Colonialism and Conquest

Introduction

Steven Erikson's engagement with colonialism runs deeper than most fantasy writers' treatment of empire. It is not merely that the Malazan Book of the Fallen contains empires and rebellions; nearly all epic fantasy does. What distinguishes Erikson's treatment is that it is rooted in the anthropological and archaeological disciplines in which he was trained, informed by his personal witnessing of ongoing colonial violence in Canada, and shaped by an explicit rejection of the "great man" theory of history that undergirds most imperial fiction. The result is a sustained, multi-novel examination of conquest, cultural absorption, and the limits of both imperial ideology and anti-imperial resistance — an examination that refuses easy answers on either side.

This essay examines Erikson's colonial thematics through three principal texts — Deadhouse Gates (the Seven Cities rebellion and its Sepoy Mutiny parallel), Midnight Tides (the Letherii conquest of the Tiste Edur and its Lakota/British Empire genealogy), and House of Chains (the Teblor and the problem of cultural relativism) — while drawing on Erikson's own interview commentary to trace the anthropological and personal convictions that shape his approach.

The Anthropologist's Objection to the "Great Man"

Before turning to individual texts, it is necessary to situate Erikson's colonial thematics within his broader rejection of conventional historiography. A recurring emphasis in his interviews, and particularly in A. P. Canavan's discussions of the series, is the refusal of the "great man" model of history:

"This is something that Erikson and Esslemont have very explicitly said in interviews — that because of their training in archaeology, because of their study of history and ancient cultures, they reject the great man theory." (Discussion of Reaper's Gale with A. P. Canavan transcript)

The "great man" theory — the notion that history is driven by the decisions of singular exceptional individuals (Caesar, Napoleon, Genghis Khan) — is the historiographical scaffolding that supports most imperial narratives. Empires tell their stories through the biographies of their founders because this renders systemic violence as the product of individual will, and individual will is more susceptible to moral evaluation (and moral absolution) than systems are. To reject the great man theory, as Erikson does, is to foreground systems — the impersonal machinery of conquest, trade, absorption, and erasure — as the true agents of historical change.

This rejection has direct consequences for how colonialism is represented in the series. There are no singular villains responsible for the Letherii conquest of the Tiste Edur, the Malazan Empire's domination of Seven Cities, or the slow annihilation of the First Empire's descendants. There are only systems — mercantile, military, administrative, cultural — whose operation transcends the intentions of any individual within them. When Erikson stages the conflict between colonised and coloniser, he is staging a conflict between structures, not between good and evil men.

Deadhouse Gates: The Seven Cities Rebellion and the Sepoy Parallel

Deadhouse Gates is Erikson's first sustained engagement with colonialism. The Seven Cities subcontinent, a conquered territory of the Malazan Empire, rises in the Whirlwind rebellion against imperial rule. The parallels to the 1857 Indian Rebellion — the "Sepoy Mutiny" — are structural and deliberate: a continent-sized imperial possession erupts in violent insurgency, indigenous troops turn against their foreign officers, refugee columns flee through hostile territory, and atrocities are committed on both sides with a ferocity that reveals how thin the veneer of "pacification" always was.

The Whirlwind is prophesied in advance, the rebellion is organised around a religious-political figure (the reborn Sha'ik), and the rebellion's success depends on the recognition that the imperial order is fundamentally illegitimate — that Malazan rule has been, from the beginning, an imposition of foreign systems on a culture with its own history, religion, and political forms. The fact that Coltaine, the Malazan commander leading the refugee column known as the Chain of Dogs, is himself a Wickan — a member of a conquered people fighting on behalf of the empire that conquered his own — doubles the irony. The colonised become the enforcers of further colonisation, and the moral geometry refuses to simplify.

Crucially, Erikson does not romanticise the rebellion. The Whirlwind is not presented as a straightforward war of liberation. Its leadership is corrupted by faction and personal ambition; its soldiers commit atrocities against civilian populations; its religious ideology is as susceptible to manipulation as imperial ideology is. This is consistent with Erikson's broader refusal of narrative simplifications. The point is not that the rebels are good and the imperials bad, or vice versa, but that conquest itself — the original imposition of foreign rule — generates the conditions in which atrocity becomes possible on every side. The rebellion is a symptom of the colonial wound, not a cure for it.

Midnight Tides: Letheras, the British Empire, and the Lakota Counterfactual

Midnight Tides is Erikson's most concentrated colonialism novel, and his interview commentary makes clear that its origins lie in a specific imaginative provocation. Driving through the American plains — South Dakota, Lakota country — Erikson found himself asking a historical counterfactual: what if the Lakota, at the height of their military capacity, had defeated the United States and marched on Washington? The answer the novel proposes is stark: the system would devour them anyway. Military victory is not enough. The conquered, even when they triumph militarily, are absorbed by the culture they defeat — because culture, not arms, is the decisive medium of colonial power.

This inversion structures the novel. The Tiste Edur, a warrior people of the Blackwood coast, conquer the mercantile Letherii empire through military force. They win. The Edur emperor Rhulad sits on the Letherii throne. And yet over the course of Midnight Tides and Reaper's Gale, it becomes clear that the Edur have not conquered Lether in any meaningful sense. They have been absorbed by it. Letherii mercantile logic, Letherii debt-slavery, Letherii bureaucratic structures, Letherii cultural assumptions — all of these continue to operate, indifferent to the ethnicity of the emperor. The Edur learn to think like Letherii, to want what Letherii want, to measure their worth in the Letherii currency of debt and obligation. The military conquest is cosmetically real but structurally meaningless. The system devours its conquerors.

Erikson has been explicit about the analogue:

"Lether and their form of enslavement is death — it's the same thing. And in many respects, we are still a slave society, even though we don't have slavery, because debt is the creepy glue that's holding everything together." (DLC Midnight Tides transcript)

Letheras, in Erikson's reading, is not American but British — a mercantile empire whose mechanism of domination is not primarily military but financial. Debt, rather than the sword, is the instrument of conquest. The Letherii do not need to march on their neighbours; they need only extend credit, create dependencies, and wait for the obligations to accumulate to the point where formal annexation becomes a mere administrative detail. This is colonialism as economic system rather than as military campaign — and Erikson's argument is that this is the form colonialism most persistently takes, in the Malazan world as in our own.

Hull Beddict: The Ethnologist as Tragic Figure

Within this colonial architecture, the character of Hull Beddict carries particular weight. Hull is an educated Letherii who learned the language, customs, and culture of the Tiste Edur in good faith — as an ethnographer, a student of the people the Letherii were slowly destroying. He sought understanding where his fellow Letherii sought profit. But his knowledge was weaponised. Treaties negotiated through his mediation became instruments of dispossession; the trust he built became the precondition for more thorough exploitation. Hull's guilt is the guilt of the well-intentioned colonial scholar who discovers, too late, that his discipline cannot be separated from the imperial project it serves.

Erikson has connected Hull directly to his own experience witnessing colonial violence in Canada:

"I've actually witnessed myself maltreatment of native peoples by usually figures of authority, police, RCMP — that kind of thing, which goes on to this day. And so there is a sense of, I guess, rage at the injustice of what has gone on and what continues to go on... I'm pretty sure a lot of that was percolating, especially when I was dealing with Hull — when I was dealing with his notions of guilt and his self-flagellation regarding the role he played in some of these things being played out in his life." (Steven Erikson Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

He further connects this to the Canadian residential school system, which was explicitly designed to destroy Indigenous cultural identity:

"Here in Canada, there was certainly a sustained effort to basically destroy cultural identity among native peoples through re-education — taking children away and putting them in private schools, basically forcing them not to speak their own language." (Steven Erikson Interview — Midnight Tides transcript)

Hull Beddict's tragedy is the tragedy of a man who saw the process clearly and was nonetheless complicit in it. His ethnological expertise did not make him a better ally to the Edur; it made him a better instrument for their destruction. This is Erikson's most unsparing critique of the colonial humanities — the recognition that empathy and understanding can themselves become tools of dispossession when they are deployed within a system whose structural imperatives are exploitation. The ethnographer who loves his subjects is not thereby exempt from the harm his discipline enables.

This maps onto the real-world critique developed by postcolonial theorists (Edward Said, Talal Asad, James Clifford) of the complicity between anthropology and empire. The anthropologist arriving to document a culture often preceded the administrator arriving to govern it and the soldier arriving to suppress resistance. Knowledge of the colonised served the machinery of colonisation. Hull Beddict is Erikson's dramatic rendering of this historical pattern — not as abstract theory but as the lived guilt of a man who cannot forgive himself and cannot undo what he has participated in.

House of Chains: Cultural Relativism vs. Universal Ethics

House of Chains introduces Karsa Orlong, a Teblor warrior from a tribal culture whose practices include rape, infanticide, and routinised raiding of neighbouring peoples. The novel's most provocative move is to grant Karsa first-person narrative space — to render his worldview from within — while simultaneously presenting its practices with unflinching clarity. The reader is forced to inhabit a consciousness whose moral assumptions are alien and, by contemporary standards, monstrous.

This stages the central tension of Erikson's colonial thematics: if the coloniser has no right to impose his values on the colonised, what is to be done about practices within indigenous cultures that inflict serious harm? The liberal answer — cultural relativism, non-interference — seems to require tolerating atrocities. The imperial answer — civilising mission, forced reform — reproduces the very violence it claims to remedy. Erikson's treatment refuses both options.

The key move is structural. Karsa's own culture is shown to be based on a lie. The "Teblor" are in fact a degraded remnant of the Thelomen Toblakai, a people whose former greatness has collapsed into tribalism and whose practices are not ancient wisdom but the ossified habits of a defeated civilisation. When Karsa eventually encounters this truth, his response is not to accept imperial civilisation as the superior alternative but to declare war on all civilisation — to become, in his famous formulation, the enemy of every system, indigenous and imperial alike. His reform of Teblor practice comes from within (he is Teblor, speaking to Teblor, in the language of Teblor heroism) but his critique of civilisation generally comes from a position that refuses the imperial/anti-imperial binary entirely.

Erikson's point, made explicit in the Reaper's Gale discussion with Canavan, is that harmful practices must be addressed but "the answer cannot come from imperial imposition" (Discussion of Reaper's Gale transcript). Reform must arise from within a culture, by members of that culture who can speak to it in its own terms. This is not relativism — Erikson does not hold that all practices are equally valid — but it is a rejection of the civilising mission as a legitimate instrument of ethical progress. Karsa is the dramatic embodiment of this position: a critic of his own culture who would sooner die than accept the imperial critique of his culture, because the imperial critique is itself a weapon of further dispossession.

The Reaper's Gale discussion summarises the philosophical stakes:

"There's a really fascinating discussion ongoing about morality and relativism — moral relativism and cultural relativism — versus the idea that there might be some set of standards to which we should adhere from a moral perspective. This is explored throughout the series." (Discussion of Reaper's Gale with A. P. Canavan transcript)

The series does not resolve this tension. It dramatises it, holds it open, and refuses to collapse it into a slogan. This is consistent with Erikson's broader methodological commitment: to treat the most difficult questions with the seriousness they deserve rather than offering readers the consolation of a clean answer.

The Subversion of the Prophesied Hero

A final element of Erikson's anti-colonial thematics is his subversion of the "chosen one" trope — the prophesied hero who arrives to deliver the oppressed. This trope is itself a form of great man theory, dressed in fantasy conventions: a singular individual whose arrival solves systemic problems through personal heroism. Erikson is structurally hostile to it:

"The idea of the saviour, of the destined hero, the prophesied hero — we can tie it back into fantasy in the general tropes of fantasy, this idea of the chosen one, the prophesied hero. It's both a subversion of that trope and a deconstruction of that aspect of the great man of history model of thinking about conflict." (Discussion of Reaper's Gale transcript)

The Whirlwind's "chosen one," Sha'ik Reborn, is the destruction of Felisin Paran — not a saviour figure but a victim whose selfhood has been consumed by the role the prophecy imposes on her. Karsa Orlong, who could have been a conventional chosen-one figure (the exceptional warrior whose violence serves a greater cause), repeatedly rejects the roles others try to assign him. The Bonehunters, the army around which the final volumes coalesce, are a military unit — a system — rather than the instrument of any individual hero's destiny. Even the most apparently heroic figures in the series (Tavore, Fiddler, Coltaine) are presented as participants in systems they cannot control rather than as singular agents of historical change. The work of liberation, such as it is accomplished at all, is accomplished collectively, anonymously, and without the consolation of prophetic vindication.

Conclusion

Erikson's treatment of colonialism and conquest constitutes one of the most intellectually serious engagements with the topic in contemporary fantasy literature. Drawing on his anthropological training, his personal experience of Canadian colonial violence, and an explicit rejection of the "great man" historiography that undergirds most imperial narratives, he constructs a fictional world in which conquest operates primarily through systems rather than individuals, in which cultural absorption is more decisive than military victory, and in which even the well-intentioned scholar is implicated in the harm his discipline enables. The series refuses both the romance of the civilising mission and the romance of indigenous purity, staging instead the genuinely difficult problem of how harmful practices can be addressed without reproducing the violence of imperial imposition. The answer the series arrives at — that reform must come from within, through members of a culture speaking to their own in their own terms — is not a comfortable one, but it is consistent with Erikson's broader commitment to the kind of moral seriousness that refuses the consolations of easy narrative.

Sources

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