The First Global Crime Against Humanity Was Colonization

Bernard Alvarez
4 days ago
2 min read

There is a truth we don’t say out loud often enough.

The first global crime against humanity was colonization.

Not just conquest. Not just war.

A system.

Colonization was not a single violent event. It was a coordinated, multi-century strategy of invasion, land theft, forced conversion, cultural erasure, and economic extraction. Empires like the Spanish Empire and the British Empire did not simply “discover” lands — they reorganized entire worlds to benefit themselves.

And they did it on nearly every continent.

It Didn’t Just Target Land. It Targeted Identity.

medicine man, the soldier, and the confiscated sacred items

Colonization did not only seize territory.

It attacked language. Ceremony. Governance. Kinship. Spiritual systems.

Children were taken from families.

Sacred practices were outlawed.

Spiritual leaders were imprisoned or killed.

Entire cosmologies were labeled “savage” so they could be replaced.

That is not expansion. That is erasure.

The Scale of Death Was Catastrophic

After the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492, waves of disease, enslavement, and warfare devastated Indigenous populations across the Americas. In some regions, up to 90% of the population died within a century.

Let that sink in.

That level of collapse is almost unimaginable.

And it was not accidental. It was tolerated. Often encouraged.

Slavery Was Engineered — Not Incidental

The transatlantic slave trade forcibly displaced over 12 million Africans. Human beings were turned into cargo. Families were shattered. Cultures were severed.

This wasn’t chaos. It was infrastructure. It was policy. It was profit.

Colonization built racial hierarchies and then wrote them into law, theology, and emerging “science.” The idea that some humans were less human became the justification for exploitation.

And those frameworks did not disappear when colonial flags were lowered.

The Theft Built Modern Wealth

Gold. Silver. Sugar. Cotton. Land. Labor.

The wealth extracted from colonized lands fueled European industrial growth and laid the foundations of modern global superpowers. Meanwhile, many of the regions that were stripped are still dealing with economic instability rooted in that very extraction.

Colonization didn’t just reshape the past.

It engineered inequality into the present.

The Trauma Is Intergenerational

When you take a people’s land, language, and spiritual sovereignty, the wound does not close in a generation.

It echoes.

It shows up in poverty statistics.

In addiction cycles.

In internalized shame.

In fractured cultural memory.

Calling colonization a crime against humanity is not hyperbole. It acknowledges the scale, the coordination, and the intentional dehumanization that spanned continents.

And yet —