Samenvatting

Several countries in Europe are developing new policies for dealing with collections from colonial contexts. In October 2020, the Council for Culture also made a contribution to this matter commisioned by Minister Van Engelshoven with the Advice for dealing with colonial collections. This article makes two caveats to this advice. The first is about provenance research, about which the advisers have a lot to say, but clues are lacking as to how museums can balance this kind of time-consuming and costly research with the large number of dubiously acquired objects from colonial contexts awaiting investigation. Second, the author misses references to how claims for two other categories of looted art involving Europeans are handled: those of human remains and objects from the early inhabitants of European settler colonies (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, USA and South Africa) and Nazi-looted art. Those early inhabitants and the descendants of the victims of the Nazi regime have made more progress with their restitution requests than the old colonies with theirs.