Over the course of four centuries, a handful of states at the western edge of Europe set their mark on the peoples of four continents. Their weapons were cunning and breathtaking courage, ingenuity and endurance, steel and cordite - and treachery and disease. Their stories have been presented as epics of exploration and adventure, and as squalid displays of colonial exploitation. Whereabouts, on that spinning axis, does the truth lie?
Mark Cocker examines four collisions: the conquest of Mexico, the British onslaught on the Tasmanian Aborigines, the uprooting of the Apaches, and the German campaign against the tribes of South West Africa. By focusing on the details of these widely spaced narratives, Cocker illuminates an entire network of parallels and links, of reflections and refractions, of echoes and contrasts. He unearths compelling and sometimes harrowing stories, and in doing so he shows that the shifts in fashion that cast Europeans first as heroes and then as villains fall equally wide of the mark. In a probing and balanced investigation he shows that the underlying truth is more complex, more interesting - and a good deal more exciting.
