Museums in the West are full of stolen treasures – by visiting them are we perpetuating colonial-era violence?

Professor Dan Hicks, curator of world archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, in Oxford, England, is a sort of gamekeeper turned poacher.

Instead of fiercely hanging on to his museum’s collections, he thinks at least some of them should be given away, and especially those items that were looted, often violently, from their owners and whose return is now being requested by heirs or successors. And he thinks other museums should do the same.

“Each morning,” he writes in his recently published book, The Brutish Museums, “this morning for instance, as these museums are unlocked, the alarms turned off, the lights switched on, the doors opened to the public, to tourists and to school groups, this loss and violence is repeated.”

This is an alarming thought. If the violence of colonial acquisition reoccurs whenever the doors open, doesn’t that make the tourists who rush in part of the problem? After all, our entry fees help to keep the museums running, and where entrance is free our visits help justify government funding.

And some would argue it’s not just colonial pillage we’re supporting, but when we visit institutions that accept sponsorship money from fossil-fuel companies – the Science Museum, in London, for instance, or the Musée du Louvre, in Paris – we’re condoning the delay in significant action on global heating, too.