The Compensations of Plunder is an important addition to the corpus of scholarly investigations into the history of collecting antiquities and to present-day debates about the repatriation of “loot.” It focuses on the highly productive collecting expeditions to obtain antiquities for Western museums and libraries from the remote northwestern reaches of the Chinese empire; Aurel Stein and others led these expeditions between about 1900 and the early 1930s. The resulting collections of paintings, sculpture, and documents on paper, silk, and wooden slips (incredibly well preserved due to the region's aridity and remoteness) have been presented over the past century in markedly different ways. The expeditions’ formal publications describe rather heroic feats that sought to preserve the remains of these long-neglected cultures in safe, modern museums and libraries in London, Paris, Berlin, and other European and American cities. More recent scholarship focuses on the more unsavory aspects of these expeditions as acts of pillage and cultural theft forced on a politically and militarily weak China during the waning years of the Qing Dynasty in the early twentieth century. However, these critical assessments of Stein and others, Justin M. Jacobs argues, apply early twenty-first-century morals to early twentieth-century activities: this harvesting of antiquities in northwest China was not always viewed as theft by Chinese administrators or by locals.

Through an admirably comprehensive and close reading of archival letters, diaries, and Chinese and Western government documents, Jacobs reveals previously unrecognized aspects of the changing nature of the relationship among explorers, local administrators, and local laborers. He presents an important theoretical framework that explores the nuanced motivations of both the collectors and the local officials who allowed—and in many cases, encouraged—this collection and removal of antiquities.

Through his deep understanding of Xinjiang's local administrative processes and ethnic relationships (see his Xinjiang and the Modern Chinese State, 2017), Jacobs lays out the benefits each party would enjoy through their cooperative relationship with these expeditions, focusing on four kinds of “capital.” Diplomatic capital refers to the presentation of antiquities by local officials in exchange for significant diplomatic benefits for themselves or their superiors. This strategy's usefulness was also recognized outside China; for example, the Ottoman rulers presented ancient Egyptian obelisks to Western leaders and institutions. Social capital provided local Han officials—frequently bored, surrounded by less-educated, non-Han populations they considered to be their inferiors, and isolated in these distant posts far from China's governmental, business, and social centers—to gain status through their association with highly educated, “scientific” Western explorers like Stein. Political capital allowed local officials to parlay their explorer's connections with high-level Chinese government officials into personal advancement for themselves or to push for their own political agenda. Jacobs recounts a fascinating example of how a Chinese translation of Stein's 1900–1901 expedition report included an additional preface that praised Stein as the embodiment of science, modernity, and wealth, with the writer pushing for China to modernize by emulating these qualities. Finally, economic capital benefited each project's laborers through higher wages and opportunities for promotions and network building, sometimes beyond their wildest dreams. This multiplicity of benefits sustained projects that could be seen as collaborations, rather than as theft and smuggling, and helps explain, at least in part, the lack of success by some Westerners such as American journalist Frederick McCormick, who from 1908 to 1918 vocally opposed the “vandalism” of Chinese sites by collectors seeking to enrich American and European museums.

The cooperative landscape for these Western expeditions changed dramatically in the period after World War I and into the 1920s. As Jacobs documents in detail, the earlier perception of antiquities as freely transferable commodities changed with the collapse of the Qing government in 1911 and the rise of the new Republic of China. Recognizing the political importance of unifying the country through the perception of a shared cultural heritage, the government nationalized many collections, most notably the vast imperial art collections that would form the new Palace Museum in 1925. We also see the rise of “scientific” archaeology in China and the emergence of a new generation of Western-trained Chinese archaeologists, anthropologists, art historians, and other scholars who returned to China in leadership positions: they implemented new rules and regulations to preserve China's archaeological sites, recognizing the importance of China's antiquities, sites, and museums as symbols of the nation's shared heritage and an important unifying tool for reinforcing political legitimacy.

The ruling Nationalist (Kuomintang) government increasingly saw the value of cultural heritage as soft diplomacy: for example, the 1935–1936 exhibition of Chinese antiquities in London sought to elicit international support in the face of growing Japanese militarism. With the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Chinese archaeology and museums from the 1950s through 1970s provided the government with a tangible tool to present a Marxist understanding of social evolution. Importantly, the use of cultural heritage for soft diplomacy continues in China to the present day, as shown by Xi Jinping's ongoing nationwide expansion of archaeology museums to showcase China's long and sophisticated cultural history on the world stage and by the use of maritime archaeology to bolster China's historical claims to dominance over the South China Sea. Indeed, China's massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) seeks to renew and strengthen China's historical economic and cultural links along the old Silk Road and well beyond, adding yet another dimension to the relevance of understanding the multilayered Central Asian relationships as laid out in The Compensations of Plunder. As William Faulkner noted (Requiem for a Nun, 1951), “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”