The Magnificent Boat

A major contribution to the debate over whether and how to repatriate the countless objects and artworks acquired through dubious means that reside in the museums of former colonial powers…As an indictment of German colonial policies and leading scholars’ complicity in them, the book is unsparing and convincing. -- Joshua Keating * Washington Post * The book is not just about museum politics and shifting postcolonial meanings of non-western objects. Museum collections are a metaphor. They stand for a larger, unresolved debate about the moral contradictions facing postcolonial western societies whose contemporary prosperity is rooted in the pillaging of the peoples and cultures they once ruled. If the ethos of the moment stands on injustice, The Magnificent Boat makes an excellent contribution that exposes and reminds us of it. -- David Lipset * Times Literary Supplement * Aly’s detailed account follows German ships as they arrive at Luf Island to punish the local population for an earlier fight with Germans, burning homes and forests, stealing food and clearing land for the coconut plantations where the remaining islanders were enslaved…He draws widely from official documents and accounts where Germans wrote openly about violence in the South Seas. -- David D’Arcy * The Art Newspaper * Concise and convincing, this damning account reveals the painful legacy of colonialism. * Publishers Weekly * Well written and full of disturbing detail—a new and much-needed perspective on an iconic museum object. -- Bénédicte Savoy, author of <i>Africa’s Struggle for Its Art: History of a Postcolonial Defeat</i> A lot has been written recently about looted art, but there’s been less talk about much greater colonial crimes. Aly shows that there’s no separating the two. -- Jörg Häntzschel * Süddeutsche Zeitung * Aly’s entertainingly written and comprehensively researched study shows that the Luf Boat was by no means fairly acquired by the German Reich. -- Andreas Kilb * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung * Anyone who sees the so-called Luf Boat in the future will immediately have in mind the murderous cruelty of the Germans. -- Felix Bohr, Ulrike Knöfel, and Elke Schmitter * Der Spiegel * This is a harrowing book, in which readers will learn more about the everyday brutality of colonialism than in any postcolonial studies tract. -- Sebastian Preuss * Weltkunst Online *