6 ideas
Hicks proposes 'necrography' as a counterpart to biography. Instead of tracing an object's life story, it records the deaths and losses that brought the object into a collection. The accession record of a looted object is therefore read as a document of killing and dispossession, not as a neutral provenance entry.
The 1897 looting did not end when the soldiers left Benin City. Each day a looted object stays on display, it restages the act of taking and repeats the claim that the taker has a right to show it. That makes colonial violence a durational process that museums actively maintain, not a past event they merely hold evidence of.
In February 1897 British forces attacked Benin City with Maxim guns and rockets and burned much of the city. Soldiers stripped the royal palace of thousands of brass plaques, ivories, and sculptures. The expedition was framed as retaliation for an ambush, but Hicks presents it as a planned corporate-military operation to remove a sovereign obstacle to trade.
Hicks reads the scramble for Africa through the alliance of chartered trading companies, military force, and the new discipline of anthropology. Seen this way, a 'punitive expedition' is a business instrument that clears a market. Ethnographic collecting becomes the cultural arm that justified the violence by recasting a sophisticated kingdom as 'primitive'.
The museum practice of arranging objects in evolutionary series by type, as Pitt Rivers did, was more than classification. It built a visible argument that non-European peoples sat lower on a developmental ladder. The curatorial layout itself was an instrument of race science that helped legitimize conquest.
Hicks argues that museums should return looted objects outright, on request, without conditions. He opposes long-term loans, shared custodianship, and demands that the receiving country prove it can conserve them properly. Those conditions keep the former taker as the arbiter of legitimacy. Under his model, the curator's job shifts from guarding collections to researching and actively facilitating their return.