In 1860, during the Second Opium War, the British and French armies sacked the Chinese Summer Palace (Yuanmingyuan), looting it of what the Chinese government today estimates to have been 150 million objects. The British effort was led by James Bruce, the eighth Earl of Elgin, and with his blessing the Chinese empress’s Pekingese dog was cruelly abducted and given as spoils to Queen Victoria. The dog's portrait—which Tiffany Jenkins includes here—was painted by Friedrich Wilhelm Keyl in 1861. As the painting's title reflects, the poor dog had been renamed: Looty.

Keeping Their Marbles is a full-throated argument against the repatriation of arguably stolen art and artifacts. To say that it is controversial is a severe understatement. Yet, as the anecdote of Looty the Pekingese suggests, Jenkins makes no attempt to sugarcoat the past. Despite her insistence that we not judge the past by present-day ethics and customs, she reveals the fact that, for instance, Victor Hugo was fiercely critical of the "[t]wo robbers" (meaning England and France) "breaking into a museum, devastating, looting and burning, leaving laughing hand-in-hand with their bags full of treasures." Nor does Jenkins fail to mention that James Bruce was the son of Thomas Bruce, the Lord Elgin whose name is synonymous, fairly or not, with plunder.

The Elgin, or Parthenon, Marbles are perhaps the best-known candidates for repatriation on the planet. Christopher Hitchens was a vocal advocate for their removal from the British Museum and return to Greece. He wrote a book, Imperial Spoils, on the subject, and in 2009 took to the pages of the New York Times to bemoan the fact that "[t]he body of the goddess Iris is now in London, while her head is in Athens. The front part of the torso of Poseidon is in London and the rear part is in Athens." This, Hitchens concluded, "is grotesque." Many agree with him.

Jenkins, a journalist and sociologist, begs to differ. She demonstrates that the Parthenon sculptures were acquired with the permission of the Ottoman Sublime Porte, then in control of Greece. Citing the legal scholar John Merryman, she writes "No court of law would find in favor of Greek complainants who would make a legal argument that the Marbles were illegally taken." This does not, of course, mean that the marbles were morally taken. Jenkins, for her part, holds that they were, arguing that Lord Elgin hoped to rescue them from both Turkish negligence and piecemeal theft, and that his actions saved them from the ravages of the Greek wars of independence.

Jenkins illustrates her broader argument against repatriation with cases in which it is far more difficult to defend an owner's moral claim. "[T]he Benin Bronzes," she writes, "were taken by the British army as they razed the Kingdom of Benin to the ground." Napoleon seized works of art from the vanquished—legally, yes, but according to military conventions that now strike us as hopelessly archaic. The British acknowledged even to Queen Victoria that what they had perpetrated at the Chinese Summer Palace was a theft. How, then, can Jenkins argue that nations and their museums have no obligation to address the wrongs of colonialism and imperialism?

The answer lies in her sense of history's sweep and of a museum's proper role. She shares with James Cuno, the author of Who Owns Antiquity? (2008), a faith in the universal or encyclopedic museum, a conviction that (as Cuno writes) artifacts are "evidence of the world's ancient past and not that of a particular modern nation." The purpose of the universal museum is to present mankind's heritage in all its wonderful variety, not to bolster the self-esteem of nationalists or identity groups. It is the therapeutic potential of repatriation of which Jenkins is most skeptical. Repatriation advocates, she argues, risk diminishing our greatest museums in pursuit of an illusory sense of healing or closure.

Jenkins delivers a colorful history of the origin and development of museums, which we owe to the daring of explorers, the curiosity of naturalists and archaeologists, the passion of eccentric collectors, and the generosity of their patrons. The first museum, a one-room collection in the 16th-century Palazzo Medici, inspired imitations across Europe. These "cabinets," or "cabinets of curiosities," as they were called, fed a burgeoning interest in the categorization and display of natural history and material culture. The British Museum opened in 1759, heralding the age of the public museum; a little over a century later, the Metropolitan Museum of Art would open in New York.

Today's calls for repatriation, Jenkins insists, reflect a dramatically shifting view of who should control history and of what museums should seek to accomplish. In her chapter about "The Rise of Identity Museums," she explains how institutions like the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington grant indigenous groups total jurisdiction over how their heritage is experienced and understood. The NMAI's "explicitly political aim" is "to affirm and enliven Native cultures in the present." Such a museum's goal is not the dispassionate presentation of history and culture but the transmission of "correct" attitudes about a given group. This runs contrary to the spirit of inquiry.

Jenkins is unconvinced that museums have any real power either to atone for past sins or to address social ills. She notes, quite rightly, that the experiences we have in museums are personal, emotional, and unruly.

When people visit either kind of institution—a national museum or an encyclopedic one—they bring their own thoughts, understanding, and imagination with them on their visit. They are not empty vessels waiting to be directed about what to think.

Perhaps it is the case, as Jenkins's critics are likely to argue, that dominant groups have always displayed their own cultural heritage in a flattering light and that now it is the underdogs' turn. One rejoinder is that Keeping Their Marbles makes no effort to render the dominant cultures of Western Europe in a flattering light. It is, in large part, a history of rapine, might-makes-right, and "finders keepers." To display objects in the museums that first acquired them is to confess that history itself has always been ugly and chaotic. Its rough edges will never be sanded off by displays of what Jenkins calls "contrition chic." Any attempt to do so would be doomed by the enormous, if not infinite, scope of the task.

This leads us, at last, to Jenkins's shrewdest and most devastating observation. Returning objects, and angrily demanding their return, serves today's great powers in much the same fashion that seizing those same objects served them centuries ago. "Consider," Jenkins writes, "what energy and ideas are diverted away from imagining a better future when those who would have fought for it are now so distracted by finding the cause of present problems predominantly in the past." It is leaving these coveted objects where time, fate, and human passion have brought them that keeps us vigilant—and brings us closer to our place in the family of man.

Stefan Beck writes about fiction for the New Criterion and elsewhere.