The 1897 Benin punitive expedition — reading the British soldiers’ own diaries changed everything I thought I knew

Spent three months in the UK National Archives working through the primary sources. What the soldiers wrote home about what they did — and took — is a different story than what got officially reported at the time.

The official reports describe a measured response to an attack on a trade mission. The soldiers’ private letters describe something considerably less measured, including explicit discussion of looting that never appears in any official account.

This isn’t new to historians who’ve worked the archives before. It’s new to most readers, and that gap is worth closing.