Review of Cynthia Scott, Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire: Negotiating Post-Colonial Returns. 202 pp. Routledge, 2020.

Abstract

Cynthia Scott’s book Cultural Diplomacy and the Heritage of Empire represents an important addition to the burgeoning literature on returns and restitution of cultural heritage objects. Its first great contribution is to focus in depth on a case study that has seldom been explored elsewhere: the negotiations over the return of cultural heritage objects and archives to Indonesia from the Netherlands, a process that took approximately three decades following Indonesia’s independence in 1949. Overall, the scholarly literature has preferred to examine cases in the Anglo-Saxon world, particularly the unresolved Greek claim over the Parthenon Marbles, currently held in the British Museum. More recently, international attention has shifted toward other high-profile disputes – in particular, over the Benin Bronzes held in several Westernmuseums and claimed by Nigeria. Comparatively, studies focusing on other geographical areas remain few and far apart; even more comprehensive studies such as Jeanette Greenfield’s classic volume barely mention the Dutch-Indonesian negotiations.1 For readers, such as this reviewer, unfamiliar with either Dutch or Indonesian history, Scott provides clear and detailed information to contextualize her argument. The objects that were at stake in these negotiations included, among others, war booty from Dutch military expeditions against kingdoms in Lombok and Bali in the nineteenth century; religious and cultural objects brought back to theNetherlands by army officers or employees of the Dutch East India Company (or the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie [VOC] in Dutch, the trading corporation that served as one of the main tools of the Dutch colonial domination over the Indonesian archipelago) and held in the public collections of Dutch ethnological museums, among them a famous Prajñāpāramitā statue from the Singasari era; and important archives of the early Indonesian republican period – the so-called Djokja Archive – taken by the Dutch just before their departure in 1949. Scott’s case study is also interesting because the return negotiations dealt with an array of archaeological and cultural materials taken over an expansive period of time, while many other return disputes concern one specific object or group of similar objects. The second, andmost important, contribution of Scott’s study is her approach to the topic of returns. Rather than focusing on the colonial context that led to the constitution of these collections (a past she evokes but does not delve on) or the legal dimension of the returns, Scott prefers to consider the return of cultural objects as a political process – namely, the establishment of new cultural relations between a major European colonial metropolis and one of its former colonies after independence. Return negotiations thus become a proxy for navigating the tumultuous process of inventing new diplomatic relations in the postcolonial period. As the author signals, the long duration of the negotiations, over three decades, “suggestsmorewas at stake than a legal or an ethical response to Indonesia’s claims for post-colonial cultural property return alone” (18). Based on a historical analysis of the archives of several dependencies of the Dutch government, the book convincingly describes how the Dutch diplomacy alternatively considered the possibility of returning archives and