6 ms·
Huh. I share a surname with the original owner (Sheldon) and once researched Henry XIII for a people fair. I think that means I’m the rightful owner…
by twodave 2y ago
Huh. I share a surname with the original owner (Sheldon) and once researched Henry XIII for a people fair. I think that means I’m the rightful owner…
- throwup238 2y agoBy British rules if you can smuggle it out of the country, it's legally yours. That's how they filled the British Museum.
- markdown 2y agoBritish? Isn't that just a human rule until about 1946.
- throwup238 2y agoThis Henry VIII portrait is under UK jurisdiction at the moment.
- wordofx 2y agoThat’s such a dumb comment. Back when the British was taking items back to the UK. There were no rules or systems in place for this stuff. You could buy it, trade it, steal it. It didn’t matter. And the UK isn’t the only country to ever do this. Laws were created to resolve/fix/prevent things happening. You can’t blame people for shit that happened before someone decided it’s wrong.
- GolfPopper 2y agoAh, so when the British stole stuff in the first place, that was fine. But once they had it, they created a rule that said "finders keepers!" and no one was allowed to take it away from them. (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".)
- Daz1 2y ago[flagged]
- ocodo 2y agoLooted. Happy?
- Daz1 2y agoNo? I have an Edo-era plate I bought from an antique store in Japan which I then gave to my mother. Did I steal it from Japan? If someone did the same thing 200 years ago then put it in a British museum is it a stolen item? Is my mother in possession of stolen goods?
- BobaFloutist 2y agoYou can, however, blame them for refusing to return the shit they stole.
- Daz1 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- iamacyborg 2y agoPresumably because a lot of it wasn’t stolen but acquired through legal means at the time.
- serf 2y agoA museum, or generally any arm of academia, should strive to work towards a moral imperative rather than disregarding morality because of a contractual allowance. Pilfering a nation is often times legal , but it's rarely right.
- iamacyborg 2y agoYou’re assuming that there is a clear moral right or wrong in this scenario.
- PhasmaFelis 2y agoPreverbal infants know that taking other people's stuff is wrong.
- serf 2y agothe moral relative concept that previous peoples' didn't know right-from-wrong is , as always, ridiculous. 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...
- wordofx 2y agoAgain. When the British were going to a lot of countries. They didn’t “steal” a lot of stuff. It was traded. They were gifts. Or they found them and took them back. No one was kicking up a fuss, half the counties were full of locals who would be classified as primitive and had no concept of cultural heritage. 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.
- mensetmanusman 2y agoWhen the original artists walk out of the catacombs to grab their stuff, I’m sure they would oblige.
- Flop7331 2y agoYou'd have to travel into the future to research Henry XIII
- twodave 2y agoHa, good catch
- sofixa 2y agoTo be fair, they didn't specify Henry XIII of what. There are plenty of them - if nothing else a bunch from the House of Reuss where all male kids are called Henry (Heinrich) Number (one branch just keeps incrementing the number to 100, and then rolls over to 1; the other one rolls over every century). There's even a living one who was in the news not all that long ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_XIII_Prinz_Reuss https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_XIII_Prinz_Reuss