There has been a heist. The Louvre Museum, one of the most renowned art museums in the world, was robbed of eight precious, historical artifacts of jewelry on Oct. 19, making international headlines. But the first robbery of the jewels occurred centuries ago, and it went unreported.

The concept of jewelry stolen from Europe is one that, maybe cynically, brings a smile to my face. As a daughter of Indian immigrants, resentment toward colonial powers has always been a condition of my worldview.

India’s precious Koh-I-Noor diamond, one of the largest diamonds ever, has an enraging story. In 1849, the East India Company kidnapped the mother of the then-10-year-old prince of the Sikh Empire and forced him to give them the gem, along with much of the empire’s wealth, in exchange for her safe return.

This is not a unique story. Across colonized countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas, priceless gems and jewels with incredible significance were violently seized by colonizers, and now live within institutions like the Louvre, which generates hundreds of millions in annual revenue.

Meanwhile, the countries these jewels were stolen from suffer from heartbreakingly high poverty rates and lower gross domestic products per capita. The museum’s colonial treasure house is built on someone else’s loss.

The stolen pieces of the recent heist — two tiaras, two brooches, two necklaces, a pair of emerald earrings, and a single sapphire earring — are embellished with diamonds, pearls, emeralds and a harrowing colonial legacy.

The emeralds were native to Colombia, then under Spanish rule, and were extracted for a necklace and earrings for Napoleon Bonaparte’s second wife. The 212 pearls on Empress Eugénie’s tiara were likely harvested from the Persian Gulf or Indian Ocean by East Africans enslaved by the French.

Over 1,000 of the Louvre’s diamonds, many of which are on the stolen jewelry, are from the Deccan region in southern India and were sold to French Monarch Louis XIV by French gem merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier in 1668 — the profits ultimately enriching British colonizers. What France calls “heritage” was built on extraction.

French President Emmanuel Macron wrote in a X post on the day of the heist that it was “an attack on a heritage that we cherish because it is our History.” Macron’s attachment to the items of 19th-century French royalty falls short considering his nation’s negligence to respect and return items of other nation’s histories.

For instance, Benin has repeatedly requested the return of a 1858 sculpture of the Vodún deity Gou by the enslaved Dahomey court artist Akati Ekplékendo. It remains in the Louvre’s Pavillon des Sessions to this date.

In a time where postcolonial communities continue to face real, immaterial injustice, there’s something undeniably thrilling in the audacity of this heist. Eight objects worth over $100 million, in seven minutes, stolen with just a ladder and grinders; it feels a little bit like revenge.

Many fear that the stolen items are already being broken into smaller pieces, their histories severed. That now, the very gems that at least were reserved toward the preservation of art and history are entirely lost to greed is a deeply unsettling possibility. While this is the most likely case, part of me fantasizes about this being a political stunt.

In 1911, the theft that made the “Mona Lisa” famous took place in the Louvre. Three Italian museum workers discreetly stole the painting and boarded an express train out of France that morning. It took 28 hours for anyone to notice it was missing.

The theft became an international scandal, and over two years later, the painting resurfaced in Florence. The thieves claimed the painting belonged in Italy — an act of repatriation, after it was stolen by Napoleon.

As Americans, we are familiar with Hollywood’s obsession with heists. Meticulously strategized and elegantly orchestrated, there is something incredibly chic about them. When I first came to know of the heist, I envisioned a team of modern Robin Hoods infuriated by their individual postcolonial nations’ ongoing economic and political suffering, planning together in a secret underground lair.

What could be if they held the jewelry hostage? What if, instead of a sale, they issued a demand: Return the treasures to the countries they came from. What could come to fruition if the countries that were forced to labor and hand over painfully mined gems were afforded some of their rightful profit?

Museums exist to preserve history, yet by protecting the art, they disregard the reality of their possession. There is no family in the postcolonial world that doesn’t have a history related to these jewels and their extraction, and yet their stories go untold.

While I do not condone robbery, I do wonder what it would be like to see these jewels in a small museum in Lagos or Lahore, rather than Paris. For them to be seen as relics of their history, not reserved for the empires that dominated them.

To imagine families peering at the intricate jewels their ancestors once toiled over — not as tourists, but as rightful heirs.