I'd like to take you to North America, before the continent was remade by Europe.
What later became the United States was not an empty land waiting to be discovered. It was a continent already full of nations, languages and political systems. Yet over the course of centuries, European powers and then the United States itself used law, force, treaties and settlement policy to take that land away.
This is the story of how that happened.
Long before large scale European colonization, North America was home to millions of Indigenous people living in hundreds of distinct nations, speaking hundreds of languages. They were not one people, but farmers, hunters, confederations of allied nations, each with its own beliefs, culture, and political systems.
Popular culture later reduced this diversity to a single stereotype. Yet this was not a wilderness waiting for civilization. It was a living world with its own order, one that simply had not developed the state and military structures of Europe because, until Europeans arrived, it had not needed them.
The earliest European claims rested on a legal fiction: the Doctrine of Discovery. Land not ruled by a recognized Christian monarch could be claimed by whichever European power "discovered" it first - and Indigenous peoples were treated not as owners of that land, but merely as its users.
This gave conquest a legal language. Once that language existed, the process didn't need to look like open theft. It could be dressed up as treaty-making, purchase or administration, while in practice, land changed hands through pressure, deception and force.
Agreements were signed across language barriers, boundaries were misrepresented, promises were broken, rivalries were exploited, and when none of that worked, armies were sent in.
A recurring pattern ran through the whole colonial and early American period: Indigenous nations were pushed into agreements they didn't control, which were then interpreted however suited the other side.
The 1851 treaty with the Sioux is a classic case - large territories surrendered for supplies and a reservation, only for the paperwork itself to be manipulated so promised payments were redirected elsewhere.
A similar pattern shaped Manhattan: the Lenape believed they were granting shared use of the land; the Dutch treated it as an outright sale, and New Amsterdam - later New York, followed. Rarely was it one dramatic seizure. More often it was a chain of small, engineered advantages, each made possible by a growing imbalance of power.
European contact brought diseases Indigenous communities had no immunity to, and in some regions entire populations collapsed before large-scale warfare even began.
That mattered strategically: hunger, fear, and social breakdown made agreements easier to force and resistance harder to sustain.
Alcohol, too, was used deliberately as a tool of dependency, weakening internal cohesion. What followed wasn't just the loss of territory, it was the deliberate unraveling of whole societies.
The American Revolution didn't end the taking of Indigenous land. It simply changed who was doing the taking.
At first, Washington treated Indigenous nations as separate political partners for treaties, but never as equals. By the 1820s and 1830s, the federal government had restricted land sales and redefined them as dependents of the state, paving the way for the Indian Removal Act, which forced tens of thousands west of the Mississippi under conditions of hunger and violence. That was not a side effect of policy. It was the policy.
Then came Manifest Destiny, the belief that the United States had a providential right to expand from coast to coast. In practice, it meant war, expulsion, and settlement.
By the mid-1800s the conquest turned openly violent, as settlers, companies and government alike wanted the same land for farms, railroads, mines and towns.
Villages were burned, civilians killed, and the buffalo - the basis of survival for many Plains nations, hunted to near-extinction as a deliberate tactic of war. The 1864 Sand Creek massacre, where Colorado militia attacked a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho camp under white flags, mostly killing women and children, was one of the most infamous episodes in a much wider pattern.
Reservations confined Indigenous nations to fixed, federally controlled land, and the Dawes Act of 1887 broke even that into individual plots, allowing "surplus" land to pass to settlers and fracturing what remained of their collective structure.
Roosevelt briefly reversed course in the 1930s, only for the 1950s to bring forced integration. The rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s clawed back some self governance, later followed by reservation casino economies, bringing real gains for some and new problems for others. Today, Indigenous nations survive on a fraction of their former land. Some are strong, some are barely visible, but they did not disappear.
Conquest often begins with language, not just weapons. The Doctrine of Discovery turned theft into legality and gave empire a moral vocabulary.
A treaty is only as fair as the power behind it. When one side controls the terms, the paper can be signed without the consent being real.
Land can be taken in stages. Settlement, law, debt, disease, force and administration can all work together.
Breaking collective structures weakens resistance. The move from communal land to individual allotment was not just economic policy. It was political disarmament.
Colonization does not end with occupation. Even after military conquest, cultural, legal and social pressure can continue for generations.
The taking of America from its Indigenous peoples was not a single event. It was a long process built on law, force and systematic pressure. It was not diplomacy in the honorable sense, but it was still a form of statecraft: patient, strategic and deeply consequential. And like every great act of dispossession, it left behind a map, a wound and a
question that is still alive today.
Stay tuned, diplomats.
Vol.III