Preservation or Plunder? The ISIS Files and a History of Heritage Removal in Iraq

Today, I published an article in Middle East Review Online that addresses the recent controversy over the New York Times' removal of thousands of documents of the Islamic State from Iraq. The NYT claims it is preserving the files in order to make them available to Iraqis (but only digitally). Meanwhile, many Iraqi critics have reacted with anger. My article aims to examine the ethical problems of this NYT project by contextualizing it among a long history of removing archives and artifacts from Iraq. An excerpt:

...the outcry should not have come as a surprise. The removal of the ISIS files from Iraq is only the latest episode in a long history of seizures of Iraqi archives and artifacts by Europeans and Americans. Rather than dismiss Iraqi critics as unreasonable, everyone with a stake in the study of Iraq—including all journalists, historians, and archivists—must reckon with the enduring legacies of two centuries of Western removal of Iraqi heritage. 

And we must begin by acknowledging that, again and again, the people who have taken Iraqi items have justified their actions by appealing to the need for preservation. Rather than considering themselves businesspeople or profiteers, they convinced themselves that they were performing an act of duty by safeguarding Iraq’s history for posterity and making materials available to scholars. In nearly every case, however, the institutions that have housed Iraqi heritage have ended up benefiting from it directly. They have attracted funding, researchers, accolades, and sightseers. All the while, efforts to make those materials accessible to Iraqis, if they have been made at all, have repeatedly fallen short.

Read the whole article here.