EMPIRE, COLONY, GENOCIDE

Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History

Edited by A. Dirk Moses

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FIRST PRIZE IN THE CATEGORY OF NON-EUROPEAN HISTORY
Awarded for 2009 by H-Soz-und-Kult

"With its depth of theoretical insight and the wealth of empirical material this volume sets new standards for the history of colonialism and genocide"

“The essential problem of the book – its recurrent question as well as its potential pitfall – is the position of the Holocaust in relation to other acts of extermination…This creates a tension throughout the book; it also makes it worth debating and certainly makes it a remarkably useful text to inform further research and for teaching purposes.”   ·  Journal of Global History

“...the volume offers an unusually rich, deeply disturbing material.”   ·  Peripherie

“Empire, Colony, Genocide represents an important contribution to genocide studies. Taken individually or collectively, the contributors should be applauded for some thoughtful, methodologically sophisticated, and intellectually rigorous work ... What this volume provides, therefore, is stimulus to further analyze the social, economic, and cultural threads that fostered this complexity, and rationalized genocidal violence.”   ·  Journal of Genocide Research

"Crossing broad temporal ranges and geographies, the collection represents a significant advance in genocide scholarship in its fusion of ostensibly unconnected episodes of mass violence, mass migrations, and nation building projects. It also represents a critical attempt to revisit the impact of murderous impulses in Western modernity as a structural logic with definable processes and actively pursued outcomes of domination and erasure of the colonised”   ·  Australian Journal of Politics and History

“In summary, this is a book that proposes a daring thesis, namely that genocide since antiquity has its origins in imperialism and colonialism.”   ·  Journal of World History

“The volume is disturbing and provocative reading. It raises fundamental methodological and conceptual notions related to genocide. It thereby positions genocide studies in their own right much independent of the hitherto largely dominant Holocaust studies, and situates the latter in a wider context. It is a context of a modern history of violence, which emerged in its still existing forms hand in hand with the industrial mode of production.”   ·  New Routes, A Journal of Peace Research and Action

"An immensely stimulating volume ... [that] meets the challenge to make this kind of mass violence ... a subject ... of global historical importance. It brings together in an innovative way the ‘crime without name’ as it is sometimes called ... with settler colonialism. This approach thus provides a common framework for fields of research that until then were thought to be disparate. Without relativising the genocide of the European Jews, which was in the minds of Lemkin and the UN Convention, new cross references are nevertheless being trialled."  ·  H-Soz-u-Kult

"This volume offers an important contribution to the discussion on methodological and conceptional foundations of the notion of genocide in that it identifies the latter more precisely and anchors it more firmly in historical epistemology than has been the case up to now in Genocide Studies… Second, this volume reflects new developments in Genocide Studies in its focus on ‘Genocide from Below’… Third, some contributions stand out because of their daring and unconventional approaches [which should be] an encouragement for others to abandon scholarly blinkers."  ·  Sehepunkte

"…a meticulously researched and deftly edited scholarly reference…strongly recommended to community library history collections and any non-specialist general reader with a strong interest in world history."   ·  The Midwest Book Review

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

A. Dirk Moses teaches history at the University of Sydney. He has published widely on modern Germany and Comparative Genocide Studies. His publications include Genocide and Settler Society (Berghahn Books 2004) and German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (CUP 2007)

Series: Volume 12, War and Genocide

Contents

Preface 
A. Dirk Moses
SECTION I: INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CONCEPTUAL QUESTIONS
Chapter 1. Empire, Colony, Genocide: Keywords and the Philosophy of History
A. Dirk Moses
Chapter 2. Anti-colonialism in Western Political Thought: The Colonial Origins of the Concept of Genocide
Andrew Fitzmaurice
Chapter 3. Are Settler-Colonies Inherently Genocidal? Re-reading Lemkin
John Docker
Chapter 4. Structure and Event: Settler Colonialism, Time, and the Question of Genocide
Patrick Wolfe
Chapter 5. "Crime without a Name": The Case for "Indigenocide"
Raymond Evans
Chapter 6. Colonialism and Genocides: Towards an Analysis of the Settler Archive of the European Imagination
Lorenzo Veracini
Chapter 7. Biopower and Modern Genocide
Dan Stone
SECTION II: EMPIRE, COLONIZATION AND GENOCIDE
Chapter 8. Empires, Native Peoples, and Genocide
Mark Levene
Chapter 9. Colonialism, History, and Genocide in Cambodia, 1747–2005
Ben Kiernan
Chapter 10. Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea
Ann Curthoys
Chapter 11. "The aborigines... were never annihilated, and still they are becoming extinct": Settler Imperialism and Genocide in 19th-century America and Australia
Norbert Finzsch
Chapter 12. Navigating the Cultural Encounter: Blackfoot Religious Resistance in Canada (c. 1870-1930)
Blanca Tovías
Chapter 13. Genocide in German Southwest Africa and German East Africa
Dominik J. Schaller
Chapter 14. Inner Colonization and Inter-imperial Conflict: The Destruction of the Armenians and the End of the Ottoman Empire
Donald Bloxham
Chapter 15. Inner Colonialism and the Question of Genocide in Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union
Robert Geraci
Chapter 16. Colonialism and Genocide in Nazi-occupied Poland and Ukraine
David Furber and Wendy Lower
SECTION III: SUBALTERN GENOCIDE
Chapter 17. Genocide from Below: The Great Inca Rebellion of 1780–82 in the Southern Andes
David Cahill
Chapter 18. Political Loyalties and the Genocide of a Settler Community: The Eurasians in Indonesia, 1945-46
Robert Cribb
Chapter 19. Savages, Subjects, and Sovereigns: Conjunctions of Modernity, Genocide, and Colonialism
Alexander L. Hinton
Notes on Contributors
Select Bibliography
Index