UNSILENCED.
VIIIChronology

A Timeline of Empire

Five hundred years on one page. Read it in order, and the pattern becomes impossible to mistake for accident.

  1. 1452Doctrine

    Dum Diversas

    Pope Nicholas V authorises the king of Portugal to reduce 'Saracens, pagans, and any other unbelievers' to 'perpetual slavery.' The legal architecture of the Atlantic slave trade is signed in Latin.

  2. 1492Invasion

    Columbus reaches the Caribbean

    Within fifty years the Taíno of Hispaniola, estimated by Las Casas at three million, are effectively extinct. Across the hemisphere as a whole the population collapse over the next century reaches, by the highest credible estimates, around 100 million dead from violence, enslavement and introduced disease. The word 'discovery' is invented to describe what is, in fact, a hostile arrival.

  3. 1518Trade

    The Asiento system begins

    The Spanish crown licenses the direct importation of enslaved Africans to the Americas. Over the next three centuries roughly 12.5 million people will be deported across the Atlantic.

  4. 1602Corporation

    Dutch East India Company

    The world's first joint-stock company is founded with the legal right to wage war, mint coinage, and execute prisoners. The corporation predates the modern nation-state in several of these powers.

  5. 1621Massacre

    Banda Islands

    Jan Pieterszoon Coen massacres the Bandanese to monopolise nutmeg. Of roughly 15,000 inhabitants, around 1,000 survive. The world's spice cabinet is built on a depopulated archipelago.

  6. 1757Conquest

    Battle of Plassey

    The East India Company defeats the Nawab of Bengal and begins the systematic extraction that, by the most cited estimate, will drain $45 trillion from the Indian subcontinent.

  7. 1791Resistance

    Haitian Revolution begins

    Enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue overthrow the most profitable colony in the world. France will spend the next 122 years extracting an 'independence indemnity' as punishment.

  8. 1830Invasion

    France invades Algeria

    A 132-year occupation begins. By independence in 1962, between 300,000 and 1.5 million Algerians will have been killed.

  9. 1845Famine

    Great Irish Famine

    Under British rule, Ireland continues to export grain and livestock while one million Irish die and another million emigrate. The market, parliament concludes, must not be disturbed.

  10. 1857Repression

    Indian Rebellion crushed

    British forces respond to the uprising with mass executions, including the practice of strapping prisoners to the mouths of cannons. The Crown takes formal control of India the next year.

  11. 1884Carve-up

    Berlin Conference

    Fourteen European states and the United States meet to partition Africa. No African is invited. The continent is divided with straight lines drawn through nations, languages and watersheds.

  12. 1885Atrocity

    Congo Free State established

    King Leopold II of Belgium acquires the Congo as personal property. Over the next 23 years, up to 15 million Congolese will die under the rubber regime — roughly half the population.

  13. 1893Coup

    Overthrow of Hawai'i

    American sugar planters, backed by U.S. Marines, depose Queen Liliʻuokalani. The kingdom is annexed five years later.

  14. 1898Empire

    Spanish-American War

    The United States acquires Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines and effective control of Cuba. The 'American Century' begins as a colonial project.

  15. 1904Genocide

    Herero and Nama Genocide

    German colonial troops in present-day Namibia drive the Herero into the desert and intern survivors in concentration camps. Around 80% of the Herero and 50% of the Nama die.

  16. 1915Genocide

    Armenian Genocide

    The Ottoman state deports and murders approximately 1.5 million Armenians. Hitler will later cite the world's indifference as evidence that genocide can be forgotten.

  17. 1917Famine

    Iranian Great Famine begins

    Joint British and Russian occupation forces seize harvests, blockade southern ports against grain imports, and in some districts burn food storages to clear land for military use. Persia, a declared neutral, loses up to 10 million people — close to 40% of its population — to famine and the typhus epidemics that follow. The episode is omitted almost entirely from Western histories of the First World War.

  18. 1919Massacre

    Jallianwala Bagh

    Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer orders his troops to fire on unarmed Indian civilians at a religious gathering. At least 379 are killed; Dyer is celebrated by the British public.

  19. 1929Resistance

    Aba Women's War

    Tens of thousands of Igbo women rise against British colonial taxation in Nigeria, in one of the largest anti-colonial revolts of the inter-war period.

  20. 1943Famine

    Bengal Famine

    Under Churchill's wartime policy, up to 4 million Bengalis die. Grain is diverted to British troops and to strategic reserves; relief is refused. Harvests in 1943 were only slightly below normal — the famine is a policy outcome.

  21. 1945Massacre

    Sétif and Guelma

    On the day Europe celebrates the end of fascism, French forces in Algeria massacre between 6,000 and 30,000 Algerians demanding independence.

  22. 1947Partition

    Partition of India

    Britain leaves in haste. Up to two million people are killed in the resulting violence; 15 million are displaced. The borders are drawn by a man who has never visited the country.

  23. 1952Repression

    Mau Mau Uprising

    Britain interns over 80,000 Kenyans in detention camps. Torture, castration and execution are systematic. Compensation is paid only in 2013, after surviving victims sue in British court.

  24. 1953Coup

    Iran coup

    The CIA and MI6 overthrow Iran's elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had nationalised the oil industry. Twenty-six years of Western-backed dictatorship follow.

  25. 1960Assassination

    Patrice Lumumba

    The democratically elected leader of the newly independent Congo is murdered with Belgian and CIA complicity. Mobutu's kleptocracy is installed in his place.

  26. 1965Massacre

    Indonesian anti-communist killings

    Between 500,000 and 1 million Indonesians are murdered with U.S. and U.K. intelligence support. Suharto's three-decade dictatorship begins.

  27. 1973Coup

    Chile, 11 September

    Salvador Allende, elected with the largest popular mandate in Chilean history, is overthrown by Pinochet with the active assistance of the United States.

  28. 1994Genocide

    Rwanda

    Roughly 800,000 Tutsi are killed in 100 days while the United Nations Security Council, fully informed, withdraws its peacekeepers.

  29. 2003Invasion

    Iraq War begins

    The United States and United Kingdom invade Iraq on false pretexts. Counting the 1991 war, twelve years of sanctions (which UNICEF linked to roughly half a million child deaths) and the 2003 invasion together, upper estimates of resulting Iraqi deaths exceed 2 million.

  30. 2011Intervention

    Libya destroyed

    A NATO bombing campaign overthrows Gaddafi. Open-air slave markets reappear in Libya within four years.

  31. 2020Reckoning

    George Floyd, global protests

    The killing of an unarmed Black man in Minneapolis triggers the largest civil rights mobilisation in U.S. history and a brief, ferocious global conversation that the powerful do their best to end.

  32. 2023Atrocity

    Gaza

    An assault on a besieged population is conducted, broadcast, and defended in real time by the same Western powers that built post-1945 humanitarian law. Mass civilian deaths are reframed as regrettable necessity.

References

Sources & Further Reading

  1. [1]Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), papal bulls authorising the enslavement of "Saracens, pagans and other enemies of Christ"; reproduced in Davenport, European Treaties bearing on the History of the United States (Carnegie, 1917).
  2. [2]Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (Houghton Mifflin, 1998).
  3. [3]Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa (Random House, 1991).
  4. [4]Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World (Verso, 2001).
  5. [5]Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (Beacon, 2014).
  6. [6]Marc Ferro (ed.), The Black Book of Colonialism (Robert Laffont, 2003).
  7. [7]UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 (XV), "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples" (14 December 1960).
  8. [8]Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (François Maspero, 1961; English: Grove, 1963).

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