Written by Lipton Matthews.
Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at the University of Birmingham, is one of the most prominent voices in Britain’s Empire debate. He has gone so far as to assert that British rule was “far worse” than the Nazis. Andrews represents a broader movement within academia that sees Western colonialism as the defining evil of human history. This movement suffers from a profound lack of perspective. Conquest and domination were not Western inventions but recurring features of human society.
Britain spent over £12 million to suppress the slave trade during the 19th century, a large sum for the era. Yet today, Britons are browbeaten and made to feel guilty over their country’s past. Mongolians, meanwhile, face no such pressure — despite the Mongol Empire being responsible for some of the most catastrophic destruction in human history. There are no calls for Mongolian reparations; no curricula are being scrubbed; no statues are being torn down.
The simple fact is that conquest, tribute extraction, forced labour, population displacement and domination of subjugated peoples are constants across human civilisation. What makes Western colonialism distinctive is not its brutality but the degree to which it’s been subjected to critical examination.
Few episodes in human history match the Mongol expansion in terms of killing. The Mongols offered conquered peoples a choice: surrender and pay tribute, or face annihilation. During the sack of Baghdad alone, hundreds of thousands were killed in a matter of days. Mongol forces also destroyed the House of Wisdom, the largest library in the world at the time. Books were thrown into the river in such quantities that historical accounts describe the Tigris running black with ink, before turning red with blood. Deaths attributed to Genghis Khan’s conquests have been estimated at 40 million, representing roughly 10% of the world’s population.
Not only that. Research has found that Mongol invasions did lasting damage to institutional quality, measurable in contemporary GDP per capita figures. Nations invaded by the Mongols became more autocratic as a result; those that weren’t developed more liberal, decentralised institutions.
The mechanism is straightforward: when resistance was met with slaughter, surviving populations were forced to prioritise the military and national defence. After the expulsion of its Mongol rulers, China turned inward under the Ming dynasty, built the Great Wall and largely abandoned its maritime capabilities. (Zheng He’s fleet, which dwarfed that of even Christopher Columbus, was left to rot.) Russia consolidated into a single autocratic state as a response to the Mongol threat, having previously been a loose federation of principalities. Islam’s Golden Age was effectively ended by the sack of Baghdad.
All this, yet Mongolia receives close to zero criticism. Conquered peoples of Eurasia are not even mentioned in the debate. (As recently as 2008, Mongolian authorities erected a huge, stainless steel statue of Genghis Khan.)
Let us turn from Eurasia to the Americas. Before the Spanish ever set foot there, a vast colonial system had already been constructed by people indigenous to that continent — the Inca Empire.
Incan imperial expansion involved the systematic seizure of resources from newly conquered territories. All wild animals and mineral resources were claimed as property of the state, personified by the divine ruler. Gold, silver and other materials were appropriated from the peoples that had previously controlled them. And provincial elites were required to deliver an annual tribute to the capital.
More significantly, the Inca displaced subject peoples on a massive scale. Between three and five million (a third of the imperial population) were resettled, as entire regions were claimed by the state. At Cochabamba in Bolivia, the emperor ordered part of the eastern valley vacated, and some 14,000 workers drawn from surrounding groups were drafted in to produce food for the army. Underpinning all this was an intricate bureaucracy imposed upon subject peoples, who had no say in who governed them.
Some individuals were permanently detached from their kin groups and then assigned to Inca elites, serving as a kind of bound labour. This included adolescent girls, who were confined to segregated state precincts where they worked until awarded in marriage. These were not isolated abuses, but rather official practices of the Empire.
Among the occupational categories documented in chronicles of the period were administrators with specific responsibility for human sacrifice. Such individuals appear alongside gold miners, feather workers and storehouse guardians in formal registers of state duties. The victims of Inca human sacrifice were of course overwhelmingly drawn from subject peoples, and many were children.
The Inca Empire was, by any reasonable definition, a colonial system. It was built on conquest, seizure of resources, mass population displacement, and detachment of individuals from their local communities. The fact that its perpetrators were not European is irrelevant.
Another case of non-European expansionism with striking parallels to European empire-building is the Nupe colonisation of Okunland in what is now north-central Nigeria, lasting from 1840 to 1897. It warrants attention because it demonstrates that the features most commonly attributed to European colonialism — slave-taking, imposition of administrators and manipulation of local elites — were practiced by an African imperial power against an African subject.
The conquest of Okunland was motivated by political rivalry and appetite for resources. Internal power struggles between Nupe princes made the wealthy region of Okunland an irresistible target. Around 1840, forces led by Etsu Usman Zaki overran several Okun settlements. Between 1840 and 1850, the large town of Kirri was taken. When it fell, able-bodied men were carried off as slaves, and a tribute of 6,000 cowries was imposed on the survivors.
Kabba, the largest Okun settlement, held out longer. Nupe forces pillaged the surrounding countryside in order to starve the population into submission. Eventually, a peace treaty was signed under which Kabba agreed to pay a tribute of 72,000 cowries. The Okun people thus became a Nupe dependency.
What followed was a system of concentrated, unaccountable power. An official known as the Ogba functioned as the sole representative of Nupe authority in a given area. Wielding immense power with no formal checks on his conduct, his aim was to collect as much tribute as possible for Bida (the imperial capital). Matters grew worse under Etsu Maliki, reaching a “monumental level of absurdity”. Taxes were raised so high that when cowries and slaves were not available, people were forced to pay with their own children.
Like European powers, Nupe authorities sometimes governed through local intermediaries. In Oworoland, chiefs who collaborated had their authority extended across entire regions; those who refused were stripped of influence. Empowering local elites is therefore not a European invention. The Nupe did it decades before Britain employed similar techniques across Nigeria. Despite this, only the British version features prominently in debates about colonial injustice.
It is entirely legitimate to examine Western colonialism. What’s wrong is to examine it in isolation, as though conquest and domination were products of European modernity. The Mongols built the largest contiguous land empire in history, causing institutional damage that is still measurable in living standards today. The Inca established a vast colonial system complete with administrators for overseeing human sacrifice. The Nupe colonised Okunland using methods indistinguishable from those later employed by European powers.
Mongolian authorities are not being asked to apologise for 40 million deaths, even as they build giant statues of the man responsible. The Inca legacy is treated as just another part of South America’s cultural heritage. And Nupe colonisation of Okunland remains largely unknown outside of specialist circles. What motivates most academic critics of Empire, it seems, is not so much anti-colonialism as opposition to the West.
Lipton Matthews is a researcher and YouTuber. His work has been featured by the Mises Institute and Chronicles. He is the author of The Corporate Myth. You can reach him at: lo_matthews@yahoo.com
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