In recent years, a number of UK museums have repatriated artefacts and ancestral remains to a range of countries and communities. Returns to India, Nigeria, Australia, Taiwan and Native American communities, raise the question of current best practice on museum repatriation, a hotly debated and current issue globally. Drawing on diverse international case studies – including presentations from those involved in returns of Aboriginal material to the Anindilyakwa people (Australia), the Ni’isjoohl Totem Pole to the Nisga’a people (Canada), and a natural history specimen to Jamaica – this full-day international conference held at Kelvin Hall, Glasgow on 19 April 2024, involved leading professionals, scholars and practitioners in the fields of museums, heritage and repatriation, addressing diverse questions around legal and ethical frameworks, community engagement, intellectual property, museum practice and more.

Glasgow Museums long led the way in the UK in setting museum best practice on repatriation in the guidance it developed in the 1990s, and this explains our title: From Scotland to the World. Starting with progressive museums’ best practice in Scotland, the conference then looked outwards to the world through a series of a geographical panels, involving direct conversations between representatives of claimant communities and museum personnel at the forefront of current best practice.

The conference coincided with the return by The Hunterian of a natural history specimen of the Jamaican giant galliwasp, a lizard endemic to the Island, to the Natural History Museum of Jamaica (see image). The return of the galliwasp made history as the first ever repatriation of a natural history specimen to the Caribbean and pushed the boundaries of how we conceive of repatriation (as applying also to items from the natural world, not just human remains and cultural artefacts). This repatriation was facilitated by the University of Glasgow’s Memorandum of Understanding with the University of the West Indies signed in 2019, committing the two institutions to further reparative justice, following the publication of the report Slavery, Abolition and the University of Glasgow (2018) by the historians Simon Newman and Stephen Mullen.