CYIL vol. 15 (2024)

PUNSARA AMARASINGHE CYIL 15 ȍ2024Ȏ The much-revered enlightening principles such as reason, humanism and the idea of beauty were mainly confined to the European landscape wherein the norms on cultural heritage and its preservation continued to apply in the warfare among the civilized nations. The art and culture of the Greco-Roman antiquity became idealized objects in 19th-century Europe. In contrast, the artefacts and looted cultural properties from the colonized territories in Asia and Africa received an inferior reception as objects of curiosity. The 19th-century international law dominated by the English-Belgian academic narratives always distinguished the colonial wars from the wars that were fought in Europe. Another English international jurist in the late 19 th century James Lorimer made a proper dichotomy between the warfare in his age as civilized armed conflicts and marching against barbarous armies, in which the protection of cultural properties appeared to be a dubious affair. 18 Mainly, the British scholarly opinion that pervaded the late 19th century academic discourse in the infancy stage of the systemic growth of international law or law of nations as it was known then was a stark portrayal of the imperial agenda of the empire. Apart from the civilizational myth they often utilized in justifying the colonial acts, British international lawyers legitimized the removal of art and cultural objects from the colonized territories based on the interest of humanity or civilization as such acquisition would enable the scholarly endeavors and general enjoyment of the public. In her seminal work International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects, Ana Vrodoljak states “Such narratives captured the schizophrenic justification of cultural takings in the colonial period. European powers claimed that they had a ‘civilising responsibility’, namely a ‘responsibility to promote civilization and institute good government in the countries under their imperial authority’. They used this argument to legitimize the taking and removal of objects, which led to cultural dispossession or destruction in societies of origin.” 19 The question that comes to the fore is whether British attitude towards the acquired cultural properties has changed after the decline of the British empire due to the robust sociopolitical changes that encompassed post-war Britain. Yet the answer is not a positive one with the strict state policy arose within then British state apparatus, which is an anathema to the popular rhetoric on colonial reparation or the return of the colonial cultural properties to the former colonies. It is an axiomatic factor that the identity of a nation built on a shared interpretation of history, which bolstered the political scientists such as Benedict Anderson, who theorized the notion of nation “Regardless of the actual inequity and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived, as a deep horizontal comradeship”. In its global expansion, British consolidated the idea of presenting itself as the epitome of the civilization, which denoted from various cultural properties that British colonial administrators displayed in the British museum. A visitor who stepped into the British museum in London might had viewed the galleries in awe as each gallery depicted the intrinsic progress of the human civilizations in various epochs. By incorporating a plethora of artifacts, paintings which personified the other cultures into the British museum, Britain accomplished two main objects. First, it redefined 18 LORIMER, J., The Institutes of Law of Nations , first published 1856, The Law Book Exchange, 2005. 19 VRDOLJAK, A. F., ‘International Law, Museums and the Return of Cultural Objects’ in PROTT, LYNDEL V., Witnesses to History. Paris: UNESCO (2009), pp. 193, 194.

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