Hayek Program Podcast · Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Kwame Anthony Appiah — 2023 Markets and Society Conference Keynote

February 5, 2025·53 min·3 clips

Appiah argues the Benin bronzes were made possible by the same conquest economy that later helped remove them.

1. Hayek Program Podcast presents Kwame Anthony Appiah’s 2023 Markets and Society Conference keynote on cultural property, war spoils, and museum restitution. 2. Appiah is introduced as a professor of philosophy and law at New York University and emeritus at Princeton, and his work on identity and heritage matters to the argument. 3. The keynote asks how property claims, cultural inheritance, and international law should shape disputes over objects in museums. 4. Appiah begins with the Iliad and the Quran to show that war spoils, captives, and redistribution have long been linked. 5. He cites Deuteronomy, the Greek verb harpazo, German Kriegsbeute, and an Asante term for a war captive to show how widespread the idea of booty is. 6. He then turns to the 1954 Hague Convention, which defines cultural property as important to “the cultural heritage of every people.” 7. Appiah notes that this internationalist language has been overtaken by state property claims, especially in debates over African heritage. 8. He discusses the Sarr-Savoy report, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, and Dan Hicks’s call to decolonize museums. 9. The Benin bronzes are central to his historical case because Benin acquired brass through trade in enslaved captives and imported manilas. 10. He argues that the same conquest economy that produced the bronzes later helped make their loss possible. 11. Appiah’s discussion of the Asante treasures includes Baden-Powell’s 1874 expedition and the line that valuables were collected “without a single case of looting.” 12. He says an Asante king, who was his uncle, did not request return of the treasures until the 1970s. 13. The Code of Hammurabi example shows how legal export, ancient war booty, and modern national claims can all point in different directions. 14. Appiah says heritage can be claimed by descent, by territory, or by identity formed through time and proximity. 15. He uses the Elgin Marbles, Etruscan objects, and Egyptian obelisks in Rome to show how those models collide. 16. Napoleon’s regalia, Wellington’s engraved sword, and the sword taken in the Anglo-Zulu war add more cases where objects carry multiple histories. 17. The keynote is argumentative and densely comparative, with long historical detours and repeated returns to the same conceptual question. 18. Appiah speaks in a measured, analytic style that moves between philosophy, legal history, and family history. 19. Listeners interested in museums, restitution, African history, and political philosophy will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a short, purely biographical talk or a light discussion should probably skip it.

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