Between 1798 and 1930, hundreds of European explorers, amateur and professional archaeologists, tomb raiders, shady antiquities dealers, but also scholars sent on high-profile missions by their governments descended upon the broader Mediterranean – territories of today’s Greece, Italy, Turkey, and Egypt. Between Great Britain, France, Bavaria, and Prussia, thousands of Egyptian stone statues, papyri, and mummies, ancient Greek and Roman pottery, sculptures, jewellery, and many other objects and artefacts were brought to museums in London, Paris, Berlin, and Munich. This ‘antiquities rush’ was often chaotic, violent, and completely unregulated.Footnote 1 Sounding much like Indiana Jones, British archaeologist Howard Carter, famous for discovering the tomb of Tutankhamun outside Luxor in 1922, lamented the passing of the glory days of the 19th-century plundering of Egypt: ‘Those were the great days of collecting. Anything, for which a fancy was taken, from a scarab to an obelisk, was just appropriated and if there was a difference of opinion with a brother excavator one laid for him with a gun.’Footnote 2
Art objects were acquired through a variety of means – aboveboard purchasing, but also bribery or outright looting, and often some murky mix of all.Footnote 3 But the scramble of the antiquities rush also destroyed the integrity of cultural sites in many different ways – aesthetically, structurally, environmentally, and even semiotically. Objects were excavated, removed, broken up into smaller pieces, and moved to various destinations for sale or depository into national museums. Stone statues were sawed off from their pedestals for ease of transport and would then appear in European museums cut up and disfigured.Footnote 4 They were also dislocated from their geographic and cultural context, detached from the integral structures that housed them. After they were displayed in European imperial museums, often separated from the larger collections or structures they were a part of, they acquired a new meaning as national collectors’ items and became valuable status symbols of the states that now owned them.
The imperial state, with its military and diplomatic arms, was essential in the process of antiquities acquisition in the 19th century. This was not just the hobby of rich explorers or adventurers trying to collect – often through simple plunder – antiquities and sell them to the highest bidder. European states coordinated and financed many expeditions to the Mediterranean, Middle East, and later Africa and Asia and organised the transport of collectibles back to their big national museums using naval vessels and providing logistical support and administration.
Establishing the relationship between archaeology, artefact extraction, and imperialism is not new, nor is it particularly surprising. What is surprising, however, is the scant attention International Relations (IR) scholarship has paid to the very explicit relationship between acquisition of cultural objects and the construction of international status hierarchy. Amid much attention paid to the construction of the international order, status-seeking, and hierarchy in IR scholarship, acquisition and display of artefacts have not featured as central foci of analysis and were often subsumed by the scholarly inquiry into other, more narrowly defined status-seeking practices such as statecraft, diplomacy, military conquest, or economic competition.Footnote 5 But as this article demonstrates, cultural practices such as extraction and geographic dispersal of antiquities were critical in the construction of the international cultural hierarchy and were, fundamentally, practices of international state competition and status-seeking. This should make them squarely of interest to International Relations, and this is this article’s main goal.
This article makes two principal contributions. It first reframes the 19th-century cultural extraction of the ‘antiquities rush’ as an issue of international status competition. Existing literature, most of it in history, archaeology, or art history, has examined this period extensively, but the scholarship has focused more on nationalism and imperialism as explanations for the antiquities rush and, when exploring interstate competition, more on competition for territory and resources than the competition for status.Footnote 6 Reframing this period as a story of status competition helps explain why states pursued massive and hugely expensive projects of cultural extraction even in the absence of a clear economic or military benefit.
Second, the article situates material culture at the foundation of international status-seeking, developing a much-needed cultural dimension to the rapidly expanding IR scholarship on status. Specifically, the article builds on the recent interest in status symbols to demonstrate how cultural objects are prime examples of such projects and have been woefully neglected as the literature focused on more narrowly construed status symbols such as nuclear weapons, space programmes, or sporting events.
Why focus on the 19th-century antiquities rush? Cultural extraction as a practice is an old and fairly ubiquitous feature of warfare and occupations throughout history. For the purposes of my argument, however, it is in this historical period that we can most clearly see that the ranking criteria for high international cultural status was not only possession of the ‘best stuff’ but the discursive ability of the extracted artefacts to animate state claims to universal cultural custodianship and lay claims of heritage to ancient civilisations. Specifically, I focus on the beginning of the antiquities rush – the turn of the 19th century and the establishment of the international race for antiquities, a race that fully blossomed throughout the 19th and into the early 20th century. This early historical focus then allows me to explore, more broadly, the origins of the civilisational bases of status claims.
The article proceeds in three sections. In the first, I offer a brief snapshot of the literature on international status and make a case for why this scholarship would benefit from a more sustained engagement with material culture, building especially on the increasing interest in status symbols in IR. I then develop two distinct logics of status-seeking that explain historical practices of cultural extraction. In the second section, I outline the principal historical dynamics of the antiquities rush and the role of Napoleonic expeditions in setting up the parameters of the international cultural race that followed. In the third section, I retell the well-known story of Lord Elgin’s removal of the Parthenon Marbles from Athens through the lens of international status competition. The research is based on analysis of British parliamentary debates at the time, as well as secondary literature from history, art history, museum studies, and archaeology.
International status politics of cultural extraction
The recent surge in attention to the questions of international status in IR has been well documented.Footnote 7 Historically, status was understood as mostly a reflection of ‘prized attributes’ such as ‘military power, economic development, cultural achievements, diplomatic skill, and technological innovation’.Footnote 8 Newer interventions, however, have introduced a more sophisticated understanding of international hierarchy, and its relationship to status, sovereignty, and power.Footnote 9 Hierarchy is a ‘system through which actors are organized into vertical relations of super and sub-ordination’.Footnote 10 If we understand the international system as a hierarchy (instead of an anarchy), we can then begin to explore the ways in which the system itself is organised through stratification and ranking of states and their conferred status relative to each other.Footnote 11 Status relations, then, are what makes a system hierarchical.Footnote 12 But status-seeking can also be quite local, as states compete for status in local rivalries.Footnote 13 As the remainder of the article detailing the antiquities rush demonstrates, much of cultural extraction as a status-seeking practice in the early 19th century was the direct result of rivalries between Great Britain and France.
As status research in IR has matured, so has the examination of status symbols.Footnote 14 This literature has already established that an important practice by which states may seek status is by investing in functionally unnecessary objects or endeavours (aircraft carriers or other expensive projects such as nuclear or space programmes), which nevertheless inscribe on them the trappings of a modern, advanced developed state.Footnote 15 This state search for symbolic capital can then explain seemingly irrational, costly, or non-beneficial investments and priorities.Footnote 16 It is this performance of conspicuous consumption that then grants states higher status in a desired group.Footnote 17 This is important because status symbols are well-defined boundary markers.Footnote 18 They pull together those that possess them within the same status rank (e.g. the nuclear powers), while clearly keeping those that do not outside of that status rank.Footnote 19 Specifically, according to Gilady, the value of these status symbols to states is in their visibility, costliness, and exclusivity.Footnote 20 In the case of the cultural artefacts I examine below, it was also their scarcity.
It is here that the scholarship on status symbols can most productively intersect with the renewed IR interest in the relationship between material culture, heritage, and world politics.Footnote 21 Material culture can be an important political asset for international status-seeking if states can demonstrate control of more art or cultural sites than other states at the same level of economic wealth or with other similar material attributes.Footnote 22 These attributes have sometimes been defined through the concept of ‘cultural wealth’, which would ‘include the number and the significance of [the state’s] cultural and natural heritage sites, its stock of art and artifacts exhibited in the top international museums of art, and the number of widely recognized international prizes earned by its citizens’.Footnote 23 In other words, it is art and culture that confer high international cultural status on, for example, Italy, Greece, or Mexico that their level of economic development otherwise would not grant. But cultural status symbols, such as opera houses or national museums, provide further benefits to states as state investment in them has historically served to lay a claim to a certain standard of civilisation, another cultural marker of status.Footnote 24 As I demonstrate below, acquisition and display of artefacts has historically been a prime example of such state practice.
Not all historical cultural extraction practices, however, followed the same status-seeking logic. There is the relatively straightforward logic of the quest for military glory as a desirable status rank. This status-seeking logic helps explain much of the pre-Napoleonic looting campaigns, from the destruction of Jerusalem, through the Crusades, the plundering of the Americas by the Spanish conquistadors, and so on. The logic of cultural extraction was relatively simple: the more artefacts accumulated the better, the more valuable the accumulated artefacts are – even better. This logic fits within the more traditional understanding of status-seeking, by which status is measured by possession of material attributes such as military power or economic assets.
To explain the change in cultural extraction practices since the Napoleonic era, however, I advance two further status-seeking logics. The first is cultural custodianship – the status sought through cultural extraction is that of custodianship of the cultural heritage of humankind. According to this logic, states pursue accumulation of as many cultural artefacts as possible in order to attain the high-status rank of being the cultural repository of the world. As I demonstrate in detail in the next section of the article, driven by the particular French national internationalism of the time, this logic of cultural custodianship was what animated the frenzy by Napoleonic France to amass as many cultural objects as possible in order to ‘liberate’ them from foreign ownership and relocate them to France, which would serve as their custodian on behalf of all humanity.
The second status-seeking logic I advance is that of cultural descendance. Here, the status sought is that of cultural successor to a highly ranked civilisation. Following this logic, states engage in cultural extraction of a specific set of artefacts based on a claim that they are legitimate heirs to the culture or civilisation the artefacts are being extracted from. Cultural extraction, then, is justified as legitimate cultural return to the artefacts’ rightful heir. Britain’s pursuit of the Parthenon Marbles, which I describe in detail below, is an illustration of this logic. Rather than extracting the antiquities to keep them on behalf of ‘enlightened humanity’, as France justified its plunder, Britain took the Marbles just for itself, basing the looting on a quasi-genealogical claim that Britain was the cultural heir to Greco-Roman civilisation.
Napoleon and the status-seeking logic of cultural custodianship
Extraction of various material objects, including artefacts, was a common and largely unremarkable feature of warfare throughout history. Several passages in the Bible’s Old Testament refer to the looting of art objects from Jerusalem by the Egyptian pharaoh Shoshenq I in 926 BCE.Footnote 25 In ancient Rome, it was routine practice to show the public looted artefacts from various Roman conquests. In a series of processions through the city, citizens of Rome could look at the objects that were individually carried by soldiers or piled up together in carriages.Footnote 26 The Christian Crusaders did the same upon their return to Venice after the pillaging and looting of artefacts from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204.Footnote 27 So did Cortes’s conquistadors after returning from Mexico to Spain with looted Aztec treasures.Footnote 28 Sweden took away art throughout Northern Europe during the Thirty Years War (1618–48), and under orders from Queen Christina, Swedish troops removed more than 1,000 paintings and other art objects from Prague and transported them to Stockholm in 1649, where the queen, an avid art collector, amassed a huge personal art collection.Footnote 29
What we today refer to as wartime art looting was understood for most of history as acquisition of ‘spoils of war’. This practice was an obvious means of material enrichment for soldiers or higher-up officers, but it also had a broader strategic purpose. It demonstrated the military supremacy of the victorious party and the humiliating loss of the defeated.Footnote 30 It was also a way of showing cultural domination over the conquered and vanquished opponents.
But what distinguishes the 19th-century antiquities rush from previous bouts of plunder is the involvement of the full state apparatus – the army and the navy, foreign ministries, diplomatic offices, military agencies, but also art commissions and professional organisations, as well as public national museums.Footnote 31 This was not just a random search for war booty to be sold as curiosities back home. Classical archaeology more broadly and the extraction of antiquities more specifically was, in large part, a fully funded state effort at the height of European imperialism and was an inextricable part of it.Footnote 32 As I demonstrate throughout the article, the 19th century also marks archaeology as a field of status competition between rival European powers who raced to dig up Greco-Roman ruins along the Mediterranean. In a broader sense, however, the antiquities rush also represented the international competition for accumulation of mass quantities of cultural objects – an international race for symbols of status.
The era of artefact extraction under examination in this article begins with Napoleon. It was not just the scale and reach of Napoleon’s extraction campaign that was astonishing; it was also the systematic and deliberate way in which it was executed and then institutionalised as state practice for the explicit purpose of constructing French cultural heritage and superiority over its international rivals.
The French state created a series of institutions in 1794 with the specific goal of organising and streamlining the extraction of art from various territories France was conquering. The institutions included the Commission of Trade and Supply with the mandate to remove the artefacts from Belgium and take them to France; another Commission of Public Instruction which proposed ‘sending secretly after our armies educated citizens who will be commissioned to identify and to have removed with care the masterpieces that are found in the countries entered by our armies’; as well as the Temporary Art Commission, which was to ‘compile lists of artistic and scientific objects in countries where the French armies were expected to enter’.Footnote 33
When in 1796 Napoleon took full command of the French army, he almost immediately went on the offensive against Italy. Extraction of art was on the top of Napoleon’s military agenda; it was not just an afterthought. On 1 May 1796, in a letter to the French emissary in Genoa, Napoleon ordered, ‘send me a list of the pictures, statues, cabinets and curiosities at Milan, Parma, Piacenza, Modena and Bologna’.Footnote 34 Here is where extraction kicked into high gear. The system of plunder became systematised and institutionalised through a series of treaties France imposed on various Italian states, making art requisition seem formalised and legalised.Footnote 35 As part of these ‘peace treaties’, the cities of Parma, Modena, Venice, Milan, Bologna, Perugia, and numerous others, including the Vatican, were emptied of their precious paintings, sculptures, and other art collections. Of course, plunder also went on outside the confines of the treaties. For example, Napoleon’s army simply removed the massive statues of the four horses of the apocalypse from St Mark’s Square in Venice and took them home to Paris.Footnote 36 Among the hundreds of art pieces Napoleon’s army took from Italy, there were 83 classical antiquities of great prestige and value, such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoön, and the Belvedere Torso.Footnote 37
Public display of acquired art was a central feature of the Napoleonic imperial project.Footnote 38 Following the triumph of the conquest of Italy, a celebration was organised in July 1798 in Paris, one of the key moments of which was the art treasures parade. A total of 29 carts of art were marched through Paris. The parade was headed by a banner that already indicated the importance of possessing antiquities for the cultural status of France, ‘Greece gave them up; Rome lost them; their fate changed twice; it won’t change again.’Footnote 39
At the end of the parade, the art was transported directly to the Louvre, as Napoleon’s mission was to make Paris the new capital of European culture. Paris was to be ‘the asylum of all human knowledge … the capital of the arts, the school of the universe’, wrote the French politician Boissy d’Anglas in 1794.Footnote 40 Paris, in other words, was to be the new Rome, and France was the only civilised country worthy of appreciating and displaying such artistic masterpieces (as the next section recounts, however, Great Britain begged to differ).Footnote 41 Artefact extraction, however, was directly linked to expressions of military supremacy – the most commonly recognised attribute of state status. The acquisition of art for the Louvre was understood to be a question of paramount military significance for France. As Webb argues: ‘Art and arms were not opposed; rather, the possession of masterpieces was a proof and an indication of superior military prowess.’Footnote 42
It was out of this notion of cultural, political, and military supremacy that France conferred upon itself the responsibility to ‘protect civilisation’, understood, of course, very narrowly as Western European civilisation. These civilisational aspects of cultural extraction should be understood within the broader framework of the nationalist internationalism of French revolutionary thought of the time. French intellectuals wrote of France ‘representing the idea of freedom in the world’, of being the nation that ‘more than any other has identified its interests and its destiny with those of humanity’, of the French as a ‘people truly destined and deserving of initiating all people to universal fellowship’.Footnote 43 Of course, as Vincent notes, ‘there existed a tension between the inclusive idealistic intentions of French nationalists and the exclusive implications of French nationalism in its cultural embodiment’.Footnote 44
And indeed, to ‘protect’ civilisation and humanity, France went on to capture Europe’s finest art and deny the enemies of France, ‘the enemies of humanity’, its possession and enjoyment.Footnote 45 The widespread looting of European art, then, allowed France to position itself at the very top of the hierarchy of international cultural status. It was not just the victories in war that propelled France to this position; it was also the symbols France acquired in those war campaigns that provided it with crucial status markers and emblems, a collection of physical and beautiful reminders of French military feats and thus its superior status.Footnote 46 To mark this status achievement, a song chanted during the parade of Italian looted art through Paris in 1798 ended its last verse with, ‘Rome is no more in Rome. It is all in Paris.’Footnote 47
Extraction of antiquities from Italy was complete, but more was to follow. In 1798, Napoleon sent an expedition to Egypt. The French army was accompanied by 167 scholars and artists (the savants), whose role was to find, evaluate, and extract Egyptian treasures.Footnote 48 Napoleon’s despoiling of Egypt was narrated in France as a civilising mission (what later became the broader concept of mission civilisatrice), and one that puts antiquity at the foundation of modern European civilisation. As the French naval officer Raymond-Jean-Baptiste de Verninac Saint-Maur reminisced in 1835:
France, snatching an obelisk from the ever heightening mud of the Nile, or the savage ignorance of the Turks … earns a right to the thanks of the learned of Europe, to whom belong all the monuments of antiquity, because they alone know how to appreciate them. Antiquity is a garden that belongs by natural right to those who cultivate and harvest its fruits.Footnote 49
The extraordinary volume of Napoleon’s looted treasure displayed at the Louvre made Paris an instant international tourist attraction at the turn of the 19th century, and visitors from all over Europe flocked to see the art and hail the Louvre as the best museum in the world.Footnote 50 The collecting of high art was not, however, understood only as an issue of war booty or in simply monetary terms. For Napoleonic France, acquiring and displaying the best art of Europe was a direct measurement of France’s cultural greatness – its cultured status, which the French understood in part to be that of ‘liberty’ as opposed to feudal ‘tyranny’. Not only did the best art belong to France, but the best artists were to be considered French: ‘every man of genius … whatever country he may have been born, is a French citizen’, claimed Napoleon.Footnote 51
French officials were quite explicit in this regard. The French Directorate instructed Napoleon in 1796, ‘the Executive Directory is convinced, Citizen General, that you see the glory of the Fine Arts as attached to that of the army you command. Italy owes to them [the Fine Arts] a great part of its riches and its fame; but the time has come when their reign must pass to France to solidify and embellish that of liberty.’Footnote 52 What we today understand as state looting on a massive scale, Napoleonic France understood as a form of restitution – return of the arts to the civilised and the free.Footnote 53 In positioning themselves as the curators of the world, the French also put themselves in the position of determining what kind of culture matters, and what counts and does not count as culture in the first place.
Napoleon’s massive looting of art, however, is also directly related to the creation and development of the Louvre, still considered the world’s premier art museum.Footnote 54 The officials of the French Directorate instructed Napoleon in no uncertain terms that the purpose of his acquisition of Italian art was to enrich the collections at the Louvre: ‘The National Museum should hold the most famous monuments of all the arts, and you will not neglect enriching it with those pieces for which it waits from the present conquests of the Army of Italy and those that are still to come.’Footnote 55 The roots of the Louvre’s extensive collection of world art are, therefore, to a significant extent found in Napoleonic cultural extraction.Footnote 56
But after Napoleon’s first defeat and abdication in 1814, some of the countries his army plundered (such as Prussia and Austria) began to ask for their art to be returned. Great Britain and Russia, however, advocated against restitution out of fear that this fraught process would destabilise the new French state.Footnote 57 Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the French leading diplomat at the time, considered the failure of restitution to be a huge triumph for otherwise-defeated France. In his memoirs, he wrote, ‘we have retained all of the admirable pieces of art conquered by our arms in nearly all the museums of Europe’.Footnote 58
Some of the great powers’ position on restitution, however, changed after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815. Britain, specifically, now turned into a strong proponent of restitution.Footnote 59 The Duke of Wellington led the international campaign for restitution and assembled a coalition of like-minded countries (Austria, Spain, the Low Countries, the German states, the Italian states, and the Vatican) to negotiate the return of plundered art at the Congress of Vienna.Footnote 60 The Duke of Wellington argued for restitution on the grounds of both morality as well as national cultural heritage claims: ‘The same feelings which induce the people of France to wish to retain the pictures and statues of other nations … would naturally induce other nations to wish, now that success is on their side, that the property should be returned to their rightful owners.’Footnote 61
French officials directly rebuffed British claims, arguing that the British new push for restitution was a thinly veiled attempt by Britain to amass its collections by taking artefacts away from the Louvre:
If we yield to the claims of Holland and Belgium, we deprive the [Louvre] Museum of one of its greatest assets, that of having a series of excellent colorists … Russia is not hostile, Austria has had everything returned, Prussia has a restoration more complete … there remains only England, who has in truth nothing to claim but who, since she has just bought the bas-reliefs of which Lord Elgin plundered the Temple at Athens, now thinks she can become a rival of the Museum, and wants to deplete this Museum in order to collect the remains [for herself].Footnote 62
While much of Napoleon’s looted art ended up at the Louvre, perhaps the most precious piece Napoleon took from Egypt, the famous Rosetta Stone, was seized by the British expeditionary force in 1801 and taken to the British Museum, where it remains. And as the next section shows, it was Britain, again, that beat France in extracting the magnificent Parthenon Marbles from Athens to London. In the international competition for most prized antiquities, it was Britain that had the last laugh.
The Parthenon Marbles and the status-seeking logic of cultural descendance
Napoleon’s successes at amassing huge quantities of antiquities from his military pursuits normalised and legitimated this practice for France’s contemporary peers and rivals.Footnote 63 At the same time as Napoleon was ravaging through Italy then Egypt, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin, organised what is probably the most consequential antiquities heist in modern history – the removal of the Parthenon sculptures from the Acropolis complex in Athens.Footnote 64
Dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, the Parthenon was built in many phases but most of it was finished in the 5th century BCE during what is considered the golden age of Athens under Pericles.Footnote 65 It was a construction project of unprecedented architectural sophistication and ambition for the time. The Parthenon was a wonder of its time, and its decorative sculptures, a group of which came to be known as the ‘Parthenon Marbles’ (see Figure 1), have become broadly valued as the high point of classical Greek art.Footnote 66
Parthenon Marbles on display at the Duveen Gallery, British Museum, London, during a special exhibition for members (reproduced from Wikimedia under Creative Commons attribution-share alike 4.0 international licence).
During the 18th century, the Parthenon began to capture the imagination of cultured Europeans, who now flocked to see and admire the ruins, sometimes as part of the rite-of-passage Grand Tour, the tourist itinerary across Europe often taken by British and other northern European men of prestige and wealth.Footnote 67 It was this same desire for a cultural education that made Paris the preferred destination for Europe’s nobility and the Louvre a major tourist attraction – developments I described earlier in the article. But Greece, Athens, and the Parthenon specifically, also became of special interest to educated Europeans in the 18th and especially the 19th century in the context of philhellenism, the intellectual movement that elevated classical Greece as the origin but also the pinnacle of European civilisation, the zenith of European aesthetic and cultural accomplishment.
Lord Elgin was a philhellene, and, as a nobleman, he fully embraced the cultural spirit of his time, which held that ‘educated Englishmen were the true heirs of classical civilization’.Footnote 68 In 1800, at his own expense, he dispatched a team of artists and architects to make sketches and drawings of major classical Greek sites, premier of which was, of course, the Acropolis. Even if Elgin initially did not plan on taking the sculptures back to England, his team on the ground made the decision for him. In two phases, Elgin’s team removed 56 of the surviving 97 panels of the Parthenon frieze, 15 metopes, and 17 sculpture fragments, one of the caryatids (female statues that supported the structure) from the Erechtheion temple, and columns and sculptures from other temples and gates at the Acropolis. The first part of Elgin’s loot was shipped to Britain in 1803, the second in 1812.Footnote 69
For a few years after they arrived from Greece, the Parthenon Marbles were privately displayed in Elgin’s house in London’s Piccadilly before they were permanently housed in the British Museum in 1816.Footnote 70 An important stipulation of their sale, in trust, to the British Museum, was that they be known as the ‘Elgin Marbles’, not the Parthenon, or Greek, Marbles.Footnote 71 The Marbles, in other words, became British. The possession of the Marbles was important for Britain internationally, as they were cultural status symbols of the highest rank.Footnote 72 They were projections of Britain’s international cultural and political power. They represented Britain’s political ambition and claims to international cultural status by demonstrating British ‘possession and mastery of the world’.Footnote 73
But they also embodied British claims to cultural descendance from classical Greece and the cultural narrative that London was the new Athens. This idea that Britain, but especially England, was a cultural descendent of classical antiquity was not new. Already in the mid-18th century, English nobles and art collectors expressed clear affinity for all things Greek and Roman. For example, Jonathan Richardson, a painter and an early art theorist, wrote in 1725 of England, ‘no nation under Heaven so nearly resembles the ancient Greeks and Romans as we. There is a haughty carriage, an elevation of thought, a greatness of taste, a love of liberty … which we inherit from our ancestors, and which belong to us as Englishmen.’Footnote 74 It is within this already-established cultural context that Benjamin West, the president of the Royal Academy, wrote enthusiastically to Lord Elgin in 1808 to thank him for bringing the Marbles to London – their spiritual and cultural home: ‘Your Lordship, by bringing these treasures of the first and best age of sculpture and architecture into London, has founded a new Athens for the emulation and example of the British student.’Footnote 75
Writing in 1816, Benjamin Robert Haydon expressed his hope that the Greek sculptures would be incorporated into the British national body and culture: ‘Thank God! The remains of Athens have fled for protection to England; the genius of Greece still hovers near them; may she, with her inspiring touch, give new vigour to British Art, and cause new beauties to spring from British exertions! May their essence mingle with our blood and circulate through our being.’Footnote 76 More broadly, it was the possession of the Marbles that embodied Britain’s cultural greatness. For example, John Wilson Croker, a member of the British parliament, passionately argued in 1816 that keeping ‘these precious remains of ancient genius and taste would conduce not only to the perfection of the arts, but to the elevation of our national character, to our opulence, to our substantial greatness’.Footnote 77
The Marbles, further, were used not only to showcase cultural affinity between the British and the ancient Greeks. They were also used to demonstrate their supposed physical and racial affinity, as contemporary British racial science held that Greeks were of ‘Scandinavian or Saxon origin’ and, therefore, racially similar to and compatible with modern Britons.Footnote 78 The Marbles, in addition to many other symbolic purposes they served for the British imperial project, also became the material embodiment of British scientific racism of the 19th century. They were invoked to exemplify the supposed cognitive superiority of the white race. A newspaper article ‘Negro Faculties’, published in 1811 in The Examiner before the Marbles were purchased by the British government from Elgin, says, ‘The “exquisite, unrivalled Greek form”, which is set forth as the epitome of the physiognomy of the “white race”, is evident in the Elgin Marbles, “which, when they are publicly studied by the academy, will enable England, in art as in arms to bid guidance to the world.”’Footnote 79
The Marbles were racialised in 19th-century Europe (specifically England and France) through the process of ‘racial Hellenism’, which was a consequence of the introduction of anthropological notions of race into the ideas of what constitutes national identity. The classical Greek body became the epitome of ‘biological perfection’, and the Parthenon Marbles were the physical embodiment of biologically understood national identity.Footnote 80 More directly, as Leoussi documents, racial Hellenism contributed to the development of a new understanding of English national identity that constructed the modern English as being the direct racial descendants of ancient Greeks.
Greek figurative sculpture – and its supreme expression in the Parthenon Marbles – then became a visual expression of the English self.Footnote 81 For Great Britain, which owned and displayed them, the Parthenon Marbles as aesthetic representations of whiteness were further used to project British superiority over its contemporary rivals. This superiority was also racialised – racial Hellenism was its own form of competition over, in this case, racial status, as ‘one European nation claimed to be more Greek than another’.Footnote 82
The Marbles cemented this connection between ancient Greece and modern Britain and their shared values.Footnote 83 Britain now claimed the classical heritage of ancient Greece as its own ancestral culture and then positioned itself as a bearer of that standard of civilisation. By narrating its own history of Western civilisation through appropriation of numerous antiquities from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, Britain created a particular cultural narrative which began in antiquity and culminated in contemporary British political and aesthetic dominance.Footnote 84 Displacement of cultural objects from the shores of Mediterranean to the banks of the Thames was instrumental to this outcome.
While so much of the discussion about the ownership of the Parthenon Marbles – at the time as well as today – centred on Lord Elgin and his legal or illegal procurement of the sculptures, it is quite clear from the historical evidence that the ambition to own these precious artefacts transcended just the obsession, hubris, or greed of one man and his team of adventurers.Footnote 85 The British state was directly involved in this complex operation of cultural extraction. As Hoock demonstrates: ‘The foreign office and its diplomats organized the removal of antiquities to ports, the admiralty and royal navy provided transport, the treasury granted customs exemptions, the admiralty offered free storage at arsenals from Chatham to Woolwich, and detachments of gunners helped install massive sculptures in Bloomsbury.’Footnote 86 It is also clear that Elgin would have never been able to procure the sculptures had it not been for the role of the state – first in the diplomatic realm, where the Ottomans were grateful to Britain for defeating the French in Egypt and were more willing to tolerate British than French cultural extraction, and, second, in the logistics realm, where Elgin depended on British naval ships to transport his loot back to Britain.Footnote 87 Finally, in his position as the British ambassador to the Ottoman Porte, Elgin acted directly as an agent of the state and on numerous occasions expected and was granted full state approval of his actions.Footnote 88
And while France and Britain each engaged in cultural extraction practices from somewhat different logics – France through claims of cultural custodianship, Britain through claims of cultural descendance – the case of the Parthenon Marbles also provides ample evidence that at the core of these distinct claims was international status competition. In fact, it was the international competition for Parthenon treasures which, to a great degree, motivated and justified the British scramble for them. As Greenhalgh bluntly puts it: ‘For many in Britain, one of the arguments in favour of Elgin’s coup was that it kept the works from the French.’Footnote 89
Indeed, before Elgin ever set foot in Athens, French diplomat Auguste de Choiseul-Gouffier, who served as ambassador to Constantinople between 1784 and 1791, removed two metopes and part of the Parthenon frieze, which he bequeathed upon his death to the Louvre.Footnote 90 The fragments are still there today. Choiseul-Gouffier was especially motivated to collect as many antiquities from Athens as possible. In his instructions to his agent in Athens, the French painter and archaeologist Louis-François-Sébastien Fauvel (who would himself become the vice-consul of France in Athens in 1803), Choiseul-Gouffier writes, ‘Take everything you can, lose no opportunity to loot everything which is lootable in Athens and its surroundings … Spare neither the dead nor the living.’Footnote 91
The race for the Parthenon Marbles, therefore, is intrinsically linked to the French–British rivalry and especially the status anxiety vis-à-vis the other.Footnote 92 Within this historical context, it is evident that Elgin was deeply anxious about being upstaged by the French, and much of his actions can be understood as an impatient response to the French interest in acquiring the same antiquities from the Acropolis. In May 1802, he warned Giovanni Battista Lusieri, his main agent on the ground, ‘I hear that French frigates will soon be coming into the archipelago. Every moment is therefore very precious in securing our acquisitions.’Footnote 93
The procurement of the Parthenon Marbles was discussed extensively and in the broader English society as an issue of international competition. For example, a written entry for the special section on the ‘Grecian Marbles’ published in London’s Examiner newspaper in 1811 says: ‘The fact is, the French are jealous of our good fortune in having secured those inspired productions by Lord Elgin’s energy; which puts us above them, notwithstanding all their selections in Italy, Germany, and Spain, as to a School for Art.’Footnote 94 ‘Which puts us above them’ is as direct an allusion to international cultural status as there is. And in 1820, the magazine Quarterly Review noted that more tourists were visiting London than Athens because of the Marbles, which would now benefit England, as the country ‘will assert and win for herself as high a pre-eminence in art as she holds at this time in commerce, in science, in literature and in arms’.Footnote 95
For both France and Britain, extracting and then displaying the Parthenon Marbles would be further evidence of the centrality of both their cultural taste and sophistication but also economic, logistical, and transportation prowess – a combination of both non-material and quite material status attributes. In his testimony to the House of Commons Select Committee in 1816, Elgin could not help but put in a small dig at the supposed poor state of the French navy: ‘My cases were at the harbour during the whole of the war; and if the French government had had any thing they could have put afloat, they would have taken them.’Footnote 96 Amusingly, Elgin himself justified his looting of the Acropolis as one-upping Napoleon. Bragging about his Parthenon marbles, he wrote, ‘Bonaparte has not got such a thing from all his thefts in Italy’.Footnote 97
Elgin’s main rival in the quest for the Parthenon treasures, Choiseul-Gouffier, wistfully acknowledged the French defeat in this pursuit:
Lord Elgin gathered, throughout Greece, a rich harvest of precious monuments, which I had coveted long and vainly; it is difficult for me to see them in his possession without some degree of envy, but it should be a satisfaction for all those who cherish the arts to know these masterpieces have been saved from the barbarity of the Turks, and preserved by an enlightened amateur who will make them available for public enjoyment.Footnote 98
What Choiseul-Gouffier’s statement indicates is that the Marbles themselves, as well as their ownership, represented not just status symbols, but specifically symbols of civilisational status. In Choiseul-Gouffier’s view, of course, France was at the pinnacle of civilisation and should have been the rightful owner of the Marbles. Britain, however, could be a reluctant second, as it belonged to the same civilisation. What was important was that the Marbles were saved from ‘the Turks’, as they did not belong to the European sphere of civilisation, and it was Ottoman Turkey’s outside position that made Elgin’s looting morally justified. The Parthenon Marbles, therefore, conferred on Great Britain high status as the guardian of Western civilisation and a worthy descendant of Athens as it successfully rescued the Marbles from assured destruction under barbaric Turks and indifferent modern Greeks.
But Britain was competing for antiquities in many other locations in the broader Mediterranean. For example, in 1815, the British undersecretary of state for foreign affairs instructed the incoming British consul to Egypt Henry Salt to acquire as many Egyptian antiques as possible, as a way of competing with rival nations: ‘Whatever the expense of the undertaking, it would be most cheerfully supported by an enlightened nation, eager to anticipate its rivals in the prosecution of the best interests of science and literature.’Footnote 99 Salt did as he was told, procuring a tremendous number of antiquities for the British Crown.Footnote 100
The competition for the Parthenon Marbles went beyond Britain and France. Elgin himself acknowledged this competition in displaying urgency that Britain, not other countries, be the beneficiary of his loot, by warning of the ‘importance they [other sovereigns] attach to the possession of objects of art’.Footnote 101 And, ultimately, it was the fear of international competition that played a critical role in persuading the British government to purchase the Marbles from Elgin in the first place. The transcript from the House of Commons Select Committee meeting of June 1816 acknowledges this quite directly, as upon questioning by a member of parliament whether any other state would purchase the Marbles if Britain did not, Earl of Aberdeen advocates in favour of the purchase with the following argument: ‘I think it extremely probable the King of Bavaria might, but I have no knowledge of that; and very possibly the Emperor of Russia, indeed the King of Prussia has bought a large collection of pictures; but this is mere conjecture.’Footnote 102 In the international race for antiquities, Britain, at least for a while, had the upper hand.
Conclusion
My goal in this article, most broadly, was to establish the cultural basis of international status-seeking. All states seek status in some domain, through some means available to them. As we look to understand the construction and preservation of various international status orders, their establishment and their demise, the history of the international competition for cultural status at the turn of the 19th century is instructive in many ways.
First, international orders can be quite durable. The international cultural order established after the antiquities rush has stayed remarkably stable. In large part due to the dizzying frenzy of cultural extraction in the 19th century, but also the colonial looting of Africa and Asia that followed, the great national museums in France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Russia have amassed unprecedented and indomitable collections of art. It was their competition for cultural status that motivated the acquisition of this art, and then it was the acquired collections that further maintained these residual empires’ international cultural status. In other words, states with recognised high international status had first-mover advantage in acquiring cultural objects and setting up norms and standards of civilisation those lower on the hierarchy then followed, trying to catch up. Discussing another international cultural status symbol, the opera house, Leira and de Carvalho identify a similar dynamic: ‘For the first movers, the status was sought through signaling grandeur, for all latecomers, the point has been to demonstrate civilizational belonging.’Footnote 103 Since it is those same states conferring status on those lower on the hierarchical pole, what gives them continuing high status is separation from the lower tier. It is a circular logic that ensures that high cultural status remains frozen in place.
Second, the roots of international status claims, at least in the realm of culture, can be explicitly civilisational. Cultural status claims often operate within the framework of civilisation, and this is nowhere more evident than in the ontological importance of antiquity to European states’ claims to high cultural status. The direct link between antiquity and European imperialism was not only in emulating ancient political institutions, structures, and ambitions of territorial expansion, but also in a specific cultural connection to what European states considered their civilisational roots. It is in the competition for who is the rightful heir of ancient Greece and Rome (and there could only be one) that the international cultural hierarchy of the 19th century came to be constructed.
Third, interpreting the peak era of imperial cultural extraction as a story of international status competition has profound implications for how we understand contemporary politics of cultural heritage. Massive quantities of valuable antiquities removed during the antiquities rush then remained in these countries’ public and private collections and became part of their national cultural heritage. The international circulation and dislocation of these cultural objects then also offers insights into how cultural heritage is internationally constructed, how it affects state cultural status, and how contemporary calls for repatriation of antiquities to their locations of origin are perceived and often rejected as, fundamentally, cultural status threats.
Finally, while the different logics of status-seeking I advanced in this article clearly overlap – it is obvious that much of cultural extraction was just accumulation of as many artefacts as possible before other rivals got to them first – the subtle distinctions in their underlying claims are important. They help distinguish both the choice of looted artefacts and the mechanism of extraction, but also the different responses to later claims for their restitution. The logic of cultural custodianship continues to underpin the argument that great world museums, such as the Louvre, should retain their massive collections as they are ‘collections of the world’ and these museums are cosmopolitan, universal institutions holding treasures for all humankind.Footnote 104 The logic of cultural descendance, however, continues to guide contemporary nationalist arguments for retention of major artefacts, specifically on grounds of their inalienable cultural belonging. In the case of the Parthenon Marbles, Britain continues to argue that these cultural objects are ‘British’ (referring to them officially as the ‘Elgin Marbles’ makes this point quite clearly), but Greece has also consistently made the argument that modern Greece is the natural heir of the classical Greek civilisation and that it is where the Marbles belong.Footnote 105 The distinct status-seeking logics, therefore, continue to have important implications for contemporary cultural policy debates.
Acknowledgments
I thank three anonymous reviewers and editors of Review of International Studies, as well as Elif Kalaycioglu, co-editor of this special issue, for providing excellent comments and guidance which immeasurably improved the article.
Open access
