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Book Review
| Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. 320. $35 (ISBN 0-226-03550-6).
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| Property is a source of power; its ownership is an assertion of authority and individual autonomy. Even an armchair etymologist can link the term "estate" to "status" and, via a quick translation, to "standing." Culture, by contrast, is a dynamic expression, a description of collectively cultivated and shared beliefs and behaviors. It is also, according to literary theorist Terry Eagleton, "one of the two or three most complex words in the English language" (The Idea of Culture [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 1). Cultural property, then, serves as a locus of political debate and struggle over the collective ownership, control, and definition of society itself. Jordanna Bailkin's book examines this phenomenon within the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. In her work, Bailkin persuasively illustrates the centrality of material culture to the history of the Liberal Party and also argues for the importance of this era in defining our present-day understanding of cultural property. |
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The Culture of Property is written as a series of interrelated essays, examining four distinct cultural property debates with a level of detail and a degree of narrative facility that make them seem fresh from the editorial pages. The first of these episodes involved a disputed group of Celtic gold ornaments discovered in 1896 and known as the Broighter Hoard. The Irish demand for repatriation of the ornaments from the British Museum, to this day the holder of infamous contested objects of cultural property, required analysis of ancient Irish history, the status of Ireland within the U.K., and the proper stewardship of authentic national culture. Ultimately venerable principles of property law rather than emerging theories of (post)colonial restitution decided the question. The Celtic gold went "home" to Ireland by authority of the king, but not before it had shaped an atypical chapter in the history of repatriation. |
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From Ireland, Bailkin moves to Scotland and a focus on cultural institutions themselves rather than on cultural objects in an institutional context. The debate over reform of the National Gallery of Scotland, at the time home to a small collection of excellent Scottish works but not much more, encompassed issues ranging from the normative role of a national gallery to the intersection of land reform and Scottish character to the Liberal understanding of national identity within a multinational state. Bailkin's reconstruction of the legislative and political debates over the museum ultimately concludes that while the dispute did not fundamentally alter the National Gallery itself, it did redefine the relationship between law, art, and culture. |
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Next, the book turns to the tension between cultural property and market transfers, with the added overlay of the relationship between gender and ownership. At issue was a portrait, Hans Holbein's Cristina of Denmark, Duchess of Milan, which belonged to the duke of Norfolk but had been displayed at the National Gallery in London for nearly three decades. When the owner announced his intention to sell the portrait, British art lovers protested its potential departure and began raising funds to meet his price. The prominent role of women and feminists in this effort gave rise to debates regarding female ownership of property and the fear of a feminization of national culture—especially when the last-minute contributor of the majority of the money turned out to be an anonymous woman. The transformation of a foreign artist's portrait of a foreign woman into British cultural property, the rights of a private owner to alienate property thus imbued with national sentiment, and the relationships between gender, culture, and property all intersect in this study. |
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Finally, Bailkin examines the relationship of high and low culture, or representations of connoisseurship and everyday citizenship, in the world of cultural institutions. The London Museum opened in 1912 as Britain's first folk museum, an experiment in what Bailkin terms "civi-otics," borrowing the term from a donor attempting to describe the fusion of civics and patriotism. The museum's simultaneous popularity and its contested role as a locus of urban class and gender identity formation suggest another dimension in the formation of cultural property. |
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Taken together these four studies offer a multilayered perspective on the role of cultural artifacts within the Liberal imagination of a British nation prior to World War I. Bailkin's use of the legal term "cultural property" rather than "cultural heritage" is particularly appropriate in this work, given the relationship that she establishes between concepts of individual ownership, property law, and national identity. While the book is perhaps most useful as a work of history and theoretical analysis rather than modern legal authority—the assertion, for example, that neither the U.S. nor the U.K. is a party to the primary UNESCO treaty on trafficking in antiquities (73) is misleading given that both countries have filed instruments of acceptance—Bailkin nevertheless succeeds in adding a new dimension to the common postcolonial analysis of cultural property. The Culture of Property is a welcome addition to a field more often occupied with international preservation and movement of cultural goods than with intranational debates. |
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| Susan Scafidi
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| Southern Methodist University School of Law |
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