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Reviewed by:
  • Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
  • Charles Tilly
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur. By Ben Kiernan (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007) 724 pp. $40.00

Kiernan’s mammoth chronicle of mass killing will divide readers into two categories. Those who appreciate well-written sourcebooks containing narratives of vicious violence unencumbered by analysis will applaud the one-stop emporium of cases that the book provides. Those who (like me) expect a big new book on genocide and extermination to advance beyond existing knowledge by challenging old explanations and/or proposing new ones will leave its pages disappointed. Blood and Soil applies the criteria of the United Nations’ (1948) convention on genocide—acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnical, or religious group as such—retroactively, searching through history for cases that conform to the un criterion.

Kiernan musters his many cases in support of the claim that four themes recur in mass killing across human history: cults of antiquity, fetishes in favor of agriculture (therefore in opposition to nonagriculturalists), ethnic enmity (which the book expands to include racial and religious hostility), and territorial expansion by the perpetrators. This is universalizing history. Kiernan presents his cases under three main headings. “Imperial Expansion” covers genocide (especially Rome’s annihilation of Carthage) in the ancient world, Spanish conquest in the Americas, European genocides in East Asia from 1400 to 1600, and comparable massacres in early modern Southeast Asia. “Settler Colonialism” gives us the English in sixteenth-century Ireland, colonial North America, and nineteenth-century Australia; genocide in the postcolonial United States; and settler genocides in Africa. The section on twentieth-century [End Page 247] genocide reviews massacres of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, German and Nazi genocide, Japanese atrocities in East Asia, Soviet terror, Maoism in China, and mass killing in Cambodia and Rwanda. An epilogue slips in the cases of Bangladesh, East Timor, Guatemala, Iraq, Bosnia, the Sudan, and al-Qaeda.

Kiernan closes by reasserting the generality of his four themes in mass killing, which after 600 pages have mutated into “race, antiquity, agriculture, and expansion” (605). He leaves the logical status of the four themes unclear. Are they necessary conditions for mass killing, jointly sufficient conditions for mass killing, separate elements that independently increase the probability of mass killing, or simply characteristics that frequently accompany mass killing? The book neither identifies systematic variations in genocide from time to time or place to place that require explanation nor proposes explanations for change, variation, and continuity in genocide. Its exclusive concentration on genocidal attempts that produced massive deaths deprives us of the opportunity to learn under what conditions popular resistance or third-party intervention prevented or mitigated massacres. Its descriptions, furthermore, concentrate overwhelmingly on ideologies and actions of perpetrators rather than on analyzing victims’ responses or interactions between perpetrators and victims. Kiernan’s forty-three-page treatment of English killing in Ireland between 1565 and 1603, for example, portrays Shane O’Neill as a rebel against English rule but neither as a military contender for the earldom of Tyrone nor as the Irish lord who accepted Queen Elizabeth’s support in his bid to head the O’Neill clan. Such are the perils of universalizing history.

Charles Tilly
Columbia University
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