Prohibiting Plunder: How Norms Change

Prohibiting Plunder: How Norms Change by Sandholtz, Wayne. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780195337235.

Prohibiting Plunder traces the emergence of international rules against the wartime looting of cultural treasures. For much of history, the norm was "to the victor go the spoils." Today, treaty-based rules prohibit wartime plundering. Those rules emerged through a series of crucial episodes, from Napoleons looting of Europe, to the destruction of World War I, to the massive Nazi plundering of World War II. The book carries the story through the conflicts of the 1990s in Bosnia and Kuwait and recent efforts to return "Holocaust art," and culminates with the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in 2003. Prohibiting Plunder links these events into a cohesive account of how and why international rules change.