⬅️ Project: Conquest Without Europeans · Cases: Africa · Asia · Numbers: Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker · Method: Adversarial Debate Prep - A Learning Method

The other side’s case at full strength, then the response, then what honestly remains unresolved. Rapoport’s rules apply: no rebuttal below a claim the opponent would not endorse as their own.

Read this before the case files

A list of non-European atrocities is not an argument. It is ammunition, and ammunition fired at the wrong target does nothing. The single most likely way this whole project fails in a live exchange is that you deploy forty historical cases against a position your opponent never held, and they answer with one sentence: “I never said Europeans were uniquely evil — I said their empire was global, racialized, and is still structuring the present. Did the Zunghars colonize me?”
Every section below exists to stop that from happening.

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The central foundational dispute

The critic’s foundational claim

“Colonialism” is not a synonym for conquest. It is a specific historical formation — the capitalist, racialized, globe-spanning European expansion from roughly 1492 to 1960 — and the reason it gets singled out is not that Europeans were morally worse than other humans, but that this particular system was planetary in reach, organized around a pseudo-scientific racial hierarchy, and produced the political and economic architecture the world still lives in. Cataloguing the Mongols does not touch any of that. It is a change of subject dressed as a rebuttal.

The strongest response

Then say so, and apply it consistently. If “colonialism” is a technical term for a specific system, the argument is over a definition, and definitions are cheap — I can concede yours entirely and simply ask the moral question in different words: was the taking of land, people, and resources by force a European deviation from a human norm, or the human norm executed with better equipment? The answer is documented and it is the second one.
But the technical-term defence has a cost, and it should be charged: the same people who insist “colonialism” is a narrow European term use it freely for Israel, for Han settlement in Tibet, and for American foreign policy — and then decline to use it for Han settlement in Zungharia, for Arab settlement in the Maghreb, or for Amhara settlement in Oromia. A term that expands to reach current political opponents and contracts to spare everyone else is not a technical term. It is a weapon with a technical alibi.

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The objections, at full strength

1. Colonialism is a specifically European phenomenon

The objection. The word has a definite content: overseas territorial control by a metropole, organized for the extraction of surplus into a capitalist world-system, legitimated by a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and administered by a bureaucratic state. The Mongols had no metropole in that sense, no capitalist world-system to feed, and no theory of racial inferiority underwriting their expansion. Calling everything “colonialism” empties the word of analytic content. Frederick Cooper — no defender of empire — makes exactly this argument in Colonialism in Question (2005): stretching the concept until it covers all domination makes it useless for explaining anything.

Response. Cooper’s warning is right, and it cuts both ways — it is the best argument in the field against the promiscuous use of “settler colonialism” in current politics, and it belongs to the critics. Take it seriously and then test the definition against the cases:

• Metropole and administered periphery: Egypt held Nubia through a permanent Viceroy of Kush and settler temple-towns for five centuries. The Qing held Xinjiang as an administered frontier, formally provincialized in 1884.
• Extraction into a core: Muhammad Ali invaded Sudan in 1820 explicitly for slaves and gold to feed the Egyptian state. Morocco destroyed Songhai in 1591 for the gold and salt trade.
• Racial or civilizational hierarchy underwriting rule: the Yuan dynasty’s four-tier legal ethnic caste system. The Hua–Yi civilized/barbarian distinction. The Japanese Yamato racial hierarchy in Korea and Taiwan. Medieval Arabic writing on the Zanj.
• Settlement and population replacement: neftenya settlers in Oromia. Han and Hui settlers in the emptied Ili valley. Vietnamese settlers in Champa and the Mekong Delta. Japanese settlers in Hokkaido under a body literally called the Colonization Agency.

Every criterion in the definition is met by non-European cases. What’s left of “specifically European” is capitalism and global reach — that is, the economic system and the technology, not the moral character of the actors. Which is the concession the argument was after.

What remains disputed. Whether “capitalist world-system” is load-bearing. A Marxian critic can coherently say that pre-capitalist tributary conquest is a different animal from colonialism proper — that Rome, the Mongols, and Sokoto extracted tribute, while European colonialism restructured whole economies into permanent dependency. That is a real argument and it is not answered by a longer list of massacres.

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2. Whataboutism does not exculpate

The objection. Even granting every case in this project: so what? That other people also committed atrocities does not diminish yours by one life. If A robs B, and it emerges that B once robbed C, A is not thereby made innocent, and B’s stolen goods are not thereby made A’s. The universality of conquest is a fact about the human species; it is not a defence of any particular conquest. What this whole exercise looks like from outside is a man who cannot answer the charge and so recites the charge sheets of others.

This is the strongest objection in the file and it is largely correct

Do not try to beat it. Concede it, out loud, first, before it is raised. It costs nothing and it buys the entire rest of the argument.

Response. Agreed — completely, and without reservation. Universality is not exculpation. If someone argues “the Mongols were worse, therefore British India was good,” they are reasoning badly and I am not defending them.

The argument this material actually supports is narrower and different:

1. It is a claim about explanation, not about absolution. If conquest is universal wherever capacity exists, then European empire is explained by European capability — ships, guns, quinine, capital, state capacity — and not by a special European wickedness. That matters, because a great deal of contemporary politics rests on the second theory: that there is something distinctively predatory in the West and its descendants, requiring permanent atonement rather than ordinary historical judgment.
2. It is a claim about the standard, not about the verdict. A moral standard that is only ever applied in one direction is not being used as a standard. When the same person can say “settler colonialism” about one twentieth-century case and cannot form the words about Zungharia, Champa, or Oromia, the concept has stopped describing the world and started sorting friends from enemies.
3. It is a claim about the counterfactual. “Without European colonialism these societies would have been free” is a historical claim, and it is false. They would have been conquered, taxed, and enslaved by their neighbours — as most of them demonstrably were, before, during, and after.

What remains disputed. Whether point 1 does the work it claims. A critic can accept that everyone conquers when able, and still hold that a system’s moral weight scales with its consequences — so the empire that had the capability bears the larger burden, precisely because it could do more. That is coherent. It is also, notably, an argument about scale rather than about character — which is already most of what this project set out to establish.

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3. Scale and reach

The objection. No previous imperialism was planetary. At its height European colonial control covered the overwhelming majority of the earth’s land surface simultaneously, integrated four continents into a single extractive economy, and moved perhaps twelve million people across an ocean in chains. The Sokoto Caliphate ruled part of the Sahel. The Qing ruled Central Asia. These are regional facts; European empire is a global fact, and a difference of that magnitude is a difference in kind.

Response. True, and it is the best empirical point the critics have. Two things follow, neither of which helps the critic as much as it appears to.

First: scale tracked capability, not intent. Every one of these powers expanded to the limit of what its logistics allowed and stopped there. The Sokoto Caliphate had no navy; it held slaves in the millions anyway. The Mongols reached the limits of grass for their horses. Morocco sent an army across the Sahara to destroy Songhai — the maximum projection of force available to a 16th-century North African state. Japan, the moment it acquired industrial capacity, built an overseas empire from Sakhalin to New Guinea in fifty years. That is the test case, and it came out the same way.

Second: the scale argument concedes the moral point. If the distinguishing feature of European empire is its reach, then the distinguishing variable is steam, rifles, and quinine — and we are no longer arguing about the moral character of peoples. That is the whole thesis.

Citation caution

The frequently quoted figure that Europeans controlled ~84% of the world’s land surface by 1914 is usually traced to D.K. Fieldhouse. I have not opened the primary source, so cite it as “a commonly given figure” or not at all. Per the standing rule, do not put an unverified number in front of an audience.

What remains disputed. Whether a global system produces categorically different effects from a regional one — integrated dependency, a world division of labour, structural underdevelopment. That’s Rodney’s thesis in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and it is not refuted by pointing at Timur.

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4. Racialization

The objection. What made European colonialism distinctive was not conquest but the ideology built to justify it: a pseudo-scientific hierarchy of biological races, elaborated by scientists and jurists, which classified whole populations as permanently and heritably inferior. Non-European empires conquered, but they generally assimilated — the conquered could convert, adopt the language, marry in, and rise. Under racial colonialism they could not, ever. That is a difference of kind, and it is the difference that produced the modern world’s racial order.

Response. This is the objection most often stated and least often checked. It contains a real point that has been overextended into a false one.

The real point: European racial theory in its 18th- and 19th-century form — measurable, biological, taxonomic, and backed by universities — is genuinely novel, and its afterlife is genuinely distinctive. Concede that.

The overextension: the claim that non-European empires did not racialize is simply false.

• The Yuan dynasty ran a four-tier legal hierarchy of ethnic categories governing office, law, and punishment.
• Medieval Arabic writing on the Zanj is explicitly and contemptuously colour-coded — see Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East (1990) — and it accompanied a slave trade in black Africans that ran for over a millennium.
• Japan built an explicit Yamato racial hierarchy over Koreans, Taiwanese, Ainu, and Chinese, complete with forced name-changing and shrine worship.
• The Hua–Yi distinction sorted humanity into the civilized and the barbarian on a hereditary-cultural axis for two thousand years.
• Ethiopian rule over the conquered south operated through ethnic-religious categories that the neftenya-gabbar system made hereditary in practice.

On assimilation: the assimilationist empires assimilated by extinguishing — that is what the Arabization of North Africa, the Manchu queue order, the suppression of Ainu and Okinawan language, and the Vietnamization of Cambodia actually were. “You may join us if you cease to exist as what you were” is a milder mercy than it sounds.

What remains disputed. Whether biological-scientific racism is different in kind from ethnic and religious hierarchy, or only in idiom. I think there’s a real distinction here and I would not pretend otherwise; the honest position is that European racism was more systematic and more permanent in theory, not that other empires were innocent of hierarchy.

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5. Chattel slavery was categorically different

The objection. Slavery is near-universal in human history; Atlantic chattel slavery is not. It was heritable in perpetuity, racially defined, legally total — the enslaved were property, not persons with degraded status — and it was organized to feed an industrial commodity economy. African domestic slavery and Islamic slavery were, by comparison, more porous: manumission was religiously encouraged, enslaved people held office and commanded armies, and the children of enslaved concubines were often born free. Equating them flattens a real distinction.

Response. The distinction is real in law and should be conceded; it is much weaker in outcome than the argument needs.

• Scale and duration. The trans-Saharan, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean trades together moved a number of people plausibly comparable to the Atlantic trade, over roughly thirteen centuries rather than four, and they were still running when the Royal Navy was suppressing the Atlantic trade. Slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia and Yemen until 1962, in Oman until 1970, and in Mauritania — where it was criminalized only in 2007 and still exists in practice.
• Heritability. Sokoto ran plantation slavery with slave villages and hereditary status. Zanzibar ran plantation slavery. The Zanj working the Basra salt flats in the 9th century were not household servants.
• Castration. The demographic argument cuts hard the other way: the absence of a large Afro-descendant population in the Middle East today, despite comparable numbers trafficked over a far longer period, is standardly explained in the literature by castration and by mortality that a “milder” system does not produce.
• Who abolished it. Abolition as a political project is a specific historical event with a specific origin — Britain, in the late 18th century, subsequently imposed by naval force on others including African and Arab states that resisted. Whatever else the record shows, the institution was universal and its abolition was not.

What remains disputed. Whether the racial-heritable form produced a distinctive and enduring social order in the Americas that the other systems did not. It plainly did. Cross → Arab Slave Trade · Slavery (Islam) · Heated Debate Slavery, Reparations & Colonialism with Rafe Heydel-Mankoo and Kehinde Andrews

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6. Living memory and continuing structures

The objection. The Mongols are not a live political question. European colonialism ended within living memory, drew the borders of most of the world’s states, built the institutions and economies those states still run, and produced diaspora populations now arguing about it in the metropole. That asymmetry of consequence is why it gets the attention. Nobody owes the Zunghars anything, because nobody is living in a structure the Qing built.

Response. This is a good argument and about a third of it survives scrutiny.

The Qing conquest of Zungharia is not a dead question — it is the live question of Xinjiang, right now, and the party running that policy is the direct institutional heir of the empire that emptied the valley. Ethiopia’s neftenya-gabbar settlement is the direct cause of the Oromo–Amhara conflict that has been killing people continuously in the last decade. The Arab-Muslim north’s centuries of raiding the African south in Sudan runs unbroken through the Turkiyya, the Mahdiyya, the two civil wars, Darfur, and the war being fought as of this year. The Cham, the Ainu, and the Okinawans are all live minority-rights questions in their own states.

The honest form of the objection is therefore not “those consequences are dead” — it is “those consequences are not ours.” Which is a claim about our obligations, not about history. Fine. But then the framework is a domestic political project, not a historical account, and it should be argued as one.

What remains disputed. The recency and proximity point genuinely does bear on obligation. Being right about the universality of conquest does not settle what anyone owes anyone now, and pretending it does is where this argument usually overreaches.

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7. Settler colonialism is a distinct structure

The objection. Patrick Wolfe’s formulation — settler colonialism is “a structure, not an event,” organized by a “logic of elimination” of the native in order to take the land itself rather than the labour on it — identifies something specific, and it is not the same as tributary conquest. The Mongols wanted taxes. Settlers want the land emptied. That distinction survives every case on your list.

Response. It doesn’t, and this is where the case files do their most direct work. Apply Wolfe’s own criterion — replacement of a population on its land, as a structure sustained over time — and it lands squarely on:

Wolfe’s concept is a good concept. It simply is not a European-specific one, and the field’s near-total silence on these five cases is the most telling fact about how it is used.

What remains disputed. Wolfe and Veracini would say the concept is analytic, not moral, and that they’d happily accept these cases. Some would. The literature, in practice, does not go there — but “the field has a blind spot” is a weaker charge than “the concept is bogus,” and it’s the one the evidence actually supports. Make the weaker charge; it’s the one you can win. Cross → Wolfe — Elimination of the Native (file not included in this release) · Tuck Yang (file not included in this release)

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8. This argument is used to license present-day dispossession

The objection. The “everybody did it” move is not deployed in seminars. It is deployed to end conversations about land, restitution, and rights that are live right now — to say that because conquest is universal, present possession is settled and no claim need be heard. Tuck and Yang’s point in “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” is that these moves function as settler moves to innocence: they relieve the discomfort without touching the arrangement.

Response. The concern about function is legitimate, and the way to answer it is to state the limit of the argument explicitly rather than let the opponent define it.

What this argument does not do: it does not settle any present claim, it does not tell you who should hold any particular piece of land today, and it does not say that historical injustice is irrelevant to present policy. Any of those inferences would be a non sequitur and I’m not making them.

What it does do: it denies that any one people is uniquely stained, and it denies a framework in which historical guilt is distributed by ancestry rather than by conduct. Whether a given group has a valid claim today is a separate question, answered case by case with evidence, and this material is silent on it.

And the function argument cuts both ways. “Your argument is doing bad political work” is not a refutation, it’s a motive attribution — and it is exactly the move the same critics reject when it’s aimed at them. If the historical claim is wrong, show it’s wrong.

What remains disputed. Nothing much, honestly. This objection is about use, not truth, and both sides should concede that a true premise can be put to bad use.

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9. Nobody actually claims Europeans were uniquely evil

The objection. You are fighting a straw man. Name the serious historian who says conquest was a European invention. Cooper doesn’t. Wolfe doesn’t. Even Rodney and Césaire write about African states’ participation. What critics actually say is far narrower and you’re not engaging with it.

Response. At the level of the scholarly literature this is largely fair, and it should be granted immediately — do not claim that historians of empire are ignorant of the Mongols.

The claim is about the popular and institutional register, where the argument actually occurs: curricula, campus politics, journalism, museum labels, and the moral vocabulary of public life, in which “colonizer” and “settler” function as ethnic descriptors with a fixed referent. The test is not what any scholar has written. The test is the consistency question: put Zungharia, Champa, Oromia, and the Maghreb to any given interlocutor and see whether the framework fires. When it reliably doesn’t, the popular usage is doing something other than history.

What remains disputed. Whether the popular register is worth arguing against or whether attacking it is itself a straw man. If you’re debating a serious historian, drop this section entirely and argue §1 and §3 instead — that’s where the real disagreement lives.

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10. The evidence for non-European atrocity is itself colonial

The objection. Much of what we “know” about pre-colonial African and Asian violence comes from missionaries, explorers, and colonial administrators with an obvious interest in depicting savagery that European rule would correct. Dahomey’s human sacrifices, the Mfecane’s death tolls, Arab slave-raiding: the sources are the people who wanted the conquest.

Response. This is a serious methodological point, it is right about at least one major case, and conceding it is what makes the rest credible.

Where it lands: the Mfecane. Cobbing’s “The Mfecane as Alibi” (1988) makes precisely this argument about precisely this evidence, and it is why that case is graded ⚠️ and 🔴 throughout this project and should not be led with. See Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker > The Mfecane problem.

Where it does not land — and this is why the case files were built the way they were. The core cases rest on sources with no European involvement and, in most instances, no motive to invent:

When challenged on sourcing, go here first. The strongest cases in this project are documented by the perpetrators, in their own languages, in celebration.

What remains disputed. Court chronicles boast and inflate — Timur’s 100,000 and Wang Xiuchu’s 800,000 are not reliable counts. The fact of the massacres is well established by these sources; the magnitudes are not, and this is the reason the Evidence Locker exists.

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The argument tree

Notation per the method note: C claim · R reason · O objection · RR response to rebuttal.

C1. Conquest, colonization, and mass enslavement were normal practice across Africa and Asia, independent of European contact.

• R1.1 Documented cases with no European involvement span every region and every era — §Africa, §Asia.
• R1.2 The best-attested cases are documented by the perpetrators themselves, in their own languages. → §10
• O1.1 The sources are colonial-era and motivated. → RR true of the Mfecane, false of the ten strongest cases. §10
• O1.2 “Colonialism” is a technical term that doesn’t apply. → RR every criterion in the definition is met by non-European cases; what’s left is capitalism and reach. §1

C2. Therefore the variable distinguishing European empire is capability, not moral character.

• R2.1 Every power expanded to the limit of its logistics — grass, ships, guns, disease.
• R2.2 Japan is the controlled experiment: acquire industrial capability, build an overseas empire within fifty years.
• O2.1 Scale is itself morally relevant; the one who could do more bears more. → RR conceded, and note it is an argument about consequence, not character — which is C2. §3
• O2.2 Only Europeans built a racial ideology to justify it. → RR Yuan legal caste, Zanj discourse, Yamato hierarchy, Hua–Yi. The novelty is the scientific idiom, not the hierarchy. §4

C3. Therefore a framework that applies “colonizer” as a quasi-ethnic category to one people is doing politics, not history.

• R3.1 The consistency test: Zungharia, Champa, Oromia, the Maghreb. → the six questions
• R3.2 Wolfe’s own criteria land on all four. §7
• O3.1 This is a straw man; no scholar says that. → RR granted for the literature; the claim is about the popular register, and the consistency test is the evidence. §9
• O3.2 This argument functions to shut down live claims. → RR state the limit explicitly: it settles no present claim, and function is not truth. §8

C4. The limit. None of this establishes that European colonialism was good, or that any present-day claim is void.

• R4.1 Universality is not exculpation — conceded first, unprompted. §2
• R4.2 Whether a given historical injustice grounds a present obligation is a separate question requiring separate evidence.

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Reply matrix

The pattern throughout: concede → distinguish → return the burden.

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Also see

Conquest Without Europeans · Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker · Colonialism TP · The Case for Colonialism · Colonialism - A Moral Reckoning by Nigel Biggar · Not Stolen · Colonizers · Indigenous · Zionism Debate - Anti-Zionist Arguments & Zionist Responses (the model this note follows)