Methodology

Where serious scholarly estimates disagree — and on colonial death tolls they almost always do — we publish the lower published end of the mainstream range. We do this even when higher figures are well supported. The argument we are making does not require the highest number; it requires the smallest honest one. If the most conservative published figure for the Congo Free State (about 10 million) is already monstrous, the case does not need 15 million to land.

When a single number is contested in either direction, we link the dispute and quote both sides rather than pick the higher figure.

We prefer, in this order:

1. Peer-reviewed academic books and journal articles by historians, economists or political scientists.
2. Primary documents — colonial-era reports, treaties, censuses, parliamentary records, court judgments, declassified state papers.
3. UN, UNCTAD, World Bank, IMF and ILO data series, used with explicit notes on their limitations.
4. Reputable long-form journalism (e.g. The Atlantic, Al Jazeera English, The Guardian long-reads) where it digests or extends the above.
5. Wikipedia and Wikimedia, treated as starting points and as image archives — never as a primary citation.

Every chapter ends with a numbered Sources block listing the books, papers and primary documents specific to that chapter. Inline superscript citations point into that list.

Every photograph and artwork in this archive is drawn either from Wikimedia Commons (predominantly public-domain reproductions of colonial-era photographs) or from institutional archives credited at the caption. We do not use AI-generated imagery for historical events; the historical record does not need to be illustrated by a machine's guess.

Captions name the photographer, the date, the place and the institution holding the original where known. Where multiple sources hold a print, we link the one with the most complete provenance record. Schema.orgImageObject markup attaches the same provenance to the image programmatically, so search engines and image-indexing systems can read it directly.

We use the word colony for any territory whose political and economic life was, or is, structurally controlled by an outside power for that outside power's benefit. By that test, we include the formal overseas territories that Europe and the US still hold today (Réunion, Mayotte, French Polynesia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the British Indian Ocean Territory and others) and we treat the CFA franc, the Commonwealth's residual constitutional links and the US base network as continuities rather than as innocent inheritances.

We do not pretend that this terminology is neutral. We argue for it openly throughout the archive.

We do not deny that other civilisations conquered, enslaved or slaughtered. The Why This Was Different chapter sets out the three axes on which European colonialism after 1492 is distinct from earlier empires (scale, racial codification, integration with industrial capital). The deaths under Genghis, Tamerlane and Assyrian conquest are part of the record. They are not a reason to let later atrocities off the hook.

Every chapter shows its last-updated date. Substantive corrections and revisions are logged publicly at the corrections page. If you find an error — a misattributed image, a wrong date, a number that has been revised in the literature since publication — please tell us and we will fix it and log the change.

It is not an academic monograph. It is a documentary archive written for a general adult reader, with academic citations attached so anyone who wants to verify a claim can follow it back. It is not value-neutral: we think colonialism was a crime, that it has not ended, and that the comfortable nations of the world have organised their public memory around forgetting most of it. We say so.