Existing studies of settler colonial genocides explicitly consider the roles of metropolitan and colonial states, and their military forces in the perpetration of exterminatory violence in settler colonial situations, yet rarely pay specific attention to the dynamics around civilian-driven mass violence against indigenous peoples. In many cases, however, civilians were major, if not the main, perpetrators of such violence. The focus of this book is thus on the role of civilians as perpetrators of exterminatory violence and on those elements within settler colonial situations that promoted mass violence on their part.

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.

This volume offers a comparative survey of diverse settler colonial experiences in relation to food, food culture and foodways - how the latter are constructed, maintained, revolutionised and, in some cases, dissolved. What do settler colonial foodways and food cultures look like? Are they based on an imagined colonial heritage, do they embrace indigenous repertoires or invent new hybridised foodscapes? What are the socio-economic and political dynamics of these cultural transformations? In particular, this volume focuses on three key issues: the evolution of settler colonial identities and states; their relations vis-à-vis indigenous populations; and settlers’ self-indigenisation – the process through which settlers transform themselves into the native population, at least in their own eyes. These three key issues are crucial in understanding settler-indigenous relations and the rise of settler colonial identities and states.

Capturing the history of thousands of German women recruited to colonize Southwest Africa between the 1890s and 1940s, The Servants of Empire engages a radical nationalist history of German efforts to prevent interracial unions and establish permanent white settlement. As colonists, sponsored women often supported or even helped perpetrate extreme patterns of racist violence and vigilantism in Namibia, which linked them inextricably to marked atrocities such as the Herero and Nama Genocides. Navigating the intersections of German attitudes toward race, class, ethnicity, gender, and nation, this revealing study traces the German settler community’s gossip and rumors to uncover how the many poor white female settlers in Southwest Africa disrupted bourgeois race and gender relations and contributed to the trenchant sexual and racial violence in the territory.

Why countries colonize the lands of indigenous people Over the past few centuries, vast areas of the world have been violently colonized by settlers. But why did states like Australia and the United States stop settling frontier lands during the twentieth century? At the same time, why did states loudly committed to decolonization like Indonesia and China start settling the lands of such minorities as the West Papuans and Uyghurs? Settling for Less traces this bewildering historical reversal, explaining when and why indigenous peoples suffer displacement at the hands of settlers. Lachlan McNamee challenges the notion that settler colonialism can be explained by economics or racial ideologies. He tells a more complex story about state building and the conflicts of interest between indigenous peoples, states, and settlers. Drawing from a rich array of historical evidence, McNamee shows that states generally colonize frontier areas in response to security concerns. Elite schemes to populate contested frontiers with loyal settlers, however, often fail. As societies grow wealthier and cities increasingly become magnets for migration, states ultimately lose the power to settle frontier lands. Settling for Less uncovers the internal dynamics of settler colonialism and the diminishing power of colonizers in a rapidly urbanizing world. Contrasting successful and failed colonization projects in Australia, Indonesia, China, and beyond, this book demonstrates that economic development—by thwarting colonization—has proven a powerful force for indigenous self-determination.

From 1884 to 1914, the world's fourth-largest overseas colonial empire was that of the German Kaiserreich. Yet this fact is little known in Germany and the subject remains virtually absent from most school textbooks. While debates are now common in France and Britain over the impact of empire on former colonies and colonising societies, German imperialism has only more recently become a topic of wider public interest. In 2015, the German government belatedly and half-heartedly conceded that the extermination policies carried out over 1904-8 in the settler colony of German South West Africa (now Namibia) qualify as genocide. But the recent invigoration of debate on Germany's colonial past has been hindered by continued amnesia, denialism and a populist right endorsing colonial revisionism. A campaign against postcolonial studies has sought to denounce and ostracise any serious engagement with the crimes of the imperial age. Henning Melber presents an overview of German colonial rule and analyses how its legacy has affected and been debated in German society, politics and the media. He also discusses the quotidian experiences of Afro-Germans, the restitution of colonial loot, and how the history of colonialism affects important institutions such as the Humboldt Forum.

This book explores the deep roots of modern democracy, focusing on geography and long-term patterns of global diffusion. Its geographic argument centers on access to the sea, afforded by natural harbors which enhance the mobility of people, goods, capital, and ideas. The extraordinary connectivity of harbor regions thereby affected economic development, the structure of the military, statebuilding, and openness to the world – and, through these pathways, the development of representative democracy. The authors' second argument focuses on the global diffusion of representative democracy. Beginning around 1500, Europeans started to populate distant places abroad. Where Europeans were numerous they established some form of representative democracy, often with restrictions limiting suffrage to those of European heritage. Where they were in the minority, Europeans were more reticent about popular rule and often actively resisted democratization. Where Europeans were entirely absent, the concept of representative democracy was unfamiliar and its practice undeveloped.

This book investigates how monuments have been used in Africa as tools of oppression and dominance, from the colonial period up to the present day. The book asks what the decolonisation of historical monuments and geographies might entail and how this could contribute to the creation of a post-imperial world. In recent times, African movements to overthrow the symbols and monuments of the colonial era have gathered pace as a means of renaming, reclassifying, and reimagining colonial identities and spaces. Movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa have sprung up around the world, connected by a history of Black life struggles, erasures, oppression, suppression, and the depression of Black biopolitics. This book provides an important multidisciplinary intervention in the discourse on monuments and memories, asking what they are, what they have been used to represent, and ultimately what they can reveal about past and present forms of pain and oppression. Drawing on insights from philosophy, historical sociology, politics, museum, and literary studies, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars with an interest in the decolonisation of global African history.

Providing an intellectual biography of the challenging concept of genocide, this topical Handbook takes an interdisciplinary approach to shed new light on the events, processes, and legacies in the field.