The British Empire, which once covered a large part of the world, was long since dwindled away. The remnants of this empire & immense power are still self evident however if you visit institutions such as the British Museum, which still house many treasures that are the spoils from past imperial conquests. The story here focuses on some pieces from Ireland, but many other countries have similar tales to tell.

Egyptian mummy at the British Museum

From:
Irish Examiner

Stolen moments in British Museum
Monday, November 04, 2013
THE British are peculiar. Their desire to conquer the world has been matched only by their obsession with bringing bits of it home with them.
By Marc O’ Sullivan, Arts Editor

Nowhere is this more evident than in the British Museum in London. Visiting it last week, my eye was drawn to a large slab of stone, about the height and width of a man, perched upon a formal plinth in the Great Court. It bore an inscription in ogham. On a plaque beneath, the crude translation of these elegant notches — read anti-clockwise — disclosed that the slab was originally raised in honour of ‘Vedac, son of Tob of the Sogain’. It was one of three 5th century ogham stones taken from Roovesmoor Rath — a ring fort outside Coachford, in West Cork — by the delightfully named General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers. He presented the group to the British Museum in 1866.

Pitt Rivers, who fought in the Crimean War, brought a scientific approach to archaeology. He catalogued all items found on digs, and not just those that seemed valuable, and his attention to detail vastly improved 19th century excavations, which had hitherto been conducted as glorified sackings.
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A more recent case of an artefact in a UK museum – that its original owners want returned because they feel that it symbolises more for to them than it does to the museum it is currently in.

From:
Irish Central

The Keane Edge
by Brendan Patrick Keane

Pressure on a British museum to return Gal Gréine to Ireland, and honor Constance Markiewicz, Irish nationalist and feminist leader

During the Easter Rising of 1916, the British administration engaged in a shock and awe campaign to destroy Dublin, and the morale of Dubliners, by the brute force of its army. Destruction and looting was a psychological tactic, and much treasure was whisked from the capital city of Ireland, back to the imperial city of London, as trophies of the British empire’s brutal resistance to self-determination.
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