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Maps like this disturb a comfortable habit in Western public life: colonialism is often discussed as though Europeans invented it, monopolized it, and uniquely embodied it.

They did not.

That does not make Western colonialism imaginary, minor, or excusable. European empires conquered, extracted, enslaved, displaced, racialized, governed, converted, and reordered huge parts of the world. The moral seriousness of that history remains. But if colonialism is part of the larger family of empire, conquest, domination, hierarchy, and the subordination of one people by another, then Western colonialism is not the whole category. It is one chapter in a much older human pattern.

The early Islamic conquests were not merely a spiritual awakening spreading through gentle persuasion. They were also military and imperial events. Arab Muslim armies and later Islamic-ruled polities expanded across the Levant, Egypt, North Africa, Persia, parts of Central Asia, and Iberia. These conquests changed political loyalties, tax systems, religious hierarchies, legal status, languages, and civilizational boundaries.

This does not reduce Islamic civilization to conquest. It would be foolish to ignore its achievements in philosophy, mathematics, architecture, medicine, poetry, trade, law, and scholarship. Many conquered peoples also helped build those achievements. Greeks, Persians, Jews, Christians, Indians, Arabs, Berbers, and others all contributed to what later gets remembered as Islamic civilization.

But that is exactly why the moral accounting should be honest. Conquest can produce synthesis. It can also produce subordination. Empire can preserve knowledge. It can also reorder peoples against their will. Complexity is real, but it cannot be used as a shield only for some civilizations.

The same selective memory appears around slavery and other imperial systems, but even staying with conquest alone, the pattern is clear: Western empire is treated as the moral template, while non-Western empire is often softened into “expansion,” “civilization,” “trade,” or “complexity.”

So why the imbalance?

Partly because Western colonialism is closer to us. Its archives, borders, museums, laws, churches, universities, racial categories, and economic consequences are still visible inside Western societies. Canadians, Americans, Britons, French, Belgians, Australians, and others are arguing inside institutional houses their own histories helped build. That proximity matters.

Partly because Western civilization developed powerful habits of self-criticism. Christianity, liberalism, socialism, abolitionism, human rights language, and modern academia all helped create tools by which the West could put itself on trial. That is not a weakness. In many ways, it is one of the West’s better inheritances.

But a virtue can decay into a ritual. Self-criticism can become selective prosecution. Once “colonialism” becomes a moral drama with fixed roles — guilty West, innocent rest — history gives way to theatre. The question stops being “Who conquered whom, and at what cost?” and becomes “Which story serves the approved politics?”

There is another reason for the imbalance. In contemporary Western politics, criticizing European empire is safe, rewarded, and institutionally familiar. Criticizing Islamic empire, Ottoman domination, Arabization, or other non-Western conquests is more dangerous. It risks being heard not as historical analysis, but as bigotry. So the subject is softened, avoided, or buried under the word “complexity.”

But all empire is complex. That cannot be a permission slip handed out selectively.

A serious anti-colonialism would not ask first whether the conqueror was European. It would ask: Who ruled? Who paid? Who was displaced? Who was taxed differently? Who was converted under pressure? Who lost language, land, status, sovereignty, or memory? Who was later told to be grateful for the civilization that absorbed them?

By that standard, Western colonialism remains morally serious. But it is not uniquely Western. It belongs to the larger human history of empire, conquest, slavery, hierarchy, and domination.

The point is not to excuse Europe. The point is to stop pretending that conquest only becomes colonialism when Europeans do it.