THE COLONIAL TRAJECTORIES OF THE BENIN BRONZES: A STUDY IN PROVENANCE RESEARCH

This paper analyses the dispersal of the Benin Bronzes as a constitutive function of colonial power. It examines the colonial expropriation of Benin bronzes during the British Benin war of 1897, elucidating the processes through which artefacts were appropriated from the subjugated Benin City and identifying principal actors directly implicated. Utilising an array of primary and secondary sources— including targeted individual and group interviews, periodicals, archival records, exhibition catalogues, monographs, and scholarly journals—the investigation employs descriptive and analytical methodologies to interrogate historical contingencies. The analysis illuminates late-nineteenth-century British imperial imperatives that precipitated the military conquest of the Benin Kingdom, thereby intertwining colonial officials with the realm‘s artistic patrimony and treasures. It further reveals that, in the conquest's immediate aftermath, victorious British forces inaugurated the initial phase of systematic looting of bronze artefacts. A subsequent phase of colonial despoliation is delineated, commencing upon the military commanders' departure in March 1897 and extending beyond Nigeria‘s decolonisation in 1960; key participants in this inaugural stage, encompassing soldiers, their superiors, and civilian accomplices, are enumerated. The study also explicates the apportionment of looted spoils among on-site personnel and metropolitan colonial bureaucracies in London. Moreover, the influx of these artefacts into London and other European centres catalysed an ensuing wave of predation, orchestrated by missionaries, scholars, colonial functionaries, and antiquities speculators, characterised by egregious practices such as theft, unscientific excavations, and clandestine trafficking. Ultimately, the purloined Benin artworks were commodified through transactions facilitated by soldiers, colonial administrations, auctioneers, and diverse intermediaries, dispersing them into museums, public institutions, and private collections across Britain and continental Europe throughout the imperial epoch and thereafter.