Colonialism

Even his birthplace is disputed between rival national historiographies, and one chronicler questions whether the standard story of his capture during the civil war happened at all.

The priest who spent decades pleading against enslaving Native Americans initially told Spain to import Africans instead, then wrote in his own history that he had come to see that stance as equally unjust, a reversal historians rarely put beside his more famous advocacy.

Columbus died still insisting he had reached Asia, and the continent he crossed the Atlantic to find ended up named after a different Italian entirely.

The treaty he signed in Amharic said one thing and the Italian version said another, and whether he was deceived or simply miscalculated is still argued over.

Even his own bones were misidentified for nearly a century, and his most famous act of daring, the line drawn in the sand, rests on no independent confirmation at all.

He dictated his own version of events with total control over the sessions, while the general who accepted his surrender gave Congress a directly contradicting account.

UNESCO calls it the largest slave trading centre on the African coast; researchers who counted the actual numbers put its share at under five per cent.

He wrote the letters that justified his own unauthorised conquest to the king, and several of the flattering claims in them have not survived independent scrutiny.

A general who trained in the Spanish army he later fought crossed the Andes with an army that lost half its mules, then walked away from power at the moment he could have claimed the most of it.

Decades of successful imperial expansion are remembered chiefly through the disputed, contradictory accounts of how he died at his empire's collapse.

One of the two traders whose eyewitness accounts built his monstrous reputation admitted urging his co-author to exaggerate it, while seeking a land grant justified by that same savagery.

European sailors called it an age of discovery for lands that were, in every case, already inhabited, and historians now argue the word itself was doing political work.

Over five thousand American soldiers were eventually needed to corner a band that never exceeded a few dozen fighters, a mismatch decades of broken agreements helped produce.

1325

1896

Historians still cannot agree whether the 1943 Bengal famine came from an actual shortage of rice or from wartime policy distributing a barely reduced supply catastrophically, and the death toll swings by a factor of five depending which you accept.

More than a hundred thousand civilians died in British camps built to starve out guerrilla fighters, and historians still cannot agree whether that was policy or simple incompetence, which may itself be the more disturbing question.

A Qing general secretly sabotaged the siege his own government had ordered, withholding artillery and shielding foreigners because he judged a simultaneous war against eight nations unwinnable, a quiet act of self-preservation that likely saved the legations from being overrun.

1600

1583

1855

A treaty signed by a minority faction, ratified by a single Senate vote, overrode a Supreme Court ruling the president simply declined to enforce.

A modest twenty ounces of gold near a creek in 1858 built a territory within three years, and the same rush of settlers set in motion the pressures that led, six years later, to a massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at Sand Creek.

The idea that Moctezuma took Cortes for a returning god only appears in European writing decades after the conquest, undercutting the legend that supernatural dread paralysed Aztec resistance.

Disease and civil war had already gutted the empire before Pizarro's ambush; steel and horses finished what a smallpox epidemic and a succession war had already begun.

1948

1602

1438

1857

A law that spoke only of voluntary land exchange produced forced marches that killed thousands, and a Supreme Court ruling against it changed nothing because the president simply declined to enforce it.

Most of the juntas that started this began by insisting they were still loyal to the Spanish king, which makes it hard to say exactly when a movement to preserve the monarchy became a war to end it.

China's own eighteenth-century tea and silk exports so far outstripped British demand for anything in return that Britain turned to selling a drug just to balance the books.

1947

The most successful sustained indigenous resistance to European colonisation anywhere in the Americas is barely known, and its organiser survives mostly through the words of people who feared him.

Fourteen nations sat down in Berlin in 1884 to divide a continent, and not one African government was invited to the table, or even seriously considered for one.

1898

1492

Twelve million people loaded onto ships across four centuries, in a trade historians still argue over calling a partnership rather than simply naming who held the power in it.

1763

The colonial administrator's own letters admit the ultimatum was designed to be refused, undercutting the righteous-defence story that dominated popular memory for generations.