Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History

Front Cover
A. Dirk Moses
Berghahn Books, 2008 - 491 pages

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."

 

Contents

Chapter 2
42
The Colonial
55
Chapter 3
81
Chapter 4
99
Chapter 5
133
Chapter 6
146
Biopower and Modern Genocide
162
Empires Native Peoples and Genocide
183
Chapter 12
271
Chapter 13
296
Chapter 14
325
Chapter 15
339
Chapter 17
403
Chapter 18
424
Chapter 19
440
Select Bibliography
461

Chapter 9
205
Chapter 10
229
Chapter 11
253
Contributors
473
Index
479
Copyright

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About the author (2008)

A. Dirk Moses Dirk Moses is chair of global and colonial history at the European University Institute, Florence / 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)

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