This book tackles big issues: colonialism and nationalism, gender and feminism, and the development of civic and popular museums. And it does so through the lens of controversy about the nature and ownership of cultural property.

Jordanna Bailkin has selected four case studies. “Celtic Gold: The Irish Invention of Repatriation” discusses the dispute, around 1900, between the British Museum and the National Museum of Ireland over the ownership of the beautiful gold jewelry and ornaments found at Broighter in Derry in 1896. “The Art of the Stateless Nation: The National Galleries of Scotland Bill” looks at the lively debate about the governance of the National Galleries of Scotland that lasted from 1901 to 1906. “Picturing Feminism, Selling Liberalism: The Case of the Disappearing Holbein” is about the successful campaign to “save” Holbein's Chris tina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan for the National Gallery in 1909. Finally, “Civics and `Civi-otics' at the London Museum” analyzes the public and critical responses to the creation of this new and popular museum in the years immediately before the First World War.

Each of these case studies is fascinating in its own right, and together they have a good deal to tell us about the issues that interest Bailkin. But whether they will bear the interpretation that she brings to them is more doubtful. She wants to see museums both as emanations of the colonial state, filled with an “extensive array of imperial booty” (20), and also as the product of a liberal political system and so “formed overwhelmingly by individual donations rather than a systematised government policy of acquisitions” (15). She takes a strong line on “Ireland's uneasy status as a past and present colony” (24) and regards the controversy over the Broighter Hoard as “part of a strategy of resistance to English rule” (37), centering on “the question of whether the British Museum could continue to function as the central imperial institution of art and science” (42). It is, in her view, the first example of repatriation that she believes “originated as the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial engagement” (23–24). Such preconceptions lead Bailkin into misconceptions that, though individually unimportant, are cumulatively disturbing.

Take the Broighter Hoard. It was found by Thomas Nichol on a farm belonging to Joseph Gibson: both of them were Scotch Irish Ulstermen. The case against the British Museum was brought by Sir Robert Bannantyne Finlay, a Scottish Conservative and Unionist MP who was at the time attorney general for Ireland. He was acting for the Dublin Museum, which had been founded by the Department of Science and Art, based in South Kensington, and was part of a network of museums and schools of art and science that covered the whole of the British Isles. In 1900, the Dublin Museum had been transferred to the newly formed Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, which was run by Sir Horace Curzon Plunkett, a Conservative Unionist. Bailkin tells us that he was later converted to Home Rule, without mentioning that he was driven from office by the Nationalists, had his house burned down in the Irish Civil War, and ended his days in England. Finally, Finlay's case depended for its success on the argument that the hoard was a treasure trove, that is to say, that it belonged to Edward the VII as King of Ireland and could therefore be allocated by the crown wherever it pleased.

This is not to argue that there was no nationalist feeling about the Broighter Hoard. There was some at the time, and decades later it became a symbol of Irish national identity. But it is to point out that the whole affair was more nuanced and interesting than Bailkin would have us believe. It does matter that she uses the term “English” when the facts of the case make it clear that she means British; that, in a book about museums, she confuses the British Museum, which concentrated on archaeology and history, with the “South Kensington” museums, which, if any, were the “imperial institution of art and science” (42); and that she claims repatriation as an Irish anticolonial invention despite the evident precedent, to which Bailkin herself refers, of the Treaty of Vienna, which brought about extensive repatriation after the Napoleonic wars and the lively early nineteenth-century controversy over the desirability of repatriating the Elgin Marbles.

When she moves on to Scotland Bailkin seems even more confused. She would clearly like to represent this as a further instance of resistance to colonial oppression. The duke of Argyll is described as “undoubtedly … an outsider in Scotland” (78—she earlier describes Lord Balcarres as English!), and poor Captain Balfour is described as “an Englishman” (92), perhaps because she was unaware that his full name was Balfour of Balgonie in Fife and Newton Don near Kelso and that he was a county councilor and later Lord Lieutenant of Berwickshire in Scotland. The Board of Manufactures, which had administered the National Gallery of Scotland since its foundation, is said to have been seen as “an unwelcome Unionist intrusion” (86) and as a “distinctively Scottish” (93) institution any attack on which “was a denial of Scottish statehood” (93). The office of Secretary for Scotland is described both as “largely ceremonial” (84) and as “a working minister of relatively low official rank … as much grandee as cabinet minister” (84). Some of this reflects conflicting views expressed at the time, but much derives from Bailkin's imperfect acquaintance with her subject matter.

She observes, bizarrely, that within the National Gallery's walls “lay the aesthetic objects of Home Rule: the paintings and sculpture that constituted the Scottish School” (88–89) and that the “art might be `national' but the gallery itself was not” (89) when precisely the reverse is true. The Gallery is national, but the art within it has always been predominantly international. She talks of “Scotland's own inglorious art history, in which native productions were either academic or overly localised” [102], which seems rather to underrate the work of Allan Ramsay, Gavin Hamilton, David Allan, Henry Raeburn, and David Wilkie. She does not seem to be aware that much of the greatest Scottish art was to be seen then, as now, not in the National Gallery but in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and she makes no mention of the great patriotic building on Queen Street, with its mosaic representation of the great figures of Scottish history, which had just been created to house the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland.

The National Galleries of Scotland bill is not, as Bailkin states, “particularly striking for its simultaneous engagement with and suppression of Highlandism” (81), nor, as the fact that it was introduced by a Conservative Unionist confirms, was it motivated by a strong desire for Home Rule. What it turned into was a traditional and enjoyable battle between Edinburgh and Glasgow, with the Glasgow Herald arguing that the National Gallery should be moved to Glasgow, and Edinburgh opinion arguing that such a proposal was unpatriotic. What seems a shame is that Bailkin does not mention either the controversy over proposals for a Museum of Scotland, which raged intermittently from the 1950s to the early 1990s, or the even more recent controversy over the location of the proposed Gallery of Scottish Art, intended as a truly national gallery, which would have been located in Glasgow if the project had not been killed off by the determination of leading Edinburgh citizens to hang on to the great collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The final two chapters are equally interesting and equally flawed. At one point, for example, Bailkin asserts that governesses were “working class or lower middle class,” when the tragedy of governesses, in Victorian eyes, was precisely that they were genteel but poor and therefore unmarriageable. It seems a shame that such interesting and original research should not have been joined to a wider, deeper, and more sympathetic understanding of the period and culture in question and that the real complexities and contradictions within the evidence were not confronted and explored.