“The word loot is taken up from the Hindi word lút — similar to “plunder” or “booty” — which first appears in Anglophone…
“The word loot is taken up from the Hindi word lút — similar to “plunder” or “booty” — which first appears in Anglophone contexts in 1788 in a handbook on “Indian Vocabulary” for English colonial officers.[1] In loot’s first recorded appearance in the English language, it describes how an officer managed to gain consent and gather recruits for subduing Indian resistance: “He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plunder) a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.” The racialized idea of an “Indian” identity did not yet exist outside the minds of the colonizers, but a natural racial tendency, one overcoming tribal, religious, and cultural differences, could be “revealed” by the offer of plunder. In other words, a deviant relationship to property is the “sufficient” attribute that unifies and defines an otherwise disparate group under the sign of race. The earliest appearances of the gerund looting, meanwhile, refer to “hirsute Sikhs” and “Chinese blackguards.”[2] Looting is a word taken from a colonized people and used to denigrate and racialize riotous subalterns resisting English empire. It would from the very beginning refer to a nonwhite and lawless relationship to property.”
– In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, Vicky Osterweil