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

Within the broader context of comparative historical analysis, the anthology Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History is an important contribution to the study of mass atrocity. Its nineteen chapters describe the enormous human toll that colonialist pretensions and imperialist aspirations have exacted. The authors seek above all to explain the linkages between the transition to post-colonialism—a transition that marks the emergence of modern states—and genocide. Though the leitmotif tends to be events occurring within Australia, the authors examine a wide range of genocidal events, experiences, and practices across time and space in ways that bespeak the near universality of genocidal conquest and cruelty.

The figure of Raphael Lemkin continues to loom large over the complex discourse presented throughout these readings. Lemkin’s juridical understanding was informed by a political anthropology that framed not only the definition, but also the conceptual application of the term “genocide” within an interpretation of the connections between genocide and colonialism. Many authors, including A. Dirk Moses (Chapter 1) and especially John Docker (Chapter 3), draw our attention to Lemkin’s concept of cultural genocide and, in particular, to his interest in settler colonialism. Lemkin’s inspiration leads numerous authors to reflect on variations in the pattern of genocide within the histories they outline.

As a consequence, the authors describe the events under study variously as “intrinsically colonial” (p. 9), “total social practice” (pp. 13, 312), “cultural genocide” (pp. 12, 90), “society-led” vs. “state-led” genocide (pp. 110, 316–17), “structural genocide” (p. 119), “genocidal moments” (p. 121), “indigenocide” (p. 141), “genocidal process, policy, and relations” (pp. 244–47), “genocide as de-territorialization and re-territorialization” (p. 261), “genocidal warfare” (p. 302), “figurative genocide” (p. 355), and “genocide by assimilation” (p. 359). These conceptual extrapolations are no mere semantic exercise; they serve to illuminate their authors’ systematic engagement in sustained historical research that is designed to show how conquest and occupation of territory unfold in ways that can, under certain circumstances, provoke vile manifestations of grotesque brutality. Often, perpetrators justify those manifestations as integral to a civilizing or ennobling historic mission.

To emphasize that “colonialism demoralized the colonizer,” Moses refers to such justification as “the phallic logic of trauma competition” (p. 35). Patrick Wolfe in turn comments that “eliminatory strategies all reflect the centrality of land” (p. 103). He concludes that “the summary liquidation of indigenous people . . . refers to a structural feature of settler colonial society that is historically continuous” (p. 105). Raymond Evans insists upon the relevance of the concept of “indigenocide” and states that “it inheres in the very process of forcibly usurping occupied territory and perpetuating that takeover by conquering, holding, and re-populating it in blatant disregard of the consequences upon its dispossessed occupiers, whatever those consequences may be” (p. 141; emphasis in the original). Mark Levene argues that the “basic trajectories or tendencies” in imperialism provoked a statist political competition among colonizing powers that accelerated the initial assaults on various territories and indigenous peoples. Levene contributes an important theoretical observation by indicating that what provoked regimes’ genocidal rage against such populations was their resistance to “the colonizing project” (p. 191). Such resistance proved to be “the break each placed on the colonizing project [that] precipitated, in somewhat different ways and different degrees, explosions of colonizer exterminatory overkill” (p. 191). Levene concludes, “the extent and tenacity of native resistance—blocking off in the process an assumed imperial developmental trajectory—massively ratcheted up the contours of violence, ultimately producing imperial reactions that were massively disproportionate to the purely military task in hand” (p. 193).

Numerous instances described in this collection illustrate the dynamics combining conquest of land, devastation of culture, catastrophic cruelty, and wanton disregard for the moral implications of genocidal practice. Ann Curthoys’ treatment of genocide in Tasmania, Norbert Finzsch’s study of settler imperialism and genocide in nineteenth-century America and Australia, Ben Kiernan...