Stuff the British Stole

Marc Fennell is an award winning journalist and documentary film maker based in Australia. This book is a tie in to his podcast and the TV series, it fleshes out and updates the stories told there.

I love museums and I love history. I have spent hours walking through museums, admiring the exhibits, reading the information plaques, drifting past dioramas showing the ‘object in its historical context’ but I have never stopped to question how the object got there and what was its back story.

Marc takes that question and runs with it. He delves deep into the history of Empire and the casual way we brush over the complicated history of the acquisition of artefacts. He points out that "Museums don’t usually lie outright. The edit. They redact. They smooth. They offer us the version of the past that’s easiest to live with."

History is complicated, messy, lived, polarising and uncomfortable. It is the story of our curiosity and hunger for knowledge, our need to possess, take ownership of the narrative, bend, fold and polish, hide the flaws and highlight the clean sanitised artefact.

Marc is painfully aware of this and uses a light, cheeky (very antipodean style of humour) conversational style to highlight it in his work. He says ’this book is an attempt to unredact the record. To look again at the objects we’ve been shown and ask what was removed before they reached us. Not to settle the past, but to stand honestly inside it. Even if it makes us uncomfortable. Especially if it does.'

Stuff the British Stole is beautifully written and very different to a lot of the recent writing on History and Empire. It holds its own against weighty, academic tomes. It is at once amusing, fascinating and discomfiting. Marc has written a very fair, balanced, well researched and challenging book. He walks that fine line between praise and condemnation. He seeks to understand rather than pass judgement. He asks us to stand with him within the flow of history and understand the complex eddies that form the whole, to accept that good and bad don’t cancel each other out. He says "It bears repeating: these things don’t balance each other out. They coexist."

You can read it as a quick cheerful romp through some of the most famous and infamous artefacts held in museums around the world, their origins and how they came to be in their current resting place. Then you can read it as a conversation, sometimes light-hearted, about history and colonialism, about empires through the ages, of people lost and objects found, of the uncomfortable truth that in fact several version of the same history exist and they are all correct within the context of our lives.

However you choose to read it, you need to read this book. At once thought-provoking and giggle inducing, this book will change how you see the world around you and how you react to the stories of the people you meet.

My next visit to the museum will have an emotional depth and richer historical context because of this book. The complexity of my reaction to this book, the thoughts it has raised about colonialism and empire, about how these events impact me as a a member of an ostensibly post-colonial generation - these will stay with me and will inform how I understand the world and my place in it.