By British rules if you can smuggle it out of the country, it's legally yours.
That's how they filled the British Museum.
That's how they filled the British Museum.
Laws were created to resolve/fix/prevent things happening. You can’t blame people for shit that happened before someone decided it’s wrong.
we're not talking about a bogus modern concept here, we're talking about cultural theft on a global scale -- and we're pretending that the British did so without ever realizing that stealing artifacts from other nations around the world is A Bad Thing, until of course they produced modern rules to apply to their cultural theft so that the world stage doesn't think too poorly of them (now that they're no longer the king of the world).
Could it be that ancient peoples knew right-from-wrong but didn't care as long as it wasn't their shit disappearing, and as long as it wasn't their natives dying from foreign-borne disease during 'excavations'? As long as it was their museums profiting, and bolstering their professionals?
And how can we presume all this shit is bogus theater in order to have it both ways?
Well, how many artifacts has Britain given back to the world at large that they previously stole?
It's really a shame that those British laws you mentioned don't have any kind of retroactive clauses -- but that might spur actual justice to occur; I'm sure certain law makers may wish to avoid that...
Pretty much all countries are now governed in some form of another and have some laws protecting these things and/or preventing them from being removed from the country.
Yes we can debate if the British should return a lot of this stuff. But that’s a completely different topic.
But you cannot fly a single banner and call it 100% looting/stealing when that is not true.
If you are on the losing side you might sometimes have to return things (see looted nazi stuff), but if you are on the winning side you probably won’t (see pretty much all of the Americas).
'Museum attendance might drop a bit so the British Museum of History regrets to inform you and your country that the exhibit is just too popular to return to Tuva. Sorry.'
"Better luck next conquest!" -- is it okay to be that petty with regards to stuff that doesn't necessarily even have 'a winning side', aside from the vultures that profited from the museum work?
I'm imagining a local yokel telling that to the police, as they go through his garage cataloguing the stolen copper wire & stolen porch packages.
That isn't a conundrum, it's a hassle.
Britain did the work to plunder the world, they can do the work to return the plunder, or pay rent to the countries they stole from if those countries choose to have their property remain in British custody.
>If you are on the losing side you might sometimes have to return things (see looted nazi stuff), but if you are on the winning side you probably won’t (see pretty much all of the Americas).
The sun set on the British empire ages ago, and it's starting to set on the American empire. In the long term, both will end up on the losing side of history, as all empires do.
[citation-needed]
The US is the only first world country with demographic numbers that look not-apocalyptic.
Pilfering a nation is often times legal , but it's rarely right.
(I grant that the whole scope of modern Western European history and law is a immense and complex topic, but the prior poster, like my snark above, is addressing a very valid topic: using a lax regulatory system to become a dominant player, then imposing rules that protect the established players and make it very difficult for new entrants to match them is something that occurs on many scales and not automatically a good thing, nor is questioning it "dumb".)