Marc Fennell > Quotes

“These stories are not really about the past. They're about charting how we ended up with the present. I f there are multiple dimensions out there, I'm convinced ours must be the most chaotic one: a messy, sometimes beautiful, frequently disastrous waterfall of events that have somehow landed you and me on this very page”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“The mosaic is caught up in the middle of all this history and conflict”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“Rubber revolutionised how people lived, starting with the most mundane items like simple seals and gaskets. In Britain, it led to a new golden age of health and hygiene”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“The last living dodo was sighted in 1662. Since then it has become an icon of human-caused extinction”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“X-rays and CT scans can give us detailed images of a body without disturbing it, and have led to amazing discoveries. They've helped solved murder mysteries - knife wounds to long-dead rulers confirm historical coups. Some mummies provide invaluable medical data to measure ancient health against modern disease”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“It's in former colonial nations like Australia and Canada that things become murkier. People tie themselves into linguistic knots to make sure you know the British weren't all bad, or that other empires were worse”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“The British Museum was created to safeguard the collection of one wealthy collector who donated his personal treasure trove of Enlightenment artefacts and documents, ion the condition that it would be kept together and made accessible to the public. A law was written to protect that wish: the British Museum Act 1753. This was the legislation that established the British Museum in London, and it laid its legal and philosophical foundation: a repository of global knowledge, meant to serve education, science and the public good”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“But, as is the theme of this book, the British did clandestine and illegal better than anyone else. A few times over, in fact”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“You've probably heard the phrase, 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'. This is not one of those polite euphemisms, it was a geopolitical fact. At the peak of empire, the sun was always shining on land that was ruled by the British Crown, whether that was Australia, Jamaica, Canada, India, Tuvalu, Northern Ireland”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“Our history matters. Our stories matter. Even when they're uncomfortable. Especially when they're uncomfortable”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“When so much has been taken, there's a human desire to make sense of it. The need to put the fragments of history into some sequence, to make it mean something”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“The British Empire was, for a good few centuries, an unprecedented artefact-gathering enterprise”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“History isn't something that happened to other people a long time ago. History is now. It's breathing down our necks. It's in the rubber soles of your shoes, it's the very ground beneath your feet. It's in your actual feet - your DNA, your culture, your mind, your ancestors, your children”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“When we talk about the past, people tend to focus on either the good or the bad - especially when it comes to colonialism”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“When your national story is tightly interwoven with empire, it's hader to draw clean moral lines. The past isn't something that happened to you - it's something that helped make you”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“If you speak English, you've been touched by the British Empire. The language that lets us communicate - our software, our news, our pop culture - is a vessel. It carries the empire in its DNA”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“To tell you the truth, I don't actually have a definitive opinion on British colonialism. But as an Australian who's a bit Indian, a bit Singaporean and a bit Irish, I do know that I wouldn't exist without it. And depending on where you're reading this, there's a pretty good chance that you wouldn't either”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“This was a time when social standing and birth were everything. To be born out of wedlock immediately sentenced Isaac - no matter how bright and ambitious he might have been - to a life of hardship. If having your remains defiled ruined your place in the Egyptian afterlife, to be born without lineage was to start two steps behind in British life itself”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“He points out that the way to save an ancient work like this is simple, and something that has happened incidentally for as long as we've been building structures: you cover it with earth. 'Obviously they wanted it. That's the bottom line. But there was no reason to remove it... It would be considered, today, a war crime. This is stolen property”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“European and Asian powers fought (and massacred) to control the sources of spices like cloves, nutmeg and mac, and the sea lanes that moved them. Many people found themselves colonised, enslaved, dispossessed or straight-up murdered because Europeans wanted nicer dinners and Jamie Oliver wouldn't happen for another 500 years”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“You ask, was it legal? I will ask first, was it moral? Law is about regulating societies, but morality is right and wrong on the personal level. We cannot debate about that. It is known, what feels right”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“I won't lie - I love the clean, bittersweet snap of a well-made gin and tonic. Every time I drink one, though, I'm struck by the moral tangle it represents. It's an imperial crossroads in unambiguous good - but it did so precisely because traditional knowledge was taken, refined and manufactured on an industrial scale of European use. Quinine was also what helped European empires to entrench themselves in the tropics. Without it, the modern world might look very different”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“The tiger represented power, ferocity and independence - qualities Tipu admired and sought to embody in his rule. He even referred himself as 'the Tiger of Mysore”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“It was Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that made the dodo famous and kept the memory of the bird alive. Which is, I think, a much nicer legacy than being the poster-bird for extinction”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole

“So much of it isn't about what happened, it's about where you're standing when the story is told - and who has been given the authority to tell it. All of these positions contain truth. Things were stolen. The British Empire wasn't the only colonial power to take what wasn't theirs. And yes, some museum objects really were gifts. But what happens when all of those things are true at once?”
― Marc Fennell, Stuff the British Stole