Keeping their marbles

For the past two centuries and more, the West has acquired the treasures of antiquity to fill its museums, so that visitors to the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, and the Metropolitan in New York -- to name but a few -- can wonder at the ingenuity of humanity throughout the ages. But all this came at a huge cost. From the Napoleonic campaigns that filled the Louvre with Egyptian artifacts, to the plunder that accompanied British imperialism across the globe, the amazing collections in the West's great museums were wrenched from their original context by means that often…