Empire, Colony, Genocide

Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History

A. Dirk Moses

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9781845457198
• eBook ISBN: 9781782382140
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term "genocide" to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and "ethnic cleansing" have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi "Third Reich," leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called "the role of the human group and its tribulations."

– Section II –

EMPIRE, COLONIZATION,
AND GENOCIDE

– Chapter 8 –

EMPIRES, NATIVE PEOPLES,
AND GENOCIDE

Mark Levene

Arguing a Case and Doubtless Muddying the Water

Any serious attempt to understand genocide in its broadest dimensions across time and space cannot but involve questions about the origins of violence.¹ This, however, might lead to a broader question still, one arguably encapsulated in the recent plea by A. Dirk Moses that scholars in the field need to “try to imagine genocides of modernity as part of a single process rather than merely in comparative (and competitive) terms.”² Moses's point is an extremely provocative one, not least because in posing that there might be a single process, he almost at one fell swoop challenges an overriding wisdom that has informed the basic working assumptions of genocide studies to date. Certainly, the field is increasingly interested to compare and contrast different genocides; yet each ultimately is nearly always treated as if it were essentially an aberration set against a normative nongenocidal model—which, on closer inspection, turns out to be the liberal democracies of the West, from which the vast majority of genocide scholars happen to hail. The fact that in most of modern and certainly all of contemporary history the West has provided the dominant, indeed hegemonic economic and political framework within which all other polities and societies throughout the world have had to operate, and that this might have some bearing on the sequence and indeed persistence of genocide seems to have been repeatedly—one might opine conveniently—overlooked.

Is genocide aberrant, or is what we are actually considering part of a broader structural dysfunction? To put both thesis and antithesis more roundly, are the genocides committed in the modern world the product of some oddity, whether ideological, cultural, structural or whatever, which disposes or even predisposes particular state-societies towards this very singular outcome and thus entirely against the grain of what is taken to be the normative universe of the ordered, civilized, legally constituted international system of states; or is it actually within that system itself and the historic struggles and interrelationships out of which it emerged that we ought to search for our primary, first cause?

My own position within this debate is unequivocal. Indeed, my own starting point for this contribution would be to posit that if we truly wish to see the forest for the trees, then modern cases of genocide or suspected genocide cannot be isolated in a series of self-contained, or even purely comparative boxes. Nor can they be treated in either limited chronological or spatial contexts. They have to be seen and hence understood within the broadest terms of world-historical reference. Certainly such an argument neither, on the one hand, refutes autonomous factors of environment, culture, and society that are as fundamental to any treatment as are issues of contingency. Nor, on the other, does it start out from an assumption that genocides, including those committed within imperial contexts primarily against indigenous peoples, are functionally inevitable, predetermined, or blanket by-products of the states from which they emanate. What instead this contribution seeks to demonstrate is that a widely geographically dispersed incidence of such exterminatory events on the broad world stage, from the early seventeenth century through to the 1914 watershed, cannot be treated simply as a series of coincidences. Rather, in their totality, they suggest a series of massive destabilizations of human communities and their historic relationships to one another. In turn, moreover, they act as critical harbingers of the end of the premodern world—which paradoxically included a previously “normative” system of self-contained traditional “world empires”—in favor of the crystallization of a global community and political economy of nation-states.³

But if this proposition is correct and hence genocide is intrinsic to the gestation of our contemporary international system, this can only reinforce the degree to which it is at deviance from some of the most authoritative comparative readings of the phenomenon to date. For instance, for a number of scholars, genocide not only essentially crystallizes in the twentieth century but also, moreover, primarily within a European or near-European context before it then takes off in a post-1945, third world, postcolonial one. The issues at stake thus become not about empire or colonial settlement as such, but rather are bound up with the onset of modernity and its relationship to the state—most particularly in the form of what are often represented as quite specific utopian projects to engineer society in favor of some ideological totalitarianism and/or toward some ethnic or racial dominance, if not outright homogenization.⁴

This is not to propose that these commentators do not have their own singular approaches to the phenomenon. But by both blocking out the significance of its pre-twentieth-century occurrence and indeed its persistent (though not exclusively) nonmetropolitan enactment, the seminal relationship between genocide, empire, and colonialism is actually implicitly marginalized in these interpretations. Most colonial genocide predated 1914. Spatially, as one would expect, moreover, these were not metropolitan events but ones that took place on imperial or colonial peripheries. To be sure, genocides did take place also in metropolitan cores. The events in the Vendée in 1793/94 was one such event of seminal significance in the emergence of modern genocide. But the Vendée was also quite singular. Nothing remotely comparable happened again, at least in western or central Europe, until the twentieth century.⁵

By contrast, imperial genocides committed by metropolitan states in colonial environs were a notable and sometimes quite endemic feature of the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. Again, we are faced with an interesting but perplexing conundrum: The critical protagonists involved, directly or indirectly, in the explosion of exterminatory assaults on native peoples at colonial peripheries were indeed the builders of modern, avant-garde, metropolitan nation-states. However, they committed these genocides not in their nation-state manifestation but in their imperial one.

How should we approach this issue? Hannah Arendt was the first to seriously speculate upon the relationship,⁶ and then, arguably both rather unevenly and without notably resolving it.⁷ The time is now ripe for reconsideration of the matter. The work of historians such as Anthony Pagden, Niall Ferguson, Dominic Lieven, and others⁸ suggest that the study of the concept and practice of empire is both acceptable and indeed respectable in a way that it was not in the aftermath of Western empire three, or even two decades ago. Paradoxically, then, resuscitated interest from different quarters in the subject of empires suggests not just opportunities, but perhaps even an urgent need for fresh historical approaches that seek to explore how events at what we think of as the peripheries of an evolving metropolitan-dominated world not only provided integral signposts to genocides that were to later occur at its heart, but even perhaps a clue as to the ongoing dysfunctionality of our resulting globalized political economy. Major treatments of genocide, however, in a colonial-cum-imperial context—insofar as they exist—do not make this task particularly easy. Two basic trajectories present themselves. The first focuses on single events such as the destruction of the Herero (1904/5) as if these were essentially aberrations at odds with the main thrust of modern imperialism.⁹ The second treats specifically Western conquest as an almost unmitigated and relentless history of genocidal violence perpetrated against indigenous peoples, a charge that in recent years has become increasingly amplified by polemical disputes with Holocaust-centric scholars.¹⁰

The Scylla and Charybdis aspect of these approaches in itself requires some brief commentary. With regard to the latter approach, certainly, empires cannot be created or sustained without a politico-military supremacy emanating from a single source. However, equally, if empires remained inherently genocidal, they would have no subject populations. Indeed, the concept of empire assumes populations as markets for metropolitan goods, and/or as a subservient labor source. Instrumental rationality would seem to dictate that while exploitation, even hyperexploitation (meaning mass suffering and mass death), might be norms of empires, “divide and rule” rather than conscious population extermination is the logical direction by which such polities sustain themselves. Thus, I take it as a basic premise here that “advancing” Western maritime empires—in contradistinction to the position taken by Jean-Paul Sartre, or more recently Sven Lindqvist¹¹—were neither founded on nor otherwise characterized by an inherent propensity towards genocide. Similarly, the ongoing multiethnicity of “retreating” world empires right through to 1914 would also seem to negate this verdict.

Yet the multiplicity and range of exterminatory assaults on native people in the pre-1914 imperial context would equally invite attention. Imperial genocide repeatedly and persistently occurred in this fin-de-siècle record even where there was no one single obvious ideological predisposition in this direction. The remainder of this consciously schematic and macrohistorical synopsis from c. 1600 to 1914 thus aims to outline the broad historical dimensions and contours as well as geographical range of such assaults, offer pointers to their interconnectedness, and present brief concluding remarks on their causation.

A final word on our usage of the term “empire.” It is easy enough to consider nineteenth-century Britain, France, or Germany as empires, albeit notably in the former case often subcontracting its powers to chartered companies or self-governing colonial administrations. The US equally in its post-1898 acquisitions is clearly imperial. But what then of its transcontinental surge beginning a century earlier? Should we see this phase as the actions of an autonomous nation builder or simply as an extension of British empire building in its North American theater? By the same token, is Argentina in the same category, a nation operating in its own right post-1816 independence, or a more forceful and vigorous “son of Hispanic imperial fathers”? There are only complex answers, I suspect, to these questions—but for my purposes, both examples will fall under the empire-building umbrella just as will the case of Antipodean colonial administrations whose self-determination remained firmly under the aegis of the British crown.

Before we get too focused on these types of cases, however, we forget at our peril that such essentially maritime-based empires are extraordinary late-comers on the historical scene, and that while in the nineteenth century they are increasingly the dominant ones, there remain on the stage four major continental “world empires”—the Qing, Ottoman, Romanov, and Habsburg (albeit in their twilight existence)—which are representatives of a much more traditional imperial norm. Then there is the non-Western empire building of Shaka and other Bantu conquerors in southern Africa.¹² If, in repeating a general Western historical mantra that the primary motor in the creation of a globalized political economy is the rise of West itself, the genocides with which I am concerned here are as much the indirect result of the West's destabilization of the old “world empires,” as they struggled to reposition themselves in this new international framework, as they are the direct results of Western avant-garde imperial building through their penetration and control of discrete regions around the globe. As a general rule, by this juncture the general case for imperial genocide as a result of Western diffusion or, put less charitably, global dysfunction is overwhelming.

Plotting trajectories

Let me then propose three basic trajectories or tendencies in modern imperial genocide that I will then delineate further:

1. Tendencies towards direct European settlement in what I will call “the 3 As”—the (north) Americas, Argentina, and the Antipodes—each of which produced a sequence of “frontier genocides” at notable moments in colonial expansion from c.1600 to the closing of their respective frontiers, arguably completed in all three regions by the 1890s (two decades later in Queensland). While the origins of these imperial responses can be traced back to the consolidation of states in their European contexts, the commonality between aspects of genocide in their diverse colonial settings is also noteworthy.

2. A significant bunching of genocidal or subgenocidal events in the 1880–1910 period—with incidents widely spread across nominally conquered or subdued regions of Africa, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, and elsewhere—all of which point to a crisis of the advancing Western empires at their apparent apotheosis.

3. By contrast, a further series of genocides or subgenocides...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Section I: Intellectual History and Conceptual Questions
• Section II: Empire, Colonization, and Genocide
• Section III: Subaltern Genocide
• Select Bibliography
• Contributors
• Index