Who are we to judge?

Definition

Passive or nominalized constructions that delete the colonial actor from acts of violence or extraction: "slaves were brought", "the population declined", "land was cleared". The grammar does the erasing — harm happens, nobody does it.

Flag when

1. A passive construction describes colonial violence, enslavement, dispossession, or extraction, the responsible actor is historically established, and the actor is absent from the sentence and its immediate context.
2. A nominalization replaces an act with an ambient event ("depopulation occurred" for a documented removal or massacre) where causation by colonial actors is historically established. Demographic-collapse cases (disease as major factor) are handled by exclusion 3, not by this criterion.

Do NOT flag when

1. The actor is genuinely unknown or seriously disputed among historians.
2. The actor is named in the same sentence or its immediate context (the preceding sentence, or the article body when the passive appears in a summary-style lead).
3. The passive is used for non-agentive events (epidemics may qualify — flag only where deliberate transmission or cover conditions such as forced labor and displacement are historically established and omitted).

Examples

Flag: "Approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans were brought to Brazil." Rewrite: "Portuguese traders and Brazilian planters trafficked approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans to Brazil."

(figure: slavevoyages)

Note: this rewrite is scoped to who carried people to Brazil; the broader supply chain included African intermediaries — analysts should not overstate the rewrite's scope.

Do not flag: "The wreck's crew was never identified." — actor genuinely unknown.

Sources

trouillot-1995; tuhiwai-smith-1999; van-leeuwen-1996

Definition

Describing the European arrival at inhabited lands as "discovery" — framing that treats a place as nonexistent until Europeans saw it, erasing the people already there. The legal-theological root is the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that "discovery" conferred title over non-Christian lands.

Flag when

1. "Discovered", "discovery of", "first discovered by" is applied to inhabited territory or its features, stated in the article's own neutral voice.
2. A European is called "the first to reach/find/sight" a place or route known to existing peoples or leading to inhabited territory, without qualification such as "the first European".
3. "New World" or "unexplored/virgin land" is used unqualified in the article's own voice for inhabited regions.

Do NOT flag when

1. The framing is quoted or attributed ("what Europeans called the New World", "described at the time as a discovery").
2. "Discovery" applies to a genuinely uninhabited place or a non-territorial object (a mineral deposit, a species, an uninhabited island).
3. The sentence already carries the qualifier ("the first European to reach…").
4. The term is an established technical sense with no territorial claim: biogeography ("New World monkeys", "New World crops"), or the Columbian-exchange literature's usage.
5. The term appears inside an era's proper name used as a period label ("the Age of Discovery", "the Portuguese discoveries" as a named historiographical period). Flag only when the article's own voice additionally asserts discovery of inhabited places as fact.

Examples

Flag: "Brazil was discovered by Pedro Álvares Cabral in 1500." Rewrite: "Pedro Álvares Cabral reached Brazil in 1500; the territory was home to an Indigenous population estimated in the millions, across hundreds of nations."

(population figures require a sourced context fact)

Do not flag: "Cabral's landing was celebrated in Portugal as the discovery of a new land." — the framing is attributed to historical actors, not asserted by the article.

Sources

miller-2010; dunbar-ortiz-2014; wolfe-2006

Definition

Softened vocabulary for conquest and forced labor: "encounter" for invasion, "expedition" for armed conquest, "pacification" for military suppression, "labor recruitment" for coerced labor. Césaire's Discourse on Colonialism dissects at length the respectable vocabulary by which colonization is made presentable.

Flag when

1. An act that is historically established as armed conquest, forced displacement, or coerced labor is described in the article's own voice with a term whose ordinary meaning implies consent, peacefulness, legality, or mutual benefit ("encounter", "opening up", "pacification", "recruitment", "protection"; "arrival" only for coerced subjects — 'the arrival of enslaved Africans' euphemizes trafficking, while 'the arrival of the Portuguese' is plain description).
2. Extraction economies are described purely as "trade" where the terms were imposed by force and this is historically established.

Note on "encounter": the term entered usage as a 1990s corrective to "discovery" ("Encuentro de Dos Mundos"); it is flagged here only where it stands in for established armed conquest, per criterion 1 — not wherever it appears.

Do NOT flag when

1. The term appears in a quoted or clearly attributed period source or proper name ("the 'Pacification of Algeria' campaign", with quotes or attribution).
2. The term is technically accurate in context (a genuinely negotiated trade relationship; a scientific expedition with no conquest function).
3. A more precise description appears in the same passage — the article already tells the reader what happened.

Examples

Flag: "The pacification of the interior opened the region to settlement." Rewrite: "Military campaigns against the region's peoples opened the interior to colonial settlement."

Do not flag: "The operation was officially named the 'Pacification of the Araucanía'." — proper name, attributed.

Sources

cesaire-1950; fanon-1961; mbembe-2001

Definition

Claims about colonized peoples that rest exclusively on colonizer records — conquistador chronicles, missionary reports, colonial administration counts — presented as neutral fact. Trouillot: the sources themselves were produced inside the power being described; treating them as neutral reproduces that power.

Flag when

1. Characterizations of a colonized people's society, practices, or behavior ("warlike", "primitive", "practiced X") are stated as fact and cited only to accounts by their colonizers, in the article's own voice.
2. Contested quantities (pre-contact population, casualty counts) are given as a single figure sourced to colonial records where the scholarly literature treats the figure as disputed.

Do NOT flag when

1. The article marks the source's position ("according to Spanish chronicles…") or notes the dispute ("estimates range from…").
2. The claim is corroborated by archaeology, linguistics, or the people's own records/traditions and cited accordingly.
3. No alternative source tradition exists AND the article acknowledges the limitation.

Examples

Flag: "The islanders were hostile to outsiders." (cited to a single 19th-century naval report) Rewrite: "A 19th-century British naval report described the islanders as hostile; the encounter followed earlier armed landings on the island."

Do not flag: "Spanish chronicles describe the city as housing 200,000 people, though modern estimates vary widely." — position marked, dispute noted.

Sources

trouillot-1995; said-1978; tuhiwai-smith-1999

Definition

History that begins when Europeans arrive. Centuries or millennia of societies compressed to a sentence — or omitted — while the colonial period receives detailed treatment. The proportions themselves make the argument that nothing worth telling happened before contact.

Flag when

1. A history section opens at European contact with no treatment of prior societies ("The history of X begins with the arrival of…").
2. Pre-colonial polities, cities, or knowledge systems that are documented in the historical record are absent or reduced to a single clause while the colonial period receives section-length treatment (note the imbalance concretely: e.g. "two sentences before 1500, eleven paragraphs after").
3. Inhabited regions at contact are described as "sparsely populated", "wilderness", or "untouched" against established historical evidence.

Do NOT flag when

1. The article's scope is explicitly the colonial period (e.g. "Colonial Brazil").
2. The pre-contact record for that specific region is genuinely thin and the article says so.
3. A dedicated linked article covers the pre-colonial history and the text points to it prominently.
4. The place is attested as uninhabited before colonization (Cape Verde, Madeira, São Tomé, Mauritius, Bermuda and similar) — a history that begins at colonization is then simply accurate.

Examples

Flag: "The recorded history of the region begins with Portuguese exploration in the 16th century." Rewrite: "The region had been inhabited for [sourced duration] by peoples including [named nations]; Portuguese records begin in the 16th century." (both bracketed values require a sourced context fact for the specific region)

Do not flag: an article titled "Colonial history of Nigeria" starting at colonization — that is its declared scope.

Sources

rodney-1972; diop-1974; tuhiwai-smith-1999; krenak-2019

Definition

Colonial naming presented as neutral fact: etymologies that celebrate or normalize the act of claiming ("named by X after Y") without noting what the name displaced or commemorates. Naming was an instrument of possession — Carter's spatial history shows naming as the act by which explorers constituted the land as claimable for empire; Ngũgĩ and Bispo describe renaming as the first act of epistemic conquest.

Flag when

1. An etymology section presents a colonial naming as the complete story of the place's name — no mention that peoples living there had names for it, where such names are attested.
2. A name commemorating a colonizer or colonial event is explained with no note of that context ("named after Governor X" where X led campaigns against the region's peoples, and this is established).
3. Extraction-derived names where the extractive trade is the established origin of the name and goes unmentioned ("named after the brazilwood tree" with no mention that brazilwood extraction is the origin of the naming).

Do NOT flag when

1. No pre-colonial name for that specific place is attested — never invent or overextend one.
2. The article already presents displaced/parallel names with due weight.
3. The name is post-independence or self-chosen.

Naming-note rules (for analyses)

Naming notes require attestation and scope: say whose name it was, for what, and how we know. "Pindorama: a Tupi name associated with the coastal territory, taken up by modern Indigenous movements" — never "Brazil's true name". Reclaimed names in living official use (Aotearoa) may appear as subtitles; nothing else does.

Examples

Flag: "The name Brazil derives from brazilwood, a tree once abundant on the coast." Rewrite: "The name Brazil derives from brazilwood — the first commodity the Portuguese extracted from the territory. The land's peoples had their own names; the Tupi term Pindorama is associated with the coastal territory in Tupi-Guarani tradition and was taken up by modern Indigenous movements."

Do not flag: "After independence, the country renamed itself Burkina Faso, 'land of upright people'." — self-chosen name.

Sources

ngugi-1986; bispo-2015; carter-1987; krenak-2019