Britain has decided that England’s national museums should remain free for everyone.Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy has declared that the 15 national museums sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport will continue to offer free admission, including to overseas visitors.“Our museums are the places that light up the world,” Nandy said. “They remind us of our shared history.”She added: “That’s why they must be free, forever, for everyone to access.”Among the treasures to which Britain is offering universal free access are objects that were not freely given to Britain.Some were acquired as trophies of conquest. Others were taken in the looting that followed colonial military victories. Still others have disputed or incomplete provenances.In some cases, Britain’s own museums say so. Take India, for instance. The British Museum displays a sword from the palace of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore who was killed defending Seringapatam in 1799.Its own description says the sword was “seized as a trophy” after Tipu died defending his palace against British forces.Nearby is a gold ring which the museum says is “said to have been taken from the finger of Tipu Sultan” after the battle.Was his finger amputated to remove it? There is no reliable evidence that it was, and the museum does not make that claim. Its record establishes only that the ring was believed to have been taken from Tipu.The wider story is clearer.Tipu’s body was eventually found “under a heap of the slain”. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) records that British soldiers “looted the houses of its inhabitants”.Arthur Wellesley, the British commander who arrived the following morning and would later become the Duke of Wellington, reported: “Scarcely a house in the town was left unplundered”. Jewels and bars of gold were being offered for sale in army bazaars by British soldiers, sepoys and camp followers.“The property of everyone is gone.”This was not simply the authorised seizure of an enemy ruler’s treasury. It was the uncontrolled plunder of a conquered city. Wellesley himself was a beneficiary.In a letter written in 1799, he put his share of the Seringapatam prize at about £4,000 — roughly £6,00,000 today, or about Rs 7 crore, in purchasing-power terms.Had £4,000 been invested in 1799 at an average 5 per cent annual return, it would theoretically have grown to about £258 million by 2026 — roughly Rs 3,020 crore.By the time he left India in 1805, Wellesley had accumulated a personal fortune of about £42,000, consisting largely of prize money from his Indian campaigns. That was a later, much larger figure representing his approximate total fortune by 1805, not another separate prize payment.In today’s purchasing-power terms, £42,000 in 1805 would be roughly £4.7 million, or about Rs 55 crore.Only after order had been restored did the formal Prize Committee begin distributing the captured wealth. More than 1,000 commissioned officers subsequently took their allotted shares, which they could keep, exchange or sell.Wellesley was therefore not merely an observer of the colonial prize system — he personally profited from it.The Victoria and Albert Museum describes what followed as “widespread looting of the city”.It says the sale of the resulting prize generated more than £1.1 million in 1799 — roughly £163 million in today’s purchasing power, or around Rs 1,900 crore.If that £1.1 million had instead been invested at a hypothetical 5 per cent annual compound return for the 227 years since 1799, it would theoretically have grown to about £71 billion — approximately Rs 8.31 lakh crore today, using an illustrative exchange rate of £1 = Rs 117.That is equivalent to about 15.5 per cent of the entire expenditure of the Government of India in its 2026–27 Union Budget.The V&A acknowledges that much of the loot did not pass through the official Prize Committee system. Objects were sold, auctioned and exchanged privately.It describes Tipu’s celebrated mechanical tiger as having been “looted from his palace at Seringapatam by soldiers of the British East India Company”.The Royal Collection Trust says Tipu’s “magnificent treasury and library were ransacked by British forces” and that many of his personal effects were seized. Some of the finest objects were presented to George III and other members of the royal family. These are descriptions contained in the records of British institutions that still hold or document the objects.And Seringapatam was far from an isolated episode.The British Museum records that, in 1858, during the suppression of the Indian Uprising, British soldiers “looted and destroyed” the Qaisar Bagh palace in Lucknow.A white marble kiosk from the palace was selected for Queen Victoria and placed in her private gardens at Frogmore Cottage, Windsor.Then there was the Sikh kingdom of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The annexation of the Punjab in 1849 brought another Indian royal treasury into British hands. Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the founder of the Sikh Empire, had died in 1839. Ten years later, after the Second Anglo-Sikh War, the British East India Company annexed Punjab. The Lahore Toshakhana — the royal treasury of the Sikh kingdom — was taken over by the British. Dr John Spencer Login, the British official placed in charge of the treasury, began cataloguing its contents.His inventory included the Koh-i-Noor, state jewels and treasures in gold, silver and precious stones; gold and silver vessels; vast quantities of Kashmiri shawls; richly embroidered tents and carpets; arms and armour; and the golden chair of state belonging to Ranjit Singh.The scale of the documented treasure was substantial.By July 1849, Dr Login valued the jewels in the treasury at approximately Rs 16.5 lakh. He estimated miscellaneous articles, including furniture, at a further Rs 7 lakh.That produced a documented valuation of approximately Rs 23.5 lakh in 1849.But that figure did not include the Koh-i-Noor, nor does it represent the entire value of everything removed from the Sikh kingdom.The British dispersed the treasury through gifts, selections for British collections and public auctions. Important objects, including the Koh-i-Noor and Ranjit Singh’s golden throne, were taken into British collections, while much of the remaining treasury was sold.Some of it went to Queen Victoria and other private collections.One of the most extraordinary survivors is sitting today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.It is Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s golden throne.The V&A describes it as a throne made in Lahore around the early nineteenth century and covered in embossed sheet gold. Technical research found that the sheet was pure gold.The V&A’s own material states that the throne “was taken by the British at the annexation of the Panjab in 1849 and shipped to London”.So a throne commissioned for the ruler who created the Sikh Empire, in Lahore, is today a museum object in London — accessible, like everything else in the national museums, without an admission charge.The documented 1849 inventory of Rs 23.5 lakh is not a modern valuation of the entire Sikh treasury. It is the value recorded by Dr Login for the jewels and miscellaneous articles that he inventoried.But suppose, purely as a hypothetical illustration, that the Rs 23.5 lakh in 1849 had instead been invested at an average 5 per cent annual return, with all returns reinvested, for the 177 years to 2026.The result would be approximately Rs 1,323 crore today.This is not a valuation of the loot from the Sikh kingdom. It is simply the hypothetical future value of the specific Rs 23.5 lakh that Dr Login assigned to those categories of objects in 1849.And now the two calculations can be put together.The V&A’s documented £1.1 million Seringapatam prize, compounded at 5 per cent from 1799 to 2026, produces a hypothetical value of approximately £71 billion — about Rs 8.31 lakh crore at an illustrative exchange rate of £1 = Rs 117. The documented Rs 23.5 lakh Lahore treasury inventory, compounded at 5 per cent from 1849 to 2026, produces approximately Rs 1,323 crore.Together, they produce a hypothetical compounded value of approximately Rs 8.44 lakh crore.The Government of India’s total expenditure in its 2026–27 Union Budget is approximately Rs 53.47 lakh crore.So the combined hypothetical compounded value represents approximately 15.8 per cent of the entire expenditure of the Government of India in 2026–27. But this Rs 8.44 lakh crore is not a valuation of Britain’s Indian loot.It excludes the Koh-i-Noor, Ranjit Singh’s golden throne, Tipu Sultan’s mechanical tiger and numerous other objects whose individual values are unknown or were never recorded.It excludes countless objects taken from palaces, cities and private homes whose monetary value has disappeared from the historical record.And now Britain says its museums must remain free “forever, for everyone”.There is nothing objectionable about free museums. Museums should be accessible.But there is an extraordinary historical irony in a country that used military power, imperial authority and colonial conquest to acquire cultural treasures now presenting itself as the custodian of universal heritage — and inviting everyone to come and look at them.Free entry to Britain’s museums. Free access to some of the spoils of empire. And free access to the contested objects of a wider imperial history.The question is whether Britain can celebrate universal access to collections containing the spoils of empire without confronting ownership, restitution and historical justice.The British Museum and the V&A have documented some of these histories in their own records. But the provenance of many objects remains incomplete, disputed or still under investigation.That, too, is part of the story.England’s national museums may be free.But the treasures inside them were not always acquired freely.