The modern narrative is relentless. The West, particularly Britain and other European powers, stands uniquely condemned for the sins of empire. Slavery, exploitation, dispossession, and cultural destruction are laid squarely at the feet of dead white men, while demands for apologies, reparations, and perpetual guilt continue unabated. Even King Charles faces pressure to repent for the slave trade that Britain itself helped abolish. Yet this selective outrage ignores a fundamental truth: empire-building, conquest, and extraction are as old as human civilisation. The West's version was often milder, more productive, and far more self-critical than most of its predecessors.
Consider the Mongols. Under Genghis Khan and his successors, they created the largest contiguous land empire in history, stretching from Korea to Eastern Europe. Their strategy relied on deliberate terror: cities that resisted were annihilated. Accounts from Baghdad, Nishapur, and other centres describe rivers of blood and pyramids of skulls, with entire populations wiped out. Estimates of the death toll from Mongol conquests range from 30 to 60 million, a staggering figure in the pre-industrial era. Conquered peoples endured heavy taxation, forced labour, and a racialised caste system that placed Mongols firmly at the top. Today, however, this is often romanticised in history classes and media as a "unifying force" that brought efficient administration. One can only imagine the reaction if Europeans had left similar monuments of slaughter.
In the Americas, the Inca Empire expanded across the Andes with its own brand of sophisticated brutality. The state claimed ownership of all land and then "generously" redistributed most of it to local communities, who in return owed compulsory labour (mita) for massive public works, military service, and the Sun God cult. Rebellious or suspect groups faced forced relocation (mitmaq), with entire communities uprooted, dispersed, and resettled far from home to neutralise resistance. This was ethnic engineering on a grand scale, yet it is frequently discussed in neutral anthropological tones as clever statecraft rather than the coercive system it was.
Even closer to the period of European contact, the 19th-century Nupe Empire in what is now Nigeria demonstrated the same pattern across Africa. Through military campaigns, the Nupe subjugated Yoruba regions, installed tribute collectors who extracted resources ruthlessly, and demanded human tribute in the form of children and adults sold into slavery. Raids on markets, depopulation of towns, and the flight of survivors into the hills left societies shattered. This was systematic extraction and enslavement by one African power over others, yet such episodes rarely feature in today's "decolonise" curricula. The spotlight remains fixed almost exclusively on the West.
None of this is intended to whitewash European actions. Atrocities occurred: the Belgian Congo, certain famines, and the displacement of indigenous peoples are undeniable. Context, however, matters greatly. Britain expended blood and treasure to suppress the slave trade globally after abolishing it within its own empire, with the Royal Navy actively patrolling against slavers. Western colonialism introduced railroads, modern medicine, legal systems, education, and technology that dramatically raised living standards in many regions. Life expectancy rose sharply in India and parts of Africa under colonial administration, even if post-independence governance often reversed some of those gains. Most importantly, no other empire engaged in the same level of self-criticism. The West teaches its own flaws in schools and universities; elsewhere, conquerors are still celebrated.
European colonialism unfolded in an era shaped by emerging human rights norms, Enlightenment ideas, and eventual decolonisation, frequently involving relatively peaceful handovers. This stands in sharp contrast to the Mongols' pyramids of skulls or the recurring cycles of conquest and subjugation across Africa and Asia. The selective focus on the West is not really about history; it is about politics. Blaming Europe serves contemporary agendas: inducing guilt to justify open borders and wealth transfers, excusing governance failures in post-colonial states by attributing everything to "colonial legacy," and undermining Western cultural confidence. Meanwhile, China's treatment of the Uyghurs, Turkey's denial of the Armenian genocide, and the long history of Arab slave trades receive far softer treatment or outright silence.
Every civilisation built empires when it possessed the strength to do so. The crucial difference is that the West industrialised, spread literacy and science, and largely withdrew from formal empire after World War II. Today it is told to atone endlessly while others face no comparable reckoning. Intellectual honesty requires consistency. If empire represents a universal human failing, then all should be judged by the same standard. The selective outrage directed only at the West reveals far more about current ideological fashions than about the actual past. Empires were harsh everywhere, but the West left better records, superior infrastructure in many places, and a culture genuinely willing to confront its mistakes. That is not something to apologise for: it is something to defend!
https://counter-currents.com/2026/05/the-selective-memory-of-empire/