Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (review)

In Conquest, Australian historian David Day has written a stimulating work that attempts to shift our perspective on the movement of peoples to lands already inhabited by others from the current paradigm of colonialism, which primarily entails political control of other territories and peoples, to a new and more encompassing concept of "supplanting societies." Day defines a supplanting society as a "society that moves onto the land of another with the intention of making that land its own" (p. 6). A new paradigm, as Day suggests, enables a deeper understanding of the constant movement of peoples throughout history to the present and places developments from colonization to genocide within a broader context that elucidates their commonalities.

Using examples from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas, primarily since 1500, Day convincingly demonstrates that humanity has lived and will continue to live in "a world of shifting boundaries" (p. 7), in which arriving societies seek to supplant existing ones. Newcomers establish a legitimate claim by "discovering" land inhabited by others or by using events in a distant past to justify their title. They then lay effective claim to the land by exploring, fortifying, peopling, and developing it. Ultimately, they attempt to absorb, expel, or annihilate the indigenous peoples. In Day's examples of the United States and of European justifications for imperialism, his discussion recalls the important work of Michael Adas, although his notes and bibliography indicate that he apparently has not read Adas's books,Dominance by Design (2006) and Machines as the Measure of Men (1990).

Day discerns a "genocidal imperative" that drives supplanting societies (p. 178). His numerous examples include the European conquest and colonization of the Americas; the Boers in South Africa; the Japanese colonization of neighboring islands, Korea, and Manchuria; the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians; the British dispossession and near destruction of the Aborigines of Australia; the German annihilation of the Herero tribe in southwest Africa; the Holocaust and the Nazi attempt to conquer and colonize the Soviet Union; and Israeli treatment of Palestinians.

Some readers may find Day's new paradigm unsettling and even repugnant, because it sets the Holocaust, the Nazi murder of the European Jews, in a global context of population movements that have effectively resulted in the genocide of indigenous peoples. This context,Day candidly acknowledges, strips the Holocaust of claims "for . . . a uniqueness that it does not warrant" (p. 178). That contention, however controversial, follows logically from Day's valuable attempt to contextualize and understand the many attempts, some more successful than others, at genocide which punctuate global history.

Day's point about the Holocaust drives home insights that historians of Nazi economics and imperialism such as Adam Tooze and Mark Mazower, in their respective studies The Wages of Destruction (2007) and Hitler's Empire (2008), have recently emphasized. Hitler was aware of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians during the First World War, but he ardently admired Great Britain's imperialism in general and in particular desired to emulate its conquest of North America. In fact, he took British North America as a model for his eastward expansion into the Soviet Union to secure Lebensraum, or living space, annihilate the Jews, and enslave the Slavs. The United States, Hitler's ultimate enemy in his quest for global power, had enslaved Africans, annihilated the Native Americans, and secured living space and raw materials in its domination of the North American continent. Hitler planned to condense the North American experience of more than three centuries into a shorter period of violent expansion on the European continent within the twentieth century to enable his "Aryan race" to establish a similar base in eastern Europe to contest for global power.

Hitler's perception of the British experience in North America horrifies some students, who immediately seek to distance the United States from such Nazi notions. They thereby ignore or deny the facts that German racist thought of Hitler's day was well aware of and shared...