Massive state violence in Latin America reached its peak in the twentieth century during the cold war under the National Security Doctrine (NSD). This doctrine provided an ideological justification for dictatorships in the region in the 1960s and 1970s, and even influenced regimes in countries where there was no breakdown of democracy, such as Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico. The NSD identified a new type of enemy – the ‘internal enemy’; a new form of warfare – the counter-insurgency campaign; and a new role for the armed forces – controlling the domestic population.

In March 1932 the Japanese government annexed northeast China and set up the Manchukuo puppet state there. In reality, Manchukuo was a Japanese colony governed by the most powerful of the Japanese army units, the Kwantung Army. In February 1933, the Kwantung Army invaded the Chinese province of Rehe, and as a result, all areas north of the Great Wall and north of Beijing came under Japanese control.

Did genocide exist in prehistory before the formation of states? With Europe as focus, this article seeks an answer to this seminal question by coupling three lines of archaeological evidence: warfare, abnormal graves and genetics. When warfare is waged against other groups, there is a risk of genocidal events of unconstrained violence. Warfare became more frequent when Neolithic farmers, and later pastoral herders, migrated into the land in several expansions that eventually absorbed or replaced original residents. In the Bronze Age, along with professional military units and higher population densities, abnormal graves increased significantly in frequency. Indeed, warfare is often in evidence in abnormal graves, which call to mind recent examples of genocidal massacres and mass graves. At times, however, there is no apparent reason for the deviant interment. The victims in these graves evidently shared some form of identity. Young women and adolescents are often in minority, probably because they were taken captives and incorporated in the captors’ society as wives and labourers. The conclusion is that genocidal moments took place. Genetic and archaeological evidence corroborates that exposed groups’ possibility to continue reproducing themselves economically, culturally and biologically became restricted. Epidemics is an unknown variable.

The Genocide Convention provides an internationally recognised, though restricted, rubric for evaluating possible instances of genocide. First, perpetrators must evince ‘intent to destroy’ a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Second, they must commit at least one of the five specified ‘acts’ of genocide against one of those four ‘protected’ groups. In addition, the Genocide Convention criminalises the following acts:

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

By March 1793 revolutionary France was at war with Austria, Prussia and Spain, and Britain was preparing a naval blockade. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts. In the west of France the levy was the trigger for massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the region itself, as ‘the Vendée’. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794. Estimates have ranged from exaggerated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and 30,000 republican troops. The rebellion and its repression left deep and durable scars on French society and politics. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as a regrettable but necessary response to a military ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis, whereas right-wing politicians and historians from the west of France have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French republic. This chapter argues that ‘the Vendée’ was not a genocide: huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéan people nor because they were devout Catholics. This was instead a brutal civil war studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’.

This chapter explores the pervasiveness of narratives of genocide and mass violence in Israelite and early Jewish sources and relate this genocidal impulse to the interethnic violence that occurred in the ancient Levant in different periods. It argues that various historical factors contributed to the prevalence of extreme violence in these sources: the brutality of imperialistic aggression carried out against the Israelites by several ancient Near Eastern empires; the demographic shifts that contributed to material scarcities in the Iron Age II and the Hellenistic-Roman era; and the dichotomized processes of ethnic boundary-marking that characterize so many Israelite and early Jewish texts. The merging of these factors generated an abundance of literature depicting genocide and other forms of mass violence.

The role of climate (including abrupt changes and extreme weather) in modern-era violence and conflict has received considerable attention in the past two decades from scholars in multiple fields, yet the mechanisms underlying (and even the reality of) such a role remains contested. Concern over projected climatic changes as a trigger for intensified violence, including mass killing and genocide, nonetheless continues to propel research. Data limitations are frequently cited as a challenge, yet comparatively few studies have turned to the millennia of human history documenting a broad range of violence against diverse social and environmental backgrounds. This chapter reviews evidence for ‘pathways’ by which climate may have contributed to violence and conflict in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. It emphasized religious, ideological, and ethnic dimensions that may have been catalysed by the psychological and material impacts of extreme weather to promote violence and conflict. In particular, we study state-enacted violence by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (909-611 BCE) and internal revolt in Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BCE). Newly available ice-core-based dates of explosive volcanism allow the examination of societal responses to the ensuing hydroclimatic shocks (also potentially ‘ominous’ volcanic dust-veils). These can be shown to closely precede documented increases in violence and conflict, including external warfare and internal revolt.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

This chapter examines and compares three genocidal events in the early modern Caribbean and Mesoamerica: the massacres of Xaragua (Hispaniola, 1503), Cholula (Mexico, 1519), and Toxcatl (Mexico, 1520; also known as the Massacre of Templo Mayor). Each of the three mass killings marked a political and military turning point in the history of Spanish military expansion in the Americas. They share other important characteristics, too. These massacres were entirely or partially planned and executed by European actors, namely Spanish officials and military entrepreneurs (conquistadores) under the leadership of fray Nicolás de Ovando, Hernán Cortés and Pedro de Alvarado respectively. Each event can be described as a genocidal massacre targeting a specific community because of its membership of a larger group: the primary objective of the European perpetrators was to provide an object lesson for the surviving members of that group (Leo Kuper). In each case, European perpetrators sought to avoid scrutiny and censure from within their own group by explaining and justifying their actions as a pre-emptive strike against indigenous plots. The tangible involvement of indigenous actors — altogether crucial in the case of the Massacre of Cholula ax— further complicates the historical analysis of a complex sources.

The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

The Holocaust began eighty years ago, and yet disagreements persist on such crucial aspects as the decision-making process that resulted in increasingly brutal policies leading up to indiscriminate murder. While the different escalating measures are clearly identified, there are still difficulties in agreeing on the precise moments of transition from one policy to another. Many factors account for this, not all specific to this singular historical event. First, there are various modalities of the crime of genocide. Different measures such as the Convention spelled out – killing; inflicting bodily or mental harm; measures leading to the ‘physical destruction in whole or in part’ of the group; impeding reproduction; and child abductions – could be implemented concurrently. Their combination multiplied the genocidal nature of the policy pursued. Moreover, if we focus on the way in which Nazi leaders conceived anti-Jewish policy globally, we can observe the succession of various increasingly radical schemes. Additionally, one can identify the contingencies of German anti-Jewish policy: several proposed programmes were barely initiated or dropped altogether, with the exception of the last one – mass murder.

From Antiquity through contemporary times, depriving populations of access to food, water and other means to sustain life has been a central tool of genocide. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population can be used to pursue policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the acts that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. When described as famine, these calamities are often presented as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or low nutrition. Drawing on historical examples that range from ancient Carthage, colonial famines, the Nazi Hungerplan, Communist agricultural and political policies, manipulation of humanitarian aid during the war in Bosnia, and genocides in the 21st century, this chapter considers the complications of assessing intent and formulating responses to mass starvation. It offers a wide-ranging overview of the critical concepts, legal developments, and key issues at stake when deliberate deprivation is imposed on a people as part of genocidal policies.

The late nineteenth century saw the height of European expansion across the globe, including the ‘scramble for Africa’. International humanitarian activism and legal initiatives arose in attempts to deal with crises that followed. In 1890 the African American reformer George Washington Williams applied the phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ to the tragedy in the Congo Free State under its proprietor, the Belgian monarch Leopold II (r. 1865–1909). In 1899, the International Hague Convention of the Laws and Customs of War on Land specifically prohibited the shelling of undefended towns or cities, and contracting parties pledged that ‘individual lives and private property, as well as religious convictions and liberty, must be respected’. The subsequent Hague Convention of 1907 codified the laws of war and the concept of ‘crimes against humanity’. In Britain, E. D. Morel and Roger Casement, with the support of others including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain and Joseph Conrad, formed the Congo Reform Association (1904–13) to address the humanitarian crisis in that African country. Its establishment was followed by the 1909 merger of the Aborigines’ Protection Society with the Anti-Slavery Society.

This Introduction to Volume I of The Cambridge World History of Genocide, which covers the ancient, medieval, and early modern worlds, raises questions about the nature of premodern genocide, about the meaning of genocide and genocidal intent in the premodern era, and about both perpetrators and victim groups, and about the scale, techniques, and ideologies of genocide in that long historical period in comparison to those of genocides committed in modern times. The chapter considers whether or not genocide can be considered a ‘transhistorical phenomenon’. It also asks whether mass violence in the pre-modern and early modern periods occurred in a different moral context than that of modern times, presenting some differing views on this question. Finally the chapter introduces the substantive chapters of the volume, and how they variously examine material, political, sociocultural, and ideological factors that contributed to premodern outbreaks of genocide, as well as noting some changes over time from prehistory to the early modern era.

Adolf Hitler had a dismissive view of the Slavs, inherited in part from the late nineteenth-century German nationalist proponents of the Kulturkampf (culture struggle) and the Drang nach Osten (urge to the east). His ideas also derived from his personal experience with the Vienna of his youth; he recalled ‘the embodiment of racial defilement’ and the ‘race conglomerate’ with its ‘alien mix of nationalities’, that he felt destroyed the positive characteristics of Germandom. During and after World War One, his views conformed to the blended ideology of antisemitism, anti-Slavism and colonialism that characterised much of German right-wing thinking about the east.