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 treasury 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 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-tales of stirring feats of arms and epics of tenacious resistance. In doing so he shows that the shifts in fashion that cast Europeans first as heroes and then as villians fall equally wide of the mark. In a probing and balanced investigation that looks beyond the clash of battle and into the human need for story, he sho