# The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution - Hardcover

by **Dan Hicks** (Author)

**Winner of the 2021 Elliott P. Skinner Book Award**

_**New York Times**_ **'Best Art Books' 2020  
'Essential' - _Sunday Times_  
'Brilliantly enraged' - _New York Review of Books_  
'A real game-changer'- _Economist_**

Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.

Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.

_The Brutish Museums_ sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonization of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we relate to the objects of empire we once took for granted.

### Author Biography

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His award-winning research focuses on decolonisation in art and culture, and academic disciplines, and on the role of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence and dispossession.

**Number of Pages:** 368

**Dimensions:** 1.3 x 9.1 x 6.1 IN

**Illustrated:** Yes

**Publication Date:** November 05, 2020

## Details

- **Price:** 37.8 USD
- **Vendor:** Books by splitShops
- **Type:** Books
- **Tags:** Books by splitShops, Shopify Collective

## Variants

| Variant | Price | Available |
|---------|-------|-----------|
| Default Title | 37.80 USD | In stock |

## Images

- The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution - Hardcover

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