The Ethics of Collecting

[Rick]

Originally Posted by ShayanMirza

The more sales of ethnographic arms and armor I see, the more I am confronted with a question: is it ethical to take the arms and armor of a people, much of which *was* obtained during imperial occupation, and sell them for profit to private collectors?

I think the key word here is "was" ; I'm not so sure that ethics are attached anymore to a confiscated weapon or a battlefield pick-up from the past.
Certainly we know the cultures that most of these pieces came from but only rarely do we know of the 'individual' owner/s.

I think that if posed 75 years ago this question would have been dismissed out of hand.
Of course some say that it is a different world now; but I strongly suspect that most cultures that have had any kind of martial history have taken and still posess weapons from cultures that they have clashed with in their history.