historiography

Malagasy envoys reached London in 1837 to end an alliance, and the Foreign Office answered by setting their queen’s conduct against the heir to the British throne. Two centuries on, the encyclopedias still file the two reigns in different grammar.

The rich fool who threw away a treasury in Cairo and came home owing money: that biography was filed by the merchants who profited from the visit and fixed the rates on the loans. The rest of the record shows a treasury that survived succession and an army that annexed Gao while its king was away. The $400 billion prices an empire, not a man.

Every land grab opens with a word: the people on the land are declared less than people. Scholarship spent the next century testing the word, with the victim in the dock and the accuser writing the questions. The other method was always available: name the speaker, date the wound that followed, and ask what the violence was for.