Collection
Empire & Colonialism
Cases documenting the acquisition and administration of colonial territory, including forced labor, land dispossession, population control, detention systems, and the suppression of independence movements — together with the policies used against Indigenous peoples on colonized and settled land.
4 files in this collection
Trail of Tears
Under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the United States government forced the Cherokee Nation from its homeland in the Southeastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) in 1838–1839. U.S. Army and state militia forces rounded some 16,000 Cherokee people into stockades before marching them roughly 1,000 miles; an estimated several thousand died of disease, starvation and exposure along the way.
Canadian Residential Schools
From the 1880s until 1996, the Canadian federal government funded and directed a system of residential schools for Indigenous children, operated in partnership with Anglican, Catholic, Methodist/United and Presbyterian church bodies, that forcibly separated an estimated 150,000 children from their families, banned Indigenous languages, and subjected many to physical, sexual and emotional abuse and severe neglect. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded the system amounted to cultural genocide.
Congo Free State
Between 1885 and 1908, the Congo Free State — the personal possession of King Leopold II of Belgium, not a Belgian state colony — extracted rubber and ivory through a system of forced labor enforced by quotas, hostage-taking, and mutilation. Population loss over the period is estimated in the millions, though the precise toll remains genuinely disputed among historians and demographers.
Mau Mau Detention and Torture
During the 1952–1960 Kenya Emergency, British colonial authorities detained tens of thousands of Kikuyu people without trial in a network of camps later described as "the Pipeline," where torture, forced labor and sexual violence were documented. A 2011–2013 UK High Court case forced the disclosure of thousands of secretly withheld colonial files and led to Britain's first official acknowledgment of and compensation for colonial-era torture.