I

For the early, post-war histories, ‘looting’ was a catchall term for stealing or taking by force. Written in the 1970s and 80s amidst the first global debates over restitution, these works were understandably more interested in exposing the violence underpinning British/European collections and/or determining where the objects had got to than the nuanced ways by which the military captured spoils.Footnote ² This changed from the 1990s as Igor Kopytoff's and Arjun Appadurai’s social and cultural lives of things gripped the field. More attention was paid to how things were taken, but in various degrees of depth as scholars juggled this concern alongside what was taken, the symbolism of looting, and the meanings invested in the objects throughout their ‘lives’.Footnote ³ These works made important strides with regards to furthering our grasp of despoilation practices – namely differentiating ‘prize’ from ‘loot’ and considering the different reasons for taking spoils – but since 2020 there has been a spate of publications focused on military practices which have drastically advanced, and revised, our understanding.

Felicity Bodenstein attributes this shift to the Sarr–Savoy report of 2018 which called for greater attention to specific acquisition methods in order to tackle questions over restitution.Footnote ⁴ The impact of the inflamed public debates around restitution is clear in the two most expansive accounts of practices: Edward Spiers’s assessment of Britain’s late nineteenth-century wars in Africa, and Christopher Joll’s public-facing, sweeping history of regimental collections from all major wars. Spiers’s work belongs to Henrietta Lidchi and Stuart Allan’s edited collection Dividing the spoils: perspectives on military collections and the British empire (2020), a book which, while acknowledging violence was undoubtedly important to the formation of military collections, pushes back against the notion that all military collecting was ‘loot’. Meanwhile, Joll starts his book by outlining the importance of the ‘circumstance under which the acquisition was made’ in relation to the topic of repatriation, and whether it was legitimate according to military regulations and custom.Footnote ⁵

While new works have deepened our understanding of practices, they are still limited in terms of chronology, geography, and typologies. Joll, for instance, covers the most wars, but loses sight of his categories of spoils after outlining them in the introduction and strikingly omits looting from the list – presumably to bypass the notion that some regimental objects were taken illegitimately according to his definition.Footnote ⁶ Fortunately, we have a vast literature covering all the major colonial wars to draw on to broaden our understanding, for even when scholars have not focused on practices, they have at least helpfully outlined the course of events. Piecing these histories together, and rereading them with our new knowledge on practices, this first section produces a more expansive typology of spoils and thinks more carefully about how they worked in practice across the century.

To understand the different practices, it is helpful to think about them as being sanctioned or unsanctioned, and either overseen by army command or undertaken by the soldiers – even if in reality the lines were often blurred. As many historians note, the term loot itself was taken from India, coming from the Hindi word lut and entering the British language in the early nineteenth century as another word for plunder. As verbs, loot and plunder were used flexibly in the nineteenth century, but according to military regulations they had a distinct meaning, referring to the unsanctioned taking of things, involving troops breaking lines to grab whatever treasures they could. The Articles of War and Mutiny Act forbade plunder/looting and made it a punishable act as it could undermine a military operation and injure innocent civilians’ feelings.Footnote ⁷

Nevertheless, historians have shown that British soldiers looted in most wars, which they usually explain as due to the commanding officer’s lack of authority in maintaining troop discipline, or even their unsanctioned authorization of looting. In other words, did the commander prohibit plunder in their general orders and were these orders followed.Footnote ⁸ Gavin Daly’s recent book, however, necessitates a reconsideration of these explanations. Daly showed that according to customary law, which sat separate to the Articles of War and Mutiny Act, looting was allowed during the sack of a fort, palace, or city after a siege. Plundering was seen as a reward for the toil of the assault, and a chance to release pent up stress. Whether or not this custom was followed depended on the commanding officer’s preference, and the extent of their authority if they tried to stop it. When Seringapatam was stormed in 1799, for instance, soldiers were allowed to loot, but sentries were posted to guard important sovereign and civilian property, and after a day Arthur Wellesley was tasked with restoring order through floggings and hangings. At the capture of Gawilghur (1803) in the Second Anglo-Maratha War, however, Wellesley pre-emptively said in his orders that officers must stop the plundering, something he did not repeat in his next sacks in Spain in the Peninsular War.Footnote ⁹

Daly’s study ends in 1815 but he notes how the development of international laws of war from the 1860s (see below) prohibited this custom.Footnote ¹⁰ A quick look at the late nineteenth-century military regulations, however, points to Britain’s confused approach to plunder. The Queen’s regulations and orders for the army (vol. II, 1868) said plundering was ‘at all times and in all places to be promptly and rigorously repressed [emphasis added]’ but later editions made no mention of it. Meanwhile, the Manual of military law (1887, 1894, 1899) cited international law to single out the ‘pillage of a town taken by assault [emphasis added]’ as an ‘act of barbarism’ which officers should ‘always endeavour to prevent’, but also conceded the difficulty of preventing it and determined that when soldiers plundered their finds must be seized and distributed as prize (more on the prize system below).Footnote ¹¹ The idea for this compromise may have come from the storm of Maqdala in the Abyssinia campaign (1868) where Robert Napier did not pre-emptively prevent plundering, but made the soldiers relinquish their loot to the prize agents.Footnote ¹²

Scholars have gleaned evidence of looting from the plethora of sources left behind by those involved in the wars, namely campaign histories published by officers, diaries, and letters, and the objects themselves. Works which have included the voices of Britain’s opponents have exposed a lot of violence hidden in the British accounts, but unfortunately these are few in number due a combination of Western scholarly priorities and lack of sources.Footnote ¹³ Instead, we know a lot more about British opinions on looting. The negative connotations surrounding looting – greed, theft, and ill-discipline – meant officers more often than not lamented it and were keen to distance themselves from it, and even those that admitted to it preferred to use euphemisms to mask and justify their actions, such as ‘annexed’, ‘obtained’, ‘collecting’, ‘snaffled’, ‘carried away’.Footnote ¹⁴ Richard Davis argued that there was a shift in the late nineteenth century toward displacing looting onto the subaltern soldiers as a way to maintain the civilized image of the British, but this was a feature across the long nineteenth century. As well as being scapegoated in campaign histories for looting, the non-white soldiers of the British forces were seemingly the only ones punished for the act, either by flogging or hanging.Footnote ¹⁵

Despite an interest in the creative language used by those engaged in or witnesses to looting, there has been little in-depth analysis of looting narratives. Daly provides the most thorough account, revealing three discursive strategies soldiers used during the Peninsular War: the necessity to loot for survival, expressing empathy for looted civilians, and those that made light of their plundering.Footnote ¹⁶ Regarding the Abyssinian expedition, Andrew Heavens’s recent book notes three other techniques used by the combatants: dismissing the loot as trash so as to justify acquisitions; saying they were acquiring objects Emperor Tewodros II had plundered; and showing disgust at those looting.Footnote ¹⁷ More work on other contexts is needed to ascertain how far who and what they looted impacted the narratives, as well as change over time. Holly Winter’s recent Ph.D. approaches the topic from an innovative angle, examining the sexualized language of looting in India, again flagging up three paradigms: ‘the similitude of hidden loot and a woman’s body; of looting and sex; and of colonisation and sexual mastery’.Footnote ¹⁸ Both Daly and Winter make the convincing case for exploring the relationship between the language of loot and performances of gender, a topic ripe for further inquiry, especially considering the burgeoning literature on military masculinities.Footnote ¹⁹

A separate practice to plunder was the ‘battlefield trophy’. According to military custom, soldiers had the right to take any object ‘seized at the point of a bayonet’. After plundering Maqdala, for instance, the British handed over their loot, but not items acquired at ‘the point of the bayonet’.Footnote ²⁰ Unlike loot’s negative associations, battlefield trophies were part of the chivalric culture supposedly embedded at the heart of the British military, symbolizing not only one’s victory over a foe, but also their respect for said foe’s martial abilities. Nicole M. Hartwell has shown the custom had its own grammar, such as ‘the most prized or highly valued artefacts were those worn or used by the enemy commander during battle’, and ‘they acquired an even greater status if they were worn or used at the moment of death’. As such, soldiers were keen to modify objects to cement its trophy – rather than looted – status, such as by inscribing them with details of the previous owner and how they were captured.Footnote ²¹

Another way spoils were acquired was when commanding officers sometimes allowed soldiers to pick up an object or two from the battlefield after the fighting. These were usually of little monetary value so not to cause upset amongst the ranks.Footnote ²² The Third Asante War (1874) provides two examples which neatly show how this practice worked. Following a battle in the jungle around Amoafo, soldiers were encouraged to ‘go and hunt’ for ‘curiosities’, with stools and chairs being popular choices, but expensive items found in the King’s Palace in Kumasi were to be handed over to the prize agents.Footnote ²³ Soldiers took advantage of what we might call ‘sanctioned small-scale collecting’ to get souvenirs and curios as well as trophies which marked their or their regiments’ participation in a victory.Footnote ²⁴ While like ‘battlefield trophies’ these trophies symbolized dominance, they differed in how they were seized, with the battlefield trophies relating specifically to objects personally won from a defeated foe. To add to the confusion, some combatants used ‘loot’ to refer to these curios, trophies, and souvenirs. In these cases, as Henrietta Lidchi points out, ‘“to loot” (verb) was deployed differently from “the loot” (noun)’, the former carrying the negative connotations noted above while the latter was a neutral term for spoils.Footnote ²⁵ Whether soldiers collected ‘loot’ as trophies, souvenirs, or collectibles depended on their tastes, something we will look at in the second section.

Trophies usually included enemy weapons, standards, regalia, and uniforms, but a small subgroup of the literature shows that some combatants took human trophies – namely hair, ears, and skulls. This was not customary or officially endorsed (at least not recorded), but it did occur. European armies since the eighteenth century considered human trophy taking uncivilized, contrary to the Enlightened customs of war which expected their enemies to dispose of human remains with respect. However, they also fought wars situationally which meant against so-called ‘savage’ opponents they felt entitled to reprisals, and that the best way of defeating such enemies was through extreme violence.Footnote ²⁶ As such, whereas the taking of non-human trophies was widespread across all Britain’s nineteenth-century wars, human trophies were restricted to wars against those considered racially inferior and against enemies who were deemed to have indulged in the same or other violent, uncivilized practices first. The main examples of British human trophy taking come from the Cape Frontier Wars (1834–6, 1846–7, 1850–3, 1877–8), the Indian Rebellion (1857–8), and the Anglo-Zulu War (1879). In these wars, some soldiers also took human remains as ‘campaign souvenirs’, but as with human trophies an uneasiness persisted which meant that most acquisitions were framed as undertaken in the name of science. Simon Harrison has shown how the development of racial science can be attributed to the emergence of skull taking in the African wars in the 1820s, and that ‘science’ allowed the British to frame their savagery as more civilized than their opponents.Footnote ²⁷

In terms of sanctioned practices, small-scale collecting and battlefield trophies existed alongside the prize system, which was designed as the mechanism for regulating the distribution of spoils of war. The modern version of prize law used in the colonial wars had its roots in the late middle ages but took shape after Britain’s mid-eighteenth-century wars in India. In theory, before and during the battle, commanding officers prohibited plundering through their general orders. After victory, they appointed prize agents – usually two but sometimes more depending on the scale of the task – to pool and inventory the booty. Meanwhile, it was ascertained which soldiers were entitled to a share of the prize money, that is, figure out who helped in its capture. The prize agents would then write to the crown asking for authorization to turn the booty into prize money. Upon getting authorization, it was customary for them to reserve some objects – usually a few of the most important ones which belonged to the enemy sovereign – for the British monarchy and then sell the rest, usually by auction. Sometimes, they went to the trouble of looking for the best global markets for goods, but other times sold in nearby towns. Sales in Britain let civilians get direct access to the spoils, while sales ‘in the field’ presented a prime opportunity for combatants to ‘lawfully’ get their hands on spoils. The money raised from the sales was then distributed amongst the troops according to rank, with higher shares going to the superiors.Footnote ²⁸

Prize was plunder’s lawful counterpart. Indeed, ‘booty’ – the term used for the captured property – was often called ‘lawful plunder’ and ‘lawful loot’. As Raffi Gregorian’s foundational account argued, its ‘ends were to maintain discipline, protect non-combatants and their possessions, and reward soldiers involved in a capture’.Footnote ²⁹ In addition to these purposes, the prize system functioned as a tool of ‘extractive statecraft’, playing a crucial role in ‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’ of colonial opponents. It humiliated enemy sovereigns and denied them legitimacy by stripping them of wealth and all sorts of material culture (arms and ordnance, treasures, regalia, etc.). Looting could have the same effects, but prize added an extra lesson to the defeated – Britain conquered in a civilized way.Footnote ³⁰

In practice, however, enforcing the prize system was messy. Prize procedure’s ‘labyrinthine bureaucracy and delayed gratification’ encouraged the very practice it was meant to replace – looting – as combatants did not want to have to wait years for payment. The Third Anglo-Maratha War ended in 1818, but the final payment was made in 1897.Footnote ³¹ Often, the commanding officer had to try and enforce the prize system after soldiers had already plundered. When this happened at Seringapatam, soldiers were allowed to keep their plunder (according to military custom of plunder after a siege), and the monetary value of the rest of the property which had escaped their hands was distributed according to rank. Crucially, Arthur and Richard Wellesley feared disciplinary issues might arise from delays, and so distributed prize money ‘on the spot’ – in anticipation of royal approval.Footnote ³² Prize was also distributed on the spot after the plundering of Yuanmingyuan (1860) in the Second Opium War, but this did not follow a siege and everyone was supposed to hand over their loot to the prize agents so the articles could be auctioned and the proceeds distributed.Footnote ³³ Looters in other wars were expected to hand over their loot, barring non-battlefield trophies, but the system relied on their honesty. Testimonies from men like war correspondent Melton Prior who confessed to concealing his loot from Kumasi in the Third Asante War shows not everything was handed over.Footnote ³⁴

Despite being the central mechanism for managing spoils of war, no scholar has attempted to provide an in-depth overview of the prize system across its history, as naval historians have done with its maritime counterpart.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, until recently there was little advancement of Gregorian’s early work which looked at its purpose, design, and the problems which led to its reform in the early 1860s. Most accounts have tended to assess whether the system was followed in a particular war, with the main exceptions being Ma Kyan and Rosie Llewellyn-Jones’s work on the activities of prize agents in Burma (1885) and the Indian Rebellion (1857–8), an area that needs much more study, and Margot Finn’s innovative use of the disputes over prize to show how British colonialism in India shaped the history discipline.Footnote ³⁶

Rahul Govind’s recent book The king’s plunder has deepened our knowledge by tackling prize from a very different angle to that of the historians, art historians, and museum scholars who dominate the field on loot. Govind is interested in the question of sovereignty and shows how the crown played a crucial role in facilitating and justifying colonial conquest through granting the East India Company power to make war and peace, and to take property. Govind provides the most detailed account of the factors leading to the genesis of the modern prize law system, which he traces to the East India Company’s applications to King George II in 1756–8 for the right to capture booty. As the Indian subcontinent became an arena of Britain’s war with France, the Company sought not to have to apply to the king after every capture. The result was the prize granting letters patent of King George II in 1757–8 that gave the East India Company the power to ‘cede, restore or dispose of any fortresses or any fortresses districts or territories, acquired by the conquest from any of the said Indian princes or governments’. Regarding prize, the Company was authorized to deal with captures which only involved its troops, but in the case of joint captures with the British army had to seek authorization from the crown and each party was entitled to half the booty.Footnote ³⁷

Govind shows how the letters patent underwrote the Company’s colonial conquests. For instance, through analysing the fallout from the conquest of Poona during the Third Maratha War (1817–18) he shows how the Company justified captures by claiming India was in a state of war even when proclamations to the contrary had been made, and that the lines between public and private property were similarly blurred allowing them to seize whatever they liked.Footnote ³⁸ Across the book, Govind impressively shows through a number of case studies how the ambiguity of prize law, combined with its jurisdiction falling with the crown (rather than parliament), effectively gave the Company carte blanche to take whatever it wanted, whenever it wanted, and without recourse as it denied Indians effective legal avenues of appeal.

Although some of Govind’s lengthy discussions of sovereignty may not interest historians of loot, his conclusions on prize advance our understanding by effectively showing how lawless the system was. At the same time, Govind’s book would have benefited from engaging with the vast literature on loot. His analysis overlooks military customs which played an important role in the legality of captures, such as after sieges, and he confusingly refers to plunder and prize interchangeably. Moreover, he misses how prize law was the cause of much consternation for the British military and government. The shortcomings of prize were exposed one colonial war after another in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the delay it took to get authorization from the crown to sell the articles; the lack of guidance to officers and prize agents; ambiguity over what constituted involvement in a battle to be eligible for prize money; what types of property were deemed legible prize; and how the scale of distribution of prize money according to rank was neither established nor equal. As Gregorian shows, the breaking point came during the Indian Rebellion when the combination of all the above issues provoked investigations by both the both the War Office (1860) and Royal Commission (1863–4), leading to reforms in the early 1860s to streamline the process and make it more equitable.Footnote ³⁹

Our knowledge of the prize system after the reforms is patchier. Prize money was only granted once after the Abyssinian campaign, over thirty years later in the Boxer War (1900). This was despite copious amounts of property being captured in the late nineteenth-century wars. Indeed, prize agents were even appointed and auctions held after the Third Asante War and the Third Anglo-Burmese War (1885), but no prize money was distributed. Elsewhere, such as in the Sudan campaigns of 1884–5 and 1896–9, captures were auctioned in the field, but not by officially appointed prize agents and the proceeds were not distributed as prize money.Footnote ⁴⁰ In his discussion of the Boxer prize money, James Hevia refers to a War Office report into prize in 1902 where military officials described prize as ‘a thing of the past’, rarely implemented since the Crimean War. Prize money was only distributed during the Boxer War because of an on-the-spot decision made by commanding officer Alfred Gaselee. As Britain’s international allies looted, the prize system helped Gaselee regain control of his soldiers while alleviating any bitterness they may have felt toward their foreign counterparts being allowed to loot.Footnote ⁴¹

The War Office report noted that prize had been replaced by a cash gratuity (also known as batta) to the soldiers, but it remains to be studied why this switch was made.Footnote ⁴² Perhaps it was an administrative issue – giving a cash gratuity to all involved was easier than determining who was involved in specific captures and responding to individual claims. It is also possible that it was the outcome of the circumstances of each war: in the Third Asante War the amount raised at the auction was deemed too small; in the Third Anglo-Burmese War it was decided the money belonged to the revenue of the country as the captures had not been made by assault; and the money raised from the organized sale of ivories and bronzes from Benin (1897) was credited to the Niger Coast Protectorate Fund which paid for the expedition.Footnote ⁴³

In some cases, spoils were not distributed through auctions, but amongst a small number of combatants involved in their capture. While designating Benin objects for sale for the benefit of the Protectorate, Ralph Moore, the consul general who accompanied the expedition, shared out what he called ‘trophies’ – ivories, bronzes, swords, corals etc. – to the officers. With rank determining who got the first pick and the quantity they were allowed, he essentially substituted the prize auction with dividing up the booty on the spot. The Crown Agents looked into the legality of this move and found that army prize regulations ‘seem to contemplate only operations on a large scale’, and there was precedent for distributing ‘the capture of small quantities of booty’ ‘on the spot, a practice which is irregular but not inconvenient’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Looking across the other campaigns shows that this practice was used on at least three other occasions, the First Opium War (1839–42), the Fifth Anglo-Asante War (1900) and Tibet (1904).Footnote ⁴⁵

The final category of spoils is those acquired through treaty. As this method was rarely used, there has been understandably scant research. There are two standout examples, the first is the confiscation of France’s Egyptian collections, notably the Rosetta stone under the Treaty of Alexandria (1801), and the second is the Treaty of Lahore (1849) which terminated the Second Anglo-Sikh War (1848–9) and saw ten-year-old Prince Duleep Singh sign over the Kohinoor diamond to Queen Victoria as well as the treasures in the Punjab treasury to the East India Company.Footnote ⁴⁶ The importance of the Rosetta stone and the Kohinoor has drawn our attention to these examples, which appear as exceptions, but new research on understudied wars raises the possibility of more cases, such as the gold ornaments Kofi Karikari used to pay a portion of the indemnity as stipulated in the Treaty of Fomena which terminated the Third Asante War.Footnote ⁴⁷

As stated above, determining the specific way spoils were acquired has become a particular preoccupation of scholars writing with restitution debates in mind as they look to establish the legality of acquisitions.Footnote ⁴⁸ The ambiguous character of British military regulations, however, essentially legitimized all captures. International law similarly posed next to no restrictions as they were based on what scholars have called the ‘civilizational paradox’, whereby different rules of war existed depending on whether the enemy was deemed civilized or savage.Footnote ⁴⁹ Take, for instance, the issue of whose property it was considered legal to capture. Attempts were made from the early seventeenth century to differentiate between civilian and enemy property, and whilst the former was to be protected, capturing the latter was allowed provided it was a military necessity.Footnote ⁵⁰ As Govind has shown, however, the British had a conveniently flexible idea of what was public and private property in colonial wars, and this was stretched even further in times of rebellion.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, the British application of the idea of ‘military necessity’ to colonial wars can be summed up by quoting the 1886 edition of Garnet Wolseley’s The soldier’s pocket-book for field service: ‘in planning a war against an uncivilised nation…, your first object should be the capture of whatever they prize most, and the destruction or deprivation of which will probably bring the war most rapidly to a conclusion’.Footnote ⁵²

Similarly, rules of law were introduced during the age of Enlightenment to protect European art collections and royal palaces. When Napoleon plundered Europe in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, it caused outcry in Europe, including in Britain, and Britons played a key role in the Congress of Vienna (1815) which sanctioned the restitution of the artworks. The protection of property ‘dedicated to religion, charity and education, the arts and sciences’ was included in the Brussels Declaration (1874) and although not ratified, the European powers agreed to these rules. As the countless confiscations of religious and cultural items from colonial opponents shows, however, these rules only applied to intra-European wars.Footnote ⁵³ The ‘civilizational paradox’ was institutionalized in the Hague Convention of 1899 which ratified these laws about civilian versus enemy property, military necessity, and cultural property. The Hague Convention offered no protection to Britain’s colonial opponents as it was only legally binding between signatories, and organized by the Western powers looking to protect their interests, they restricted the convention to nations with sovereign status.Footnote ⁵⁴

This research has effectively challenged the whiggish history of international law and cultural property which dominated the field until the early 2000s, but from a legal standpoint, studying despoilation practices to advance restitutions appears a dead end.Footnote ⁵⁵ Indeed, decolonial scholars have raised questions over the intellectual focus on military practices more generally. In the introduction to their special issue on the ‘Decolonial futures for African collections’, JoAnn McGregor, Napandulwe Shiweda, and Nicola Stylianou note how ‘[d]ebates over decolonising therein have lagged behind, or in some instances been supressed, while scholarly calls for greater understanding of “military culture” beyond looting jar with the critical, reparative approaches to colonial durabilities that we respond to here’.Footnote ⁵⁶ But studies of military culture need not sit at loggerheads to the decolonial project. As well as assisting provenance research, knowledge of the different violent categories which make up spoils is vital for undermining and even bypassing the arguments of critics of decolonization who call for greater attention to historical specificities. Indeed, as we will see in the final section, a recent, loud critic of the decolonial critique of museums falls far short in his definition of loot.

II

Since the 1990s, the ‘object biography’ has been the most common approach to studying loot and colonial collections in general.Footnote ⁵⁷ Analysing the historical meanings invested in looted objects throughout their ‘lives’, scholars have explored colonial encounters and imaginaries and the history of museums and collecting. Almost all have done so by focusing on objects from a particular war. Where they mostly differ is through the adjustment of two scales – chronology and number of objects. While some trace the changing meanings of a single looted object, or a set of objects, across their whole lives, others zoom in on a particular chapter of the biography.Footnote ⁵⁸ The closest we get to a broad overview is a chapter in Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireland: how imperialism has shaped modern Britain (2020) which gallops through a series of wars and notes how spoils wound up in British public and private collections. Sanghera effectively shows the prevalence of loot in British culture, but limited to one chapter, and aimed at a popular audience, it understandably lacks analytical depth and chronological nuance.Footnote ⁵⁹ Drawing on the vast body of biographies we have to hand, this section builds on Sanghera by teasing out in greater detail the social and cultural lives of looted objects from across the empire and across the nineteenth century. It does so by tackling the main contexts in which spoils ‘lived’ – military collections, public collections and exhibitions, and private collections and the market.

The earliest object biographies of loot were by James Hevia and Richard Davis, whose articles, published in the same issue of History of Anthropology, looked at the plunder of Yuanmingyuan and Seringapatam respectively. Both texts came out of a panel on ‘Looting as a Cultural Practice’ at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in April 1992, and as the title suggests, were interested in how and why the British army looted. Heavily influenced by Edward Said’s work, they attributed the looting and destruction to pecuniary greed, as evidenced by the soldiers’ focus on jewels, silks, and precious metals; an intense disdain for Oriental culture as indicated by the soldiers’ use of the pejorative adjective ‘curious’ to describe Chinese and Indian material culture; and a desire to teach the enemy a humiliating lesson by acquiring the sovereign’s belongings as ‘trophies’.Footnote ⁶⁰

This interpretation of looting as a frenzied, greed, and hate-filled act of vengeance was complicated in the early 2010s with a spate of works that drew on the history of collecting and thereby looked more closely at the objects taken, who took them, and the language they used in their description of objects.Footnote ⁶¹ Katrina Hill directly challenged Hevia’s arguments by outlining how during the Opium Wars some British looters were knowledgeable and appreciated Chinese objects. For example, they had a discerning eye for quality porcelain and knew that yellow-glazed porcelains were reserved for the emperor. Moreover, officers used ‘curious’ to describe exotic, interesting objects, not things they thought were evidence of a backward culture. ‘Plunder’, Hill somewhat provocatively remarked, ‘could be an exercise in connoisseurship.'Footnote ⁶²

Similar studies have helped uncover a distinct culture of collecting within the military, showing a range of motivations, tastes, and methods.Footnote ⁶³ The combination of wealth, a Classical education, and opportunities to travel meant officers made good collectors, and from at least the early nineteenth century the army encouraged collecting as a way to instil virtuous behaviours.Footnote ⁶⁴ Lidchi and Allan’s aforementioned Dividing the spoils makes an important contribution to this sub-field. While most of the chapters are case study focused, by bringing all the chapters together the book effectively provides the first broad assessment of military collecting, demonstrating the range of objects soldiers collected and their different motivations and methods. One of the book’s crucial contributions is its demonstration of the importance of regimental culture to understanding military collecting. For example, Charles Kirke and Nicole M. Hartwell’s chapter shows that in the context of the officer’s mess, regimental silver was prized more than trophies. Trophies were only used on special occasions, such as balls, or where they could be domesticated to suit the register of the dining room, for instance, an elephant tusk said to have belonged to Cetshwayo kaMpande was made into a snuff mull.Footnote ⁶⁵

What happened to spoils once they entered Britain? A well-trodden route for the enemy sovereign’s property was into the hands of the monarchy, usually via tributes and gifts from military officers or bought by royal family members at prize auctions. The power dynamic symbolized by the British monarchy’s ownership of these objects means they have been mostly interpreted as trophies, but more work is needed on how the royals felt about these objects. The example of Queen Victoria worrying about showing Duleep Singh the Kohinoor is often referenced but her anxiety is not explored in any depth.Footnote ⁶⁶ What we do know is that the monarchy received large quantities of spoils, from almost every colonial war, and these were shared with the public through exhibitions. Arms and armour were displayed at the Tower of London whilst Windsor Castle exhibited a wider variety of objects. Both became more accessible to the public across the century, and opportunities to view Queen Victoria’s spoils multiplied in the latter half of the nineteenth century as she lent and donated objects to exhibitions and museums.Footnote ⁶⁷

Indeed, the mid-nineteenth century appears to be a turning point in the public display of colonial spoils. Before then, they were mostly kept in private collections and the hands of the monarchy, as evidenced with the fate of objects from Seringapatam. Spoils were also kept and displayed in regimental messes, and flags were hung at different times at the Banqueting Hall and Chapel Royal at Whitehall, the Royal Chelsea Hospital, and St Paul’s Cathedral but access to these spaces was limited.Footnote ⁶⁸ More accessible were the East India Company Museum (est. 1801) and United Service Museum (est. 1831) which displayed trophies and ethnography, as well as the sporadic displays by commercial exhibitors such as the Egyptian Hall or ‘Bullock’s London Museum’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The turning point came after the Great Exhibition in 1851 with the expansion of museum and exhibitionary culture which meant there were more places showing spoils and framing it in different ways.Footnote ⁷⁰ A dizzying array of public displays sprung up across the United Kingdom, ranging in size, scope, and subject, from a lock of Tewodros II’s hair on display in a shop in Plymouth to military exhibitions showcasing the nation’s trophies, and from design and industrial exhibitions preaching good taste through Oriental workmanship to anthropological displays using African material culture to perpetuate racist theories.Footnote ⁷¹ Once again, complicating Hevia’s and Davis’s assertion that all colonial loot was trophies or curios, studies have shown the importance of considering where, when, and how objects were shown to investigate meaning, as well as demonstrating that the objects themselves – their materiality and provenance – impacted both how they were displayed and interpreted.Footnote ⁷²

There is a noticeable increase of spoils entering museum collections in the second half of the century too. From the 1870s, the British Museum was actively seeking spoils for its growing anthropology collections, asking the Foreign Office and Colonial Office for a heads up on any objects collected during recent and future military campaigns.Footnote ⁷³ In two instances – Abyssinia and Tibet – a British Museum representative joined the campaign with the official purpose of buying manuscripts but found more joy acquiring spoils.Footnote ⁷⁴ Meanwhile, South Kensington Museum (est. 1852, now the V&A) benefited from its close relationship with the India Office. With the transfer of power from the East India Company to the crown in 1858, the India Office inherited the Company’s museum which then eventually transferred the bulk of the collection to South Kensington Museum in 1879. Via the India Office, the museum also became custodian of two hugely significant collections – a crown and chalice from Abyssinia and the regalia from Burma.Footnote ⁷⁵ Like other museums across the United Kingdom, these national ones also purchased or were given spoils by soldiers, their families, or collectors and dealers who had bought loot second hand.Footnote ⁷⁶

Predominantly undertaken by art historians and museum scholars, the scholarship has mostly analysed public displays of spoils to interrogate the history of art and anthropology. Less work has interrogated how ‘loot’ was incorporated into a wider British imperial culture by investigating the imperial narratives projected at exhibitions of spoils, and their reception by the public. Dan Hicks’s new book argues that between 1870 and 1920 loot was part of an artistic, intellectual, and supremacist movement which he calls ‘militarist realism’ – the naturalization of corporate-colonial violence to the extent that it was seen as the only possible way things could be.Footnote ⁷⁷ This periodization corroborates Tim Barringer’s early work on South Kensington Museum which referred to the museum’s display of Abyssinian spoils as indicating its shift from academic Orientalism to popular imperial triumphalism, as well as my own research which showed how mid-nineteenth-century (inter)national exhibitions used more sober references, or were silent about objects’ identity as spoils.Footnote ⁷⁸ However, more research is needed to ascertain how displays changed over time and how the public responded to them. As Lancelot Arzel and Daniel Foliard argue, looted objects – what they call ‘tristes trophées’ or ‘grim trophies’ – ‘aroused heated debates within European and American societies that claimed to be morally irreproachable’.Footnote ⁷⁹ The articles in their special issue mostly refer to human remains, but examples elsewhere show that ostensibly less emotive spoils also spurred anxiety and criticism, especially as the century wore on. For example, commentators interpreted the Kohinoor displayed at the Great Exhibition (1851) more ‘as an emblem of old-imperialism than as a progressive acquisition fit for the figurehead of a modern Britain’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Similarly, in relation to the aforementioned crown and chalice from Abyssinia, Prime Minister William Gladstone condemned the looting of religious icons.Footnote ⁸¹ What and how things were taken seemingly influenced one’s view of loot and imperialism more broadly.

Another common chapter in the biography of looted objects is their time in private collections. This includes the collections of combatants who brought objects home and were kept in the family, as well as those who bought spoils on the market. Once in Britain, spoils were invested with a range of meanings according to people’s tastes, from family keepsakes to ethnography.Footnote ⁸²

With regard to collecting and the market, the most detailed research has been on Yuanmingyuan and Benin spoils. In both cases, soldiers were quick to put their spoils up for auction after returning to Britain, and dealers were the main purchasers. But whereas the Chinese objects were collected and marketed as decorative arts, the Benin objects were anthropology. The former were sold through high-end auctioneers of fine art and antiques Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and Phillips, who emphasized the ancient and rare nature of the objects, as well as their Summer Palace provenance.Footnote ⁸³ In contrast, it was mainly Stevens auctioneers, labelled by Barnaby Phillips as ‘trading in horror and salaciousness’, that conducted the early sales of the Benin loot and did so by hamming up the grisly nature of Benin culture, such as by describing one as ‘freely drenched in human blood’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Despite the ‘art market turn’ in art history research, the relationship between spoils and the market remains critically understudied.

III

The Rhodes Must Fall movement spurred a noticeable decolonial turn in the literature, and such studies have become even more prominent following the BLM protests in 2020. These works differ from the mainstream scholarship that came before by adopting methods which better expose the violence of colonialism and its endurance, forefront the agency of colonized peoples in histories of loot, and incorporate Indigenous peoples’ knowledge of the objects and the wars. This has led to a reconsideration of the utility of the object biography approach. Hicks has been most forthright in asserting that the presentation of a ‘positive, incremental model of recontextualization, where each new setting is a new accumulated layer of life for an itinerant object…has thus served to stifle any discussion of enduring colonial violence and dispossession over time’. Instead, Hicks calls for necrographies – ‘death-histories, histories of loss’ – which he provides by shifting the focus to exposing and even calculating the death and destruction wrought by the ‘punitive’ Benin expedition.Footnote ⁸⁵ Similarly, Ariella Aisha Azoulay argues that accepting the new meanings ascribed to looted objects relegates ‘the ruination of colonized people’s worlds’ to the background and ‘that their status and identity as art objects must be reversed and revoked, in order to enable the rights inscribed in these looted objects to be recognized’.Footnote ⁸⁶

Hicks provides compelling evidence for how the object biography method has been weaponized by museum officials when arguing for the retention of looted objects.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, Staffan Lundén has questioned the evidence underpinning Hicks’s necrogaphy of the Benin bronzes which threatens to undermine his argument for restitution, and Priya Basil points out that necrographies are prone to perpetuate the same issue as object biographies – the colonial archive’s silences steer the historian’s gaze to the metropole.Footnote ⁸⁸ Indeed, Hicks’s necrogaphy of the Benin bronzes in The brutish museums is ‘a self-consciously “anglocentric” account’ and essentially follows the same narrative effect as an object biography.Footnote ⁸⁹ While Hicks’s work essentially shows that the violence underpinning collections can be more explicitly written into object biographies, Basil makes a convincing case for artistry and fiction to fill in the gaps of the colonial archive. In contrast, Haidy Geismar asserts that the object biography can be used effectively in decolonial scholarship as it enables ‘the surfacing of alternative narratives, counter-histories, and histories from below’. Geismar states that Hicks ‘replaces the possibility of a polyphonous, grass-roots or bottom–up approach with yet another top–down perspective’, and advocates for ‘an approach that gives much more space to voices that have been so violently displaced and suppressed’.Footnote ⁹⁰

Sela K. Adjei and Yann LeGall’s recent edited collection Fifteen colonial thefts: a guide to looted African heritage in museums (2024) shows the utility of object biographies to decolonial scholarship, though the authors avoid the word ‘object’ as it denies the spiritual agency of things. Instead, they use ‘cultural assets’, ‘belongings’, or the names related to their primary use, e.g. Royal Insignia. The book’s fifteen chapters are a mixture of academic essays and more informal conversations inspired by traditional oral histories giving chance to reflect on the personal and emotional dimensions of the histories. They are also written collaboratively with descendants to foreground African knowledge and therefore show the significance of the belongings to their source communities, to celebrate African agency in history by pushing back against the idea of Africans as violent and Africa in crisis, and to show how museums are inappropriate settings for these cultural assets.Footnote ⁹¹ Fergus Nicoll and Osman Nusairi’s academic chapter, for instance, compellingly outlines the deep religious and political meanings of flags to Sudanese fighters, and exposes how the flags have been misinterpreted in British museums. This latter point is brutally exposed by the authors who translate the text on one flag in the Highlanders Museum in Inverness. Labelled as captured from the Mahdi himself, the text actually reveals the flag was the one Khalīfa ʿAbdullāhi used to surrender.Footnote ⁹²

The recent decolonial scholarship builds on the earlier work of activists and scholars like Ekpo Eyo and Kwame Opoku who exposed the colonial violence underpinning Western museum collections and argued that these museums continue to perpetuate colonial violence by altering the meaning of things, and by silencing or misconstruing the stories of their violent acquisition.Footnote ⁹³ Their critiques of the museum have become more mainstream thanks to the pressure of decolonial activists in the twenty-first century, and increasingly museums are playing an active role in this research. Hicks, for instance, is a curator at Pitt Rivers Museum and thus writes as an insider. Meanwhile, the essays in Fifteen colonial thefts, as well as McGregor, Shiweda, and Stylianou’s ‘Decolonial futures for African collections’, are the products of meaningful collaborations between academics, curators, and activists in Britain, Europe, and Africa. As editors of the latter argue, such partnerships have ‘all too often…been skewed and reinscribe colonial relations, because power, resources and legal ownership of collections remain with Western institutions’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Moreover, while we do not have statistics for the literature on colonial spoils in general, Open Restitution Africa found that of all the works referencing the Benin bronzes published between 2016 and 2021, only seventy came from African authors, as opposed to 374 from non-African authors.Footnote ⁹⁵ With this in mind, ‘Decolonial futures for African collections’ and Fifteen colonial thefts are particularly powerful for platforming Africa-based and diaspora experts and successfully demonstrate the benefits of equitable knowledge production. At the same time, however, they also affirm the Open Restitution Africa’s findings that decolonial scholarship and museum praxis are more likely to come from scholars from formerly colonialized countries.

The rising prominence of the decolonial critique has unsurprisingly provoked backlash. Justin Jacobs’s Plunder? How museums got their treasures (2024) is directly set up against Hicks’s The brutish museums, and the notion that the museum is a tool and repository of violence more generally. Jacobs assures us he has no interest in arguing for or against restitution but is troubled by the likes of Hicks who would have us believe that ‘everything in a museum is now regarded as stolen and equated with cultural rape and genocide’ – an argument, it is worth pointing out, Hicks does not make.Footnote ⁹⁶

Jacobs’s argument that plunder only makes up a small proportion of museum collections is not new. Tiffany Jenkins, for example, made it in the mid-2010s when the question of repatriating colonial collections loomed large in public debates.Footnote ⁹⁷ Although their structures differ – Jenkins opting for a chronological approach to show how different methods of museum acquisition were predominant at different times, and Jacobs focusing the chapters on different acquisition practices – both provide short and simplistic accounts of looting. Surprisingly, for a book entitled Plunder, Jacobs does not give military plunder its own chapter. Instead, it shares one with diplomatic gifts and is reduced to the ‘bloody smash-and-grab actions of a menacing soldier in the heated fog of war’, and ‘an orgy of disorganized looting by armed riff-raff hacking its way through enemy lines’. Museums did not have standing armies, Jacobs informs us, nor could they ‘anticipate when such objects would become available for purchase, nor could they craft their annual budgets and exhibitions around their unexpected arrival’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Jacobs is right to point out how other acquisition methods were more important to museums, but his analysis nonetheless misrepresents the significance of military plunder. Jacobs refers to museums and armies in general and only mentions three specific, modern, looting episodes – Napoleonic, Yuanmingyuan, and Boxer War, and not in substantial detail. It should be apparent from the discussion above that with regard to Britain, his definition of military plunder is unhelpfully restrictive, and museums did actively pursue spoils after 1860. Recent work on Europe shows a similar story too, with the relationship between the military and museums particularly strong in Germany.Footnote ⁹⁹

Jacobs also sets out to complicate our understanding of museum collecting by studying ‘the words and actions of the many non-Western people who engaged the foreign collectors at the time they were removing antiquities from their lands’ to see what they ‘thought about their role in the endeavour’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Echoing the purpose of some decolonial studies, this is an important and valuable approach – you may have noticed how the discussion in the first and second sections is focused on Western actors. Unfortunately, Jacobs’s analysis of non-Western people with regard to loot is not as thorough as his sections on gifts, dealers, and excavations. He notes how at Yuanmingyuan ‘opportunistic Chinese pilferers wasted little time in joining Western troops in the plunder’ and a Qing official lamented the fact that treasures had fallen into the hands of Chinese commoners. But how representative was this of the Chinese in the Second Opium War, and of Indigenous peoples in other episodes of military plunder? From snippets in the extant literature, we know that at Yuanmingyuan and elsewhere the British relied on local labourers to carry and look after their loot, some of whom took this opportunity to steal it for themselves.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Locals participated in the auctions too, as was the case with the Third Asante War.Footnote ¹⁰² They also made direct attempts to restrict the British, such as the fallen Xhosa soldiers destroying their ornaments before they could be taken, and the Tibetans holding up a twenty-five-foot-long petition specifically asking the British not to loot in 1904.Footnote ¹⁰³

Jacobs seeks to amplify the voices and actions of historical actors as he believes an assumption prevails that they felt the same toward objects back then as people do today. What particularly troubles Jacobs is the notion that museum objects should be returned as they ‘hold the memories of a nation’. In terms of loot, he argues that the objects usually belonged to the sovereign, not the people, and voices of dissent at the time were not fuelled by nationalism as they are today. Jacobs’s mission to uncover the complex ways people in the past interacted with cultural assets is commendable, and his point about the historical specificity of nationalism is convincing, but by reducing the contemporary reasons for restitution to nationalism he does what he accuses others of doing – speaking for other people. As work like Fifteen colonial thefts show, restitution can be about peoples’ familial, religious, and ethnic connection to belongings.

On a final note, the decolonial turn has not only fuelled debates over restitution but also spurred new investigations into the history of restitution itself.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This is not to say it is a new topic of historical inquiry. The early histories of loot written alongside restitution requests mentioned that previous attempts and legal scholars have similarly looked for historical precedents. Relevant object biographies have also noted moments when an object has been embroiled in restitution debates.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Where the more recent work differs is that it envelops restitution attempts into the wider critique of museums, showing how they have facilitated and inhibited restitutions, or ‘returns’ as some historians prefer as it encompasses ‘restitution’ and ‘repatriation’, which have specific meanings.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ When viewing the literature together, we can see how restitution has a long history. Way back in 1872, for instance, just four years after the plundering of Maqdala, Emperor Yohannes applied to Queen Victoria for the return of the Kebra Nagast and Kwer’ata Re’esu painting. In this instance, the application was partly successful – the British Museum returned the former, albeit their inferior copy, but not the painting as it was squirrelled away in the private collection of Richard Holmes – the British Museum curator who accompanied the expedition.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Whether or not objects were returned was dependent on a myriad of factors. As with today, an important determinant for the national museums was museum legislation. Jacques Schuhmacher’s comparison of the restitution requests for the V&A’s Burmese and Abyssinian regalia effectively highlights this. In both cases, the V&A were only custodians of the material for the India Office, which became the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1947. In 1964/5, after six years of petitioning by the Burmese government and wranglings with the V&A and Foreign Office, the Commonwealth Relations Office agreed to return the regalia. However, when the Ethiopian government made a formal restitution application to the V&A in 2008, they were blocked – the National Heritage Act (1983) had transferred the legal ownership of the objects from the Commonwealth Relations Office to the V&A, which was then governed by restrictive stipulations on deaccessioning.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ While most of the research has focused on twentieth-century legislation, in particular the infamous British Museum Act (1963), legislation was also seemingly an important factor in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Though not remarked upon by those studying it, the British Museum’s aforementioned return of one of their Kebra Nagast to Yohannes in 1872 was facilitated by the British Museum Act of 1807 that allowed the trustees to exchange, sell, or dispose of duplicates.Footnote ¹¹⁰

As well as legislation, museum personnel and the political climate were crucial in steering the fate of restitution requests. The leftist John Irwin, curator at the V&A for instance, was pivotal in arguing for the Burmese material to return, and the Foreign Office supported the returns as they hoped it would unfreeze British assets.Footnote ¹¹¹ Meanwhile, in the 1970s, William Fagg at the British Museum apparently had unopened letters from Ghana asking for returns and the Foreign Office was ‘fundamentally unsympathetic’ to the idea at that time.Footnote ¹¹² Despite new interest in the history of the restitution of British colonial loot, however, we are still lacking a comprehensive history of it. There is currently nothing akin to Bénédicte Savoy’s exploration of German museums in Africa’s struggle for its art: history of a postcolonial defeat (2022), which itself is restricted to African restitution attempts from 1965 to 1985. A chapter in Claire Wintle’s new book provides the most expansive account, looking at returns made between 1945 and 1980. This important contribution not only showcases that many local museums returned objects during this time, but also that they did so because their interests had shifted away from ethnographic to local objects, and they were struggling with issues of space and money – not out of a moral sense of colonial injustice.Footnote ¹¹³ It still remains to be studied how (or whether) museum, government, and public responses to restitution requests changed according the political context in which they were made, who was asking, how they did so, and the object(s) in question. In line with the above discussion on loot, historians who take up this task need to meaningfully incorporate the voices and actions of those making the requests.

IV

As well as outlining and assessing the historiography, this review set out to weave the numerous histories together to take stock of what we know (and do not know) about colonial ‘loot’. In doing so, it has revealed how acquiring spoils of war was a prevalent feature of British colonial warfare throughout the period, and across the different geographical contexts. Various practices made up a complex military culture determined to capture material culture, including looting, battlefield trophies, sanctioned small-scale collecting, prize auctions and auctions, treaties, and dividing up booty on the spot. Although the circumstances of each war influenced how and which practices were used, we can nevertheless see some broader trends. Looting and battlefield trophies appear to have been ubiquitous across the period and geographies, despite the former being prohibited unless after a siege, while the prize system was dominant until 1868, whereafter auctions were used to distribute larger captures and gratuity issued instead of prize money. The Boxer War prize money is the exception which proves the rule.

Once in Britain, spoils played multifaceted roles depending on what they were and their owners’ tastes and intentions – becoming trophies of imperial victories, curios, decorative arts, and so on. Spoils became increasingly public in the second half of the century with the development of museum and exhibitionary culture, and after 1870 were more likely to be used in imperial propaganda. Far from stable trophies of Britain’s imperial might, however, preliminary findings suggest that increased publicity generated more opportunities for reflection and criticism about spoils as commentators struggled to square the objects’ violent provenance with Britain’s civilizing mission.

Since the early studies of spoils, the case study approach has dominated. While the recent trend toward investigating understudied wars has been fruitful, these need to be complemented with studies expanding the scope and asking new questions. The rising prominence of decolonial approaches has made great strides regarding the latter, but it also has the potential to breathe new life into existing topics and methodologies. Rather than creating more silos, future works should look for integrations, for, as this review has hopefully shown, there is much to be learned from more joined-up thinking.