How Colonialism Works
Not slavery as origin. Colonization as method. The distinction matters: slavery requires a transportation story. Colonization describes what happens to a population on their own land when a foreign power asserts authority over them without consent or treaty. What was done to the EOM subject class was colonization — imposed on a people who were already home.
Colonized, not enslaved. The distinction the system was built to prevent you from making.
The slavery origin narrative serves a specific legal function: it places the person outside any national protection. An enslaved person transported from a foreign land has no citizenship, no national treaty, no sovereign to claim on their behalf. The story removes the legal claim before it can be made.
But the EOM subject class was not a transported population without a sovereign. They were subjects of the Empire of Morocco, the first nation to recognize the United States, with a treaty in force. The colonial apparatus had to find a way to make them legally invisible — without acknowledging what it was doing. The name chain was that mechanism. The institutional pattern below is how it was maintained.
"The colonial apparatus arrived into a population of EOM subjects already inhabiting the western territory of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa."— Moroccan Treaty Research: 2026
The correct legal status of EOM subjects under colonial administration was not "enslaved person." It was occupied person — a subject of a recognized sovereign, present on their own territory, brought under colonial control without their sovereign's consent or surrender.
Under the Law of Nations — operative long before the 1949 Geneva Conventions codified it — an occupying power cannot strip occupied persons of their nationality, cannot reclassify them as property, cannot naturalize them without individual voluntary consent, and cannot deny them access to their sovereign's diplomatic representatives. EOM subjects in the Americas were not transported from a foreign continent. They were subjects of the Empire of Morocco, standing on the western territory of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, progressively subjected to colonial control by powers that held no valid sovereign title over the territory.
The slave narrative performed a specific four-step legal operation that could not have been executed against EOM subjects in their known sovereign status. Step 1: convert persons to property — a piece of property has no nationality and cannot assert "I am a subject of the Empire of Morocco." Step 2: manufacture an African origin — severing the territorial claim to Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. Step 3: "emancipation" without restoration — the 13th Amendment (1865) abolished the property status without disclosing or restoring the prior treaty status it had suppressed. Step 4: forced naturalization — the 14th Amendment (1868) absorbed the now-legally-blank persons into US citizenship collectively, without individual adjudication, without disclosure of the prior treaty status, and without the 12-month notice Article 25 of the 1836 Treaty required.
The 14th Amendment could not lawfully absorb EOM subjects — because you cannot forcibly naturalize a sovereign subject of a foreign empire standing on their own sovereign territory without individual consent, without disclosing the prior status being extinguished, and without following the treaty's own exit procedure. Public Law 856 (1956) confirms this: it names "subjects of Morocco" as an active legal category 88 years after the 14th Amendment — proof the treaty status was never extinguished by the forced naturalization.— Moroccan Treaty Research: The Slave Narrative as Legal Preprocessing, July 2026
Eight steps. Three centuries. One direction.
Each of the steps below looks, individually, like a normal government action. Tax law. Census policy. Education reform. Legal procedure. Viewed together, across three centuries, all moving in the same direction — away from the treaty, away from the national identity that created the legal obligation — they reveal the pattern.
The pattern documented above — eight institutional steps across three centuries, all moving in the same direction — does not require a new legal framework to be recognized as a violation. The Rome Statute, the international accountability framework for state responsibility, and the UN human rights covenant the United States has ratified contain the exact categories. This filing maps each phase of the colonial apparatus to its corresponding international legal violation.
Imprisonment or severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law
Convict leasing (1866–1928): 25–40% annual death rates documented. Treaty class members imprisoned under Black Codes for "vagrancy" — criminal statutes applied exclusively to the emancipated class — then leased as labor. The imprisonment violated the treaty's consular protection provision (Article 21). No consul was present at any trial. The imprisonment was also under statutes that the Knox-Lansing rule confirms were subordinate to treaty law.
Persecution against any identifiable group on political, racial, national, cultural, or religious grounds
COINTELPRO (1956–1971): Church Committee confirmed that FBI operations specifically targeted Islamic-identity, Black nationalist, and Pan-Africanist organizations — the organizations whose worldview was closest to the treaty-class framing. The political grounds: any organization challenging the citizenship framework. The national grounds: any organization asserting a prior national identity. The religious grounds: Noble Drew Ali's community asserting Moroccan origin for the treaty class (FBI files confirm by name), Nation of Islam specifically named. This is textbook Article 7(1)(h) persecution against identifiable groups on multiple listed grounds simultaneously.
Extermination — including through the deprivation of access to food, medicine, or other indispensable means of survival
HOLC redlining (1933–1968) combined with sundown towns (10,000+ documented). The HOLC Residential Security Maps designated treaty class neighborhoods as "D" (hazardous) — cutting off mortgage access and investment for 35 years. Combined with 10,000+ sundown towns physically expelling treaty class members at night, this produced geographic confinement + economic extraction that constitutes systematic deprivation of survival resources across the post-Reconstruction period.
Deportation or forcible transfer of population
Dawes Commission double reclassification: treaty class members who were classified as "Indian" on one set of documents were administratively reclassified as "Freedman" and then as "Black American" — removed from their documented national identity without consent, notice, or hearing. NARA T626 Roll 291 documents this in the federal government's own archive: the word "Indian" crossed out, "Neg" written in. This is administrative forced transfer — the person was moved from their documented national category to a different classification by unilateral government action, with no due process.
Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering or serious injury to body, mental or physical health
4,084 documented lynchings (EJI, 1877–1950): each one a violation of Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty, since no consul was notified and no consular presence was available at trial or at the extrajudicial killing. Senate Resolution 39 (2005) is the US's own admission that these killings occurred with no federal prevention and no accountability. The lynching record, combined with the consular access denial at every instance, constitutes systematic inhumane treatment of the treaty class.
Cultural persecution — forcible erasure of national and religious identity
The 1667 Virginia Slave Code, the One-Drop Rule, the Plecker Directive, and the GEB educational suppression mission all targeted the specific cultural, national, and religious markers of the treaty class — Islamic practice, Arabic language retention, Moorish naming traditions, and the organizational expression of prior national identity (surveillance of Noble Drew Ali's community asserting prior national identity). The cultural persecution was systematic, documented, and specifically targeted at the identity markers that would have connected the treaty class to the 1836 Treaty.
Each of the eight institutional steps was not independent. Each one was designed to make the next step possible. This is the compound nature of the colonial apparatus: not eight separate harms, but one connected system where each element enabled the elements that followed it.
Four moments where the colonial apparatus moved against the treaty class precisely when a protective framework was about to activate. Coincidence requires one such moment. Four — with overlapping institutional actors — is design.
Each sequence below shows the same structure: a suppression mechanism deployed in the window immediately before a legal or political framework that would have created a remedy for the treaty class. The suppression preceded the protection. Each act was completed before the framework it foreclosed could activate.
The colonial apparatus did not pass through multiple independent governments. It passed through one continuous operator that changed names four times and renounced colonialism zero times.
The institutional succession is unbroken. The 13 British colonies became the Continental Congress (1775–1781). The Continental Congress became the Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation (1781–1789). The Confederation Congress became the United States under the Constitution (1789–present). Each successor absorbed the treaty obligations of the prior entity. Each also continued the colonial apparatus — the slave codes, the reclassification statutes, the land grants — without a single formal act of renunciation.
The 1786 Treaty of Peace and Friendship was ratified by the Confederation Congress — the republic's first constitutional government, before the current Constitution existed. When the Constitutional government replaced it in 1789, it inherited every obligation the Confederation Congress had made. When the treaty was re-ratified in 1836, both the pre-Constitution and post-Constitution governments had confirmed the EOM subject class's treaty status. The class had been acknowledged by every form the American government had taken. Not one of those forms renounced the colonial apparatus that was simultaneously operating against the same class.
The operator changed names. The apparatus continued. The treaty class remained unrecognized throughout every transition.— 13 Colonies → Continental Congress → Confederation Congress → United States (Constitution). Four names. One unbroken system. Zero renunciations.
The most precise documented statement of this position is the vote on UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 — the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples — adopted December 14, 1960: 89 in favor, 0 against, 9 abstentions. The United States abstained. So did the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Australia, and the Dominican Republic. Every colonizing power abstained. They did not vote against — opposition on the record would have been opposition to decolonization. Abstention left the posture ambiguous while leaving the apparatus in place.
Three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council — the United States, the United Kingdom, and France — were among the abstaining colonizing powers. Three of the five nations holding veto power over Security Council enforcement are the same nations that built, sustained, and refused to renounce the colonial apparatus. The court cannot be neutral when three of five judges are parties to the case. This structural conflict of interest — documented in the Algeciras Conference record (1906), the abstention vote (1960), and the diplomatic archive — is why C24, not the Security Council, is the correct UN venue for the treaty class claim.
The 1959 State Department Note — issued 21 months before Resolution 1514 — closed the Moroccan nationality-survival clause in the window before the decolonization framework it was designed to evade. The United States government that issued the 1959 Note was the same government that abstained on Resolution 1514 fourteen months later. The preparation and the abstention were the same act in two stages. The operator's position on colonialism has never changed. It has only been expressed in different institutional forms.
The colonial authorization had no legal force — from the beginning.
The entire colonial project in the Americas traced its authority to a series of papal bulls — documents issued by the Pope authorizing the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns to claim, occupy, and administer newly discovered lands. The most significant: Dudum Siquidem (1493), which extended this authority to all lands in the western direction.
But the Pope had no jurisdiction over the western territory of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. The EOM was a sovereign empire. The Islamic legal tradition — under which the EOM operated — did not recognize papal authority over Muslim lands. The papal bull was an act without jurisdiction. It was void from the moment it was issued: no legal effect, no legitimate authority to confer on any colonial enterprise built upon it.
Then, in 1537 — 44 years after Dudum Siquidem — Pope Paul III issued Sublimis Deus, which declared that the original people of the Americas were rational beings with souls who could not be enslaved. This was an effective self-revocation of the colonial authorization, issued 130 years before the British colonial statute enacted on EOM land in Virginia in 1667 tried to remove the religious exemption. The root authority was already void. Every instrument built upon it was void ab initio.