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14 results

The Cambridge World History of Genocide
  • Volume 2, Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One
  • Edited by Ned Blackhawk, Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley, Rebe Taylor
  • General editor Ben Kiernan
  • Published online:
    23 June 2023
    Print publication:
    04 May 2023
  • Volume II documents and analyses genocide and extermination throughout the early modern and modern eras. It tracks their global expansion as European and Asian imperialisms, and Euroamerican settler colonialism, spread across the globe before the Great War, forging new frontiers and impacting Indigenous communities in Europe, Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia. Twenty-five historians with expertise on specific regions explore examples on five continents, providing comparisons of nine cases of conventional imperialism with nineteen of settler colonialism, and offering a substantial basis for assessing the various factors leading to genocide. This volume also considers cases where genocide did not occur, permitting a global consideration of the role of imperialism and settler-Indigenous relations from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. It ends with six pre-1918 cases from Australia, China, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe that can be seen as 'premonitions' of the major twentieth-century genocides in Europe and Asia.

  • 20 - Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871

  • from Part III - Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides
  • Edited by Ned Blackhawk, Yale University, Connecticut, Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut, Benjamin Madley, University of California, Los Angeles, Rebe Taylor, University of Tasmania
  • General editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Genocide
    Published online:
    23 June 2023
    Print publication:
    04 May 2023, pp 481-507

  • Summary

    The British colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) began in 1803. There was an estimated 6,000 Aborigines (Palawa) living on the island with a history dating back over 40,000 years. By 1835, there were just over 100 Palawa living in forced exile on one of Tasmania’s smaller offshore islands. Only two residents remained when the government closed the Aboriginal Settlement in 1871. This chapter traces the history of Tasmania’s colonisation from 1803 to 1871 and finds that the British committed acts against the Palawa that meet the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: killings, child removals, and creating conditions unconducive to sustaining life. Tasmania has been cited as one the ‘classical’ cases of genocide, but the finding has also stirred debate. This chapter surveys the historiography of Tasmanian genocide including Raphael Lemkin’s 1940s finding of a clear case of genocide; Henry Reynolds’ 2001 counter evidence of gubernatorial humanitarianism; and the subsequent histories that recognise genocide within the structure of settler colonialism. This chapter concludes that the British committed genocide in Tasmania with intent, but reported and framed that crime within the rhetoric, and even the guidelines, of contemporaneous humanitarian policies.

  • Introduction to Volume ii

  • Edited by Ned Blackhawk, Yale University, Connecticut, Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut, Benjamin Madley, University of California, Los Angeles, Rebe Taylor, University of Tasmania
  • General editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    The Cambridge World History of Genocide
    Published online:
    23 June 2023
    Print publication:
    04 May 2023, pp 1-20

  • Summary

    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: