Every atrocity came with a justification.
The slave trade, the engineered famines, the stolen continents, the vanished peoples. Empire did not only commit the crimes — it wrote down why they were permitted, and the reason was almost always the same: the victims were not fully human. This hub keeps both ledgers.
What this hub is about
This hub documents the crimes of empire and colonialism — the transatlantic slave trade, the engineered and neglected famines, the erasure and dispossession of indigenous peoples, the massacres, the subjugation, the deceit — and holds each one against the primary record. It is a long list, and it will grow. The point is not to relitigate every disputed casualty figure or to flatten centuries into a slogan; it is to keep an honest, sourced account of what was done, to whom, by whom.
What makes this hub more than a catalogue is the second column. In case after case, the people who committed these crimes left behind the justification — the doctrine that made the atrocity thinkable. The enslaved were “chattel.” The colonized were “savages” awaiting a “civilizing mission.” Whole continents were declared terra nullius, empty land belonging to no one. Where the record preserves that reasoning — in laws, in officials' own words, in the pseudo-science of race — we document it, because the dehumanization is not a footnote to the crime. It is the license for it.
Each crime gets its own graded page, pinned to the historical record — the act, and the doctrine that licensed it. On the record so far, from the codified doctrines to the explicit exterminations to the famines:
- The chattel principle. “The Chattel Principle” documents the transatlantic slave trade — some 12.5 million people shipped as property, ~1.8 million dead in the Middle Passage. The dehumanization here was legislated: chattel status written into the slave codes, the three-fifths clause, and the pseudo-science of race, with the 13th Amendment's “except as punishment” loophole carrying it into the carceral present.
- The doctrine of discovery. “The Doctrine of Discovery” traces the erasure of indigenous peoples through the papal bulls, terra nullius, and the U.S. Supreme Court's Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), down to the boarding schools built to “kill the Indian, save the man.” The hub's most fully written-down dehumanization — and a legal skeleton the Vatican did not repudiate until 2023.
- The extermination order. “The Extermination Order” covers the Herero and Nama genocide (1904–1908), widely called the first genocide of the twentieth century. Here the crime and its justification are the same document — General von Trotha's written order to shoot a whole people out of existence — followed by the camps and the race-science on the dead.
- The finest race. “The Finest Race” is Cecil Rhodes, the rare perpetrator who wrote his supremacist creed down (the 1877 “Confession of Faith”) and then built it into a diamond monopoly, conquest by Maxim gun, and the Glen Grey Act — a labour law historians read as an ancestor of apartheid, bridging to the Pretoria Playbook.
- The philanthropist king. “The Philanthropist King” is King Leopold II's Congo — a private country run on rubber quotas, hostages, and baskets of severed hands, with the population cut by roughly half (~10 million, a figure we fence). The dehumanizing justification here wore the mask of charity: a terror sold to the world as an anti-slavery civilizing mission.
- The forgotten famine. “The Forgotten Famine” documents the Persian famine of 1917–1919: a neutral country occupied by three empires whose requisitioning aggravated a multi-causal disaster of ~2 million dead. We fence the contested 8–10 million “genocide” figure and treat this as the quiet end of the hub's spectrum — empire killing by indifference, with no doctrine to quote.
- The denial policy. “The Denial Policy” covers the Bengal famine of 1943 (~1.5–3 million dead), deepened by the wartime confiscation of boats and rice and continued exports from a starving province. The documented decisions and Churchill's recorded contempt for Indians are graded fact; whether London deliberately chose to let Bengal starve is carried as a contested question, with the case for the defence alongside it.
OPENIndian removal and the Trail of Tears. The forced deportation of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and other nations under the 1830 Removal Act — thousands dead on the march — as the Doctrine of Discovery turned from a land theory into an eviction order. A dedicated spoke to build off The Doctrine of Discovery.
OPENThe Stolen Generations. Australia's forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families across most of the twentieth century, and the assimilation doctrine that licensed it — the Southern-Hemisphere twin of the boarding-school system.
OPENThe Mau Mau detention camps. Britain's brutal suppression of the Kenyan uprising in the 1950s — mass detention, torture, and the documents London destroyed or hid, only forced into the light by a 2013 High Court settlement.
OPENThe Amritsar massacre. The 1919 killing of hundreds of unarmed Indians at Jallianwala Bagh on the order of a British general who was then celebrated by much of the establishment — the “savage” needing discipline, made explicit.
OPENThe Opium Wars. Britain waging war to force a narcotic on China — empire as drug cartel — and the racial condescension that dressed addiction-for-profit as free trade and civilization. If you are a historian or hold primary documents on any of these, send them to the contribute form.
This is a living record, and our readers make it stronger. If there is a thread here you want us to chase, or you have documents or firsthand knowledge that would sharpen a claim, send it to us. We read every lead.
The crime is only half the record
Read the crimes of empire as isolated horrors and each looks like an aberration. Read them with their justifications attached and the pattern appears: before the atrocity came the idea that made it permissible — that the victims were a lower order of human, or not human at all. Keeping the two columns side by side is the whole method of this hub, because the doctrine is what turns cruelty into policy.
What was done, and to whom
The documented act: the people enslaved, the land taken, the food seized, the villages burned, the children removed. We anchor each to the primary record — laws, ledgers, dispatches, court findings, demographic data — and where the toll is contested we give the mainstream range and mark the dispute rather than pick a side by size.
The doctrine that licensed it
The reasoning the perpetrators recorded: chattel status, the “civilizing mission,” the racial hierarchies of pseudo-scientific “raciology,” terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the “savage” and the “heathen.” Sometimes it is explicit — an extermination order, a supremacist manifesto. Sometimes it is quieter — the imperial indifference that lets a subject population starve because its survival was never the point. Across the spectrum, the through-line is the denial of full humanity, and it is almost always written down. That is what this hub reads back.
Investigations in this hub
Each crime gets its own graded page — the act, the record, and the justification — with the death tolls stated honestly and the dehumanization quoted from the source.
The Forgotten Famine
The anchor spoke of the Crimes of Empire hub. FACT: the Persian famine of 1917–1919 killed roughly two million people (mainstream scholarly estimate) — a staggering share of a country of ~18–20 million, and one of the least-remembered mass deaths of the 20th century in the West. FACT: Persia declared neutrality in WWI and was occupied anyway by British, Russian, and Ottoman armies. FACT: the famine was multi-causal — occupying-army requisitioning and confiscation of grain/livestock and disruption of trade routes, layered onto successive droughts, hoarding and war profiteering, and the diseases of the era (1918 influenza, cholera, typhus); Britain was the dominant power after the Russian collapse, so bears the largest share of the occupier's role. FALSE / MISLEADING (attributed, fenced): the claim that the famine killed 8–10 million and was a deliberate British-engineered 'genocide'/'Iranian holocaust' — this traces almost entirely to historian Mohammad Gholi Majd (2003), has NOT been accepted by the academic field, and is demographically strained (10M would be half the country); we carry it as a contested minority thesis, do not assert it, and drop the 'bigger than the Holocaust' comparison that rides on it. PROBABLY TRUE (the hub's dehumanization lens, applied honestly): the justification here was imperial indifference — treating a neutral people's survival as subordinate to the armies' needs, amid the era's racial condescension — NOT a documented extermination order, which places this at the quieter end of the hub's spectrum and we say so. FACT: the catastrophe has been all but erased from Western memory of the war (with scholarship now treating that erasure itself as a subject) — the knowledge-control second injury. No numbers auction: mainstream ~2M led, maximal claim fenced; dehumanization graded honestly.
The Chattel Principle
The cornerstone spoke of the Crimes of Empire hub, and the purest case of its method — the crime alongside the dehumanization that licensed it, here written into law. FACT: over ~1517–1867 about 12.5 million Africans were embarked on transatlantic slave ships and about 10.7 million survived the crossing (per the SlaveVoyages database), meaning roughly 1.8 million died in the Middle Passage itself (15–25% per-voyage mortality) — before the deaths of capture, the coastal barracoons, and the plantations; we cite 'embarked' precisely as embarked, not as deaths. FACT: chattel slavery was a deliberate legal invention — colonial statutes (the Virginia codes, culminating in the 1705 slave code) methodically converted Africans into movable, inheritable, salable property with no legal personhood, and slave codes barred the enslaved from owning property, reading, marrying in law, or testifying against a white person. FACT (the hub's signature dehumanization column, quoted from the record): the justification ran from a distorted theology (the 'curse of Ham') to the pseudo-science of race (polygenism, Samuel Morton's craniometry) to the U.S. Constitution's three-fifths clause counting an enslaved person as three-fifths of a human being. FACT: the trade built vast wealth (the sugar and cotton economies, and the ports, banks, and insurers that financed them). FACT: the Thirteenth Amendment (1865) abolished slavery 'except as a punishment for crime' — a loophole that carried forced labor into Black Codes, convict leasing, and mass incarceration (cross-linked to Policing the Poor). Honest fences carried as FACT: the trade was multinational (Portugal the largest carrier, then Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands), most of the enslaved went to Brazil and the Caribbean rather than the future US, and African kingdoms/merchants participated on the supply side — documented precisely so the account is durable, without shifting the culpability of the buyers, shippers, insurers, and lawmakers who created the demand and wrote the chattel principle into law. No numbers-auction (embarked vs died kept distinct); the dehumanization is quoted from statutes and doctrine, not inferred.
The Extermination Order
The Crimes of Empire spoke where the mask is off — the hub's method (the crime paired with the dehumanization that licensed it) at its most literal, because here the doctrine was a signed military order. FACT: between 1904 and 1908 Imperial Germany destroyed the Herero and Nama of German South-West Africa (now Namibia), killing roughly 80% of the Herero and about half the Nama — in battle, driven into the Omaheke desert to die of thirst, and worked to death in concentration camps; it is widely called the first genocide of the 20th century, and Germany itself formally recognized it as genocide in 2021. FACT (the dehumanization column, quoted from the record): General Lothar von Trotha issued the Vernichtungsbefehl (extermination order, Oct 1904) directing that every Herero within the colony 'with or without a gun' be shot and that women and children be driven into the desert or fired upon, and stated his aim that the Herero nation 'must be annihilated.' FACT: survivors were interned in Konzentrationslager — the deadliest, Shark Island ('Death Island'), killing a large share through forced labor, exposure, and starvation. FACT: the dead were made specimens — skulls scraped by imprisoned women and shipped to Germany for race science, with Eugen Fischer using the colony as a eugenics laboratory. SOME SMOKE (attributed, contested): serious historians (Olusoga & Erichsen, 'The Kaiser's Holocaust') argue the genocide was a precursor/'blueprint' for the Holocaust via the camps, the fusion of race science with state power, and personal threads to Nazi figures — carried as a documented, debated argument, not asserted as a proven causal line. FACT: Germany's 2021 recognition came with €1.1bn structured as development 'aid' over 30 years, not reparations, rejecting legal liability, and Herero/Nama representatives — sidelined from the talks — rejected the deal as inadequate. Tolls given as proportions the record supports, not a single spurious figure; von Trotha's words quoted, not invented.
The Philanthropist King
The Crimes of Empire spoke where the dehumanizing justification wore the mask of charity. FACT: for 1885–1908 the Congo Free State was not a Belgian colony but the personal property of King Leopold II, granted at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 after he spent years posing as an anti-slavery philanthropist (the 'International African Association'). FACT: the engine was wild rubber — Leopold's private army, the Force Publique, imposed impossible quotas and enforced them by seizing women and children as hostages, flogging workers with the chicotte, executing those who failed, and burning villages. FACT: to prove cartridges weren't 'wasted' hunting, soldiers were required to bring back a severed human hand for every bullet fired — cut from the living and the dead, including children — and missionary photographs of the mutilated became the evidence that broke Leopold's story. FACT: the population fell catastrophically; the exact number is unrecoverable and estimates run ~1–15 million, with the most-cited assessment (Hochschild's 'King Leopold's Ghost') that it fell by roughly half, on the order of 10 million, from murder, starvation, exhaustion, disease, and collapsing births — reported as a demographic estimate, not a body count, with no numbers-auction. FACT (the dehumanization column): Leopold's justification was itself a fraud — not an open declaration that the Congolese were subhuman but a performance that he was their rescuer, sustained by an international propaganda campaign even as the evidence mounted; the ordinary colonial racism that made hostage-for-rubber thinkable sat underneath the charity. FACT: the terror ended only under exposure — E. D. Morel's Congo Reform Association and British consul Roger Casement's 1904 report, one of the first modern international human-rights campaigns, forced Belgium to strip the colony from its own king in 1908.
The Finest Race
The Crimes of Empire spoke where the perpetrator answered the hub's central question himself, in writing. FACT: Cecil Rhodes's 1877 Confession of Faith is an explicit creed of Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy — the English are 'the finest race in the world' and the more of the world they rule the better for humanity — proposing a secret society to advance it; written at 23 and pursued for life (quoted from the primary text, not inferred). FACT: in 1888 he built De Beers into a near-total diamond monopoly resting on migrant Black labourers confined to closed compounds at a fraction of white wages. FACT: his British South Africa Company (chartered 1889) conquered Mashonaland and Matabeleland by private army and Maxim gun — annihilating Ndebele regiments in the First Matabele War (1893) — and the seized land was named Rhodesia after him; the 1896–97 Ndebele-Shona uprising was crushed. FACT: as Cape prime minister he passed the Glen Grey Act (1894), using individual land tenure and a labour tax to force Black men into wage work while curtailing the Black franchise — a measure historians widely identify as a deliberate precursor to apartheid (attributed; a precursor, not apartheid itself, which came decades later; cross-linked to the Pretoria Playbook). FACT: the dehumanization was operational — his supremacist creed was the operating logic of the monopoly, the chartered conquest, and the Glen Grey regime alike. FACT: his legacy was laundered for a century (the Rhodes Scholarships, statues at UCT and Oriel College Oxford) until the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall movement forced a public reckoning. No invented motive (the creed is quoted from his own manifesto); no collective guilt by nationality (one man, his stated doctrine, and the institutions he built).
The Doctrine of Discovery
The Crimes of Empire spoke where the dehumanization is not inferred but codified — in bulls, rulings, and school mottoes. FACT: 15th-century papal bulls invented the doctrine — Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) authorized Christian monarchs to seize non-Christians' lands and sanctioned reducing those peoples to perpetual slavery; Inter Caetera (1493) split the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal with no one from those lands consulted. FACT: terra nullius ('nobody's land') held that territory not occupied by 'civilized' people was legally empty — the fiction on which Britain claimed an Australia inhabited for tens of thousands of years (overturned only in Mabo, 1992). FACT: the U.S. Supreme Court wrote the doctrine into American law in Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823) — Chief Justice Marshall holding that Native nations retained only a 'right of occupancy' because 'discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it'; the case has never been overturned and still anchors federal Indian law. FACT: when the land was taken, the doctrine turned on the child — Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle school (1879) and the U.S./Canada boarding-and-residential-school systems built to 'kill the Indian … save the man,' stripping language, names, and family. FACT: Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015) called the residential-school system 'cultural genocide' (~150,000 children; ~3,200 confirmed deaths, 6,000+ estimated) — used as the TRC used it, attributed. FACT: the Vatican did not formally repudiate the doctrine until March 2023 — and even then did not rescind the bulls, by which time it had done its work in secular law for five centuries. Every element quoted from the primary record; no invented motive; no guilt by present-day nationality or faith.
The Denial Policy
The Crimes of Empire spoke graded with the most care, because the toll and the culpability are both fought over. FACT: the Bengal famine of 1943 killed an estimated 1.5 million (conservative official count) to ~3 million (most estimates) from starvation and disease — and was the one major famine in modern Indian history not caused by serious drought. FACT: fearing a Japanese invasion after the fall of Burma, British authorities imposed a 'denial policy' on coastal Bengal, confiscating ~46,000 river boats (the delta's transport and fishing lifeline) plus carts and rice stocks, wrecking the local economy that fed and moved people. FACT: even as shortages turned deadly, India exported 70,000+ tons of rice (Jan–Jul 1943) and Churchill personally resisted diverting scarce wartime shipping; the War Cabinet approved barley and wheat only in Aug–Sep 1943, once the scale was undeniable. FACT: Amartya Sen's 1981 'Poverty and Famines' reframed it as an 'entitlement' failure — the poor couldn't afford food that existed — making it a failure of distribution and priority, not nature. FACT (the dehumanization on the ledger, quoted precisely): Churchill's private contempt for Indians is documented — his own India Secretary Leo Amery recorded remarks so hostile that Amery wrote he saw little difference between Churchill's outlook and Hitler's. SOME SMOKE (contested, both sides carried): whether Churchill DELIBERATELY/culpably caused the deaths — the strong thesis (Mukerjee's 'Churchill's Secret War'; a 2019 study) against the Churchill-Project defence (Burma supply shock, global shipping crisis, local hoarding/mismanagement, the eventual grain shipments). We grade the deliberate-genocide charge SOME SMOKE and refuse to launder an argument into a verdict. Fences: the 'breeding like rabbits' line is real but recorded ~a year before the famine, so cited as documented contempt without a manufactured caption; the toll is given as a range, not the top number.
Questions worth taking seriously
Isn't judging the past by today's morality unfair?
We don't need modern morality to condemn these crimes — we use the perpetrators' own contemporaries. Abolitionists, anti-colonial writers, and dissenting officials denounced the slave trade, the famines, and the massacres in real time, and the perpetrators themselves recorded that they were doing something that needed justifying. Documenting the justification is the opposite of presentism: it's letting the era speak for itself, in its own words.
Aren't a lot of these death tolls exaggerated or disputed?
Some are, and we say so on every page where it's true. We lead with the mainstream scholarly range and fence the maximal claims — the Persian famine's ~2 million versus one historian's disputed 10 million is the template. Reaching for the biggest possible number is how a real atrocity gets waved away as propaganda. We'd rather the figure survive an expert's scrutiny than impress on first read.
Why put so much weight on the 'justification'?
Because it's the part that recurs, and the part that still operates. Mass crimes need a permission structure, and empire's was the denial of the victims' full humanity — chattel, savage, terra nullius, heathen. Naming that doctrine, in the perpetrators' own words, both explains how ordinary people carried out extraordinary cruelty and equips a reader to recognize the same move when it is used again. The crime is the what; the justification is the how — and the warning.
Corrections and contributions
These are contested histories, and we want them right. If you are a historian or archivist and can show us a figure, a date, or an attribution that is wrong — or point us to primary documents that deepen a case — we correct and credit. Reach us through the contact channels on our mission page.