Verges is an activist and researcher who has been around the world looking at interventions or campaigns that challenge the use of museums as weapons of imperialism and colonialism.

So if you think the main issue for socialists is the return of stolen objects, she shows that this is just the beginning. Verges first deals with the imperial stealing of objects by soldiers, scientists, officers and the apparatus of the colonial state.  This includes plants, which are 40% of the stolen artefacts.

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford had an exhibition about acquired objects, in which they explained how colonial invading armies from the UK took Oxford scientists with them. Just like with Napoleon’s expeditions the scientists decided on the acquisitions. Above you can see a brass sculpture of a cockerel, looted in a British colonial expedition in Benin in 1897 – this was owned by Jesus College Cambridge but has now been handed back.

The industrial scale of such artefact theft is shown by the fact that the new Humboldt Forum in Germany has 22,000 challenged objects. There are a huge number of such museums.

The author describes many of the protests at museums, including on the climate and against oil companies.

Another campaign is to show that there are few black faces in galleries and when they are present they are not named. When one American gallery agreed to have an exhibition of their paintings with black subjects, there was a demand for their names. However of the few names they had recorded they were only the first names because slaves only had first names, given by their owners.

This section alone is useful as she outlines the different ways to protest,

She concentrates on the Louvre to show the origins and purpose of ‘universal’ museums. It was Napoleon who transformed it, arguing that France was the centre of European culture, having taken over from Rome, which had taken over from Greece. So he invaded all over Europe, having sent people ahead to look at their treasures.  He then proceeded to steal them, particularly in Italy, including from the Vatican. These were brought back in big processions through the Arc de Triomphe. He argued that Paris was the new Rome, and the only place for the world’s treasures.

After Europe he invaded Egypt and stole ancient treasures from there. Verges uses the Louvre as an example, but the same could be said of the British Museum.

She comes from Reunion, a French territory in the Indian Ocean, and her main argument is for restitution, but also against Museums from the Global South replicating Western ones. She got together people on the island, and with some official backing got her project going of a decolonised museum. How she envisaged this is fascinating, and is the meat of the book.

The problem was that a right-wing government got elected. Much property in Reunion is still possessed by ex-slave-owners. The project lost all finance and support and was closed down.

What is great about this book is you get the view from the colonised of the theft of their culture. This clearly goes alongside the theft of wealth, and land.

This is a fascinating book, and places the campaign for returns within a much more anti-racist, and socialist framework.