Britain has repeatedly rejected India’s request for the return of its cultural heritage, like the Koh-i-Noor diamond, taken from a 10-year-old boy ruler along with his kingdom’s sovereignty in 1849, and the Sultanganj Buddha, stolen in 1862 when an ancient monastery was discovered during railway construction. The Koh-i-Noor diamond now sits in the Tower of London, and the Sultanganj Buddha in the Birmingham Museum.

In response to calls for repatriation made as recently as 2016, Britain cited its own 1963 act that forbids the British Museum from disposing of its holdings. “If you say yes to one, you suddenly find the British Museum would be empty,” Prime Minister David Cameron said in 2010. “It is going to have to stay put.”

The movement of artifacts in the private sector continues unhindered. Christie’s international head of jewelry, Rahul Kadakia, said that the al-Thani collection was “living history in your hand.” But the only history in cultural property removed from its context, however, is its story of displacement. Culture is action. Culture is in motion. Culture cannot be propped up on red velvet as a promise of pocketable exotic beauty. You cannot sell “500 years of history.”

Desire for these artifacts is mediated by the fetishization of the Orient and facilitated by cultural amnesia. Imperial collecting, as the historian Maya Jasanoff points out, was a cultural exchange by an empire whose main imperialist project was to establish difference, but also representative of how an empire is a collection of people. And so we have the British Commonwealth — a collection of stolen objects, histories and futures.

The private sale of colonial artifacts is indefensible; unlike museums, it offers no public good. We go after museums because private collectors’ right to property is harder to touch. And even if people from former colonies were able to buy up all that was looted from their homelands, it would not solve the problem of returning items to their context. Nonetheless, the international sale of looted artifacts should be made illegal so that countries can negotiate repatriation, even if that is a difficult proposition.

At the Christie’s auction, I sat among the richest people I’ll ever see in one room — or maybe their friends, their employees. It was remarkable: At least a third of the audience was brown. All of the emeralds commanded high prices, mostly to anonymous phone bidders. “Probably a Chinese buyer,” said one of my neighbors, a woman from Hong Kong who had been to many auctions. Two Indian men, perhaps a father and son, sat next to me, circling items in their slick catalogs, clutching their bidding paddles.

“Do you think we’re going to get enough?” the older man said. I don’t think they did, don’t think they could.