Description
This article examines the 19th century ‘antiquities rush’ – the frenzy of archaeological digging, scientific expeditions, and straightforward looting of artifacts in the broader Mediterranean – through the framework of international status competition. The article makes three principal arguments. First, it situates culture at the foundation of international status-seeking and demonstrates the importance of cultural objects as status symbols for states. Second, it establishes that it was specifically the cultural extraction of Greco-Roman antiquities that was critical in the establishment of the 19th century international cultural hierarchy that attributed high rank to states that claimed to be the cultural heirs of ancient Rome and Greece. Third, it shows that it was through cultural extraction and its domestic narration by major national institutions (museums and the press) that empire was made more domestically legitimate and legible for the citizens in imperial metropoles. Cultural extraction, therefore, was not an epiphenomenon of imperialism, but its central feature. To illustrate these arguments, the article focuses on the international competition between France and Britain for the extraction of the Parthenon Marbles from Greece and, once they were moved to Britain, the way in which they were narratively constructed as status symbols for the British empire.
