Territorial aggrandizement alone cannot explain colonial destruction either

Evidence

Furthermore, if territoriality were the terminus ad quem, then one might ask why the Chinese, the Indians, the Muslims, and many others did not approach territory with the same mental attitude and methods of conquest; they did not systematically inflict physical or cultural or mental destruction on their subjugated populations, as the White settlers did on the Amerindians. Furthermore, had territory constituted such a terminus or a final cause, why would this same territory be subjected to ecological and environmental degradation, and why was it eventually remade into a new nature, as William Cronon has argued? In this larger story, territory is an instrument of a larger instrument, and this larger instrument is in turn an instrument of yet a larger one. Such instrumentalities therefore beg for a regressive series that can inhere in an intelligibly constituted, primary structure of thought. It has been my argument that this structure is the Distinction from which all major modern phenomena, including instruments, instrumentalism, genocide and colonialism, and much else of the same vein, ensued, issued, resulted, and flowed. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 403

Categorization

• QUESTION: The counterexample of Chinese, Indian, and Muslim empires expanding territory without systematic destruction of subjugated populations is a striking empirical claim worth verifying and exploring further.
• XREF: Connects to ‘On Sacrifice: The Real Kind, with Corpses’ — the same question of why some civilizations ritualize destruction of others while others don’t, pointing to an underlying epistemic structure rather than surface motive.