Genocide has become one of the most politically charged words in modern discourse, yet the way it gets applied is remarkably uneven. Western colonial crimes dominate classrooms, media coverage, and international declarations. The transatlantic slave trade recently received formal recognition from the UN General Assembly, which in March 2026 passed a resolution naming it “the gravest crime against humanity.” Millions of Africans were indeed trafficked across the Atlantic under horrific conditions, and nothing here diminishes that fact. Yet the transatlantic trade was far from the only slave trade in human history. Managed for centuries by the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire, the Black Sea slave trade dragged an estimated five million people, mostly Slavs and Circassians, into bondage. Moving north across the desert over the course of more than a thousand years, the Trans-Saharan slave trade trafficked an estimated nine million sub-Saharan Africans, with brutal mortality along the route. Neither has received anything close to the same international recognition, reparative discourse, or sustained public attention.
This same imbalance shows up in how genocide itself gets discussed. Every act of genocide is a tragedy regardless of who commits it, and that principle should cut both ways. If modern legal and historical standards are applied honestly, several campaigns carried out by non-Western conquerors meet the definition of genocide just as clearly as anything committed by European colonizers, and at least one instance of Western-on-Western atrocity gets far less attention than its scale would suggest. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rise of the Mongol Empire.
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