Thread by @MichaelDPress

Current reading:
Lynn Meskell, A Future in Ruins: UNESCO, World Heritage, and the Dream of Peace (July 2018)
global.oup.com/academic/produ…

Meskell refers to this speech by FDR at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario), 18 August 1938
fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/ima…
This really captures both the strengths and weaknesses of the universalist idea of heritage

Meskell: "The foundational aspirations of UNESCO rest upon the modernist rhetorics of progress, development, and uplift that many critics consider its fatal flaw . . . it would remain a one-way flow, later to prove problematic, from the West to the rest."

Surprise, surprise, the U.S. plays politics at UNESCO from the beginning:
The original U.S. contribution to UNESCO was cut from $7.5 million to $6.5 million after they failed to get an American appointed as the organization's first Director-General

Precursors to UNESCO: the 1939/1940 Manual on the Technique of Archaeological Excavations as a step toward a "one-world archaeology" (Meskell's term)
The editorial committee includes René Dussaud, Amedeo Maiuri, George Reisner, Alan Wace, and Alfred Westholm.

As Meskell points out, these efforts were driven almost exclusively by European and American scholars.

The text of the manual makes clear who is supposed to be carrying out this archaeology and where, and the status that the local population enjoys.

"obliged to come into contact"

Meanwhile, a remarkable conference was held at the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem in the summer of 1943
(from BASOR, October 1943)

But Meskell notes the one-way flows (legislation from the West, heritage to the West) continues:
"It was easy for foreign scholars to argue in favor of international legislation and oversight, because the antiquities and heritage of their own nations were not under discussion."

Richard Barnett argued that "since museums did not yet exist in some of the colonies, archaeological finds should be relocated so as to be accessible to 'the world.' By this he meant the Western world."

An interesting post on the manual from @w_carruthers that anticipates in some ways what Meskell has to say:
worldlypractices.wordpress.com/2014/08/19/mak…

One thing @w_carruthers highlights is the list of delegates to the 1937 Cairo conference that gave rise to the manual, and the number of delegates from across the Middle East:

It's probably significant that while the delegates include many Middle Eastern scholars, the editorial committee is exclusively European and American.

Also interesting: While the manual seems to take for granted the continued existence of the antiquities trade, every mention of that trade is in the context of the need for greater control.

Meskell on the UNESCO-sponsored History of Mankind radio series, a truly international effort. But there were problems:

"The institutions of the United Nations were not simply built around British and imperial networks: they were envisaged as a way to shore up and extend imperial power."

Reinhold Niebuhr recommends that UNESCO reduce its scope to economic and technical assistance . . . and only to countries in American sphere of influence.