For Frederick Douglass, it was an argument against repatriation schemes for the freed slaves.
Does the online presence of these artefacts blow the argument for repatriation out of the water?
The marbles in fact belonged to the Parthenon, a building here and nowhere else, the best argument for repatriation, except the idea now is not to reattach them where they came from but to move them from one museum to another, from the British Museum to the new Acropolis Museum, albeit next door — a different matter, if not to the Greeks.
It considers the traumas of colonialism and the arguments for repatriation of precious objects from western museums; one passage directly takes issue with British Museum director Neil MacGregor's statements on the Benin bronzes.
The German authorities have also argued the bust is too fragile to transport and that the legal arguments for the repatriation were insubstantial.
Take Nadine Gordimer, who has contributed the preface to a new edition of Christopher Hitchens's book, The Parthenon Marbles, a typically vigorous argument in favour of repatriation first published in 1987.
According to Kurt G. Siehr, another argument in support of repatriation is that "Archeological finds have their 'home' in the country of origin and should be preserved in that country".
A cost-of-illness analysis may thus be the first step in an economic evaluation of repatriations to establish strong arguments to promote the health and welfare of seafarers.
It has also been the subject of an intense argument between Egypt and Germany over Egyptian demands for its repatriation.
Repatriation has become, for them, both a human-rights cause and a policy argument, a way of championing the rehabilitative German model over the costly, punitive American one.
