Why Do People Say Colonialism Was Not Unique?

People usually mean one of three things when they say colonialism was “not unique”: Europeans did not invent empire; non-European states also conquered and enslaved; and colonial regimes varied across time and place. All three propositions are true. Ancient Rome, the Mongol Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Aztec Triple Alliance, and many other powers seized territory, exacted tribute, moved populations, or enslaved captives.

The misleading step is to treat shared features as proof of equivalence. From 1492 onward, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, Belgian, German, and other projects connected conquest across the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Colonizers commonly governed territories as subordinate possessions rather than equal parts of the metropole, imposed racial or civilizational hierarchies, redirected land and labor toward external markets, and sometimes established settlers intending permanent possession.

“Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not.” — Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller (1898)

Belloc’s satire captured a material asymmetry: industrial weapons, steam transport, finance, bureaucracy, and communications enabled conquest and administration over enormous distances. See the archive’s account of why colonial systems differed and its broader historical chronology.

Modern European colonialism fused older practices into a new global order. Oceanic empires integrated plantation slavery, chartered companies, military occupation, missionary institutions, scientific racial classification, commodity extraction, and settler seizure. The 1884–1885 Berlin Conference formalized rules among European powers for claiming African territory without African representation.

Settler colonialism was especially consequential in the Americas, Australia, and parts of southern Africa. It sought not only labor or tribute but land, replacing Indigenous jurisdiction through warfare, expulsion, confinement, child removal, assimilation, and settlement. Under Article II of the United Nations Genocide Convention, adopted in 1948, acts including killing, deliberately inflicting destructive living conditions, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children may constitute genocide when committed with intent to destroy a protected group.

Colonialism is best compared by mechanisms—land seizure, coerced labor, political subordination, racial law, extraction, and demographic replacement—not by assigning every empire an identical moral or institutional character.

This distinction also explains why colonialism requires separate analysis, while the archive’s history overview places it beside earlier empires rather than outside history.

No single colonial death toll is methodologically defensible. Researchers count different events and distinguish direct killing from deaths caused by disease, hunger, forced labor, displacement, and collapsing subsistence systems. Disease often preceded effective occupation in the Americas, but conquest, enslavement, resettlement, and food-system disruption intensified exposure and mortality.

Case	Period	Published estimate	Source and scope
Indigenous Americas	1492–1600	About 56 million deaths, within an estimated 54–60 million population decline	Alexander Koch and colleagues, 2019, modeled demographic collapse after European arrival
Atlantic slave trade	1501–1867	12.5 million embarked; 10.7 million landed alive	SlaveVoyages database, figures current in 2024; excludes many deaths during capture and inland transport
Congo Free State	1885–1908	Population loss commonly cited at about 10 million, but highly uncertain	Adam Hochschild, 1998, popular synthesis; demographic records are inadequate and scholars dispute precision
British India excess mortality	1891–1920	50–165 million excess deaths	Dylan Sullivan and Jason Hickel, 2023, range depends on mortality baseline
Herero and Nama genocide	1904–1908	Approximately 65,000 Herero and 10,000 Nama killed	German government figures acknowledged in its 2021 recognition statement; totals remain estimates

The chart demonstrates scale, not comparability. The Americas figure is modeled population decline; the Congo figure is a contested population-loss estimate; and the German South West Africa figure concerns genocidal deaths. Evidence must remain attached to its definition.

Some comparative historians object to presenting European colonialism as an unprecedented rupture. They emphasize earlier Eurasian empires, Ottoman expansion, the Arab and trans-Saharan slave trades, African participation in Atlantic slave trading, and Indigenous warfare. Scholars including Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper argued in 2010 that empire has been a durable, varied political form rather than an exclusively European invention.

Other disputes concern numbers, causation, or terminology rather than whether atrocities occurred. In 1998, Adam Hochschild’s estimate of roughly 10 million population loss under Leopold II became influential, but Congo specialists warn that the absence of reliable censuses before 1885 prevents a firm death count. In 2023, Sullivan and Hickel estimated 50–165 million excess deaths in India during 1891–1920; critics challenge their counterfactual mortality baselines, while the study’s authors argue that British-era mortality exceeded plausible precolonial standards.

Political actors often turn valid comparison into evasion: “everyone conquered” shifts attention from documented perpetrators, beneficiaries, laws, and reparative claims. Conversely, treating every colonial setting as identical can obscure local agents and different systems. Precision requires both comparison and attribution. Consult the archive’s history of colonial expansion rather than substituting analogy for evidence.

The sound conclusion is comparative, not absolving. Colonialism belongs within the longer history of empire, but modern European colonial systems require analysis on their own evidentiary terms. Their legacies include borders, concentrated landownership, racial categories, unequal trade, extractive infrastructure, museum collections, and legal disputes over sovereignty and restitution.

Recognizing precedents also prevents a false geography of innocence: domination was not an exclusively European capacity. Yet responsibility attaches to institutions and decisions, not ethnic essences. Britain’s Parliament compensated slave owners—not enslaved people—with £20 million in 1835, approximately 40% of annual government expenditure at the time, after the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Germany formally recognized the Herero and Nama genocide in 2021, while its proposed €1.1 billion over 30 years was framed as development support rather than legally binding reparations and was rejected by many victim representatives.

Historical comparison should therefore sharpen questions about archives, land, wealth, apology, restitution, and repair. It should not convert the existence of earlier empires into an alibi for later ones.

• Koch et al., “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492”, Quaternary Science Reviews (2019).
• SlaveVoyages: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, collaborative scholarly database covering 1501–1867.
• Sullivan and Hickel, “Capitalism and Extreme Poverty”, World Development (2023), including British India mortality estimates for 1891–1920.
• United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted 1948.
• Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History, Princeton University Press (2010).
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Western Colonialism”, historical overview.