How to Return Stolen Art (Update)

**Patricia Allan** (0:03)
I mean, I'm quite famous for not doing what I'm told.

**Stephen Dubner** (0:06)
Well, it's very convenient for our purposes, I have to say. You think we're 100% safe here?

**Patricia Allan** (0:11)
Well, we can just keep a weather eye on those three. Especially the man with the big fuzzy microphone.

**Stephen Dubner** (0:16)
That is me with Patricia Allen in the Kelvin Grove Museum in Glasgow, Scotland. At the time, she was curator of world cultures for the 11 institutions that make up the Glasgow Museums, which made her responsible for all non-European objects in their collections. We have come to the Kelvin Grove to see a group of objects known as Benin bronzes, artworks and artifacts looted by Britain from the historic kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria. The last time I tried to see some Benin bronzes in a museum at the British Museum in London, our microphones were confiscated and then, as it turned out, all the Africa galleries were closed that day.
Today, in Glasgow, we are having better luck.

**Patricia Allan** (1:03)
This is the head of an oba. So all of these heads were made by ancestors.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:09)
An oba is a Benin king.

**Patricia Allan** (1:12)
A newly crowned oba would make the head of the preceding oba. They're placed on altars along with other offerings, including things like a bell.
There's an ebon sword, maybe some of the ivory.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:24)
What is that?

**Patricia Allan** (1:25)
That's a ceremonial sword carried by the oba.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:27)
I see.

**Patricia Allan** (1:28)
So we have two of these heads. This head and another one that used to be on display at St.Mongo Museum of Religion. Glasgow Museums bought them in auction in 1898
So that was a year afterwards.

**Stephen Dubner** (1:40)
A year afterwards, meaning after the bloody 1897 expedition in which British soldiers burned Benin City, killed much of the population, expelled the oba, and took home everything from the palace that wasn't bolted down. Actually, as we heard in our previous episode, they took some of the bolted down stuff too.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:02)
They even took the bolts from the doors, these ivory bolts.

**Victor Ehikhamenor** (2:07)
The Western colonizers were kleptomaniacs. They stole hairpins. They stole keys to the doors in the palace.

**Stephen Dubner** (2:18)
The British shipped thousands of objects from everyday tools to religious and historical objects back to England. Many of the best pieces went straight into the British Museum. Others were auctioned off to museums throughout Europe. For the British Empire, plunder was an important economic activity.
In recent decades, Nigeria has repeatedly asked for the return of the stolen artifacts from Benin. The British Museum has thus far refused. But many other institutions, including the Glasgow Museums, have begun to repatriate their Benin pieces.
Today, on Freakonomics Radio, the third and final episode in our series on the economics, politics, and ethics of returning stolen art. We have already learned how easily stolen art can still get into even the most prominent museums.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:08)
Let's talk about the gold coffin, the $4 million gold coffin.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:13)
We've learned how quickly public sentiment has changed.

**SPEAKER_6** (3:16)
If they will tell the truth, it would be so disgusting that would be the end of the British Museum.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:24)
And today on the show, what does it mean to be a museum in the 21st century?

**Lonnie G. Bunch III** (3:30)
I always think that people go to the worst-case scenario.

**Stephen Dubner** (3:34)
Reporting from museums in Glasgow, London, Washington DC, and more, beginning right now.

**SPEAKER_8** (3:58)
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:13)
Okay, let's get back to Patricia Allen, former curator of world cultures at the Glasgow Museums.

**Patricia Allan** (4:19)
My role isn't so much front of house curating exhibitions at the moment. At the time of lockdown, I took it upon myself to focus quite heavily on repatriation and restitution.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:31)
I feel like I've read in your biography that you came to curation via perhaps archaeology and maybe even biology. Is that true?

**Patricia Allan** (4:39)
That is absolutely true. I started as a microbiologist and then I moved into archaeology and then ultimately into museum curation.

**Stephen Dubner** (4:48)
So my amateur unscientific brain, if it's looking for the most obvious connection between what you did perhaps as an archaeologist and what you do now as a museum curator of world culture, the linchpin that my brain puts in the middle is looting. Am I wrong there?

**Patricia Allan** (5:06)
I have not made that connection before, but looting is big in both professions. I have been on archaeological sites in South America where you go off for the night and then come back and find that people have got in to the site and have dug everything out.