Although China’s Taiping Rebellion (1851-64) is perhaps history’s bloodiest civil war it has remained largely beyond the purview of genocide scholars, and its historiography has generally portrayed it as a “progressive” or “revolutionary” movement. This essay argues, however, that in its alien ideology derived from Protestantism and pre-Confucian millenarianism guided by the visions of Hong Xiuquan (1813-1864); radical attempts at social leveling; dismantling of Confucian culture and society; and elimination of select ethnic and religious groups, this attempt to create a theocratic “heavenly kingdom of great peace” (taiping tianguo) bears the hallmarks of current definitions of genocide and departs in crucial ways from even the most massive and sanguinary conflicts marking the Chinese past.

In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade of “extermination” and “expurgation” against the heretics supposedly infesting the lands of the count of Toulouse. What is now known as the “Albigensian Crusade” lasted twenty-one years and was the first holy war in which Christians were guaranteed salvation by killing other Christians. The massacres during the crusade, especially at Béziers in 1209, were “genocidal moments.” The victims, though, were neither an ethnic, national, or racial group. The victims were arguably a regional or possibly a cultural group, but such groups are not covered by the modern legal definition of genocide. Nevertheless, they were deliberately targeted for destruction. Despite accusations of heresy, the victims were not initially a self-consciously different religious group either. Crucially, they were not “Cathars,” which is what most medieval historians and genocide scholars assume the victims to have been. “Catharism” as a medieval heresy never existed; it was an invention of nineteenth-century scholars trying to understand the Albigensian crusade more “scientifically” and less confessionally. Finally, were the individual testimonies collected by the first inquisitions into heretical depravity, established in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, analogous to the memories of individuals who witnessed or survived genocides collected by modern tribunals?

Gruesome instances of mass killing have punctuated the 6000 year-long sequence of the prehistoric South American Andes, an area that encompasses modern-day Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and northern Argentina and Chile. Accurately gauging the intensity and intent of violence—in particular mass extermination—among people who left no form of written language, requires a forensic skeletal approach that informs on both the cause and manner of death, as well as the nature of corpse disposal or burial, which itself reveals how bodies were treated after death.

Time and again, aggressors in the Andes marshalled common tactics, including the sacking of towns and sanctuaries, instituting systems of mass displacement, controlling reproduction among women, moving children from subservient groups, and orchestrating the maiming and murder of both formidable rivals and civilian noncombatants alike. These violent episodes of eradication may best be understood as outbreaks of local communal strife, limited in both place and time. These genocidal moments capture the collective murder of targeted sub-population groups. The physical and material record helps us identify catastrophic death assemblages, reconstruct the profiles of victim and perpetrators, discern the methods of murder, and even deduce underlying motivations for attack.

A question not asked to this point in the study of genocide by all the scholars associated with this work in the various disciplines is whether or not there something inherent in the very social construction we call “religion” that lends itself, adapts itself, all-too-easily to those communities— both nation-states and non-nation-state actors—that perpetrate genocide, either in actuality or in potential? Thus, this contribution begins with something of a theoretical look-see vis-à-vis that nexus between religion and genocide by suggesting applicable definitions for both and further outlining the constituent factors of each. (NB: There are, in truth, uncomfortable similarities between religious groups and genocidal perpetrator groups which, to my understanding, have never been addressed or explored.) To further bolster my overall argument—that religion, however defined and understood, is a “participating factor” (my preferred term) in all genocides, both historically and contemporarily—a series of case studies, using Raphael Lemkin’s tri-partite division from his incomplete History of Genocide—Antiquity, Middle Ages, Modern Times—are examined to determine whether my thesis holds.

In October 1945 the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were charged, for the first time in international law, with ‘genocide’. The Nuremberg indictments included, under war crimes, ‘deliberate and systematic genocide, viz., the extermination of racial and national groups, against the civilian populations of certain occupied territories in order to destroy particular races and classes of people and national, racial, or religious groups, particularly Jews, Poles, and Gypsies and others’.1

Allegations over atrocities committed in Ireland by the English throughout the early modern period have generated bitter debate but little genuine insight. The Cromwellian Wars of the 1650s, however, are widely acknowledged as one of the most traumatic episodes in Irish history. According to English accounts, Ireland suffered a demographic collapse in the face of total war, which included the widespread killing of captured soldiers and Catholic clergy, as well as the deliberate targeting of the indigenous community and the destruction of the country’s infrastructure. These brutal tactics triggered a major famine, which in turn enabled the spread of diseases such as plague and dysentery, killing tens of thousands in the process. Following their military victory, the English transplanted thousands of Catholic landowners, and their dependents, to make way for a new Protestant settler community, and forcibly transported significant numbers of men, women and children across the Atlantic to work in New World colonies. Few today would argue that the excesses of the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland constitute a major war crime but to date nobody has specifically charged the government of the English republic with genocide. This chapter will determine whether in fact there is a case to answer.

Genocide has a way of imposing silence. Part of its purpose is to erase history, and human voices. This series of three volumes aims to contribute to breaking the silence that so often follows genocidal outbreaks. These volumes attempt to document and understand this global phenomenon. The term “genocide,” as a way of describing the “practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups,” was coined in 1943, when Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) penned the preface to his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Five years later the United Nations General Assembly unanimously adopted the Genocide Convention. But Lemkin considered genocide to have much older roots. He had set about writing – but did not complete before his death – a three-volume history of genocide from ancient times, in which he argued that the phenomenon had “followed humanity throughout history.”

The term genocide has often been applied to the Mongol conquests in the thirteenth century, as well as many other pre-modern groups. Legally, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide can only be applied anachronistically to the Mongols, but the Mongols have been accused of genocide of the Tatars (1202) as well as the Tangut (1227). Yet, these accusations often misunderstand the events themselves, not to mention the motives of not only the Mongols, but also the purpose of those actions. This is not to say that the Mongols did not employ massacres and other actions of mass destruction. Indeed, massacres were used widely, but often more judiciously that one might expect. Indeed, rape, pillage and plunder was standard not only for the Mongols but virtually all military organizations of the era.

While the legal application of the UN Convention definition may be impractical, nonetheless, investigating its attribution to the Mongols can be a useful exercise as it can help us understand not only the era and methods of violence employed, but also how the Mongols understood and rationalized their actions. Of greater significance is the employment of Leo Kuper’s concept of “genocidal massacres”. This concept cannot be considered anachronistic in any sense. Furthermore, it lends itself to a broader understanding of whether these “genocidal massacres” lead to a broader pattern of actions that might properly fall under the umbrella of genocide as defined by the UN Convention on the basic principle described by Douglas Adams, “If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands”.

Additionally, this study cannot be confined strictly to episodes of violence. In order to properly understand genocide in the context of the Mongol Empire, or any entity, one must understand other policies (both direct and indirect) that may be connected to the genocidal act. This is all the more important as the Mongol Empire emerged from the steppes which in the 12th century had numerous tribal entities into a single polity known as the Yeke Monggol Ulus. The use of the term ulus is particularly important. While it eventually acquired the meaning of “patrimony” and then later “nation or country” as it does today (Mongolia’s name in Mongolian is Mongol Uls), in the thirteenth century it was only used by the Mongols to refer to the various Mongol lineages. Other non-Mongol groups were considered irgen or people. There was a clear identification of the other. Thus, we must also consider whether the establishment of the Yeke Monggol Ulus was simply the melding of diverse groups, whether through voluntary or coercive actions, or perhaps something a bit different and did this Mongols apply massacres, deportations, and others aspects related to genocide and extermination as instruments of state creation in the creation of the Yeke Monggol Ulus.

From the earliest period of British invasion of the lands now referred to as Australia, white authorities have removed Indigenous children from their communities. Sana Nakata even states that ‘the history of Australia is a history of interventions into the childhoods of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’. In this chapter, we describe how Indigenous child removal has been perpetrated in Australia since 1914. We consider the period from 1914 until the 1980s, during which the removal of Indigenous children was explicitly enabled under a growing range of laws and policies. While it is impossible to calculate the exact number of children removed during this period, the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (henceforth ‘the National Inquiry’), headed by federal judge Sir Ronald Wilson, concluded in 1997 that ‘Most [Indigenous] families have been affected, in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children.’ In this chapter, we also consider the contemporary context, from the 1990s onwards, in which Australian governments have apologised for the historic Stolen Generations but continue to remove Indigenous children from their families in rising numbers.

Nazi camps were among the most important sites of mass murder and genocide between 1939 and 1945. National Socialism, however, did not invent ‘concentration camps’. They were an institution already known during the second half of the nineteenth century that governments built before, during and after World War Two. Camps as a space of confinement for civilians who were not sentenced by the judiciary or interned as enemy aliens were both an addition to the existing prison system and a completely separate phenomenon. And camps installed under Nazi German hegemony could look quite different, from the use of empty industrial buildings to small areas of a single barracks or the standardised look of concentration camps, to large spaces confined by barbed wire and watchtowers with barracks and specific functional parts, like guards’ facilities or forced labour workshops. The latter shaped the general representation of camps both during the war and in post-war memory. And camps were different from another specific Nazi German institution, the ghetto for Jews, a space of isolation, starvation and confinement, and death before transporting the remaining population to killing centres.

In 2018, the UN-sponsored Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) found that Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime had perpetrated two genocides while in power from 1975 to 1979. The Trial Chamber of the ECCC’s hybrid international-national court in Phnom Penh convicted the two surviving top leaders of that regime. Both Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s number 2, and Khieu Samphan, the regime’s head of state from 1976 to 1979, were found guilty of the genocide of Cambodia’s ethnic Vietnamese minority. Samphan thus became the first head of state to be convicted of genocide in an international court. The Trial Chamber also found Nuon Chea guilty of the genocide of the country’s ethnic Cham Muslim minority.1 The ECCC had previously, in 2014, convicted both men of crimes against humanity for the persecution and mass murder of members of their country’s Khmer majority population, and they were already serving life sentences in Phnom Penh.2

This chapter takes up a half-forgotten novel fragment of 1941-2 by André Malraux based on first-hand accounts from the 1914 War, as well as two, neglected photographs of targeted civilian casualties of poison gas made in a Macedonian town in 1917 by the German Jewish criminologist R. A. Reiss. It moves beyond conventional archives to uncover complex histories, interweaving cultural artifacts with archival material to represent at two distinct moments the experimental poison gas war on the eastern front. Prussic acid -- by 1917, the base for an early form of Zyklon – provides the constant in these episodes. Eastern Europe, an area historically associated with colonialism and post-colonialism, furnished the choice terrain in 1915-17 of poison gas warfare, and so, premonitions of a Nazi continental imperialism which relied on gas, a weapon designed for colonial use, to enforce racial hierarchies. These cultural artifacts –Malraux’s Bolimów/Bolgako and Reiss’s Monástir -- map the head of the “Zyklon trail,” in Lemkin’s phrase. The experimental poison gas war on the eastern front substitutes premonitory vistas for the classic, western battlescapes of Wilfred Owen’s poetry by redrawing the templates and boundaries of the developmental logic of Nazi “scientific violence” amidst occupation, subjugation, and ethnic/racial warfare.

The academic literature on the two major phases of violence preceding the Armenian genocide (1915-1923), namely the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909, remains in its infancy. While most historians have embraced the continuity approach which claims that the Armenian genocide was the culmination of the two other periods of massacres, only a handful of historians have argued that these episodes of violence should be analyzed and assessed as separate historical events by positioning them in their respective historical contexts. Following the latter approach the following entry analyzes the Hamidian Massacres (1894-1896) and the Adana Massacres of 1909 both of which had catastrophic impact on the Armenians of the Empire. While the former took place during the despotic period of Sultan Abdülhamid II and led to the massacring of more than 200,000 Armenians in different parts of the Ottoman Empire, the latter took place after Young Turks Revolution of 1908 in the provinces of Adana and Aleppo leading to the death of more than 20,000 Armenians. The Hamidian massacres demonstrates the premediated nature of the massacres and the role of the central government. The Adana massacres were organized locally with the participation of the both the provincial authorities as well as local agents and their cronies.

For decades, historians have expressed divergent perspectives on the question of genocide in North America. These debates often hinged on legal technicalities and narrow political definitions of genocidal “intent.” This chapter takes a more robust view of the causes of genocidal violence early colonial North America. Paying particular attention to the contested terrain of historical causation, the following chapter encourages readers to remain cognizant of the overlapping, intersecting, and competing ideas, motives, and patterns of mass violence that shaped, and reshaped, North America prior to the Revolutionary era. From New England to Michigan Territory, the Chesapeake Bay to southern Appalachia, Indigenous nations navigated preexisting rivalries while also grappling with the arrival of often-aggressive European colonizers. As the bloody history of the Kikotan people in early-seventeenth-century Virginia reveals, the perpetrators of genocide came in many forms. And when violence did come, it caused social discord and the loss of life and culture as the violence of settler greed, ambition, a brute force took root and extended across eastern North America like a “spreading fire.”

Guatemala’s indigenous population stands today at approximately 40 per cent of the overall population, and incorporates the majority Maya and the smaller Xinca and Garifuna ethnic groups.1 Since the colonial encounter, indigenous Guatemalans have been marginalised systematically from the country’s political, economic and cultural spheres and have fallen victim to aggressive institutional, structural and interpersonal racism propagated and instrumentalised by religious and military leaders, politicians and the wealthy landowning oligarchy. Such beliefs and the behaviour they undergird are embedded within Guatemalan society and employed broadly by the non-indigenous at all social and economic levels, largely determining the norms and attitudes that mould intergroup relations. (See Map 23.1.)

The mass killing that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1930s was part and parcel of the interlocking Bolshevik projects of state building and the refashioning of society. The process of radically transforming the social, economic and political life of Russia had already begun already under Vladimir Ilich Lenin during the Great October Revolution, starting in 1917, and cost millions of lives, most during the protracted civil war and international interventions of 1918–21. But the genocide of Soviet citizens in the 1930s was directly related to Josef Stalin’s ascendance to power during what has been called the ‘Stalin Revolution’, or the ‘Second Revolution’, which centred on crash programmes of forced industrialisation and agricultural collectivisation inaugurated in 1928. Simultaneously, Stalin consolidated his dictatorial power. By 1930, writes Oleg Khlevniuk, ‘the Stalinization of the Politburo was completed’ and Stalin was ‘confirmed as the sole leader of the Politburo’.

In 1592 Japan’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi mobilized a massive force and invaded Chosŏn Korea. Upon landing on Korea, the Japanese slaughtered almost all Koreans they could find in the fort of Pusan – an atrocity they called “a festival of blood.” In the sixth month of 1593 the Japanese attacked a local town (Chinju) and killed thousands of Koreans in it. Why did the Japanese troops commit atrocity until their invasion ended in failure in 1598? In addition to act of brutality which they had praticed for long in their country, the Japanese troops got frustrated as their war of invasion was falling apart. They directed their anger and vexation to Korean people. A widespread genocide took place in the second half of 1597 when the Japanese resumed a massive attack on Chosŏn’s southern provinces. Hideyoshi was livid that the Koreans who staged “rebellions” for defense spoiled his military campaign. Hideyoshi ordered his generals: “I will send more troops year after year, kill Koreans one by one, and empty their country.” The freewheeling atrocities the Japanese troops committed in Chosŏn reflected Hideyoshi’s senseless and ruthless push for Chosŏn’s submission to his authority that he thought was boundless.