The Compensations of Plunder
Book description
From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely seen as "stolen" or "plundered" from their countries of origin, and demands for their return grow louder by the day. In this pathbreaking study, Justin…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Compensations of Plunder as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
A good deal is known about the Westerners who dug up ancient artifacts in Central Asia (China’s Far West) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not least because these explorers were great self-promoters. This book tells the story from the Chinese side, and it is a lot more interesting and complicated than you might expect. It is only with the birth of Chinese nationalism that the tens of thousands of artifacts now found in the museums and collections of the West came to be defined as Chinese and their loss defined as imperialist looting. By academic standards, this…
From Peter's list on how imperial China became modern China.
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