The Brutish Museums is a timely, radical critique of the museum as an institution pivotal to the making of empire. Hicks makes his case in terms that are brutally honest, calling out museum directors, curators and his own colleagues in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to reject the legacies of empire. But the book not only rejects the museum as an institution of segregation; it rejects the entire subdiscipline of Material Culture Studies as implicated in the duress of empire. Engaging with the now canonical view on the circulation of objects conceived by Igor Kopytoff in 1986, the author rejects the idea of object life histories as justifying the non-return of looted objects. Instead, he proposes to refocus on the museum as institution, or, as he states, ‘to slice open the museum to see what cancer is inside’ (p. 151). The next page shows a photograph of a set of carved ivories on display in the Royal Palace of the Benin Kingdom before they were carted off to London. The photograph represents the ivories as the booty of a bloody expedition, the contents of an ancient palace bombarded, subdued and prised open by the military force of an expanding British empire. This visceral photograph comes with an equally unambiguous caption, taken from the 1971 brochure ‘The Treasures of the British Museum’: ‘Guns paved the way of the explorers. Much of the collection is the plunder of punitive military expeditions. The relics of the Benin tribe in the section on Divine Kingship in Africa are here as a result of war with the British.’

Thus, in a nutshell, runs the argument of the book. The punitive expedition by British troops that led to the sacking of the City of Benin in February 1897 was a pivotal event in the expansion of the British Empire in Africa, resulting in the looting of an unknown quantity of art and material culture from the Royal Palace and the distribution of this precious cultural heritage across museums and private collections in Europe and the USA, where these objects were employed to tell the stories of race science. Informed by ideas on necrology, The Brutish Museums presents a ‘necrography’ of the punitive expedition – a story of violence, death and loss. Littered with quotations from the participating marines and soldiers, the book interprets the expedition as a premeditated ambush in which men, women and children were killed indiscriminately and the palace treasure looted, a democide unrecognized as crime against humanity.

Given the painstaking research it is based on, we have to accept the author's assessment that the subsequent distribution of the loot was less well organized than is often believed and that, although part of the loot was entrusted to the British Museum, much of it was auctioned off, given away or otherwise dispersed in private, family collections. This wanton distribution of loot discredits any claim that this appropriation by the British ensured a better protection of this cultural heritage than the ruler of Benin City was capable of providing. Critically, it also raises the question to what extent the life histories of these objects were entangled with those of their carers – the Oba of Benin, or the looters, happy to sell the booty. This book firmly rejects the view that objects and their histories are entangled with the museums that hold them. Hicks explicitly denounces the theory of entanglement (launched by Nicholas Thomas) as legitimating an epistemology and a politics of museums that prevent the repatriation of the Benin Bronzes to Benin City. In terms of its academic merits, this is the most significant and controversial claim Hicks makes – and likely to have the most enduring impact on the academic discourse that legitimizes the continued existence of anthropology museums and the place of Benin Bronzes in them.

In other respects, the book is less incisive. The chapter on chronopolitics argues that the art and material culture in anthropological museums in general and in the Pitt Rivers Museum in particular was used to support a racist view of human evolution integral to the despicable race science that legitimized Empire and Holocaust. In this chapter, none of the pioneering work done on this subject by Nélia Dias, Tony Bennett, Benoît de L'Estoile and Alice Conklin is referenced, as if Hicks was the first to enter this scene. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that the book fails to credit the work of predecessors – as if Museum Studies did not have a well-established, critical history that has had a significant impact on how museums operate today. Of course, it is brave that Hicks embraces the manifesto of the ‘Dig Where You Stand’ movement, which exhorts workers to investigate their own workplaces. Speaking from the Pitt Rivers Museum about its own collection, Hicks examines the ethics and politics of his own workplace. Yet, the book neglects a diversity of approaches adopted by museums, including the Pitt Rivers Museum, over the last few decades to address the traumas and legacies of empire. The book risks throwing away this baby with the proverbial bathwater.

As an institution founded in the age of Enlightenment, the museum expressed a desire for curiosity and a will to power. As the nascent discipline of anthropology thrived on the display of human remains and fetishes, the Enlightenment was complicit in the making of empire. Yet, however necessary a necrography of empire may be, it does not – and should not – determine our range of ethical and political options in the present. Conscious that much of the damage done by empire is beyond repair, postcolonial scholars such as David Scott nonetheless urge for a politics that engages with the legacy of the Enlightenment. Achille Mbembe, whose work on black reason situates the work of black scholars in a black tradition in dialogue with the Enlightenment, advocates a repair of reason. The Enlightenment, embodied in the museum, undoubtedly requires revision. But would the museum, an institution that lends itself so well to object lessons, not be the most appropriate place to revise that legacy?

In the last thirty years, the discipline of Museum Studies has been a lively and engaged academic discipline that has contributed much to the decolonization of anthropology. Much of the work in museums is informed by a sense of social justice and an ethics of repair. Although these fields have been the preserve of privileged, white middle-class employees – and are still dominated by them today – they have opened up in all manner of directions. For the museum to become a more inclusive institution, it needs more time to revise its own history and reconsider its future. At this point, we need to decide whether we want rupture or repair. Hicks sees the future of the anthropology museum as a ‘site of conscience’. This position is not that different from the function Achille Mbembe has in mind for the museum. In a conversation on the subject at the University of Cologne in 2019, Mbembe suggested that the anthropological museum might serve as the site for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the legacies of empire. For this future to take shape and to contribute to a transformed understanding of the legacies of empire and Enlightenment, a considerable commitment to the museum as platform is required. On his part, Hicks is clear that the time for dialogue has run out: ‘Dialogue is giving way to action’ (p. 234). However, rather than monologue, dialogue is required for the work of repair to succeed.

At present, restitution is the future towards which Hicks’ book is leading the conversation. With the steps taken by Emmanuel Macron in France and the Humboldt Forum in Germany, it won't take long before Britain, and the USA too, will have to face restitution. In the last chapter, the book asks how this process of restitution should be conceived in relation to the parallel process of decolonization. As Mbembe made very clear in the conversation in Cologne, there is an analogy between returning looted objects and returning refugees to their countries of origin. With their return, conversations can be ended. In some ways, then, returning objects to Africa would be too easy. The question is whether everyone is best served by such quick fixes. In a different strand of postcolonial theory in which the failures of the postcolony are recognized, scholars argue that Europe's responsibilities remain and that its entangled obligations towards the global South ought to be observed. In her writings on reparation, the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein has warned that hasty reparations risk turning into aggressions. She suggested that the work of repair should be a continuous process, rather than an event concluded once and for all. Maybe thinking through entanglements still has a purpose?