> “If you ask anybody what should happen to Jewish art stolen by the Nazis, everyone would say of course they’ve got to be given back to their owners,” Dalrympl

> “If you ask anybody what should happen to Jewish art stolen by the Nazis, everyone would say of course they’ve got to be given back to their owners,” Dalrymple says. “And yet we’ve come to not say the same thing about Indian loot taken hundreds of years earlier, also at the point of a gun. What is the moral distinction between stuff taken by force in colonial times?” I'm not sure a state conquering another state and seizing the conquered artifacts is comparable to a state systematically imprisoning & murdering millions of civilians and seizing their valuable possessions. After all, as others have pointed out, which state should it return to: Pakistan, Afghanistan or India? If the British "looted" it, should we also consider Afghanistan or Pakistan to have "looted" it first?