Dr. Justin Jacobs, "The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures," CSUSB Book Talk

Presented by California State University San Bernardino's Robert and Francis Fullerton Museum of Art (www.csusb.edu/..., the CSUSB College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the History Department.
Justin Jacobs is Associate Professor of History at American University in Washington DC. He is a historian of China, Xinjiang, the Silk Road, antiquities, and archaeology. He is the author of The Compensations of Plunder: How China Lost Its Treasures, Indiana Jones in History, and Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State. He teaches courses on ancient and modern China, the Japanese empire, an introduction to Asia, and the history of archaeological expeditions. He also serves as editor of The Silk Road journal and hosts Beyond Huaxia, a podcast on East Asian history.
From the 1790s until World War I, Western museums filled their shelves with art and antiquities from around the world. These objects are now widely seen as stolen or plundered from their countries of origin and demands for their return continue to grow louder.
Drawing on his new book, The Compensations of Plunder, Justin M. Jacobs, associate professor of history at American University, challenges the longstanding assumption that coercion, corruption, and deceit were chiefly responsible for the exodus of cultural treasures from northwestern China. From a close analysis of previously neglected archival sources in English, French, and Chinese, Jacobs finds that the removal of art and antiquities from China by Western archaeologists was generally undertaken with the full knowledge and consent of Chinese officials and scholars, who in exchange received various forms of capital or compensations deemed more valuable at the time than the objects in question.
In the decades after the 1911 Revolution, however, these antiquities went from being diplomatic capital to disputed icons of the emerging nation-state. A new generation of Chinese scholars began to criminalize the past activities of archaeologists, erasing the memory of the pragmatic barter relationship that once existed. Through his research that recovered the voices of local officials, scholars, and laborers who shaped the global trade in antiquities, Jacobs provides historical grounding for a contentious topic in modern Chinese history that informs debates over cultural restitution throughout the world.