In late June 2019, Tristram Hunt wrote a piece for The Guardian: ‘Should museums return their colonial artefacts?’

Here I want to focus specifically on museum documentation, viewed through the lens of what is perhaps Hunt’s most problematic statement: “For a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise.” Any examination of museum artefacts online quickly reveals that, when it comes to metadata, missing context is a significant issue, and the concept of decolonisation a valuable part of the solution.