Cynthia Scott’s book Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire represents an important addition to the burgeoning literature on returns and restitution of cultural heritage objects. Its first great contribution is to focus in depth on a case study that has seldom been explored elsewhere: the negotiations over the return of cultural heritage objects and archives to Indonesia from the Netherlands, a process that took approximately three decades following Indonesia’s independence in 1949. Overall, the scholarly literature has preferred to examine cases in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly the unresolved Greek claim over the Parthenon Marbles, currently held in the British Museum. More recently, international attention has shifted toward other high-profile disputes – in particular, over the Benin Bronzes held in several Western museums and claimed by Nigeria. Comparatively, studies focusing on other geographical areas remain few and far apart; even more comprehensive studies such as Jeanette Greenfield’s classic volume barely mention the Dutch-Indonesian negotiations.Footnote ¹

For readers, such as this reviewer, unfamiliar with either Dutch or Indonesian history, Scott provides clear and detailed information to contextualize her argument. The objects that were at stake in these negotiations included, among others, war booty from Dutch military expeditions against kingdoms in Lombok and Bali in the nineteenth century; religious and cultural objects brought back to the Netherlands by army officers or employees of the Dutch East India Company (or the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie [VOC] in Dutch, the trading corporation that served as one of the main tools of the Dutch colonial domination over the Indonesian archipelago) and held in the public collections of Dutch ethnological museums, among them a famous Prajñāpāramitā statue from the Singasari era; and important archives of the early Indonesian republican period – the so-called Djokja Archive – taken by the Dutch just before their departure in 1949. Scott’s case study is also interesting because the return negotiations dealt with an array of archaeological and cultural materials taken over an expansive period of time, while many other return disputes concern one specific object or group of similar objects.

The second, and most important, contribution of Scott’s study is her approach to the topic of returns. Rather than focusing on the colonial context that led to the constitution of these collections (a past she evokes but does not delve on) or the legal dimension of the returns, Scott prefers to consider the return of cultural objects as a political process – namely, the establishment of new cultural relations between a major European colonial metropolis and one of its former colonies after independence. Return negotiations thus become a proxy for navigating the tumultuous process of inventing new diplomatic relations in the post-colonial period. As the author signals, the long duration of the negotiations, over three decades, “suggests more was at stake than a legal or an ethical response to Indonesia’s claims for post-colonial cultural property return alone” (18). Based on a historical analysis of the archives of several dependencies of the Dutch government, the book convincingly describes how the Dutch diplomacy alternatively considered the possibility of returning archives and cultural objects as a tool to restore the damaged international image of the Netherlands in the wake of the armed conflict that preceded Indonesian independence, as a gesture of good will toward their new Indonesian partner, and as an incentive to convince successive Indonesian governments to continue negotiating larger agreements of cultural cooperation and bilateral development aid.

Rather than an end in itself, the return of cultural heritage objects would thus serve broader diplomatic goals. Scott examines the Dutch point of view in this process – we learn little here about the (nationalist?) considerations that push Indonesian authorities to continue claiming these objects throughout the decades. The author shows how Dutch attitudes shift in response to the varyingly aggressive stances of the first two presidents of independent Indonesia – Sukarno (1950–65) and Suharto (post-1966). While negotiations stalled immediately after independence, when Sukarno was one of the pillars of the Non-Aligned Movement and sought to severe the ties with the former metropolis, the more Western-oriented (but also strongly anti-Communist and more authoritarian) Suharto showed better dispositions to restart programs of cooperation and development with the Netherlands.

Scott’s focus on the political aspects of the negotiations over the return of cultural heritage objects, which owes much to Elazar Barkan’s work on returns as instruments of reparation,Footnote ² is a welcome departure from much of the literature that continues to examine returns and restitutions from the sole perspective of international and national law on restitutions and the protection of cultural heritage. Scott shows that postcolonial guilt is not easily dealt with: framing returns as a gesture of good will may be seen today, from a postcolonial perspective, as a tentative means to evade responsibility for the damage done in the name of European civilization during the colonial rule. However, it was also, as Scott reveals, a more strategic argument to convince many Dutch citizens of the very idea of the transfer of objects back to Indonesia, several decades after independence.

Analyzing the negotiations between the Netherlands and Indonesia as an instrument of the establishment of new diplomatic relations in the postcolonial context also allows the author to overcome some of the limitations of the old debate that opposes the so-called “internationalists” and “nationalists” over the question of returns and restitutions.Footnote ³ Indeed, instead of seeking to resolve once and for all the endless dispute over who is the legitimate owner and possessor of an object, Scott prefers to focus on the dynamics that make these objects the stakes of lengthy negotiations that vary as governments change in both countries and as the international landscape and concern over restitutions and returns fluctuate. This approach, which takes into account the conflicting and evolving views over the colonial era in both the claimant and claimed countries, offers an understanding as to why agreements over returns of cultural heritage objects displaced during the colonial rule “may continue to seem partial, provisional and defiant of easy resolution” (170). Because these agreements are historically situated, nothing warrants that they will not be revisited in the future. Simultaneously, because these agreements are the result of bilateral negotiations, they only engage both parties but hardly set a precedent binding other European colonial powers.

In that regard, Scott’s book clearly evidences the shortcomings of existing international instruments – in particular, the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (1970 UNESCO Convention).Footnote ⁴ By being strictly forward looking, this text offers no legal ground to deal with the numerous cases of objects displaced before 1970 and in any case during the colonial era. Scott shows how the debates taking place in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) throughout the 1960s and 1970s certainly bore on Dutch reflections on the past and future of their collections from the East Indies, yet she also evidences that these debates only served as an intellectual background for the Dutch-Indonesian negotiations, which took place exclusively within a bilateral framework.

The book also hints at another political dimension of the return process by suggesting that the Dutch left-leaning government of the mid-1970s was more sympathetic to the claims coming from the former colony than its right-wing predecessors: in the Netherlands, after decades of center-right coalitions, a more progressive coalition led by Joop den Uyl, of the Labor Party, came to power in 1973. The returns were finally implemented starting in 1975. Scott’s argument opens an interesting avenue for research as it remains to be confirmed empirically if, indeed, in other European countries, left parties have been more prone to condone returns. Scott herself mentions the example of the British Labor leader Jeremy Corbin, who in 2016 declared in favor of returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. In France, Emmanuel Macron, a former minister in a socialist Cabinet turned centrist neoliberal president, ordered the Sarr-Savoy report, published in Reference Sarr and Savoy2018,Footnote ⁵ and offered to return 26 artifacts to Benin and Senegal over the next few years. Elsewhere in Europe, left-wing Austrian political parties have shown greater sympathy toward the Mexican claim to obtain the return of Montezuma’s featherhead dress – another claim tainted in the colonial and imperial adventures of European powers that has been dragging on for decades. A more systematic study of European political parties on the question of cultural heritage returns remains to be published.

Finally, another quality of Scott’s book is to consistently respect the semantic distinction among returns, restitutions, and repatriations – a commendable development in a literature that often confuses the three terms, which contributes to obscuring the political stakes of each specific case. Returns, restitutions, and repatriations are, indeed, better analyzed as distinct phenomena. As some scholars have proposed, returns – a somewhat neutral term – refer to the transfer of cultural objects displaced before the implementation of international conventions (particularly, the 1970 UNESCO Convention) back to their “country of origin” (regardless of whether this country existed as such when the object was taken away), while restitution fits better the cases of objects whose devolution to their country of origin takes place within clearly established, contemporary, international and national legal frameworks.Footnote ⁶ As for repatriation, it concerns more specifically cases of human remains and religious and cultural objects claimed by Native and Indigenous communities. Scott makes consistent use of the term “returns” and notes that it has indeed served as “an alternative or replacement for the embarrassing ‘restitution’” (140), yet this use is also consistent with the differentiation between the two terms posited above. This consistency pays off because it allows Scott to continue focusing throughout her book on the political stakes of the negotiations rather than on legal quibbles, as may occur by confusing cases of returns with restitutions.

Because it represents a great effort at diversifying the approach to returns and restitutions and at using little-known case studies, Scott’s book is one of the most interesting contributions to the subfield of cultural property and heritage returns and restitutions to be published in recent years.