BBC History - UK (2022-01)

Looting history

DAVID OLUSOGA praises a stark exploration of the blood-

soaked British raid that plundered the treasures of Benin

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Blood and Bronze

by Paddy Docherty

Hurst, 2 4 0 pages, £20

At no time since 1897,

when the Benin

Bronzes were looted

from the royal palace

of the Kingdom of

Benin (in what’s now

Nigeria), have they

been discussed as much as they are today.

In the 1890s, debate focused on how it was

that an African kingdom, dismissed and

derided as barbarous and uncivilised by the

politicians, press and public of late Victorian

Britain, had been able to produce such

exquisite works of art – objects of outstanding

technical and aesthetic sophistication.

Today the Benin Bronzes are famous once

again, while the British invasion of Benin has

become infamous. The contrast is stark be-

tween the beauty of the objects and the ugli-

ness of the history by which 700 of them end-

ed up in the British Museum, with hundreds

more in museums across the world. Now the

art of Benin is at the epicentre of demands

that western colonial-era museums return ob-

jects seized by the soldiers and administrators

of Europe’s empires.

In Blood and Bronze, historian of empire

Paddy Docherty covers the restitution debate

in his early and final chapters. The bulk of

the book is devoted to exploring the broader

history of late 19th-century Britain’s military

and economic forays into what is today

Nigeria. The 1897 raid can only be prop-

erly understood, Docherty rightly states,

when “seen in this context of British ex-

pansion in the wider Niger region”. To

explore that context, Docherty goes back

in time, in particular to the 1880s when

the British – in search of palm oil and

other commodities, and determined to

prevent incursions by French and other

European traders – began to tighten

their grip on the region.

Blood and Bronze is careful to

highlight what that process meant

for the people of the region,

chronicling in detail the long list of

unequal treaties, punitive raids and

gunboat actions that punctuated Britain’s

west Africa power grab. Docherty powerfully

draws from the letters and dispatches of

British officials and traders – documents

saturated with racial thinking – in which

they coldly recount the routine deployment

of violence or the threat of violence in the

extension of British power, all done in the

interests of “opening up trade”.

Blood and Bronze starkly recounts the

deadly imbalance of military power that in

1897 enabled the British to invade, capture

and devastate the capital of an ancient

kingdom, with negligible risk and minimal

casualties. It is a similar inequality of power,

Docherty notes, that convinces a number of

21st-century politicians and curators that

their claims of ownership over artworks

looted by force, during the committing of

what Geoffrey Robertson QC argues was

a war crime, have moral legitimacy.

By setting this comparatively familiar

story in its less well-known historical context,

Blood and Bronze reminds readers that the

raid on Benin is now a cause celebre not

because it represents the nadir of British

colonial violence but only because the art-

works that the British unexpectedly found

and enthusiastically looted from the Kingdom

of Benin were of such exceptional beauty.

In every other respect, that episode in 1897

was standard operating procedure for the

British empire in the last years of the 19th

century. Indeed, many of the men who took

part in the conquest of Nigeria had long

careers of imperial violence in India, Egypt

and elsewhere. The treaties forced upon

these regions, and the military blueprints

for the raid of 1897, were off-the-shelf

templates drawn from the arsenal of

imperial experience.

David Olusoga is a historian and

broadcaster. His books include

Black and British: A Forgotten

History (Pan Macmillan, 2021)

A sculpture of a horse and rider,

in the British Museum. A new

book examines the looting of

the Benin Bronzes in 1897

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