largely agree on those descriptive elements, although there’s, you know, some people talk about the Bengal famine one way and the other way, and so on. But it is really educating ourselves ethically and emotionally to have empathy, not just with the colonisers, but the colonised and all of those positions in-between that were part of that complex structure, that I think is only available when you have that multiplicity of sources.
And I think it’s challenging for universities, because, in a way, on the one hand, we’re encouraged to very much standardise and quality assure our modules and so on, so there have to be readings like this, assessments like this, do this, and so every – it becomes much more about a box ticking exercise and students want to come out with this set of employable skills. And where the spaces for saying, actually, this class is about emotionally educating, or emotionally exploring what it means to be colonised or what, the kind of violence that is involved in an acquisition or something, could entail, and that’s a much harder thing to make room for. It is possible, we can be creative, we can say as universities, ‘cause we set our own criteria for what we think the standards should be, we can try to say that one of the competencies that is required, as part of a history education or a politics education, is actually the ability to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes. And so, some of your assessments or coursework need to reflect that kind of skill. But that’s – you know, we can – actually, we need to go much further.
Just briefly on the source of wealth question, so, I think this is, actually, where the housing crisis in Brooklyn come back. And so, some of the conversations that you’ve seen in the United States, for example, where universities have had their endowments rooms, slave owning families, for example, have been about lowering tuition for the descendants of slaves and having access programmes and ensuring greater representation. It’s a difficult conversation, ‘cause on the one hand, let’s say, capitalism and property laws make property, sort of, absolute. On the other hand, the ethical dynam – dimensions of how we understand wealth to be acquired don’t ask us to fully, kind of, comply with just that law. So, I do think it’s about reparative and restitutive action, particularly where specific groups of affected people can be identified, but also, more broadly, where groups have been disadvantaged by those structural dynamics and this might be groups within the UK, for example. A lot of displacement of populations was had in the Scottish Highlands and all these things, and you know, and we’ve got populations that have been driven out of various areas to make space for these things. Universities, in this sense, have more specific constituencies to which they’re accountable and which they try and include as part of historical restitution.
Ritula Shah
Katharina?
Dr Katharina Rietzler
Yeah, just to follow on from that, I think it’s a difficult conversation to have. I think we’re also operating in a higher education context where funding is tight, where there are multiple pressures on universities. So, I think it will remain to be seen to what extent universities are willing to engage in these processes, and I understand that some have done more than others and, obviously, we have a very diverse higher education landscape. We have very old institutions, very wealthy institutions, but then, we also have the opposite. So, I’m not sure there’s a, sort of, one size fits all answer here.
About teaching emotions, it’s a difficult thing to do. I do think that it’s not always easy for students to empathise and there’s sometimes a, sort of, kneejerk reaction to distance oneself from, especially the perpetrators of colonialism. I think it’s – that’s a very difficult process and it has to be done sensitively, and we come back to having multiple sources when we teach history, for example, but also, to the problem that, you know, to truly hear other voices is actually quite hard. And again, I don’t think there are easy solutions here. Sorry to be a bit more negative.
Ritula Shah
Tristram, I wonder if you have any thoughts, particularly on that emotional aspect question? I remember, I went to see that Fabrics of India exhibition at the V&A and, honestly, was in tears, because there were fabrics in there that I had grown up with, you know. I mean, I come from a peasant background, we didn’t – we haven’t – didn’t have – there was no money, but they were everyday objects that were in the V&A. I couldn’t get over it. So, it wasn’t a negative thing, at all, it was a very positive thing, but it is interesting, isn’t it, those – how that lineage, when you see that representation in a museum, can bring out aspects of your cultural past that you didn’t even really know you felt?
Dr Tristram Hunt
I think that’s right and one of the stories we told within that exhibition was also, the way in which the British then sought to destroy the indigenous Indian textile industry through the flooding of it, through mechanisation and the power relationship. So, it was both the, kind of, the extraction of source designs and the destruction, then, of a successful and indigenous industry. And we – you know, and those are exactly the kind of stories and histories we should seek to tell. And museums, you know, you want an experience. It’s not a book; you want an account of that visceral sensibility and when you go and see, for example, the African American Museum in the Smithsonian and see the, kind of, horrendous artefacts on display and you see the deep emotional responses from the African American community to that museum, you understand a great – a richer sense of that history and the importance of thinking very carefully how you put it on show. And I think we’ve all learnt, in museum worlds, from the Holocaust museums of the last 20 years plus, which were able to, you know, deal with those, they’ve got – not in a, kind of, vicarious way, but in a way with an emotional response.
And I think on the origins of the wealth of collections, as I’ve said, you know, we owe this history at the V&A to the East India Company and all of that history. We’ve done research into the slave owning wealth of those who gave items to the collection. And I think it’s right we’re, kind of, open and transparent about that, but I would – my one, kind of, caution on all of this is that this is a rich and interesting intellectual conversation for many of us within the Academy, within museums. We are a national museum, paid for by taxpayers right across the country, whose interests we have to serve and speak to. How interested the large parts of other parts of the country are interested in this conversation, I’m not so sure. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have it and it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t show leadership on this, but we also need to be attuned to where other interests lie and, actually, for a museum like us, where we would want to put resource into is teaching design and technology for young people in disadvantaged parts of the country. And the demographic, who are falling behind the faster, are White working class boys in former industrial areas and for a museum like the V&A, born of the design school movement, we have responsibilities, it seems to me, there, as much as in other parts of the conversation. We’re big enough to do both, but I sometimes worry our, kind of – you know, that the interests of an internal museological or an academy conversation are not shared more broadly.
Ritula Shah
Meera, would you see it as a conversation that is inward looking, or is it a reflection of a wider world?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
No, I do think this is a reflection of a wider world. I mean, I think precisely the story you told about African Americans in the Smithsonian, that should be a conversation which White Americans are involved in and very interested in, as, actually, many of the parts of the country that are not familiar with those histories or who don’t want to confront those histories that need to. Those former industrial areas in the North, let’s say, where White working class boys are falling behind, these are areas which industrialised, precisely because of the deindustrialization of India, right? These connections and these histories needed to be understood and I don’t think it’s a disservice to those communities to highlight these other histories. I actually think it’s a richer understanding of the histories of why those industries came and also, why they went.
Ritula Shah
Time for one more? Oh, lovely. There’s two women I’m going to go for, woman at the back, woman at the front, two more. Can’t add…
Member
So…
Ritula Shah
…up either.
Member
…picking up from what Meera was saying, and Tristram, you’re all dealing with – in academic context, you’re dealing with people who are coming at the age of 18 or 19, who will already have attitudes that are set. Museums, in a sense, also, although you have children coming who have – you know, in the Academy you’re dealing with old people, you know, adults, if you were speaking to Gavin Williamson, newly, you know, restored as – or Secretary of State for Education, what should we be doing differently in schools, if anything at all, in terms of preparing people for these kind of conversations, or engaging young people at an early stage in these kind of conversations?
Ritula Shah
And there’s a woman at the front here.
Eliza Sears
My question is…
Ritula Shah
Hang on, just wait for the microphone.
Eliza Sears
Oh, sorry.
Ritula Shah
Just coming.
Eliza Sears
Thank you very much. Thank you, I’m a Member here, Eliza Sears. It’s really a question for Tristram, probably, mostly, and it’s do you think that there has ever been, and is now, an argument in favour of safe haven for some artefacts from all over the world, which are threatened? We have this long debate about returning, perhaps, some marble effigies to Greece and there’s destruction in Syria of fine pieces and all over the world there are issues. Do you think that it is enough of an argument to say we will take these and look after them?
Ritula Shah
Do you want to address that, Tristram, then I’ll Katharina and Meera deal with the two?
Dr Tristram Hunt
I don’t think it is now. I think, for a long time – because also, there’s a lot of history, people say we’ll look after them and then not returning them and they still need looking after. And I don’t think it is up to cultural institutions in other countries to say we can look after items better than you and I don’t think that’s where you can have the, kind of, the balance of argument. I think there are real questions about the level of infrastructure in parts of the Global South for the support and preservation of collections. And one of the conversations we’re involved with colleagues in Ethiopia is, how do we work together to provide the facilities to ensure that items which have been, you know, preserved for 200 and 3 – 250/300 years, continue into the future? But to say it – but – and it’s also not up to us in the future to say where and how these items should be looked after. So, I think that argument’s come to an end.
I think the argument that is more – and that is richer and more sustainable is the importance, particularly to the issue of the lady at the back, that young people having the ability to see works of great beauty and wonder from different parts of the world. And as we live, both in this, kind of, great global village, but also with rising chauvinism and populism and museums that can tell the story of global cultural movements and multiculturalism through the material culture, becomes even more important. And that’s where the argument for global collection should rest, I think.
Ritula Shah
Katharina?
Dr Katharina Rietzler
Education is always a political football, so I think to say, oh, it will all be better if Gavin Williamson does this or that, I’m not sure about that. I think probably there are, and has been highlighted in the media, there are issues around school funding. It would be fantastic if Teachers could have more time to continue their own education. Because, really, what Teachers teach in school is what University Lecturers taught 20 years ago. So, in some ways, that might be a fruitful conversation to have, but that’s very difficult. I did not grow up in this country myself. The history curriculum, to me, is quite strange, I have to say. So, I’m maybe not the best qualified person to comment on this.
Ritula Shah
Meera, briefly?
Dr Meera Sabaratnam
Briefly, I think schools have become ranking and grading machines and I think this has really made a lot of Teachers teach to the test and the, you know, the kinds of – I’ve got friends who are Teachers and they very much have to drill students in particular ways. And I think that means that the space to discuss the complexities of issues, to become comfortable with various kinds of history, is reduced, greatly. So, I would be in favour of giving Teachers and students more space and time to explore whichever issue they want to pick up, but make sure they explore it from multiple angles and get into the habit of doing that and understanding that when you don’t have multiple angles, you’re actually not doing the work properly. One of the things that I’ve found disappointing, I think, recently in the media, is that diversity has become greatly shrunk in that way. We used to have a greater variety of voices, I think, than sometimes we do.
The last thing I just want to say is quickly about this question of global collections and I think it is a great privilege and a wonder for children to go and see objects from around the world and that’s certainly influenced my interest in history. But that should be available to children from all around the world, right, not just children in London, but in Addis Ababa or in Colombia, or wherever else they be. And I think, actually, much more co-operation and sharing of the collective responsibility to move those objects around is critical.
Ritula Shah
Just last, brief last word?
Dr Tristram Hunt
I totally agree with that and I think in these conversations about – around restitution and repatriation and provenance, where we’re very narrow about it and say, well, this item, you know, can go back, the – in a sense, the more interesting question is, well, what else can we send, what should go with this? Yes, we – you know, interesting conversation around the Magdala items, but we should also be interested in a conversation around some Wedgwood pottery and some Chippendale furnitures and some, you know, Turners and some Constables and so, you make it a – you begin with those items around which there’s a real issue and concern, but also, you want a much richer conversation about the sharing of culture.
Ritula Shah
Fantastic, thank you very much, Tristram Hunt, Katharina Rietzler and Meera Sabaratnam, got it right that time [applause]. Thank you very much.
