On Oct.19, 2025, thieves stole eight pieces of the French Crown Jewels from the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. The incident drew international condemnation, not just because of the immense monetary value of the jewels, but because of their undeniable historical significance as well. French President Emmanuel Macron called the heist “an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our history.” Irony, however, persists. Some of the world’s most valuable artifacts, steeped in cultural and historical significance, remain locked behind glass in Western museums, illegally acquired through colonial violence and exploitation as well as thousands of miles from the people who created them.
In recent years, as debates around neocolonialism and colonial reparations have intensified, there have been numerous renewed calls to repatriate several of these artifacts to their places of origin. Most recently, with the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, the museum world has been abuzz with calls to return artifacts like the Rosetta Stone and Bust of Nefertiti to Egypt, where they were created. In an interview for BBC, Dr. Zahi Hawas, former minister of tourism and antiquities for Egypt, said: “I need three objects to come back: the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, the Zodiac from the Louvre and the Bust of Nefertiti from Berlin.”
With the renewal of this debate, there has been an onslaught of discussion around the importance of historical preservation; specifically, the question of whether Western museums are justified in retaining colonial-era artifacts on the grounds of preservation and the protection of global cultural heritage, or if they are morally responsible to return them to where they were taken from? Discussion has also spotlighted how notions of preservation may perpetuate continued colonial exploitation.
A deeper look at these questions reveals that Western museums’ claims of preservation do not justify the continued possession of looted colonial artifacts. Rather, this ongoing retention induces grave cultural, psychological and moral harms.
Western museums have never just been neutral institutions, removed from the horrors of colonialism. Instead, they have long functioned as ideological extensions of empires rooted in imperialism, shaping public perceptions of colonized peoples and communities through displays that whitewash colonial brutality and plundering. For instance, psychology Professor Geraldine Palmer presents that many Western museum displays continue to operate within the structures of white supremacy shaped by colonial racism. Focusing on the British Museum specifically, Palmer notes that “the museum remains a trope of empire… it is still an imperialist institution resistant to attempts to dismantle a dominant British culture of the past.” This is especially evident through the organisation and labelling of artifacts, which often foreground aesthetic value while minimising the colonial conditions under which they were acquired, reinforcing imperial narratives.
Museums in the Western world play a significant role in legitimizing a system of racial hierarchy, one that situates Western cultural values as the universal standard and reshapes historical narratives to align with them. This trend can be seen in many ways. For example, in a recent research paper, anthropologist Margareta von Oswald describes how museums do not just showcase artifacts obtained through colonial plundering, but actively construct the narratives that uphold notions of European colonial power.
Examining catalogue labels ascribed to the Benin Bronzes, the largest collection of which is at the British Museum, Oswald recounts how a “selection of textual descriptions…, apparently neutral texts, reveal a range of racial prejudices and lack serious scientific analysis regarding their function and their author.” Oswald criticizes that the artifact descriptions of the Benin Bronzes undermine the artistic culture of the people of Benin and justify British possession of their intellectual property. The Bronzes are a collection of highly detailed plaques and sculptures made by the Kingdom of Benin (in present day Nigeria), looted by British forces in 1897.
This reveals how even seemingly objective museum descriptions can embed bias, shaping how visitors interpret these objects while obscuring the colonial violence behind their acquisition and normalising their continued possession in Western institutions.
This process evidences how museums can forge biased interpretations that shape how the public perceives looted artifacts and the culture of the communities that created them. Even when under the guise of scholarly neutrality, the way objects are displayed in museum spaces, as well as how they are described and contextualized in exhibit text labels, can create inaccurate and biased portrayals of the artifacts and their origins.
The reality of many western museums withholding colonial artifacts from the communities that created them does not merely help maintain colonial structures, in many cases it actively perpetuates harm. Artifacts can be integral components of their origin’s heritage, and their continued absence can intensify the wounds of cultural harm left behind by colonialism.
As international law professor Federico Lenzerini outlines, for some indigenous people, their “cultural heritage defines their distinctive identities as people.” Lenzerini explains that “depriving indigenous peoples of their cultural heritage, therefore, does not simply mean stealing their material property but also can involve mutilation of an element of their belief system essential to their existence.”
Withholding these artifacts prevents source communities from celebrating their history and transmitting their culture to their descendants, creating what can only be described as a sustained identity crisis across generations. For example the aforementioned Rosetta Stone, taken by British forces from Egypt in 1801 and still is housed in the British Museum, remains a powerful symbol of Egyptian heritage that continues to be separated from the people to whom it holds cultural significance.
For Lenzerini and others, artifacts, to their makers, have immense significance that extends beyond just materiality. When colonizers looted the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, the Benin Bronzes from the people of Benin and the Koh-i-Noor diamond from the subcontinent, they gained valuable objects, but the people of these lands lost something much greater: continuity of their cultural identity. Today, these objects remain sealed by museum glass in Western countries, thousands of miles from their origins, leaving descendant communities with cultural interruption and fresh colonial wounds. Artifact repatriation, therefore, is not merely a transfer of ownership, but a restoration of disrupted heritage.
The harm caused by this cultural disruption also produces large-scale psychological consequences for the communities from which these artifacts have been stolen. Professor Palmer at Adler University explores these impacts extensively, arguing that Western museums perpetuate intergenerational trauma, reinforce feelings of cultural inferiority and extend colonial presence within Indigenous communities.
On the integral nature of preserving heritage to overall health, Palmer notes that the preservation of cultural heritage strengthens community health, citing evidence that “protecting heritage has improved the health of Aboriginal Australians, and preservation of rock art has fostered well‐being among Indigenous People.”
When colonial powers remove relics, and Western museums continue to hold on to them, this relationship between heritage and wellbeing is severed, placing the psychological health of descendant communities at risk. Stolen cultural artifacts and images leave members of these communities questioning their place in their own history, asking: “Am I missing from the picture all together?”
Western defenses for continued colonial artifact retention often hinge on cosmopolitan arguments. Kwame Appiah is one of the most influential proponents of this view, arguing that,“True art is cosmopolitan. It knows no country,” and because of their historical significance, colonial artifacts do not just belong to any single country or culture, but rather are a “world heritage.”
Appiah challenges the idea that specific cultures have ownership over historical artifacts, an idea he calls “cultural patrimony”, claiming several of these artifacts were created “before the modern system of nations came into being, by members of societies that no longer exist,” and therefore, cannot be meaningfully tied to any community today.
However, arguments like these collapse in the light of historical context. They ignore that, in unequal power structures like colonialism, consent cannot and does not exist. Therefore, the argument that Western forces acquired relics legitimately is null and void. This is evident in the coercive conditions under which many artifacts were acquired, where local populations had little to no ability to refuse, and agreements, if made, were shaped by overwhelming political and military dominance rather than genuine consent,
Scholars like Amara Esther Chimakonam explain this further, arguing that within colonial systems, what is often framed as a “legitimate transfer” of artifacts and relics was in reality shaped by coercion and deception, reflecting a fundamental “lack of free, prior, and informed consent”, a condition she identifies as a “basic feature of colonialism.”
Across scholars, the evidence presented showcases that: the possession of colonial artifacts by Western museums continues to inflict moral, psychological and cultural harm within the descendant communities of their original makers. These artifacts, reduced to mere displays behind glass cases, represent something much greater for the communities from which they were looted; they are expressions of identity, collective memory and cultural continuity.
The question that follows, however, is what the future of museology must look like. An ethical museum future lies in a shared stewardship model, where artifacts are returned to their source communities, and Western museums serve only as their temporary custodians, via long-term loans, temporary exhibitions and fully transparent agreements. Such a model preserves access and scholarship without acting as an instrument of empire.
This shift toward a more ethical museum model is increasingly reflected in practice. In 2025, the Netherlands returned 119 Benin Bronzes to Nigeria, acknowledging their colonial looting while retaining a small number on long-term loan, demonstrating how repatriation can coexist with global access. This signals a broader change toward recognizing the rights of source communities and rethinking ownership as collaborative rather than imperial. In this context, the outrage surrounding incidents like the Louvre heist reveals a deeper irony: Western institutions fiercely protect objects as universal heritage while resisting their return to the communities to which they hold the greatest cultural significance. Repatriation, then, is not the death of global heritage, but a restorative path to a more just celebration of it in a post-colonial world.
The views expressed in opinion pieces do not represent the views of Glimpse from the Globe.