Over the past few years, the issue of restitution of art looted during European colonial occupations has regained steam. Accelerated by the Savoy-Sarr report (2018) commissioned by the French president Emmanuel Macron, a number of countries have begun negotiations to return all or parts of their collections of colonial-looted art still displayed or stored in their museums. France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, among others, have all put in motion policies to facilitate restitution, while pressures are increasing on Great Britain to do the same. This article explains the remarkable change in state attitudes regarding colonial-looted art through the framework of international status management. While material objects collected during the colonial period and displayed in grand European museums used to represent valued objects of status for which European powers competed, they have over time come to represent objects of stigma. The same objects that granted states high international status now threaten to provoke status loss, as they implicate the state that owns them in colonial crimes and serve as material reminders of past violence. The article illustrates the argument with the case of the Benin Bronzes, a collection of artifacts looted by the British army from the Kingdom of Benin in 1897, but subsequently dispersed throughout major European museums. The intense international competition for possession of the Bronzes at the turn of the 20th century demonstrates that these were highly coveted objects of status. More than a hundred years later, there is competition among states to return them. It is restitution, not collection, that is now expression of high international cultural status.
