⬅️ Project: Conquest Without Europeans · Sister: Conquest Without Europeans - Africa · Numbers: Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker · Hub: 60.14 Colonialism

Asians conquering, colonizing, enslaving, and exterminating other Asians — case by case, graded for evidence quality and for how much Europe was actually involved.

Grading key

Evidence — ✅ solid · ⚠️ real event, contested magnitude or interpretation · ❌ do not use
European entanglement — 🟢 none · 🟡 marginal · 🔴 entangled

The headline

Asia contains both the deadliest imperial project in human history before the twentieth century (the Mongols) and the clearest documented case of a state ordering the extermination of an entire people and then colonizing the emptied land (the Qing and the Zunghars). Neither had any European involvement of any kind.

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The ancient Near East and Central Asia

Assyria — deportation as a permanent instrument of state

911–609 BCE · Neo-Assyrian Empire → everyone within reach · ✅ · 🟢

The Neo-Assyrians did not invent conquest, but they industrialized forced population transfer as a standing policy of empire. Tiglath-Pileser III systematized two-way deportation: uproot a conquered population, move it hundreds of miles, settle a different conquered population in its place, and the capacity for revolt disappears with the connection to the land. Sargon II’s deportation of the northern Israelite kingdom in 722 BCE is the episode that produced the “ten lost tribes.”

✅ Verified — and the book is in your vault

Eckart Frahm, Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire — in the vault (file not included in this release), and read for this note:

“The practice of forced population movements is attested since the earliest days of Mesopotamian history, and in Assyria since the thirteenth century BCE. But with the accession of Tiglath-pileser III, it reached unprecedented dimensions. The inscriptions of this king describe some fifty military operations during which people were deported, with a total of nearly 600,000 deportees.”

Frahm adds the caveat himself: “This last number may be somewhat exaggerated, but probably not by that much.”

And here is the detail that makes it real. Frahm quotes a surviving letter from the governor of Arrapha, who has been ordered to “feed the 6,000 captives” he is overseeing and writes back that he cannot: “For how long? (They are) 6,000!” — then asks for several hundred thousand litres of barley and proposes splitting the burden with other officials. Mass deportation as a logistics problem, complained about in writing, by a middle manager.

Note that Frahm’s ~600,000 is for Tiglath-pileser III alone. The larger empire-wide figure often cited — roughly 4.5 million across three centuries — comes from Bustenay Oded, Mass Deportations and Deportees in the Neo-Assyrian Empire (1979), which I have not opened. Use Frahm’s number, which you can check tonight; treat Oded’s as ⚠️ until verified.

And the Assyrians advertised it. The royal annals and palace reliefs record flaying prisoners alive, impaling, piling severed heads, and destroying cities to the foundations — not as accusations by enemies, but as boasts by the state, carved into its own walls. Ashurbanipal’s annals describe the destruction of Elam in 647 BCE in terms of total erasure: Susa levelled, the royal tombs desecrated, the land sown so nothing would grow.

Debate use: the concept of atrocity-as-policy, and its self-documentation, is thousands of years older than Europe.

The Mongol conquests

1206–1300s · Mongols → China, Persia, Central Asia, the Rus’, Eastern Europe · ✅ on events, ⚠️ on totals · 🟢

The largest contiguous land empire in history, built in roughly seventy years, and by most estimates the deadliest imperial project before the twentieth century.

The set pieces: the Khwarezmian campaign of 1219–21 destroyed Merv, Nishapur, Urgench, and Herat — cities that in some cases never recovered their pre-Mongol size. In 1227 the Tangut Western Xia state was destroyed so completely that the Tangut effectively cease to exist as a people and their script goes dead; this is the case that most readily meets a modern definition of genocide. In 1258 Hulagu sacked Baghdad, executed the Abbasid Caliph al-Musta’sim, and destroyed the libraries — ending the five-hundred-year Abbasid Caliphate and the intellectual centre of the Islamic world.

Numbers: total death tolls of 30–40 million circulate widely. Treat as ⚠️ — they are largely back-derived from Chinese census figures, which conflate death with administrative collapse and flight. The destruction of specific cities is well documented; the grand totals are estimates. See Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker.

The detail that answers the “only Europeans racialized empire” objection

The Mongol Yuan dynasty in China governed through a legally codified four-tier ethnic hierarchy — Mongols at the top, then Semu (Central and West Asians), then Hanren (northern Chinese), then Nanren (southern Chinese) — determining eligibility for office, legal status, and punishment. This is a formal racial-ethnic caste system, written into law, run by an Asian empire over Asians, five centuries before European scientific racism.

And it was colonial rule, not just conquest: the Golden Horde extracted tribute from the Russian principalities for roughly 240 years, appointing and deposing princes. Persia was ruled by the Ilkhanate. China was ruled by foreigners for nearly a century.

Cross → Mongol Empire · Genghis Khan — Weatherford · The Silk Roads — Frankopan

Timur

1370–1405 · Timurid → Persia, India, Iraq, Syria, Anatolia · ✅ on the massacres, ❌ on “17 million” · 🟢

Timur’s campaigns are unusual because the atrocities come to us from his own side. The court chronicles — Nizam al-Din Shami’s and Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafarnama — record the towers of skulls as achievements:

• Isfahan, 1387 — a general massacre after a tax revolt, with skulls built into towers.
• Delhi, 1398 — Timur’s forces executed the mass of captives taken on the march before the battle, then sacked the city. The figure usually given is around 100,000 prisoners killed.
• Baghdad, 1401 — the city stormed, another set of skull towers.
• Damascus and Aleppo, 1400–01 — sacked; the artisans deported to Samarkand.

Almost every one of these victims was Muslim. Timur’s declared jihad against Delhi was jihad against a Muslim sultanate.

Do not use the “17 million killed” figure. It has no sound basis and a well-read opponent will know that. Use the documented massacres, cited to his own chroniclers — which is far more damning anyway.

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South Asia

The Turkic and Afghan conquests of India

c. 1000–1500 · Ghaznavids, Ghurids, Delhi Sultanate → the Indian subcontinent · ✅ on the pattern, ⚠️ on scale · 🟢

Mahmud of Ghazni raided India repeatedly between roughly 1000 and 1027, culminating in the sack of the temple at Somnath in 1025. Muhammad Bakhtiyar Khalji destroyed the great monastic universities of Nalanda and Odantapuri around 1193 — an event recorded in Minhaj-i-Siraj’s Tabaqat-i-Nasiri — a blow from which Indian Buddhism as an institutional presence never recovered. The Delhi Sultanate under Alauddin Khalji and others expanded by conquest and enslaved on a large scale; Firuz Shah Tughlaq’s own memoir, the Futuhat-i Firuz Shahi, describes destroying temples and taking captives as pious accomplishments.

Two rules, or this case will blow up in your face

1. Never use “80 million Hindus killed.” That figure traces to K.S. Lal and is rejected by essentially the entire professional field as methodologically unsound. Using it destroys your credibility on everything else in this file.
2. Use Richard Eaton’s numbers instead. Eaton’s “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States” (2000) works through the evidence and documents roughly 80 well-attested instances of temple destruction across five centuries — arguing they were politically targeted at the royal temples of defeated rivals rather than blanket iconoclasm. That is a much smaller number than the polemical claim of tens of thousands, and it is unassailable, because it is the careful scholarly count. A conceded small true number beats a disputed large one every time.

The strongest evidence here is not any death toll. It is that the conquerors’ own court historians boast about it. Nobody has to prove the massacres against a hostile source; the sultans’ chroniclers wrote them down as achievements.

Aurangzeb and the Mughals — stated fairly

r. 1658–1707 · ⚠️ on interpretation · 🟢

The evidence: Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya on non-Muslims in 1679 after it had been abolished for over a century; the Maasir-i-Alamgiri records the destruction of major temples including Kashi Vishwanath at Varanasi and Keshava Deo at Mathura; he executed the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur (1675) and the Maratha ruler Sambhaji (1689); and the endless Deccan wars drained the empire and its population.

Apply the same standard here that you’d demand elsewhere

Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Life and Legacy of India’s Most Controversial King (2017), substantially revises the demonological portrait: Aurangzeb also issued protective orders and land grants to some Hindu temples, and employed a higher proportion of Hindus in his administration than any previous Mughal emperor.
This is the honest position, and it is also the strategically correct one. If you insist on a one-standard critique — which is the whole point of this project — you cannot demand nuance for European empire and refuse it for Mughal empire. State the record, state Truschke’s correction, and let the opponent notice that you did what they didn’t.

The Maratha raids into Bengal

1741–1751 · Marathas → Bengal · ⚠️ · 🟢

The Bargi raids: Maratha cavalry raided Bengal repeatedly for a decade, burning, extorting, and killing. The primary source is Bengali — the Maharashtra Purana of Gangaram, a contemporary Bengali account of the atrocities. Contemporary estimates of around 400,000 dead circulate; treat the number as ⚠️.

Debate use: Hindus devastating Hindus, in India, before British rule was established there, recorded by an Indian eyewitness.

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East Asia

The Qing conquest of China

1644–1683 · Manchus → Han China · ✅ · 🟢

A small foreign people — the Manchus numbered perhaps one to two percent of the population they conquered — took China and held it for 268 years. The conquest and the rule were both explicitly ethnic.

• The Yangzhou massacre, 1645. The eyewitness account is Wang Xiuchu’s Yangzhou shiri ji (“A Record of Ten Days at Yangzhou”), which gives a figure of 800,000 dead. The figure is almost certainly inflated; the massacre is not in doubt. Jiading was sacked three times the same year.
• The queue order. Every Han male was required to adopt the Manchu hairstyle on pain of death — “keep your hair and lose your head, or keep your head and lose your hair.” Forced bodily and cultural assimilation, enforced by execution, imposed by a conquering ethnic minority on a subject majority.
• The Great Clearance, 1661–1669. To starve out Ming loyalists at sea, the Qing ordered the entire population of the southeastern coast evacuated inland — the whole coastal strip depopulated by decree, villages burned, with enormous death from exposure and starvation. One of the largest forced population transfers before the twentieth century.
• Structural apartheid. Banner garrisons quartered separately in walled Manchu cities inside Chinese ones; Han settlement in Manchuria legally prohibited for most of the dynasty; intermarriage restricted.

Qing extermination of the Zunghars

1755–1758 · Qing → Zunghar Mongols · ✅ on the facts, ⚠️ on the word “genocide” · 🟢

The strongest case in this project — and the one where you must know the counter-argument, because it is in a book on your own shelf.

✅ Verified against the source. Both books below were read for this note: China Marches West — Perdue (file not included in this release) and Eurasian Crossroads — Millward (file not included in this release), both on the NAS.

The Qianlong Emperor, having defeated the Zunghar Khanate, issued orders that went beyond suppressing a revolt. Perdue quotes the edict directly (p. 284):

Qianlong’s order, in Perdue’s translation

“These are not ordinary cattle rustlers. They must all be captured and executed. Why should we have to distinguish leader and follower? These tribes have many bandits; if we do not completely exterminate them [jiaomie jingjin], it will be no good for the Mongols and merchants.”

The goal, Perdue writes, “was not merely to put down a rebellion but to ‘cut off the roots’ of the Zunghar resistance.” Russian governors in Siberia heard that Manchu troops had massacred men, women, and children, sparing no one. Generals who “shrunk back from wholesale slaughter” were criticised for insufficient zeal.

Perdue’s verdict, in his own words (China Marches West, pp. 284–85):

“But they had never attempted ethnic genocide before.”

“With this policy, the Qing succeeded in imposing a ‘final solution’ to China’s northwest frontier problems, which lasted for about a century. The Zunghars disappeared as a state and as a people, and the Zungharian steppe was almost completely depopulated.”

“Zungharia was left as a blank social space, to be refilled by a state-sponsored settlement movement of millions of Han Chinese peasants, Manchu bannermen, Turkestani oasis settlers, Hui, and others.”

The correct numbers — and my earlier version of this note had them wrong. The figures are not Perdue’s own estimate; they are the 19th-century Qing historian Wei Yuan’s, in the Shengwuji, quoted by Perdue at p. 285. Wei Yuan put the total Zunghar population at 600,000, and broke down what became of them:

So: roughly 70% dead, 90% removed — not the “80% died” I first wrote. And note the split matters in argument: an opponent can say most died of disease, not massacre. The answer is that 30% of 600,000 is on the order of 180,000 people killed by the army under explicit orders to leave no one alive — and Perdue’s judgment of the policy does not rest on the disease share. Wei Yuan’s closing line: “For several thousand li there was not one single Zungharian tent.”

The counter-argument, which is in your library — get to it first

James Millward, Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang, p. 94, directly rejects Perdue’s framing:

“Perdue calls the episode a deliberate ethnic genocide unprecedented in Qing practice, a ‘final solution’ to China’s north-west frontier problems. This is an exaggeration, however. The political name Zunghar was expunged, but not all Zunghar people, even Zunghar men, died. Survivors were henceforth renamed ‘Oirats’, and the Qing resettled them on state pastures and farms, and even employed them in negotiations with Kazakhs.”

Millward’s footnote cites Levey (2014) for the position that there was no Zunghar genocide at all.

How to handle it: raise it yourself. “The leading historian of Xinjiang thinks Perdue overstates it — he says the name was erased but the people weren’t all killed. That’s a real dispute and I’ll give you the strongest version of it.” Then note what is not in dispute between them: the extermination edicts, the massacres, the near-total depopulation, the state-directed resettlement, and the renaming. Millward disputes the label, not the events.

And notice the shape of Millward’s objection — the group was destroyed as a political entity but not every individual died, so it isn’t genocide. That is structurally the same argument made in other genocide disputes, and it is worth putting to an opponent who accepts it here and rejects it elsewhere. Cross → Debate/Genocide/

Then the colonization. The emptied Ili valley was resettled by state-directed migration; the territory was given a name that says exactly what it was — Xinjiang (新疆), “New Frontier” / “New Dominion” — and was formally constituted a province in 1884. Existing notes: 1644-1912 - Qing Dynasty controls Xinjiang · China - Xinjiang.

The line that answers “why have I never heard of this?”

“This deliberate use of massacre has been almost completely ignored by modern scholars.” — Perdue, p. 284

That is the leading authority on the subject, saying the thing you want to say, in print, in 2005.

Debate use: mass killing under explicit imperial orders, followed by settler colonization of the emptied land, followed by renaming it “the new frontier” — by an Asian empire against an Asian people, while Britain was still losing the American colonies.

The 19th-century Chinese catastrophes

1850–1877 · ✅ that they happened, ⚠️ on totals · mixed

Three overlapping internal wars that between them killed on a scale comparable to both world wars, and which almost nobody in a Western argument has heard of:

The Dungan Revolt is the one to use. Deaths on the order of the First World War, concentrated in Shaanxi and Gansu, driven by sectarian and ethnic massacre in both directions, with the Hui population of Shaanxi nearly eliminated — and no European involvement of any kind. It is almost entirely absent from Western historical consciousness, which is itself a useful observation about whose atrocities get remembered.

Earlier, for the same point: the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) coincides with a Tang census fall from roughly 53 million to 17 million. Do not claim 36 million deaths — see Conquest Without Europeans - Evidence Locker > Census-derived death tolls. And the Battle of Changping (260 BCE), where Sima Qian’s Shiji records that Bai Qi buried alive 400,000 surrendered Zhao soldiers — a Chinese primary source, contested in number, unambiguous in intent.

Japan’s empire

1869–1945 · Japan → Ainu, Ryukyu, Taiwan, Korea, China, Southeast Asia · ✅ · 🟡

Rhetorically the most valuable case in Asia, because Japan built a colonial empire while marketing itself as the liberator of Asia from colonialism.

Internal settler colonialism first:

• Hokkaido and the Ainu. From 1869 the Meiji state established the Kaitakushi — literally the Colonization Agency — and directed mainland Japanese settlement into Ainu land. The Hokkaido Former Aborigines Protection Act (1899) forced the Ainu onto allotted plots, pushed them from hunting and fishing into agriculture, and suppressed the Ainu language and customs. The policy was consciously informed by American Indian policy. Japan did not formally recognize the Ainu as an indigenous people until 2008.
• The Ryukyu Kingdom, subordinated by Satsuma in 1609 and formally annexed and abolished in 1879, with the monarchy dissolved, Okinawan language suppressed in schools, and forced assimilation. (And the Ryukyu Kingdom had itself earlier conquered the Amami and Sakishima islands — conquest all the way down.)

Then the overseas empire: Taiwan (1895), Korea (1910 — 1910 - Japan annexes Korea), Manchuria and the Manchukuo puppet state (1931–32), and the invasion of China proper from 1937.

And the atrocities:

• The Nanjing Massacre, 1937. The event is not in serious dispute; the toll is — estimates run from roughly 40,000 to the official Chinese figure of 300,000. State it as a range.
• The Three Alls Policy (Sankō Sakusen), 1940–42 in North China — “kill all, burn all, loot all.” Figures around 2.7 million Chinese civilian deaths are attributed to it by some scholars (Mitsuyoshi Himeta); treat as ⚠️.
• Unit 731 — biological and chemical weapons research conducted on living human subjects.
• The comfort women system of enforced military sexual slavery across the empire.

The ideology is the whole argument

Japan governed its empire under the banner of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere — presented explicitly as Asian liberation from Western imperialism — while operating a racial hierarchy with the Yamato Japanese at its apex, forcing Korean subjects to adopt Japanese names (sōshi-kaimei, 1939) and worship at Shinto shrines.
An anti-colonial empire is still an empire. That observation transfers to a great many other places.

Why 🟡 and not 🟢: modern Japan built its empire in a world already shaped by Western industrial power, and consciously imitated European colonial models. The conquests, the settlement policies, and the atrocities were entirely Japanese.

Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea

1592–1598 · Japan → Korea · ✅ · 🟢

The Imjin War — Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s attempt to conquer Korea as a route to conquering Ming China — devastated the Korean peninsula, destroyed much of its urban infrastructure and cultural heritage, and killed on a scale Korea took generations to recover from. Korean potters were carried off to Japan by the thousand as forced labour.

It is still standing

The mimizuka — the “ear mound,” in fact a nose mound — in Kyoto is a burial monument containing the severed noses of roughly 38,000 Korean and Chinese dead, taken as battle trophies and shipped home for counting. Built in 1597, still there today.

Pre-modern, entirely East Asian, no European within four thousand miles.

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Southeast Asia

Vietnam’s Nam tiến and the erasure of Champa

c. 1000–1830s · Đại Việt → Champa and the Khmer · ✅ · 🟢

Eight centuries of Vietnamese southward expansion — the Nam tiến, “the march to the south” — progressively destroyed the Hindu-then-Muslim kingdom of Champa, which had occupied central Vietnam for over a thousand years.

The decisive blow came in 1471, when Lê Thánh Tông took the Cham capital of Vijaya; Vietnamese chronicles record roughly 60,000 killed and 30,000 taken captive. Champa survived as a rump for another three and a half centuries and was finally absorbed under Minh Mạng in 1832, with a suppression of Cham revolt that Cham accounts remember as annihilation. The Cham are today a small minority in the country built on their territory.

Simultaneously, Vietnamese settlers moved into the Mekong Delta, taken from the Khmer over the 17th and 18th centuries — territory Cambodians still call Kampuchea Krom, “Lower Cambodia,” and still resent.

And in 1834–41, Minh Mạng occupied Cambodia outright as the province of Trấn Tây Thành, abolished the Khmer monarchy’s authority, installed Vietnamese administration, and ordered the Khmer to adopt Vietnamese dress, customs, and agricultural methods — a program of forced cultural conversion stated in exactly those terms.

Debate use: this is settler colonialism, completed, by the country that is the global icon of anti-colonial resistance. Vietnam did to Champa what nobody managed to do to Vietnam.

Burma and Siam

1767–1828 · ✅ · 🟢

• The Burmese destruction of Ayutthaya, 1767. The Konbaung army took and burned the Siamese capital — one of the most complete destructions of a major Asian capital on record, with the royal library, archives, and monasteries destroyed and tens of thousands deported into Burma.
• The Burmese conquest of Arakan, 1784–85. The kingdom of Mrauk U destroyed, the Mahamuni Buddha image carried off to Amarapura, and mass deportations that pushed a refugee wave into Bengal. This is upstream of the modern Rakhine question.
• The Siamese destruction of Vientiane, 1827–28. After Chao Anouvong’s revolt, Siam razed the Lao capital and forcibly deported much of the Lao population across the Mekong into Siamese territory. Depopulation as policy.

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Central Asia and the Ottoman world

The Central Asian slave markets

c. 16th–19th century · Khiva, Bukhara, Kokand, Turkmen raiders · ✅ · 🟢

The khanates of Khiva and Bukhara ran open slave markets holding tens of thousands of captives — overwhelmingly Shia Persians, taken as religiously licit captives by Sunni raiders, along with Russians seized in Turkmen alaman raids. The system persisted into the mid-19th century.

The awkward postscript: Russia used the liberation of Russian slaves as a stated justification for conquering Khiva in 1873. That is a European empire arriving as the abolisher — the same structure as British abolition in northern Nigeria. Note it, but don’t overclaim it: the humanitarian pretext was also a pretext.

The Crimean Khanate’s raids on the Slavs

c. 1450–1774 · Crimean Tatars → Ukraine, Poland, Russia · ✅ on the system, ⚠️ on totals · 🟢

For three centuries the Crimean Khanate — an Ottoman vassal — raided the Slavic lands for captives, a practice contemporaries called “the harvesting of the steppe.” The captives were sold at Kaffa into the Ottoman slave system. Alan Fisher’s widely cited estimate is roughly 1.75 million Slavs enslaved between 1468 and 1694; later work by Kołodziejczyk and Kizilov offers related figures. Treat the totals as ⚠️; the system is thoroughly documented.

Debate use: this one inverts the direction completely — a Muslim Turkic khanate conducting a centuries-long slave raid on Europeans, at a scale in the same order of magnitude as some estimates for the trans-Saharan trade.

The Ottoman Empire

1453–1923 · ✅ · 🟢

• The conquest of Constantinople, 1453 — three days of sack and enslavement of the surviving population, and the end of the Roman Empire.
• The devşirme — the child levy. Christian boys taken from Balkan villages, converted, and raised as Janissaries and administrators. A state institution for the systematic removal of children from a subject population, running for roughly three centuries.
• Balkan rule — five centuries of it, under the millet system, with subject Christian populations paying differential taxation.
• The genocides of 1914–1923 — roughly 1.5 million Armenians, alongside the Assyrian (Seyfo) and Pontic Greek genocides, and the population expulsions that followed.

Debate use: the paradigmatic modern genocide, the one that gave Raphael Lemkin the case he was thinking about when he coined the word, was committed by a non-European Muslim empire against its own subjects — and the European powers were the ones documenting and protesting it. Cross → Ottoman Caliphate · the definitional work in Debate/Genocide/.

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The twentieth century, without Europeans

Worth having on hand, because the reply “that was all long ago” comes up constantly.

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What you already own

📚 On the NAS — the sources behind this note

China and Inner Asia
China Marches West — Perdue (file not included in this release) — the Zunghar case; pp. 282–87 are the ones that matter · Eurasian Crossroads — Millward (file not included in this release) — the counter-case, p. 94 · Mao’s Great Famine — Dikötter (file not included in this release) · The Tragedy of Liberation — Dikötter (file not included in this release) · The Cultural Revolution — Dikötter (file not included in this release) · The World Turned Upside Down — Yang Jisheng (file not included in this release)

The Islamic and Ottoman world
Islamic Imperialism: A History — Efraim Karsh (file not included in this release).pdf) — the single most useful book you own for this project · The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Suppression, 1840–1890 — Ehud Toledano (file not included in this release)%20-%20libgen.li.pdf) · The Fall of the Ottomans — Eugene Rogan (file not included in this release) — the 1915 genocides · The Cambridge History of Turkey vols. on the Ottoman Empire, in Religion/Islam/

Ancient
Assyria: The Rise and Fall of the World’s First Empire — Eckart Frahm (file not included in this release) — in the vault, with a note at Assyria - Eckart Frahm

Reference/short — Osprey Genghis Khan & the Mongol Conquests, The Ancient Assyrians, Ottoman Empire 1326–1699, all in History/War/

The framing quote for the whole project — Karsh, Islamic Imperialism, Introduction

“To many educated Westerners, ‘empire’ and ‘imperialism’ are categories that apply exclusively to the European powers and, more recently, to the United States. In this view of things, Muslims, whether in the Middle East or elsewhere, are merely objects — the long-suffering victims of the aggressive encroachments of others. Lacking an internal, autonomous dynamic of its own, their history is rather a function of their unhappy interaction with the West, whose obligation is to make amends.”

And the distinction that does the most work anywhere in this project:
“Expelling occupiers from one’s patrimony is an act of self-liberation. Conquering foreign lands and subjugating their populations is pure imperialism.”

✅ Both verified in your copy. Use the second one on Samori Ture, on Japan’s Co-Prosperity Sphere, and on any “anti-colonial empire.”

Also in the vault

1644-1912 - Qing Dynasty controls Xinjiang · China - Xinjiang · 1910 - Japan annexes Korea · Mongol Empire · Genghis Khan · Innovations of Mongol Empire · Maps of Mongol Empire · Ottoman Caliphate · Armenian Genocide (1915-1917) by Ottoman Empire · Greek Genocide (1913-1923) by Ottoman Empire · Islam Caliphates, Conquering, Colonizing · Islam Invasion of India (⚠️ see the Evidence Locker before using it) · Decolonization of Asia after WWII · Pacific War · Continents by Death Toll · Genocide percentages · Thucydides Trap