UNSILENCED.
XIThe Ledger

What the numbers say.

The polite version of empire requires the numbers to stay scattered across footnotes. Here they are, in one place, with sources.

12.5M

Africans embarked on the Middle Passage; total Atlantic-trade deaths reach 17M when raids, marches and depot mortality are counted

SlaveVoyages.org; Inikori

$45T

Drained from India by Britain (1765–1938) — several times the UK's current GDP

Patnaik, 2018

15M

Killed under Leopold II in the Congo — upper bound, population collapse 1885–1908

Hochschild; Vansina

≈10M

Iranians dead in the 1917–19 famine engineered by British and Russian occupation forces — possibly the largest per-capita catastrophe of WWI

Majd, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia

I. The body count

Upper-bound published estimates, in millions, counting direct and indirect deaths — violence, engineered famine, introduced disease, forced labour, deportation. Lower estimates exist for almost every entry; they are almost always produced by the responsible power or its sympathisers.

Figure

Estimated deaths from major colonial and post-colonial episodes

In millions. Bars use the highest credible figure in the cited scholarship.

Source — Cook (Born to Die); Inikori; Davis (Late Victorian Holocausts); Majd (Persia 1917–19); Hochschild; Vansina; Sen & Mukerjee; Anderson; Kiernan; Cribb; Gibbons (Lancet); Iraq Body Count; UNICEF sanctions reports

Figure

The Atlantic slave trade by century

Number of Africans embarked on transatlantic slaving voyages.

Source — SlaveVoyages.org, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

II. The wealth that moved

In 1700, India produced roughly a quarter of world GDP. By the time Britain left, it produced four percent.

Figure

India's share of world GDP, 1700–1950

Percent of global output.

Source — Maddison Project; Bairoch

Figure

Wealth extracted by colonial relationship

In billions of 2018 US dollars. Lower-bound published estimates.

Source — Patnaik (2018); Inikori; Brown University Slavery & Justice Report; Hickel

III. The present tense

The accounting does not stop in 1960. Every chart below describes a country that officially considers racism a closed historical question.

Figure

U.S. fatal police shootings per million, by group

Annualised rate, 2015–2023.

Source — The Washington Post Fatal Force database

Figure

Median U.S. family wealth, by race

In thousands of 2022 dollars.

Source — Federal Reserve, Survey of Consumer Finances

Figure

Whose voice carries — and whose does not

A composite index, 0–100, of structural advantage in global institutions, media, and mobility.

Source — Henley Passport Index; IMF voting shares; Reuters Institute Digital News Report; UNESCO publication data — composite presentation.

Figure

How much of it is on shelves in former colonial capitals

Approximate number of objects, including reserves not on public display.

Source — Institutional reports; Sarr-Savoy report (2018); Hicks, The Brutish Museums.

Counters

The arithmetic of a single century.

≳225M

Upper-bound combined deaths from colonial violence, engineered famine, slave-trade mortality, introduced disease and post-1945 Western interventions

36,000

Documented Atlantic slaving voyages

£20M

Paid in 1833 by Britain — to slaveholders, not the enslaved. Loan repaid in 2015.

90M FF

Demanded from newly free Haiti in 1825 by France, as the price of recognition

~84%

Of the earth's land surface was at some point claimed by a European power

54

African countries — borders almost entirely drawn in Berlin, 1884–85

1 / 5

Approximate Black share of the U.S. prison population vs. general population, today

0

Minutes of compulsory British school curriculum on the Bengal Famine, as of 2024

"If we cannot read the numbers, the apology is theatre."

— Unsilenced, editorial note

References

Sources & Further Reading

  1. [1]Jason Hickel, Dylan Sullivan & Huzaifa Zoomkawala, "Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015", New Political Economy / Global Environmental Change (2022).
  2. [2]Utsa Patnaik, "Revisiting the 'Drain', or Transfer from India to Britain", in Agrarian and Other Histories (Tulika, 2018); summarised in Jason Hickel, How Britain stole $45 trillion from India (Al Jazeera, 19 Dec 2018).
  3. [3]Branko Milanović, Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization (Harvard, 2016).
  4. [4]Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Harvard, 2020), Part III on slave and colonial societies.
  5. [5]Stephen Broadberry & Bishnupriya Gupta, "The Early Modern Great Divergence: Wages, Prices and Economic Development in Europe and Asia, 1500–1800", Economic History Review 59 (2006).
  6. [6]Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001).
  7. [7]World Bank, World Development Indicators.
  8. [8]UN DESA, World Population Prospects.
  9. [9]Oxfam International, Inequality Kills (annual Davos briefing, 2022 onwards).

All works cited in good faith for documentary, educational and critical use. Errors and omissions: contact the archive.