The Cambridge World History of Genocide, Vol. 2 [2] 1108486436, 9781108486439

Table of contents :
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Contributors
Introduction to Volume II
Part I. Settler Colonialism:
1. 'The centrality of dispossession': Native American genocide and settler colonialism
2. A very British genocide: acknowledgement of Indigenous destruction in the founding of Australia and New Zealand
3. Settler genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940
Part II. Empire-Building and State Domination:
4. A case lacking contemporaneous local sources: The 'sack of Novgorod' in 1570
5. Atrocity and genocide in Japan's invasion of Korea, 1592–1598
6. The English conquest of Ireland, c.1530–c.1650
7. Extirpation and annihilation in Cromwellian Ireland
8. Genocide in the Spice Islands: the Dutch East India Company and the destruction of the Banda Archipelago civilization in 1621
9. 'Too furious': the genocide of Connecticut's Pequot Indians, 1636–1640
10. The destruction of Wendake (Huronia), 1647–1652
11. A 'spreading fire': understanding genocide in Early Colonial North America, 1607–1790s
12. The Qing extermination of the Zünghars: an early-modern genocide?
13. A vicious civil war in the French Revolution: 'the Vendée,' 1793–1795
14. The Zulu Kingdom as a genocidal and post-genocidal society, c.1810 to the present
Part III. Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides:
15. The genocidal French conquest of Algeria, 1830–1847
16. 'The bloody ground': nineteenth-century frontier genocides in the United States
17. 'A war of extermination': the California Indian genocide, 1846–1873
18. Lessons from Canada: the question of genocide in US boarding schools for Native Americans
19. Frontier massacres in Australia, 1788–1928
20. Genocide in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871
21. Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824–1928
Part IV. Premonitions:
22. Genocide and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children in Australia, 1800–1920
23. The killing fields of Jiangnan: genocide and China's Taiping rebellion, 1851–1864
24. The crime of the Congo: a question of genocide in the Congo Free State, 1885–1908
25. The Ottoman massacres of Armenians, 1894–1896 and 1909
26. 'Rivers of blood and money': the Herero and Nama genocides in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1908
27. Representations of the Poison Gas War on the Eastern Front, 1915–1917

Citation preview

the cambridge world history of

GENOCIDE

Volume II documents and analyses genocide and extermination throughout the early modern and modern eras. It tracks their global expansion as European, Asian, and Euroamerican imperialisms, and 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 settlerIndigenous 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. N E D B L A C K H A W K is the Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. His book Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West (2006) won half a dozen awards, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. B E N K I E R N A N is the Griswold Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and was founding Director of Yale’s Genocide Studies Program. His book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007) won numerous awards, including a gold medal for the best work of history, awarded by the Independent Publishers Association. B E N J A M I N M A D L E Y is Associate Professor of History at UCLA. His focus is on Native Americans, as well as colonialism in Africa, Australia and Europe, often applying a transnational and comparative approach. His book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (2016) won the Los

Angeles Times Book Prize for History, and the Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute forthe Study of Genocide. R E B E T A Y L O R is Associate Professor of History in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. Specialising in the histories of southeast Australian Indigenous peoples, her most recent book Into the Heart of Tasmania (2017) won the 2018 Tasmanian Book Prize.

t h e ca m b r i d g e w o r ld h i s t o r y o f

GENOCIDE General Editor Ben Kiernan, Yale University

Split into three volumes, The Cambridge World History of Genocide offers an analytical survey of genocide across six continents from prehistory to the twenty-first century. Combined, they compare and contrast cases in multiple different cultures and contexts, demonstrating common themes and sharp variations that have developed over time. By examining the long-term and immediate causes of genocide, these essays emphasise that genocidal intent has historically been shaped by structural factors and human decision-making. Featuring over 80 essays from experts across the field, together they cover ancient Carthage, the Holocaust, medieval Crusader massacres, Mongol conquests, the extermination of Indigenous peoples in European settler colonies in the Americas, Africa and Australia, as well as prehistoric mass graves from the Alps to the Andes, and the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. A much-needed addition to genocide studies, these volumes reveal how genocide is a world historical phenomenon that has operated under different names and capacities, but possesses similar key characteristics. VOLUME I Genocide in the Ancient, Medieval and Premodern Worlds EDITED BY BEN KIERNAN , TRACY LEMOS AND TRISTAN TAYLOR VOLUME II Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One EDITED BY NED BLACKHAWK , BEN KIERNAN , BENJAMIN MADLEY AND REBE TAYLOR

EDITED BY BEN

VOLUME III Genocide in the Contemporary Era, 1914–2020 KIERNAN , WENDY LOWER , NORMAN NAIMARK AND

SCOTT STRAUS

THE CAMBRIDGE WORLD HISTORY OF

GENOCIDE *

VOLUME

II

Genocide in the Indigenous, Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, from c.1535 to World War One *

Edited by

NED BLACKHAWK Yale University BEN KIERNAN Yale University BENJAMIN MADLEY University of California, Los Angeles REBE TAYLOR University of Tasmania

University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108486439 D O I: 10.1017/9781108765480 © Cambridge University Press 2023 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2023 Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Limited, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. A Cataloging-in-Publication data record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Three-volume set ISBN 978-1-108-75973-1 Hardback Volume I ISBN 978-1-108-49353-6 Hardback Volume II ISBN 978-1-108-48643-9 Hardback Volume III ISBN 978-1-108-48707-8 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figures page xi List of Maps xiii List of Tables xv List of Contributors to Volume I I

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Introduction to Volume I I 1 ben kiernan, benjamin madley and rebe taylor

part

I

SETTLER COLONIALISM 1 . ‘The Centrality of Dispossession’: Native American Genocide and Settler Colonialism 23 ned blackhawk 2 . A Very British Genocide: Acknowledgement of Indigenous Destruction in the Founding of Australia and New Zealand 46 tony barta 3 . Settler Genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940 mohamed adhikari

part

69

II

EMPIRE-BUILDING AND STATE DOMINATION 4 . A Case Lacking Contemporaneous Local Sources: The ‘Sack of Novgorod’ in 1570 99 cornelia soldat

vii

Contents

5 . Atrocity and Genocide in Japan’s Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598 118 nam-lin hur 6 . The English Conquest of Ireland, c.1530–c.1650 nicholas canny

139

7 . Extirpation and Annihilation in Cromwellian Ireland michea´ l o´ siochru´

163

8 . Genocide in the Spice Islands: The Dutch East India Company and the Destruction of the Banda Archipelago Civilisation in 1621 186 frank dhont 9 . ‘Too Furious’: The Genocide of Connecticut’s Pequot Indians, 1636–1640 215 benjamin madley 10 . The Destruction of Wendake (Huronia), 1647–1652 243 ned blackhawk 11 . A ‘Spreading Fire’: Understanding Genocide in Early Colonial North America, 1607–1790s 267 gregory d. smithers 12 . The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars: An Early Modern Genocide? 292 david brophy 13 . A Vicious Civil War in the French Revolution: ‘The Vendée’, 1793–1795 312 peter mcphee 14 . The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c.1810 to the Present 335 michael r. mahoney

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Contents

part

III

NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRONTIER GENOCIDES 15 . The Genocidal French Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1847 361 william gallois 16 . ‘The Bloody Ground’: Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides in the United States 383 karl jacoby 17 . ‘A War of Extermination’: The California Indian Genocide, 1846–1873 412 benjamin madley 18 . Lessons from Canada: The Question of Genocide in US Boarding Schools for Native Americans 434 preston mcbride 19 . Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1928 lyndall ryan

461

20 . Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871 rebe taylor 21 . Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824–1928 raymond evans

part

481

508

IV

PREMONITIONS 22 . Genocide and the Forcible Removal of Aboriginal Children in Australia, 1800–1920 537 anna haebich 23 . The Killing Fields of Jiangnan: Genocide and China’s Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864 562 charles desnoyers

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Contents

24 . The Crime of the Congo: A Question of Genocide in the Congo Free State, 1885–1908 585 dean pavlakis 25 . The Ottoman Massacres of Armenians, 1894–1896 and 1909 bedross der matossian

609

26 . ‘Rivers of Blood and Rivers of Money’: The Herero and Nama Genocides in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1908 634 leonor faber-jonker 27 . Representations of the Poison Gas War on the Eastern Front, 1915–1917 657 nicole jordan Index 681

x

Figures

In December 1862, the US military maintained this concentration camp at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, surrounded by a 12-foot-high wooden stockade, to house nearly 1,700 Dakota men, women and children while 303 warriors awaited execution. (Minnesota State Historical Society) page 35 2.1a &b The civilising mission of Britain – and Ma¯ori resistance to it in New Zealand. (Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images) 57 3.1 Tracing of a rock painting depicting a clash between San stock raiders and a pursuing trekboer commando. (Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of Their Life and Thought (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976, p. 25) / Courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute) 82 4.1a Copper candlestick base, c.1600. The only existing visual image of somebody normally identified as a member of Ivan the Terrible’s troops, an oprichnik. 109 4.1b The other side of the same candlestick, bearing the inscription: ‘The tsar left the city with the brethren and went to the monastery.’ 109 5.1 The ‘Mimizuka’ and its stele in Kyoto. (Photo: Nam-lin Hur) 135 6.1 Woodcut from John Derricke, The Image of Ireland (London, 1581). (Courtesy of The University of Edinburgh) 147 7.1 Statue of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) outside the British Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London. (silkfactory / Getty Images) 175 8.1 A Dutch map from 1612 showing the islands of Banda Api, Neira, and Lonthor with its main settlements of Lonthor, Urtatang and Combir. (From Johann Theodor de Bry, Illustration of the two cities Ortattan and Londer, located on the island of Banda (1612)) 192 9.1 John Underhill, ‘The figure of the Indians’ fort or Palizado in NEW ENGLAND and the maner of the destroying It by Captayne Underhill And Captayne Mason’. In Underhill, Newes from America: or a New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638). (Courtesy of the Huntington Library) 227 11.1 Map of Virginia, ‘discovered and described’, by Captain John Smith, c.1606. (Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC) 280 11.2 Phillip [sic], alias Metacomet of Pokanoket. Engraved from an original by Thomas Church in 1772. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC) 286 1.1

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List of Figures 12.1

13.1 13.2 15.1 16.1

16.2

18.1

21.1

22.1 23.1 25.1

25.2 25.3

26.1

26.2 27.1 27.2

‘Receiving surrender from the Eli’ (Pingding Yili shouxiang), depicting the Qing occupation of Ili in 1755. Copperplate print from a drawing by Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng). (Cleveland Museum of Art) 299 ‘The brigands are crushed!’ Proclamation after the Battle of Savenay, 23 December 1793. (ullstein bild Dtl. / Getty Images) 322 Atrocity against civilians in the Vendée, December 1793. (ullstein bild Dtl. / Getty Images) 329 French colonial school map of Algeria, c.1950. 379 Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), whose writings and lectures underscored the centrality of sexual violence against Native women to the Indigenous experience of genocide. (Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution) 390 The speech of Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi) at the Chicago World’s Fair, critiquing the violent invasion of their homelands that Native Americans suffered after 1492; printed on birch bark, a traditional Potawatomi building material. (Image courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College) 409 Kent Monkman (Cree), The Scream, 2017. (By permission, Denver Art Museum: Native Arts acquisition fund, purchased with funds from Loren G. Lipson, MD, 2017.93. Image courtesy of the artist) 454 Depiction of a Native Police ‘dispersal’ of the Guwa (Koa) people at Skull Hole on Bladensburg pastoral station, near Winton, central Queensland, in 1877. (C. Lumholtz, Among Cannibals: An Account of Four Years’ Travels in Australia and of Camp Life with the Aborigines in Queensland (London: John Murray, 1889, p. 375)) 518 Unnamed Nyungar mother, father and infant, c.1860–80. (State Library of Western Australia, Perth) 557 Statue of Hong Xiuquan in heroic pose, Huadu, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China. 577 Massacre of Armenians in the streets of Istanbul. Drawing by Eduardo Ximenes (1852–1932), L’Illustrazione Italiana, 24 November 1895. (Getty Images) 618 The Armenian massacres in Istanbul. Drawing by Dante Paolocci, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 13 September 1896. (Getty Images) 620 Pillage of Trebizond, 8 October 1895. Carnage in Trebizond or Trabzon, Turkey. Scene from the Massacres of Armenia card series produced by the chocolate factory at the Monastery of Aiguebelle. (Photo by Art Media / Print Collector / Getty Images) 621 Hereros tried and hanged, February 1904. (C. Rust, Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande. Auszeichnungen aus dem Kriegsjahre 1904 (Berlin-Großlichterfelde: E. T. Förster, 1905)) 643 Herero women working as forced labourers in Swakopmund concentration camp, c.1905–7. (National Archives of Namibia) 648 Women and children gassed at Monástir, March 1917. (Photo: R. A. Reiss in The Kingdom of Serbia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919)) 670 Victims of asphyxiating gases, Monástir, June 1917. (Photo: Reiss in The Kingdom of Serbia) 671

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Maps

3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 7.1 8.1 9.1 10.1 11.1 12.1 13.1 13.2 14.1 15.1 17.1 17.2 18.1 19.1 19.2 20.1

The location of San groups in southern Africa, c.1890. (Cartography by Liezel Bohdanowicz) page 71 Trekboer penetration of the Cape interior during the eighteenth century. (Cartography by Liezel Bohdanowicz) 74 Sixteenth-century Russia, Novgorod and Moscow. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 100 Japan and Korea in the 1590s. (Cartography by Raphael Ryu) 119 The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, 1649–53. (Cartography by Matthew Stout and David Brown) 173 The Banda Archipelago and major Indigenous settlements, c.1621. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 187 Early colonial New England: the Pequot genocide of 1636–40 and its aftermath. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 220 Select Iroquoian campaigns during an era of internecine Indigenous warfare, 1649–56. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 255 Selected massacres in colonial North America. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 277 Eastern Eurasia in the mid eighteenth century. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 293 The ‘Vendée militaire’. (Cartography by Gavin Leys, University of Melbourne) 313 The Vendée in 1793, showing major roads. (From Thomas George Johnson, François-Séverin Marceau (1769–1796) (London, 1896), p. 123) 327 Zululand and neighbouring regions, including chiefdoms mentioned in this chapter. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 336 The French conquest of Algeria, 1830–75. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 366 Selected locations in the California Genocide of 1846–73. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 414 Some federally recognised California Indian lands, 2021. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 430 Selected Canadian and US schools for Indigenous children and young adults. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 438 Selected frontier massacre sites in Australia, 1788–1930. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 469 Colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1780–1930. (Courtesy of The University of Newcastle, Australia, 2017–20) 476 Colonial settlement of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1830. (Cartography by Robert J. Anders) 482

xiii

List of Maps 21.1 Locations of racial conflict mentioned in the text. 22.1 Locations and institutions referred to in the text. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 23.1 The Taiping movement in China, 1850–64. (Charles Desnoyers, Patterns of Modern Chinese History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 210) 24.1 Congo Free State, c.1906, showing the major concessions and Crown Domain. (Cartography by Bill Nelson) 26.1 The campaign against the Hereros and Namas, German Southwest Africa, 1904–8. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

xiv

509 540 565 590 635

Tables

9.1 18.1 19.1 19.2

Comparative reported death tolls in the Pequot War, 1636–1637. US and Canada Indian school enrolment and percentage of group. Frontier massacres, 1794–1859. Frontier massacres, 1860–1928.

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page 237 437 477 477

Contributors to Volume I I

M O H A M E D A D H I K A R I is an emeritus associate professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town. He works in the field of settler colonial genocide. His books include The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Ohio University Press, 2010), and two edited volumes, Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (Berghahn Books, 2015) and Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies (Routledge, 2021). His next book, Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples (Hackett, 2022) is in press. T O N Y B A R T A taught European and Australian history at La Trobe University, in Melbourne, Australia, where he also founded the History and Film Program. His edited book Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History was published in 1998. Research interests in twentieth-century Germany (Living in Dachau 1900–1950) and in the European settlement of Australia brought him to the developing discipline of Genocide Studies, where his theses about colonial impacts on Indigenous peoples led to Australian genocide being taken seriously, and to a world-wide reputation. An updated collection of essays, On Genocide, will reconsider the evolution of colonialism in Britain, the United States and Nazi Germany in the light of Lemkin’s concept. N E D B L A C K H A W K (Western Shoshone) is the Randolph Townsend, Jr. Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. His first book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, won multiple professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. His articles and essays have appeared in Ethnohistory, American Quarterly, Reviews in American History, The American Historical Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal and The New York Times Book Review, among others. His co-authored publications include: Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the Legacy of Franz Boas (2018); a special issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2018); and a ‘Brief for amici curiae historians and legal scholars’, submitted in 2015 to the US Supreme Court in Dollar General Corp. v. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. His current project is The Rediscovery of America: American Indians and the Unmaking of U.S. History. D A V I D B R O P H Y is a senior lecturer in modern Chinese history at the University of Sydney, and a specialist on Xinjiang in the Qing and Republican periods. He is the

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List of Contributors to Volume I I author of Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia–China Frontier (Harvard University Press, 2016) and China Panic: Australia’s Alternative to Paranoia and Pandering (La Trobe University Press, 2021). He is also the translator of In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner Asian Sufi Dynasty (Columbia University Press, 2021). N I C H O L A S C A N N Y is an expert on early modern history broadly defined. He edited the first volume of The Oxford History of the British Empire (1998) and, with Philip D. Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c.1450–c.1850 (2011). His major books on Irish history include The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established 1565–1576 (Sussex: Harvester, 1976), Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001) and Imagining Ireland’s Pasts: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries (Oxford 2021). He is a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the American Philosophical Society, and a past president of the Royal Irish Academy. B E D R O S S D E R M A T O S S I A N is an associate professor of modern Middle East history, and the Hymen Rosenberg Associate Professor in Judaic Studies, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. He is the author, editor and co-editor of multiple volumes, including Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014) and The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 2022). He is also the series editor of Armenians in the Modern and Early Modern World, published by I. B. Tauris and Bloomsbury Press. C H A R L E S D E S N O Y E R S (b. 1952) received a BA (Sociology) in 1975, and an MA (European History) from Villanova University in 1979, and earned a PhD in modern Chinese history from Temple University in 1988. His early scholarly work includes a translation of the travel account of Chinese official Li Gui, A Journey to the East (University of Michigan Press, 2004). Li’s memoir of captivity among the Taiping rebels prompted an ongoing interest in the genocidal aspects of that conflict and its lingering effects on Chinese history. He is currently Professor of History at La Salle University. F R A N K D H O N T is an associate professor in the Department of History of National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan. He specialises in Southeast Asian history, and particularly in insular Southeast Asia. His research focus is on the struggle of Indonesians against Dutch colonialism from the early age of European colonisation, extending into the twentieth century and Indonesian independence. He is particularly interested in the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and Southeast Asia; the socio-political changes this brought about in society, especially for ordinary people; and the memory of World War Two in the region. R A Y M O N D E V A N S is an Australian social historian who has been engaged in frontier research, among many crucial historical matters, since the mid-1960s. In 1965, he completed one of the first historical theses on frontier and post-frontier relations in Australia. He began publication on this issue in 1971. In 1975, he contributed a full-blown frontier analysis in the co-authored study of racism in colonial Queensland, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination. Since then, he has written extensively upon frontier and

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List of Contributors to Volume I I post-frontier gender and labour relations, segregation policies, racial ideologies, patterns of genocide, statistical analyses of frontier casualties, and the Australian ‘History Wars’. L E O N O R F A B E R - J O N K E R specialises in the colonial history of Namibia and Southern Africa. She was the scientific curator of an acclaimed exhibition on the Namibian genocide at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (2016). Her publications include More Than Just an Object: A Material Analysis of the Return and Retention of Namibian Skulls from Germany (ASC Leiden, 2018). She has given lectures and workshops at Ghent University; University of the Western Cape; Spui 25, Amsterdam; and Université Paris Nanterre; and, in 2021, was awarded a fellowship at the Research Center for Material Culture, Leiden. W I L L I A M G A L L O I S is Professor of the History of the Mediterranean Islamicate World at the University of Exeter. His monographs include Time, Religion and History (Longman, 2008) and A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (2014), alongside essays in History and Theory, French History and Les Temps Modernes. This work forms one part of a larger project recuperating lost or forgotten works of Indigenous art from the Islamicate world in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Multi-award-winning scholar A N N A H A E B I C H is recognised as one of Australia’s great interpreters of the nation’s collective Indigenous and settler histories. Her major publications include the first and most comprehensive national history of Australia’s Stolen Generations, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000; the definitive community history For their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the Southwest of Western Australia 1900–1940; a comprehensive study of assimilation, Spinning the Dream: Assimilation in Australia; and her ground-breaking history of Nyungar performative responses to European invasion, Dancing in Shadows: Histories of Nyungar Performance. Anna is currently a John Curtin distinguished research professor at Curtin University, Western Australia. N A M - L I N H U R is a professor in the Department of Asian Studies, University of British Columbia. His publications include: Prayer and Play in Late Tokugawa Japan: Asakusa Senso¯ji and Edo Society (Harvard University Asia Center, 2000); Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System (Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); ‘National defense in shambles: wartime military build-up in Choso˘ n Korea, 1592– 98’; ‘The celestial warriors: Ming military aid and abuse during the Korean War, 1592–98’; and ‘Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of the Choso˘ n kingdom, 1592–1598’. Hur is writing a book on Japan’s invasion of Choso˘ n Korea in 1592–8. K A R L J A C O B Y is the Allan Nevins Professor of American History at Columbia University. He is the author of Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (2001), Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008) and The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire (2016), along with many articles and essays. N I C O L E J O R D A N, who passed away suddenly in January 2022, was an international historian whose work crosses many boundaries. Among her interests were the

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List of Contributors to Volume I I intersection of medical history with epidemics and forms of colonialism during the world wars, and the evolution of industrialised death targeting civilians in twentieth-century European conflict. Jordan also published on the military, economic and diplomatic history of interwar Europe. Her book The Popular Front and Central Europe: The Dilemmas of French Impotence 1918–1940 (1992) won the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize and is an ACLS Humanities e-book. A former Guggenheim fellow, she taught at the University of Illinois, Chicago. B E N K I E R N A N is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History Emeritus and was also Professor of International and Area Studies at Yale University. Founding Director of both the Cambodian Genocide Program and the Genocide Studies Program (gsp.yale.edu) from 1994 to 2015, he has also served as Chair of Yale’s Council on Southeast Asia Studies. His books include How Pol Pot Came to Power (1985); The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979 (1996); Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia (2007); Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (2007); and Viê t Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present (2017). ˙ B E N J A M I N M A D L E Y is Associate Professor of History and a member of the American Indian Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. His first book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History, the Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, and other prizes. His essays have appeared in The American Historical Review, European History Quarterly, Journal of British Studies, Journal of Genocide Research, Pacific Historical Review, The Western Historical Quarterly and the Los Angeles Times, as well as seven edited volumes. M I C H A E L R . M A H O N E Y was born and raised in the United States. He received his PhD in African History from UCLA and taught for twenty years at the university level. He is the author of several articles and one book, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa (Duke University Press, 2012). P R E S T O N M C B R I D E (Comanche by descent) is Assistant Professor of History at Pomona College. He is a historian of Native America, health and education. His research focuses on American Indian / Alaska Native students, the social determinants of health, and epidemics in federally run boarding schools for Native Americans. He has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Dartmouth College; the Organization of American Historians; the University of California Humanities Research Institute; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California. P E T E R M C P H E E A M was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He has published widely on the history of modern France, most recently Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (2012) and Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (2016). He was appointed to the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) in 2003 before becoming the University’s first Provost in 2007–9. He has been selected to both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences. He became

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List of Contributors to Volume I I a member of the Order of Australia in 2012. He is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria, the state’s peak body for history. ´ S I O C H R U´ is Professor in Modern History at Trinity College Dublin and M I C H E A´ L O author of numerous works on early modern Ireland, including Confederate Ireland, 1642– 1649: A Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin: Four Courts, 2008) and God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). He was co-Principal Investigator on the 1641 Depositions project, available online at htt p://1641.tcd.ie and in twelve published volumes. Together with David Brown, he created the award-winning Down Survey website (http://downsurvey.tcd.ie) and edited the five volumes of the Books of Survey and Distribution, to be published by the Irish Manuscripts Commission. D E A N P A V L A K I S received his PhD from the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. He taught at Canisius College and SUNY at Buffalo before joining the faculty of Carroll College in Helena, Montana, where he is the Associate Professor of Modern European and Sub-Saharan African History. His research interests involve the intersection of European humanitarianism and colonialism in Africa. Ashgate (now Routledge) published his monograph British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913 in 2015. His next project involves the origins of the 1926 Slavery Convention of the League of Nations. E M E R I T U S P R O F E S S O R L Y N D A L L R Y A N is a leading historian of the Australian colonial frontier. Her first book, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981), broke new ground in arguing that, contrary to widespread belief, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people did not die out in 1876, or at any period in history. Her most recent book, Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre (2018; co-edited with J. Lydon), considers the massacre from national and imperial perspectives. Her current project, a digital map of massacre sites of Aboriginal people and settlers across the Australian frontier 1788–1930, is based on a concise definition of frontier massacre based on international scholarship, and uses a rigorous methodology to investigate and verify the often disparate evidence. Stage 3 of the map, released in November 2019, includes 300 sites of massacres of Aboriginal people across the Australian frontier, and 12 sites of massacres of settlers. G R E G O R Y D. S M I T H E R S is Professor of History at Virginia Commonwealth University and a British Academy global professor, based at the University of Hull in England. He is the author of numerous books and articles on Indigenous history, his most recent book being Reclaiming Two-Spirits: Sexuality, Spiritual Renewal & Sovereignty in Native America (Beacon Press, 2022). C O R N E L I A S O L D A T is Associate Researcher at the Slavisches Institut, University of Cologne, and Section Editor for Christian–Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History 1500– 1900 (CMR1900). She studied Russian and history at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, and wrote her PhD dissertation on the Orthodox concept of the icon, and its use in the legitimation of Old Russian rulership. She has taught Russian and East European Culture and History at the University of Potsdam, Freie Universität Berlin and the University of

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List of Contributors to Volume I I Cologne. Her current research focuses mainly on the German sources of Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina. She is the author of the blog ‘Neues aus Altrussland’, https://sold atkuepper.de/category/blog. R E B E T A Y L O R is Associate Professor of history at the University of Tasmania. Rebe’s chief area of expertise, Tasmanian Aboriginal or Palawa history, has led her into Genocide Studies and, in turn, to the histories of European imperial extinction discourse and of Indigenous cultural resistance and resurgence. She is the author of Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Wakefield Press, 2004, 2008); Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017); and The Women at the Edge of the World: Surviving Extinction (Black Inc., in press, 2024).

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Introduction to Volume I I ben kiernan, benjamin madley and rebe taylor

In 1943, the eminent Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin minted a new word: genocide. The following year, Lemkin defined genocide as any attempt to annihilate, physically or culturally, an ethnic, national, religious or political group, or, as he put it, ‘the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group’, including by the imposition of ‘measures for weakening or destroying political, social, and cultural elements in national groups’.1 Three years later, negotiations between national representatives in the United Nations yielded a less expansive definition: that of the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. This international legal treaty, which entered into force in 1951, defines genocide as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’, including: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. 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 1 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. xi–xii, and ch. 9, e.g. pp. 79, 92. Lemkin’s Preface was dated 15 November 1943.

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‘protected’ groups. In addition, the Genocide Convention criminalises the following acts: (a) (b) (c) (d) (e)

Genocide; Conspiracy to commit genocide; Direct and public incitement to commit genocide; Attempt to commit genocide; Complicity in genocide.

The UN Genocide Convention also specifies that ‘persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated . . . shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals’. This is important because state or government employees may not be the sole perpetrators of genocide. For instance, ‘private individuals’ may include posses assembled informally. The Genocide Convention also stipulates that ‘genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law’.2 Finally, the Convention does not mention or require any specific motive for committing genocide. If the requisite act is deliberate, and the group’s partial or total destruction is a consciously desired outcome, whatever motive lies behind that intention is irrelevant. The Genocide Convention does not allow for the retroactive prosecution of crimes committed before 1951, but it does provide historians with a useful analytical tool: a consistent definitional framework for evaluating the past and for comparing similar (and dissimilar) events across both time and space. Lemkin asserted that ‘genocide has always existed in history’, and he wrote two manuscripts addressing instances of genocide ranging from ‘Antiquity’ to ‘Modern Times’.3 ‘Genocide’ is a twentieth-century term, but it describes an ancient phenomenon and can be used to analyse the past, in much the same way that historians routinely use other neologisms to understand historical events. Indeed, Lemkin planned chapters entitled ‘Genocide against American Indians’ and ‘The Indians in North America (in part)’, as well as chapters on ‘Tasmania’, ‘The Germans in Africa’ and ‘Hereros’. However, he died before he could complete any of these projects, including his planned chapters on Ireland, Korea, ‘Belgian Congo’ and ‘Armenians’.4 All of these 2 The United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, Treaty Series, vol. 78, no. 1021, 278, 280. 3 R. Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, ed. S. L. Jacobs (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 3. 4 For ‘Genocide against American Indians’ and ‘The Indians in North America (in part)’, see: M. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the

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topics, along with others from the early modern era, are discussed in this volume, using the United Nations Genocide Convention as an analytical rubric. The UN Genocide Convention (UNGC) is a widely accepted international legal treaty reinforced by a growing body of case law. On 9 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Genocide Convention and its definition ‘unanimously and without abstentions’.5 It remains the only authoritative international legal definition. Unlike the at least twenty-two alternative definitions proposed since 1959, it has judicial power.6 As many as 152 nations are now parties to the UN Genocide Convention.7 The core of the Convention is also part of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, which entered into force in 2002.8 Moreover, the Convention is supported and further defined by an expanding body of international case law. Between 1998 and 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) convicted sixty people of crimes defined by the Genocide Convention.9 In 2018, the UN-sponsored hybrid (international–national) tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, convicted two former leading members of the Pol Pot regime on three counts of genocide. Nuon Chea, Pol Pot’s deputy, was found guilty of the genocides of Cambodia’s Muslim Cham and ethnic Vietnamese minorities, and Khieu Samphan, head of state of the Pol Pot regime, was also convicted of committing genocide against the ethnic Vietnamese. His conviction was particularly significant as Samphan is the world’s first head of state to be convicted of genocide by an international court.10

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Americas’, Journal of Genocide Research 7 (December 2005), 502. For ‘Tasmania’, see Raphael Lemkin, ‘Tasmania’, ed., and with commentary, by Ann Curthoys, Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (June 2005), 170–96. For ‘The Germans in Africa’, see Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, pp. 189–222. This included sections on ‘Hottentots’ (pp. 204–5) and ‘Brutalities in South West Africa’ (pp. 210–11). For ‘Hereros’ and the other topics Lemkin planned to cover, see ibid., pp. 267–8, 17–19. L. J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 1. For twenty-two alternative definitions, see: A. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 23–7. https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=IND&mtdsg_no=IV-1&chapter= 4&clang=_en. International Criminal Court, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (The Hague: International Criminal Court, 2011), p. 3. www.icty.org/en/cases; http://unictr.unmict.org/en/cases. Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, Trial Chamber, Summary of Judgement, Case 002/02, 16 November 2018, www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/publicaffair/summary-judgement-case-00202. The full judgment was released on 23 March 2019, www.eccc.gov.kh/en/document/court/case-00202-judgement. See, esp., pp. 1600–1782, 2111–16, 2134–6, 2157–60, 2164–5.

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Rulings in these courts have clarified crucial elements of the Genocide Convention definition, including what is known as ‘specific intent’: the intent to destroy a group ‘as such’. In its 1998 Akayesu decision – the first conviction rendered by an international court using the Genocide Convention – the ICTR declared that specific intent, or dolus specialus, is a ‘constitutive element’ of genocide that may be deduced from the ‘general context of the perpetration’, the ‘scale of atrocities committed’ and ‘the fact of deliberately and systematically targeting victims on account of their membership . . . while excluding the members of other groups’. Indeed, the ICTR ruled Jean-Paul Akayesu guilty of genocide and ‘culpable because he knew or should have known that the act committed would destroy, in whole or in part, the group’.11 The 2016 ICTY summary judgment for Radovan Karadžić added: ‘intent may . . . be inferred from’ facts and circumstances including, but not limited to, ‘the general context, the scale of atrocities, the systematic targeting of victims on account of their membership in a particular group, the repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts, or the existence of a plan or policy’. In addition, ‘Display of intent through public speeches or in meetings may also support an inference as to the requisite specific intent.’12 Still, that kind of ‘smoking gun’ documentary evidence is far from the only possible proof of specific intent to commit genocide. Case law has also addressed the question of scope, originally defined in the Genocide Convention as the intentional destruction of a ‘protected’ group ‘in whole or in part’. The seminal 1998 Akayesu decision determined that, ‘Contrary to popular belief, the crime of genocide does not imply the actual extermination of [a] group in its entirety, but is understood as such once any one of the acts mentioned in Article 2 [a–e] . . . is committed.’13 In its 2001 Sikirica decision, the ICTY ruled that ‘in whole or in part’ specifically ‘calls for evidence of an intention to destroy a reasonably substantial number relative to the total population of the group’.14 Three years later, the ICTY’s Kristic ́ judgment added: ‘the part must be a substantial part of that group’, while ‘the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole’.15 11 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, ‘Judgement’, in The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, 2 September 1998, pp. 129, 133. 12 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Public redacted version of judgment’, in Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžic,́ 24 March 2016, pp. 208–9. 13 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, ‘Judgement’ in The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, 2 September 1998, p. 129. 14 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Judgement on Defense Motions to Acquit’, in Prosecutor v. Duško Sikirica, Damir Došen, and Dragan Kolundžija, 3 September 2001, pp. 28, 29. 15 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Judgment’, in Prosecutor v. Radislav Kristic’,́ 19 April 2004, pp. 2–3.

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International courts have also clarified the meaning of three basic genocidal acts, beyond ‘killing’, listed in Article I I of the Convention. In its 1998 Furundžija judgment, the ICTY indirectly addressed Article I I(b), ‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, specifying that ‘Rape may also amount to . . . an act of genocide, if the requisite elements are met, and may be prosecuted accordingly.’16 In 2008, ICTR justices determined that ‘The quintessential examples of serious bodily harm are torture, rape, and non-fatal physical violence that causes disfigurement or serious injury to the external or internal organs’, while ‘serious mental harm includes “more than minor or temporary impairment of mental faculties such as the infliction of strong fear or terror, intimidation or threat”’.17 International courts have also further defined Article I I(c), the genocidal act of ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. The 1998 Akayesu ruling described this act as including ‘subjecting a group of people to a subsistence diet, systematic expulsion from homes and the reduction of essential medical services below minimum requirement’.18 The 2012 ICTY Zdravko Tolimir judgment added that ‘subjecting the group to a subsistence diet; failing to provide adequate medical care; systematically expelling members of the group from their homes; and generally creating circumstances that would lead to a slow death such as the lack of proper food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation, or subjecting members of the group to excessive work or physical exertion’ are acts of genocide when committed with intent to destroy the group.19 In addition, international courts have expanded the legal meaning of Article I I(d), ‘Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’. The Akayesu ruling held that ‘sexual mutilation, the practice of sterilization, forced birth control, separation of the sexes and prohibition of marriages’ also violate the Genocide Convention.20 Finally, during the 1948 debates about the contents of the UNGC, the Venezuelan delegate had argued that ‘the forced transfer of children to a group where they would be given an education different from that of 16 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Judgment’, in Prosecutor v. Anto Furundžija, 10 December 1998, pp. 67–8. 17 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Appeals ‘Judgement’, in The Prosecutor v. Athanase Seromba, 12 March 2008, p. 18. 18 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, ‘Judgement’, in The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, 2 September 1998, para. 506. 19 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, ‘Judgement’, in Prosecutor v. Zdravko Tolimir, 12 December 2012, p. 327. 20 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, ‘Judgement’, in The Prosecutor v. Jean-Paul Akayesu, 2 September 1998, para. 507.

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their own group, and would have new customs, a new religion and probably a new language, was in practice tantamount to the destruction of their group, whose future depended on that generation of children’.21 This view was expressed in Article I I(e) of the Convention, which defines, as an ‘act’ of genocide, ‘Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’. Although there have not been any international criminal tribunal convictions for ‘Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’, one important domestic commission finding, on the part of an Australian national inquiry, suggests a legal interpretation of the definition of this act. According to the 1997 National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, ‘The policy of forcible removal of children from Indigenous Australians to other groups for the purpose of raising them separately from and ignorant of their culture and people could properly be labelled “genocidal” in breach of binding international law.’22 Future judicial rulings may add to the case law defining this genocidal crime.

Settler Colonialism European colonisation has stretched around the world for more than five centuries, disrupting or destroying millions of Indigenous people’s lives. Yet only in the last few decades have some colonial histories, especially those of settler colonies, begun to be understood as genocidal. This volume reflects that historiographical shift. Sixteen of the following chapters identify and document genocides committed by colonists and their leaders in Ireland, North America, Australia and Africa. However, this volume also includes two cases of mass violence perpetrated by members of Indigenous groups, in North America (Ned Blackhawk’s Chapter 10 on the Iroquois destruction of Wendake) and Africa (Michael Mahoney’s Chapter 14 on the Zulu Kingdom’s genocide of neighbouring groups). In addition, this volume also assesses cases that did not take place in a settler colonial context, such as Dean Pavlakis’ Chapter 24 on the Congo, as well as four cases on the Eurasian continent, in Korea, Central Asia, Russia and France. 21 Pérez Perozo, in Sixth Committee of the General Assembly, ‘Eighty-Third Meeting’, 25 October 1948, 195. 22 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (Sydney: Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 1997), p. 275.

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Genocide, it had long been assumed, is not merely a twentieth-century term, but a twentieth-century crime – an invention of modern warfare and industrial capability, motivated by ‘scientific’ racial theories and political ideologies that presumably neither pre-existed nor informed the capitalist and mercantile aspirations that had earlier driven Europeans to explore and conquer ‘new’ oceans and lands, and to colonise ‘new’ territories. That drive was considered distinct from what propelled earlier, more conventional military expansions, such as Japan’s genocidal invasions of Korea in the 1590s and the Chinese empire’s extermination of the Zünghars of Central Asia in the 1750s, examined in Nam-lin Hur’s and David Brophy’s Chapters 5 and 12, respectively, in this volume. Asian as well as European powers had long engaged in devastatingly brutal conquests. And while Indigenous societies were increasingly their victims, on occasion even Indigenous leaders could also commit genocide. Yet at both ends of the Eurasian landmass, from Ireland to the Banda Archipelago (as Frank Dhont shows in Chapter 8), scholars have found that twentieth-century genocide has deep colonial antecedents. The Europeaninflicted genocides of traditional landowners that began in the late-fifteenth -century Americas were rationalised by an evolving sense of religious righteousness, commercial drive, cultural superiority and racial supremacy that persisted into the modern era. The wealth and power that colonisation generated for Europeans helped to define – for many of them – their sense of moral and cultural dominance. For those whom colonisation dispossessed, the reverse was true. Their loss and demographic decline came to define their inferiority and to justify their dispossession in the minds of many Europeans. Colonisation realised a supposedly natural European ascendancy. It is no coincidence that, as European colonisation expanded, so its ideological rationalisation became most sophisticated and intense. Nineteenth-century British imperial expansion – and the colonisation of Australia, in particular – was pivotal to the development of evolutionary anthropology. According to this view, Indigenous Australians appeared the living manifestation of the recently discovered European Stone Age – the most ‘primitive’ phase of human development.23 That ‘prehistoric’ peoples should ‘die out’ when encountered by more ‘advanced’ societies seemed logical to many colonisers. Some presented the Tasmanian Aborigines’ 23 T. Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 9–10.

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(Palawa) supposed ‘extinction’ in 1876 as ‘a key instance’ of the predicted demise of all colonised ‘primitives’ the world over, signifying for Europeans their seemingly unparalleled global dominance.24 Even a growing British humanitarianism appeared to demonstrate the interlocutors’ sense of superiority, both within European society and over the ‘primitives’ they sought to ‘protect’.25 Nineteenth-century evolutionism presaged (though it did not determine) a twentieth-century racial science that culminated in – and hopefully ended with – the Holocaust. The manifest horrors that came to international light after World War Two inspired a new generation of scientists to seek out human connections above divisions. The subsequent discoveries in human genetics and archaeological dating have documented humanity’s singular biology and history of migration and population growth.26 Modern imperial history was simultaneously revised. By the 1960s, histories of imperial ‘discovery’ were reframed as histories of fatal impact – fatal to species of both plants and animals, as well as to human societies.27 The 500th anniversary of Columbus’ landing inspired sweeping histories of the vast numbers of Indigenous deaths since 1492.28 While these histories offered an important new perspective, the sense of contrition that inspired them, especially at a popular level, maintained the problematic focus upon overwhelming European power, overlooking examples of Indigenous resilience, resistance and survival. Meanwhile, an emergent post-colonial criticism recognised the deep Eurocentrism of modern historiography and identity, but did not extend to understanding colonial/Indigenous relations as genocidal. The founding Indigenous post-colonial theorists were from former colonies such as India that had not experienced massive European settlement and that had historically relied upon subjugated labour, the elimination of which would have been counterproductive for India’s colonisers. It was when scholars examined the 24 P. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 124. 25 T. Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London, New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014), pp. 94–101. 26 Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors, pp. 86–7. 27 A. Moorehead, The Fatal Impact: An Account of the Invasion of the South Pacific 1767–1840 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1966); A. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1972). 28 D. E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); M. Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal Peoples (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998); A. Crosby, Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1994).

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histories of other colonies where land, not labour, was the primary resource sought, that genocide became a central question. In the 1980s, historian Tony Barta turned his expertise in German history to the Australian context. Australian Indigenous peoples’ well-being, sovereignty and culture depended upon a continuing connection to Country, the English-language term that many Indigenous Australians use for their close cultural and economic relationship to their land. However, in the Australian colonial context of extensive stock grazing rather than intensive cultivation, British capitalist growth relied upon an ongoing occupation and exploitation of Aboriginal land, which most often meant removing its owners rather than employing them on it. The primary relations between British colonists and Aborigines were not over labour but over land, Barta identified, and they were ‘relations of genocide’.29 Historian Patrick Wolfe followed with a similar observation: that in settler colonies, such as Australia and the Americas, the determinant ‘articulation . . . between colonizer and native is . . . directly to the land’. The traditional owners are thus superfluous in the view of the new immigrants; indeed, partly because Indigenous people have their own use and need for the land and may resist dispossession, they are a hindrance. Just as settler colonies are ‘premised on the elimination’, that premise becomes their determinant feature: ‘The colonizers come to stay’, Wolfe concluded, ‘ – invasion is a structure, not an event.’30 Works by Australian historians like Barta and Wolfe on the genocidal logic of settler colonisation had a profound impact on the international historiography of settler colonialism, but this impact was incremental and contentious. Genocide has remained a threateningly technical and modern term to many historians. A key sticking point has been the required evidence of ‘specific intent’ or conscious desire to commit genocide, which it has been assumed must be both premeditated and documented in writing by state leaders. Barta wonders (in Chapter 2 of this volume) why historians of settler colonies fail to ‘engage with the reality that actions and relationships and interests also declare intentions. The relations of genocide’, Barta explains, ‘are constructed historically by forces greater than documented plots to destroy a people.’ There is much to be said for this important observation. 29 T. Barta, ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’ in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. M. Dobkowski and I. Wallimann (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), 237–53. 30 P. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), p. 2.

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In some cases, at least, it may meet the requirements of ‘specific intent’, outlined above. This is not to say, however, that ‘smoking gun’ documentation of premeditation, even in writing and even by state officials, is always lacking. This volume offers, besides other imperial expansionist cases such as those from early modern China and Japan, empirical evidence for Barta’s observation across five centuries of European settler colonial history. In Part I, ‘Settler Colonialism’, three chapters collectively survey the colonial histories of the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Southern Africa from the sixteenth to the early twentieth centuries. These chapters bring the many differences between these colonies to light, but it is what connects them that determines their histories as genocidal: the goal of imposing a new settler society on Indigenous lands. Further, these chapters articulate how genocide has shaped the nationalist historiographies of settler colonies. In his chapter on settler colonialism and United States historiography, Ned Blackhawk chooses four words to demonstrate the centrality of Indigenous erasure from nationalist histories: ‘We, Here, Power, Responsibility’. The words come from President Abraham Lincoln’s famous letter to Congress, written in defence of the Union in 1862: ‘We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility . . . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.’ Lincoln’s words have come to capture ‘the essence . . . of the nation’ – of its virtue and hope. Yet they were written during a time not only of civil war, but also of Indigenous genocide. Many wars against Native peoples were waged during the Civil War, including part of the genocide of California Indians analysed by Benjamin Madley in Chapter 17 of this book. While the details and ongoing impact of these parallel wars have largely been forgotten by people in the 21st-century United States, the myth of an Indigenous ‘disappearance’ remains entrenched. Native American peoples did not ‘vanish’. Their adaptive endurance and surviving sovereignty in the face of genocide makes Native Americans, and indeed surviving colonised Indigenous communities everywhere, ‘central to understandings of the rise of the modern world and to the expansion of colonialism across it’. Barta’s comparative view of settler colonialism in New Zealand and Australia offers an innovative study of the phenomenon in a period of ascendant British humanitarianism. The Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes handed down its landmark Report to Britain’s parliament in 1837 after fifty years of colonisation in Australia. Colonial centres and outposts spanned that continent. Its Aboriginal populations were in massive decline. Colonisation, the Report acknowledged, had been disastrous for Aboriginal 10

Introduction to Volume I I

peoples. Britons founded the colony of New Zealand in 1840 during what Barta thus describes as ‘a unique moment of genocide awareness’. Yet it was not this awareness that averted genocide in New Zealand, Barta concludes. Rather, it was the fact that the British recognised Ma¯ori warrior leadership and sought a negotiated peace above an Indigenous elimination. Settler colonisation did not have to lead to genocide. Still, in Australia, the British aimed to remove First Nation Australians from the lands that were essential to their well-being. There, the 1837 Report proved ineffective in preventing the continuation of this destructive process, for the British ‘were not equipped to see that their conception of civilisation was itself genocidal’. Colonial humanitarianism could not in the early nineteenth century prevent or remedy that to which settler colonialism was integral. British humanitarianism features in Mohamed Adhikari’s Chapter 3 as a comparatively benign, if ultimately failed, phase in three centuries of settler colonisation in Southern Africa. Arriving in the late eighteenth century, the British sought to placate both Dutch colonists and Indigenous San peoples after one and a half centuries of frontier warfare between them. In ways that parallel the British invasion of early colonial Australia, the Dutch trekkers formed state-sanctioned militia commando units to kill San communities. While themselves also relatively itinerant, the trekkers attempted to rationalise their genocide with racialist condemnation of the San as primitive nomads. These Dutch trekkers practised an ‘exterminatory violence’ supposedly justified by a dehumanising racialism that echoes through much of the history of European colonisation. A sense of cultural superiority was a constant of genocidal cruelty. Adhikari’s narrative ends with the German forces in what is now Namibia, who killed or enforced the starvation of about 80 per cent of the Herero and 50 per cent of the Nama peoples between 1904 and 1908, genocides that form the focus of Leonor Faber-Jonker’s Chapter 26 in the final part of this volume.

Empire-Building and State Domination Part I I of this volume is entitled ‘Empire-Building and State Domination’. In their chapters, Cornelia Soldat, Nam-lin Hur, David Brophy and Peter McPhee examine four cases of possible genocides on the Eurasian landmass in the early modern period: in Russia, Korea, China and France, respectively. Only two of these cases, those involving the Japanese invasion of Korea and the Qing Empire in Central Asia, mentioned earlier, actually meet the UNGC definition of genocide. McPhee shows, however, that the large-scale 11

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atrocities of the French revolutionary regime in the Vendée in 1793–5 definitely count as war crimes. Soldat, for her part, shows that there is no local evidence of Ivan the Terrible’s supposed 1570 ‘Sack of Novgorod’, but that the story long served as a threatening metaphor in the arsenals of other European imperial powers. Later, however, in cases discussed in Parts I I and I I I of this volume, states and empires assembled the capability to conduct mass murder more frequently on a systematically genocidal scale, against non-Indigenous groups on the Eurasian continent. Part I I also considers settler colonialism in the early modern period. First, Nicholas Canny and Micheál Ó Siochrú offer pioneering critical assessments of successive English conquests of Ireland as genocide. The Tudor invaders in the 1530s, Canny argues in Chapter 6, applied the scorched-earth methods learned in Boulogne, but they were also limited by the lack of resources that that simultaneous conquest absorbed. The English monarch Henry VIII had to curb any ambition of total Irish conquest with conciliation. A century of balancing political coercion with sanctioned genocidal brutality then came to a head in 1641 with the Irish rebellion. The subsequent reconquest by republican Oliver Cromwell, the focus of Micheál Ó Siochrú’s chapter, presents a clearer instance of genocide, both Canny and Ó Siochrú concur. An estimated 40 per cent of the Irish population perished; Cromwell sought the ‘total extermination’ of the Irish, Ó Siochrú writes, for whom he held a ‘visceral contempt’. These events in Ireland prefigured the annihilating violence and racialism of European colonialism in the Americas and beyond, but Canny cautions against emphasising a link. It was not the state-led English conquests of Ireland, even including the attempts to ‘re-people’ Gaelic lands with English plantation settlers, that foreshadowed the English invasions of the Americas, he argues, but the activities of privately funded English adventurers, who exploited the invasions of France and Ireland for opportunistic profit with brutal ruthlessness. This is useful foregrounding for the chapters on early North American history that follow. Benjamin Madley offers a close examination of New England’s ‘first major colonial conflict’. The Pequot genocide of 1636–40 possesses the historiographical distinction of having been identified and contested for perhaps as long as any other North American case, a status it shares with the Palawa genocide in Tasmania, the longest-identified and most contested genocide in Australia. As in that later instance, some historians have even demanded the application to the Pequot case of a definition of genocide that surpasses the requirements of the 1948 Genocide Convention – that is, they demand proof of ‘actualized intent . . . to physically destroy an 12

Introduction to Volume I I

entire group’, not merely ‘in whole or in part’. Madley reveals that such farreaching evidence indeed exists. Written evidence demonstrates colonists’ intent to achieve what Madley calls the ‘total erasure’ of the Pequot nation. Near success not only facilitated the English domination of New England, but established patterns of violence against Native Americans that were soon repeated across much of North America. The Pequot genocide, Madley concludes, ‘remains an important, even formative, event in . . . the making of the United States’. Madley’s conclusion resonates with Blackhawk’s thesis of the centrality of Indigenous dispossession to US nationalist narratives. It is pertinent to acknowledge Blackhawk’s caution against applying exterminatory ‘logic’ to all settlers across the breadth of US history. For centuries, North America’s early coastal European colonies existed in parallel to the Indigenouscontrolled interior. The point is emphasised by Gregory Smithers, whose chapter on early North America aims to demonstrate the diversity of reasons for different perpetrators committing ‘a series of historically and geographically specific genocides’ against Indigenous Americans. Smithers’ exploration of early colonial Virginia and Kentucky reveals the common threads running through this volume’s American chapters. His study of the 1610 Kikotan genocide in Virginia parallels Madley’s history of the Pequot genocide as another, important Indigenous genocide in the making of United States history. Smithers’ examination demonstrates Blackhawk’s argument of the commonplace violence towards Indigenous Americans during that period. Finally, Smithers’ call to integrate Indigenous understandings into the history of genocide is amply heeded by Karl Jacoby’s study of the nineteenth-century US frontier in Part I I I, but also by William Gallois’s chapter on the contemporaneous French conquest of Algeria.

Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides Part I I I, entitled ‘Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides’, maps the settler colonial genocides of that era which accompanied the swift and immense reach of European colonisation across Algeria, the American interior and the Australian continent. Gallois opens Part I I I grappling with why the French conquest of Algeria, 1830–1875, has not been more widely recognised as genocidal, or compared more often to Australia, Canada and America. He acknowledges the distinctive fact that Algeria began as a military base, and that its colonial spread marked a new direction in French international policy. That the Indigenous population remained a majority after colonisation also 13

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contrasts with the histories of Australia and North America. But French leaders recognised the precedent of British colonial methods of ‘partial’ or, preferably, ‘complete’ extermination as a step in the successful establishment of a settler colony. There were also concerns raised in the French metropole in the 1830s over such violence, as there were in Britain at this time. Further, some Indigenous Algerians, both contemporaneously and since, recognised the French economically driven policies of genocide. ‘Everyone sought quickly to enrich themselves’, landowner Hamdan Khodja wrote of the French in 1833, ‘in a system of extermination and ruination.’ Gallois’s inclusion of Indigenous understandings of genocide finds a parallel in Karl Jacoby’s exploration of the conquest of the North American interior during the long nineteenth century in Chapter 16. Jacoby renames these so-called ‘Indian Wars’ as ‘the bloody ground’. The term comes from the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe’s description of early Kentucky and Tennessee settler hostility to his people, and it records the ‘asymmetrical violence’ that Native people have long recognised in their history. While genocide may be a recent and contentious term for many historians, explains Jacoby, Indigenous Americans have long known that settlers were prepared to eliminate their communities in order to acquire their land. Dakota refugees fled into Canada in 1812 seeking to avoid what they termed their ‘final extinction’. The Spokane in the 1850s said ‘troops had come to wipe them out’. And, in 1876, the Lakota leader Spotted Tail described his land as being ‘filled . . . with soldiers who think only of our death’. Such Indigenous consciousness of genocide and its potential emerges from the official archive by reading ‘against the grain’, from listening to living Indigenous people, and from learning to read the very landscape where their memory endures. Place names like Itomot’ ahpi Pikun’i (Killed Off the Piegans) and Wichakasotapi (Where All Were Wiped Out) reveal the ‘deep intertwining of Native memory and geography with genocide and its afterlife’. Such revisionary reading effectively extends the focus beyond genocide perpetrators and the question of their intent to Indigenous experiences and a recognition of what Karl Jacoby in his chapter identifies as ‘the sociopolitical structures that created the conditions that facilitated genocide’. Recognition of settler colonial structures began, as noted above, in the Australian historiographical context, and it remains of key significance to historians in that field, as the final three chapters of Part I I I demonstrate. Shortly after its beginnings as a penal settlement in 1788, Australia’s colonial economy relied upon the development of pastoralism. Compared to close 14

Introduction to Volume I I

cultivation, pastoralism required vast tracts of land to range and graze domesticated European livestock. While some landed settlers needed Aboriginal workers – especially later in Australia’s tropical north where free convict labour was no longer available – most of all they wanted land cleared of its traditional owners. In every Australian colony, from the 1790s to the 1920s, colonists coerced Indigenous people onto missions and reserves. They killed many thousands in frontier violence that included hundreds of massacres. (See the map, Figure 19.1, in Lyndall Ryan’s Chapter 19 in this volume.) The chapters on Australia in Part I I I by Lyndall Ryan, Rebe Taylor and Raymond Evans reveal, among other important material, substantial new evidence of the extent of mass killings in Australia’s colonial history, providing the basis for a potential historiographical shift. Previously, the framework of settler colonialism has been a way to understand the genocidal impact of colonisation in Australia in the absence of systematic, state-sanctioned mass killings. It was broadly believed that genocidal violence was sporadic, unplanned, silently condoned and passively sanctioned, perhaps better described as systemic than systematic. While this remains the case, these three chapters in Part I I I demonstrate that there were also clear patterns of planned and sanctioned massacres in every colony of Australia for more than a century. This undermines the supposition of a passive role of government in settler/Aboriginal frontier warfare. Lyndall Ryan traces the history of massacres on Australia’s colonial frontier, from the first recorded mass killing in New South Wales (NSW) in 1794 to the last known large-scale murder in the Northern Territory in 1928. Ryan defines a massacre as an event with corroborating evidence for killings resulting in least six deaths. Her findings to date show that British troops and/or settlers committed 290 such massacres in Australia across 134 years. Ryan estimates that these killings alone resulted in more than 7,500 Aboriginal deaths, severely diminishing the structural viability of the surviving societies. Ryan explains that her findings are provisional, and that the number of massacres documented in her current project will likely increase with ongoing research.31 Yet its chief conclusion will not alter – namely, that ‘frontier massacres were an integral part of [Australia’s] colonial history’. This conclusion, Ryan acknowledges, will take time for the wider Australian 31 L. Ryan, J. Fairbairn, G. Hedy, et al., ‘Colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1788–1930’ (The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, University of Newcastle, Australia (acccessed 2 March 2021), https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php).

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community to grasp. Silence and denial of frontier killings has long been entrenched in both popular and scholarly Australian discourse. Her recent research was prompted by political claims that she had ‘fabricated’ and exaggerated the numbers of mass killings in colonial Tasmania.32 Ryan’s findings counter these claims convincingly, but they also mark a return to an earlier Australian historiography. From the mid nineteenth century, Australian writers wrote openly about massacres. Ryan has verified some of these earlier findings, including a forensic analysis of the Risdon Cove massacre in Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) in 1804, when British soldiers opened fire on about 300 Palawa people who had gathered to hunt. In her Chapter 20 on Van Diemen’s Land, Rebe Taylor identifies that Risdon Cove massacre as a seminal moment in the island’s history, marking genocidal attitudes and policies of the British from their arrival to the closure of the mismanaged Aboriginal Establishment in 1871. Like the Pequots in colonial Connecticut, Tasmania has one of the few Indigenous histories with a long-recognised, but also much debated, genocide. Taylor explains how, since 2008, historians have increasingly recognised the genocide in Tasmania, in the forcible removals (for instance in the work of James Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land, 2008) and in an understanding of the relevance of the structure of settler colonialism. Taylor extends this work by outlining evidence of systematic massacres, especially following the governor’s order of 1826 that authorised district magistrates to sanction military-led parties to pursue Palawa people and to ‘use such force as is necessary’ to prevent their escape. Taylor also demonstrates the governor’s use of political rhetoric to frame genocidal actions as intended humanitarian protection, which parallels the findings of Barta’s Chapter 2 in this volume. Raymond Evans’ Chapter 21 on Queensland and the tropical north of Australia offers the first history to encompass this geographical and historical sweep. Evans shows the audacity of and increase in frontier violence as it moved north, with evidence of mass killings that corroborates Ryan’s finding that the average number of Indigenous people killed in each massacre rose with the founding of each new Australian colony. Evans reaffirms the importance of the question of intent to commit genocide, answering it with clear evidence of complicit, conspired, repeated violence that continued into, and beyond, the 1920s. His findings of massacres that persisted beyond that of 1928 at Coniston in the Northern Territory, and the suggestion that 32 K. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. I: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002). See Lyndall Ryan’s and Rebe Taylor’s chapters in this volume (Chapters 19 and 20, respectively) for more detailed discussion and references.

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killings continued into the 1940s, bring to light important new evidence.33 It is worth noting that, at the time, these victims in the tropical north were still disenfranchised. By the time of the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901, Aborigines could vote in all states ‘except Queensland and Western Australia, where most lived’.34 In Western Australia, Aborigines gained the right to apply for citizenship only in 1944, and under strict conditions, including proving that they had ‘severed all ties with their Aboriginal family and friends’.35 In Queensland, Aboriginal people obtained the vote only in 1965.

Premonitions In Part I V, ‘Premonitions’, Leonor Faber-Jonker’s Chapter 26 on German Southwest Africa investigates in detail the Herero and Nama genocides of 1904–8, conducted by Germans in what is now Namibia. For Faber-Jonker and many other scholars, this is the first genocide of the twentieth century. It is worth considering, however, the persistence of genocidal massacres in Australia at this time. Evans writes, in Chapter 21 of this volume, about a Western Australian policeman who, in mid-1901, publicly admitted to the violence committed by his constabulary against Aborigines, who ‘have in places been shot by scores, put in heaps and burnt, both men and women’. Other local witnesses corroborated his admission of massacres and of incinerating the dead. Chapters by Faber-Jonker and others in this final section of Volume II – those by Charles Desnoyers, Anna Haebich, Dean Pavlakis, Bedross Der Matossian and Nicole Jordan – all foreshadow later twentiethcentury cases of genocide, and thus lead readers into Volume III of this series. The chapters by Desnoyers and Pavlakis on the Taiping rebellion and the Congo, with their vast death tolls, prefigure the scale of twentieth-century genocides. Der Matossian and Jordan discuss cases involving some of the victims of later twentieth-century cases, including Armenians and Jews, while Faber-Jonker’s study of two pre-World War One German colonial genocides raises the possibility of whether it presaged the Nazi Holocaust. Nicole Jordan’s chapter, with its discussion of the experimental use of poison gas on the Eastern Front in World War One, of course raises a closely related issue. 33 Michael Bradley, Coniston (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2019). 34 David Kemp, A Free Country: Australians’ Search for Utopia, 1861–1901 (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2019), p. 498. 35 http://museum.wa.gov.au/referendum-1967/aboriginal-rights (accessed 1 May 2021).

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Similar premonitory questions apply to nineteenth-century cases of child removal, a practice which accelerated in the twentieth century in both Australia and North America.

Child Removal Child removal long preceded the nineteenth century and was far from unique to colonial settler societies. As Ned Blackhawk shows in Chapter 10 on the destruction of Wendake in the seventeenth century, Iroquois raiders often took Wendat children captive and subsequently raised them as Iroquois. In Chapter 12, Brophy quotes a Qing commander fighting the Zünghars in Central Asia in 1758, who ordered his troops to ‘kill all the men, and give all the women and children to the military and civil officials’. For members of Indigenous societies, the experience of European colonial genocide was not uniform either. Colonists and their allies often killed Indigenous men because of their presumed roles as community leaders and warriors. Indigenous women were more vulnerable to forced labour and sexual predation. Older Indigenous people were more vulnerable to frontier attacks and forced removals. Indigenous children faced all of the threats met by men, women and Indigenous elders, as well as other dangers. Newcomers targeted them in an additional act of genocide. Colonists removed them from their families and ‘forcibly transferred [them] to another group’ (to cite the UN Genocide Convention) in order to inculcate in them new languages, beliefs and skills, and to control their lives, employment and relationships. This latter process has also been termed a form of ‘cultural genocide’. On early colonial frontiers, child removal was frequent, but often not formally sanctioned or organised. Colonists commonly took Indigenous children from their communities (sometimes during or after frontier attacks) for sexual exploitation, for labour, as hostages, or out of curiosity and for social experimentation in the guise of humanitarianism. Increasingly, as colonies developed, colonists removed children in order to mould and ‘civilise’ them – to create a future for colonies where the ‘problem of the native’ was eliminated through cultural and biological assimilation. Thus, colonised Indigenous children suffered the loss of parents, family and community; of language and identity; of connection to their lands and sacred places; and of their dignity – all without the support and developmental skills needed to understand, process and protect themselves from trauma and assault. 18

Introduction to Volume I I

Blackhawk notes in Chapter 1 in Part I that one of the first and most valuable works of history to apply the paradigm of settler colonialism in the American context was a study of child removal. Margaret Jacobs’ 2009 comparative history of Australia and North America recognised how the structure of settler colonialism facilitated the removal of tens of thousands of Indigenous children. Further, Jacobs’ work advanced the field of settler colonial studies by demonstrating the gendered nature of Indigenous genocides. While child removals were usually enacted and sanctioned by white men, educating and ‘caring’ for Indigenous children was largely the responsibility of white women. Jacobs built upon the pioneering work of the Australian historian Anna Haebich, whose 2000 book, Broken Circles, brought to light the intergenerational impact of child removals in Australia, from the beginning of British colonisation to the turn of the twenty-first century.36 In Part I V of this volume, Haebich offers a more concise history of child removal in Australia from 1800 to 1920, which she frames within the Genocide Convention’s definition. Haebich illustrates the prevalence of child removal on the colonial frontier, and recounts shifts in official policies. The initial efforts to Christianise Aboriginal people through removals and incarceration became, over time, attempts to ‘breed out the colour’ and culture of Aboriginal children in ways that prefigured the twentiethcentury goals of eradicating the Australian Aboriginal ‘race’. Taylor parallels Haebich in her examination of child removals in Tasmania, and the terrible effect that child removal had on a waning Aboriginal population. Haebich shows how the disregard and abuse of children in Tasmania was preceded in NSW, and then repeated in Victoria and Western Australia (thus extending the Australian chapters in this volume with the inclusion of southern Western Australia, and the experience of its Indigenous families whose children were taken away). Other contributors in this volume acknowledge the specific and severe impact of child removal on colonised Indigenous communities across the world. In Chapter 3, Adhikari explains the distinctive ways southern African trekkers attacked the San: they killed the men ‘on the spot’ because they were deemed to be both dangerous and of little ‘economic value’, but they seized San women ‘and especially children’ to enslave them. Children born into trekker captivity then became part of ‘an ultra-exploitable class of labourers’ who, from 1775, were legally bound to masters until at least age 25 (many 36 A. Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000).

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were coerced to work for life). From the early twentieth century, German farmers in Southwest Africa were similarly ‘keen on obtaining San children’ because they could be ‘easily resocialised’ and forced to work. The chapters on North American Indigenous genocide in Parts I I and I I I of this volume underscore how and why colonists took First Nations children from their communities from the beginnings of colonisation. Madley notes that, in early-seventeenth-century New England, colonists exiled at least fifteen Pequot boys to the Caribbean as slaves – a forced displacement that effectively commodified Native American children in an early European imperialist trade network. He likewise explores the forcible removal of thousands of Native American children in nineteenth-century California. And Jacoby shows how Native child removal was an integral stage of a US settler colonial process in the nineteenth century. First, colonists forced Indigenous Americans to the colony’s peripheries – whence they could be moved no farther – then came the Christianisation and the removal of children into state boarding schools, the subject of Preston McBride’s examination in ‘Lessons from Canada: The Question of Genocide in US Boarding Schools for Native Americans’, Chapter 18 of this volume. McBride reveals intentions that, in some ways, overlap with the observation at the end of Haebich’s chapter, in which she describes the Australian Chief Protector of Aborigines A. O. Neville’s early twentieth-century ambition to ‘erase Aboriginal physical traits and culture altogether’. This racialised social engineering constituted, as Barta summarises in Chapter 2, ‘genocide exactly as Lemkin was then trying to make it understood. It was not only about killings but also words and actions that signified an intention to destroy a human group.’

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I

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SETTLER COLONIALISM

1

‘The Centrality of Dispossession’ Native American Genocide and Settler Colonialism ned blackhawk

As nation-states confront the legacies of Indigenous dispossession, statesanctioned practices of child removal, and the desecration of sacred sites, scholars have established new paradigms to illuminate these historical developments. Indeed, the experiences of Indigenous communities now appear central to understandings of the rise of the modern world and to the expansion of colonialism across it.1 Indigenous peoples’ ongoing adaptations and successful survival – what Native American literary scholar Gerald Vizenor (Ojibwe) has termed ‘survivance’ – continue to undermine many of the teleologies of ‘frontier history’.2 Mythologies of Indigenous ‘disappearance’ appear as ahistorical as they are problematic. Neither five centuries of European colonialism nor its accompanying ideological justifications have rendered complete the project of Indigenous land dispossession and forced assimilation. As the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) now mandates, each member nation maintains an inherent obligation to protect the rights of Indigenous

1 See, for example, J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-world (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); J. C. Weaver, The Great Land Rush and the Making of the Modern World, 1650–1900 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2003); and A. Woolford, J. Benvenuto and A. Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). 2 G. Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994). See also K. L. Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), esp. pp. 129–212. ‘Indians appeared in most history courses and texts, if at all, as fringe characters, a dramatic obstruction, or as Billington’s textbook described them, a “barrier”. The conflation of natives with nature predominated’: ibid., pp. 210–11.

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peoples, to safeguard their access to religious and spiritual sites, and to refrain from interference with their cultural development.3 The first decades of the twenty-first century contrast with those of the previous century, when nation-states openly espoused celebratory and often providential visions of their national histories while targeting Indigenous peoples for elimination. To reinterpret the violent history of Indigenous peoples and global colonisation, scholars have increasingly deployed broad conceptualisations of ‘genocide’ and ‘settler colonialism’. They have done so against what the historian Patrick Wolfe termed ‘an oddly monolithic, and surprisingly unexamined, notion of colonialism’.4 This chapter considers the overlapping 21st-century use of, and congruence – and at times dissonance – between, these two paradigms of historical and cultural analysis: genocide and settler colonialism. It aims to apply them in order to interrogate global colonialism as a constitutive feature, and not a subsidiary, of modernity. Often denied access to nation-state institutions and excluded from contemporary visions of national communities, Indigenous peoples continue to confront the logics and structures of colonisation. As land loss, language endangerment, and ongoing forms of political subordination continue, Indigenous Studies scholars have repurposed these two paradigms – genocide and settler colonialism – into more operative categories of analysis. New approaches, methods and concepts now frame studies of global colonialism. As the First Nation and Indigenous Studies scholar Glen Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene) has suggested, the inability of scholars to recognise ‘the centrality of dispossession’ in broader discussions of power and nationhood poses inherent limitations: ‘critical theory risks not only becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it ought to oppose but also overlooking what could prove to be invaluable glimpses

3 For overviews of the UNDRIP and its place in efforts to reform Native American law and policy, see W. R. Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror: The 10 Worst Indian Law Cases Ever Decided (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010), pp. 428–60. 4 P. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), p. 1. Wolfe’s work appeared in the ‘Writing Past Colonialism Series’, which he co-edited from the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne. He notably challenged both ‘post-colonial’ theory and ‘internal colonization’ and established alternative visions of a global, settler colonialism. See ibid., esp. pp. 1–7, 43–68. For an overview of post-colonialism and post-coloniality, see L. Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). ‘(P)ostcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary project devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering, and, crucially, interrogating the colonial past’: ibid., p. 4.

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into the ethical practices and preconditions required of a more humane and sustainable world order’.5 As the discipline of Native American and Indigenous Studies has contributed to broadening cultural studies, ‘genocide’ and ‘settler colonialism’ have joined its operative theoretical formations.6 To study Native America and Indigenous peoples is, on some level, to query the processes of genocide and settler colonialism. To study genocide and its relationship to settler colonialism now requires engagement with Indigenous peoples, history and the ongoing logics of ‘elimination’. As the historian Boyd Cothran has written, ‘settler colonialism is the logic that gives meaning to the history of North America’.7 Despite their visibility across numerous fields and historiographies, these two paradigms remain too often disconnected. Settler colonialism and genocide have shared genealogies that remain, however, under-recognised because the historical trauma, experiential hardships and ongoing political indeterminacy of Indigenous peoples pose continuing challenges to national historiographies that celebrate the distinctiveness of national experiences.8 The field of Genocide Studies began addressing genocides against Indigenous peoples from its inception. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide and first defined it, himself planned to write multiple chapters on such genocides.9 Scholars began addressing Indigenous genocides as early as the mid twentieth century. For example, in 1948 the Australian writer Clive Turnbull published Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines, in which he compared that case with those of ‘the Incas, natives of the Congo, [and] “Non-Aryans”’, thus suggesting a comparison with the then very recent Jewish Holocaust.10 In 1980, historian Horst Drechsler called the early 5 G. Coulthard, ‘From wards of the State to subjects of recognition? Marx, Indigenous peoples, and the politics of dispossession in Denendeh’ in A. Simpson and A. Smith, eds., Theorizing Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 61. 6 For an overview on the establishment of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, see R. Warrior, ‘Organizing Native American and Indigenous Studies’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (2008), 1683–91. 7 B. Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), p. 16. 8 For one of the most comprehensive efforts to incorporate Indigenous histories of Latin America, the United States and Australia into a single global history of genocide, see B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), esp. pp. 72–100, 213–363, 582–5. For an examination of US domestic and international law pertaining to ‘Was Genocide Legal?’, see Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror, pp. 399–420. 9 For example, see R. Lemkin, ‘Tasmania’, edited, and with commentary, by Ann Curthoys, Patterns of Prejudice, 39:2 (2005), 170–96. 10 C. Turnbull, Black War: The Extermination of the Tasmanian Aborigines (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1948), p. 2.

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twentieth-century German policies towards the Herero and Nama of Southwest Africa a case of genocide.11 In 1986, the historian of the British empire Robin Winks described ‘a war of genocide against’ early nineteenthcentury Aboriginal Tasmanians.12 By then, the Australian historian Tony Barta had already asserted that colonists had developed a ‘relationship of genocide’ with Aboriginal people.13 Still, it is only in the early twenty-first century that the settler colonialism paradigm has gained broader application as well as an interconnection with that of Genocide Studies and its pre-existing engagement with the genocides of Indigenous peoples. That application has been achieved through the concerted efforts of Indigenous Studies scholars. Most notably, in 1999, the Ma¯ori education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Nga¯ti Awa and Nga¯ti Porou iwi) and Patrick Wolfe both challenged the then prevailing limits of post-colonial theory. In their respective works, Decolonizing Methodologies and Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, they questioned the absence of Indigenous peoples within formulations of post-colonial theory and urged scholars, activists and policy-makers to make the dispossession of Indigenous peoples a central, ongoing intellectual concern.14 Joined by scholars across multiple fields, each helped to lay the foundations for early-21st-century historical and cultural analysis. Meanwhile, Alison Palmer’s Colonial Genocide (2000) carefully compared nineteenth-century Queensland, other settler colonies in Australia and German Southwest Africa.15 Other Genocide Studies scholars followed suit with additional studies of genocides against Indigenous peoples in colonial contexts.16 Charting the overlapping 21st-century historiographies of genocide and settler colonialism, this chapter examines these paradigms and deploys them to provide context for approaches to the history of Indigenous genocide and 11 H. Drechsler, ‘Let Us Die Fighting’: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zed Press, 1980), pp. 210–11. 12 R. Winks, ‘A system of commands: the infrastructure of race contact’ in Studies in British Imperial History, ed. G. Martell (Hong Kong: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), 24. 13 T. Barta, ‘After the Holocaust: consciousness of genocide in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 3:1 (1985), 157. 14 L. T. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012); Wolfe, Settler Colonialism. 15 A. Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2000). See also A. Palmer, ‘Colonial and modern genocide: explanations and categories’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (1998), 89–115. 16 Additional early studies of colonial genocide include B. Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research 6:2 (2004), 167–92; and A. Dirk Moses and D. Stone, eds., Colonialism and Genocide (London, New York: Routledge, 2007).

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global colonialism. Drawing from the writings of Wolfe, it continues an engagement with the problematic temporalities undergirding ‘the ideological regime’ of Genocide Studies and exposes the still too often limited study of Indigenous genocide, particularly in the field of US history.17 Tracing the growth of settler colonial studies, it then examines how recent studies of genocide seek to broaden paradigms of analysis.

2006 and After More than any other work, Wolfe’s seminal 2006 essay, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’ established the ‘centrality of dispossession’ to our understandings of Indigenous genocide in the context of settler colonialism. His definition of ‘settler colonialism’ spoke directly to Genocide Studies scholars. ‘The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism’, he began. ‘I term settler colonization a structure rather than an event, and it is on this basis that I shall consider its relationship to genocide.’ Appearing in the Journal of Genocide Research, Wolfe’s essay built upon his 1999 monograph and established a 21st-century vernacular for identifying the ongoing ‘structure’ of settler colonialism. It also identified a core attribute in this process: a genocidal ‘logic’ aimed at the ‘elimination’ of Indigenous peoples.18 Wolfe linked colonialism and genocide in new and unprecedented ways. Notably, unlike most historical analyses, Wolfe’s paradigm conjoined past and present. It identified ongoing dialectics of Indigenous resistance and state power that reside not outside, but at the constitutive core of, the settler colonial nation. As the historians Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen noted, for Wolfe, ‘settler colonialism cannot be seen as an essentially fleeting stage but must be understood as the persistent defining characteristic, even the condition of possibility, of . . . settler society . . . Extermination and 17 Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, p. 53. Writing about anthropological approaches to Indigenous peoples, Wolfe stated: ‘the representation import . . . can hardly be overemphasized. For, in relocating internally colonized indigenes into some unspecified heterotopia . . . anthropological representation not only denies their expropriation [dispossession]. It also compounds it, by discrediting the ethnic integrity of those natives who survive incorporation’: ibid. 18 P. Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (December 2006), 387–8. For one of the first historical and transnational efforts to apply Wolfe’s theorisation, see M. D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), esp. pp. 4–86.

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assimilation, he states provocatively . . . both aimed at . . . utterly destroying the indigenous world.’19 Related to this, as Smith contended, prevailing academic methodologies expose and often perpetuate practices of Indigenous erasure and elimination. As the historian Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibwe) detailed in Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England, antiquarians and US national historians had developed historiographies and habits that erased the violent history of Anglophone colonisation. Such writing also denied the continuing presence of the region’s contemporary Native peoples, who had survived generations of colonialism. Historical practice and nationalist memory thereby fostered ideologies of difference and inauthenticity that erased the region’s contemporary Indigenous peoples from the history of their homelands. As O’Brien suggested, ‘to understand the relations of power in the process of historical production, we need to account not just for professional historians but also for “artisans of different kinds, unpaid or unrecognized field laborers who augment, deflect, or reorganize the works of professionals”’.20 Such process-orientated conceptualisations increasingly animate settler colonial analyses. They also inform studies of the production of historical knowledge and memory. Indeed, within the field of settler colonialism, nationalist historiographies that elide fundamental questions of indigeneity and Indigenous dispossession appear uncanny in their disassociation from themselves. They often take on a performativity that seeks easy repair for national traumas through new representational forms, established committees and forums for recognition, as well as national apologies for historic abuse.21 However, as the anthropologist Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk) has suggested, such ‘discursive machinations of [the] performance of contrition by an Anglo settler colonial nation-state’ provide little remedy on their own for the contemporary asymmetries in Indigenous health, economics and political power, among other things.22 Moreover, as the jurist Walter Echo-Hawk (Pawnee) has maintained, ‘policies and processes of 19 C. Elkins and S. Pedersen, eds., Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century: Projects, Practices, Legacies (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 3. 20 J. M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xvii (emphasis in original). 21 See, e.g., M. Asch et. al, eds., Resurgence and Reconciliation: Indigenous–Settler Relations and Earth Teachings (University of Toronto Press, 2018). For critiques of ‘settler colonial recognition’, see also L. B. Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), p. 180. 22 A. Simpson, ‘Whither settler colonialism?’ Settler Colonial Studies 6:4 (2016), 2.

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genocide and ethnocide . . . were legalized and facilitated’ throughout US history, and constitute ‘a menacing dark side . . . of the law that is very much like a loaded gun’.23 In the context of such ongoing challenges, recent scholarship on Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism provides methods for transcending the histories of Indigenous erasure that define so many national historiographies. In particular, such emphasis challenges the temporalities of analysis that have disaggregated and compartmentalised global colonialism into discrete eras, regions and national histories. Following Wolfe, studies of Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism seek to recognise ongoing processes of elimination in political, material and intellectual arenas. Nowhere is such intellectual erasure more apparent than in studies of the history of the United States.

We, Here, Power, Responsibility: Reconfiguring the Spatialised Temporalities of Genocide Few words in academic and popular nomenclature carry the weight of ‘genocide’, a word invented during the height of the Nazi Holocaust to convey the ultimate horror: the attempted eradication of an entire people. First defined by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, the term and its varied meanings have become a part of the everyday parlance of international affairs, numerous fields of academic inquiry, and popular culture.24 Rarely has a single word circulated so quickly and come to hold such intense associations, as scholarly journals, international forums and, most notably, the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention all examine, query and attempt to define this ultimate of human horrors.25 Given its long-standing association with the Nazi Holocaust, the term genocide has come to frame countless analyses of Europe’s darkest hours. It has also been used to characterise the twentieth century more broadly. Such 23 Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror, pp. 418–19. 24 R. Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). ‘The practice of extermination of nations and ethnic groups as carried out by the invaders is called by the author “genocide”, a term deriving from the Greek word genos (tribe, race) and the Latin cide (by way of analogy, see homicide, fratricide)’: p. xi. ‘Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation . . . It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’: p. 79. 25 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 10.

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temporal associations still endure, particularly outside of academia. To many people, genocide constitutes not only a ‘problem from hell’, but also one that defines an ‘age’ or even a ‘century of genocide’.26 While demographic and statistical debates about mass killings comprise key elements within such assessments, the ‘sheer mass casualties’ alone, according to the historian Eric Hobsbawm, ‘are only one part’ of the ‘growing brutality and inhumanity of the twentieth century’. Another disfiguration, he argued, marred that century: The greatest cruelties of our century have been the impersonal cruelties of remote decision, of system and routine . . . So the world accustomed itself to the compulsory expulsion and killing on an astronomic scale, phenomena so unfamiliar that new words had to be invented for them: ‘stateless’ . . . (and) ‘genocide’. The First World War led to the killing of an uncounted number of Armenians by Turkey which can count as the first modern attempt to eliminate an entire population.27

For Hobsbawm, while the technological, ideological and economic structures of nation-states all contributed to the rise of various exterminationist practices, the everyday bureaucratisation of state power ultimately enabled its expansion. Indeed, a new, dehumanising feature of modernity itself underlies contemporary society.28 Growing and centralised state power unleashed ‘phenomena so unfamiliar’ that not only new names but also new characterisations of humanity itself became needed. Accordingly, the ‘world accustomed itself’ to its haunting new reflection and developed an unwelcomed yet permanent new appendage, one capable of mass killing and forced migrations on ‘an astronomic scale’. Celestial modifiers and metaphors thus help to convey genocide’s deep association with a modernising present, as well as its radical distance from 26 S. Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002); and S. Totten and W. S. Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009.) 27 E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 50 (emphasis added). 28 See also E. D. Weitz, ‘The modernity of genocides: war, race, and revolution in the twentieth century’ in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 53–73. ‘The breadth and depth of the twentieth-century violence could be explained . . . by modernity’s defining features, the combined force of new technologies of warfare, new administrative techniques that enhanced state powers of surveillance, and new ideologies that made populations the choice objects of state policies that categorized people along strict lines of nation and race . . . this has been the view of major twentieth-century theorists of modernity’: p. 54. But, in the same book, see also ‘Part II: Indigenous peoples and colonial issues’, pp. 115–85.

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connections to an anterior pre-industrial world and time. Moreover, while often synonymous with state-organised exterminations of the twentieth century, genocide has also come to imply a form of historical development in which breakdowns of seismic consequence rupture social contracts, political orders and ethnic relations. As such, genocide is, quite contradictorily, often seen not as evolutionary in its historical development but devolutionary, an uncanny disassociation outside of, or away from, a potentially otherwise liberating modernity. Across many studies in the field, the technologies and capabilities of modern nation-states are seen as having been harnessed into the most harmful and destructive of forms, whose collective impact ‘goes well beyond statistics’.29 Studies of the Holocaust, of the use of atomic weaponry, and of wars of decolonisation all increasingly convey a sense of such uncanny, or what literature scholar Jean Franco called ‘cruel modernity’.30 With a historiography that traces its origins to Lemkin and the Holocaust, as well as the United Nations and the dawn of the Cold War, much of the field of Genocide Studies developed an association with the twentieth century. For many, as for Hobsbawm, genocide corresponds with a new epoch of human history when newly established international entities, technological transformations and even celestial rivalries marked a heightened moment of global competition and consciousness. Moreover, since 1951, the United Nations has provided a particular forum for future-oriented prevention as well as an internationally recognised definition for this crime. Indeed, as Genocide Studies scholars Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs suggested in 2002, ‘In the last half of the twentieth century, the Convention . . . remains the cornerstone of international legal and moral-ethical reasoning regarding genocide and its prevention.’31 The temporal associations conveyed by Hobsbawm have been echoed by many Genocide Studies scholars – but even more so across American historical inquiry. The supposed temporalities that mark the twentieth century as the ‘century of genocide’ have tended to inhibit examinations of pre1900 Indigenous genocide. For generations, exceptionalist paradigms have limited attention to the demographic catastrophe that attended post-1492 29 C. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), p. 366. 30 J. Franco, Cruel Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). As Franco relays, in Latin America, ‘the urgency of modernization transposed racism into a different key and turned the indigenous from an exploited labor force into a negative and undesirable mass’: ibid., p. 8. 31 S. Totten and S. L. Jacobs, eds., Pioneers of Genocide Studies (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2002), p. 399.

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European expansion into the Americas, in which European-introduced diseases, violence, slavery and colonisation deprived tens of millions of Native peoples of their lives and homelands.32 US state-driven designs of Indian removal also often receive similarly limited scholarly attention. Indeed, throughout the late twentieth century, a discomforting incommensurability developed, as the temporalities of twentieth-century genocides paralleled American historiographical frameworks that erased earlier histories of Indigenous elimination and colonialisation. Before Wolfe’s 2006 essay, such dissonance abounded. For example, the 2004 edition of Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views began (like the 1997 first edition) in 1904 in Africa with the German government’s attempts to ‘destroy a whole people’ – the Hereros of German Southwest Africa. The anthology then shifted to Armenia and ‘the brutal culmination’ of ‘a thousand-year struggle of the Armenian people to hold on to their homelands and of the Turks to take it away from them’.33 Of the anthology’s fourteen chapters, only one, ‘Physical and cultural genocide of various Indigenous peoples’, then addressed the global history of Indigenous populations. It summarised the US past as follows: assimilation policies on the part of the United States, combined with differential legal treatment of Indians, had major impacts on the well-being of Native Americans . . . While the U.S. government generally did not openly espouse extermination policies, it did engage throughout its history in cultural modification programs that led to the destruction of Indian societies.34 32 See D. K. Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), who noted that epidemics would leave ‘much of the countryside empty of human habitation’, p. 5. For additional overviews of American Indian population history, see R. Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); and W. M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976; 1992, rev. ed.). As Richter elsewhere claimed: ‘It would take until the eve of US independence for the number of Euro- and African Americans to exceed 2 million and return the population of the east to the level it probably sustained in 1492.’ See Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 7. As D. S. Jones has suggested, ‘Few developments in human history match the demographic consequences of European arrival in the Americas.’ See Jones, ‘Population, health, and public welfare’, in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. F. E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 413. See also J. Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), pp. 1–8, 383–7. 33 S. Totten and W. S. Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004,), p. 61. 34 R. K. Hitchcock and T. M. Twedt, ‘Physical and cultural genocide of various Indigenous peoples’, in Totten and Parsons, eds., Century of Genocide, 379.

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That is scarcely adequate coverage, as readers of subsequent chapters of this volume of The Cambridge World History of Genocide may conclude. Canada is mentioned just once in Century of Genocide, and not because of its centurylong history of removing children from First Nations communities and assimilative state-organised schooling. Century of Genocide examined Canadian history only for its foreign office’s statements regarding the Indonesian genocide in East Timor. Moreover, in the over 100 eyewitness accounts that accompanied its fourteen chapters, only one came from the Americas: selections drawn from the memoir, I, Rigoberta Menchu, An Indian Woman from Guatemala. In this 2004 volume, genocide seemingly occurred outside of the North American past. It even appeared to have limited applicability to the history of the entire western hemisphere, apart from the genocide in Guatemala in 1981–3. Only in 2013 did a new edition, now retitled Centuries of Genocide, include a separate chapter on a genocide in the United States.35 The Armenian case, an extremely important one but not the first genocide, even in the twentieth century, began another century-long overview of genocide, that in the journalist and politician Samantha Power’s popular 2002 book, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Power’s work broadly chronicled ‘U.S. policy responses to genocide’. According to Power, these policies were ‘astonishingly similar across time, geography, ideology, and geopolitical balance’.36 ‘A Problem from Hell’ deployed not only the temporalities of public thinking about genocide but also a related spatial emphasis that further removes genocide from the American past. As in Century of Genocide, Power located her subject within the twentieth century – which she termed ‘the Age of Genocide’ – and emphasised its origins somewhere outside the western hemisphere. For Power, genocide is a ‘problem’ for America that emanates ‘from’ someplace else. ‘A Problem from Hell’ scarcely mentioned the demographic disaster Native Americans experienced beginning in 1492. It included a brief reference to the US ‘eradication of Native American tribes in the nineteenth century’, which Power implied might possibly fall into a category ‘too mild to warrant [international] interference in another state’s domestic affairs’. She did, however, assert that ‘Reckoning with American brutality against native peoples was long overdue’, but that would remain the case on publication 35 B. Madley, ‘The genocide of California’s Yana Indians’ in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. S. Totten and W. S. Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16–53. 36 Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’, p. xvi.

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of her book. She offered no details nor referred to the programmes of forced removal of Native nations by US state leaders in the nineteenth century, or the various forced assimilation and sterilisation programmes that targeted Native Americans throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.37 She charted only twentieth-century responses of US policy-makers to global genocides (excluding Guatemala) in this attempt at an exploration of ‘America’s relationship with genocide’. Like many studies of US history, her erasure avoided any form of national culpability in Indigenous land dispossession while also simultaneously shutting Native peoples outside of visions of contemporary history. The exceptionalisms inherent in visions of an untainted and teleological North American past have been critiqued for generations. In both US and Canadian historiography, the mythology of an innocent, less violent and indeed celebratory national history has been complicated or largely abandoned by professional historians within each nation’s primary historical associations.38 Genocide, however, still remains disassociated from standard North American historiography. It has become a ‘problem’, but one that comes inherently ‘from’ elsewhere. In fact, Power evoked such exteriority before the book even began. ‘A Problem From Hell’ opened with a spatialised epigraph from Abraham Lincoln: ‘We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility.’ Although predating the book’s own periodisation of genocide by nearly half a century, the numerous presumptions structuring Power’s vision of ‘America and the age of genocide’ are in many ways encapsulated in these four powerful words: We, Here, Power, Responsibility. 37 Ibid., pp. xxi, 67. For introductions to Native American demographic history, see Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival. For the removal programmes, see Ostler, Surviving Genocide; and J. P. Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016). For state-driven assimilation programmes and Native American sterilisation, see B. Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). ‘Scholars estimate that beginning in 1970, physicians sterilized between 25 and 42 percent of Native women of childbearing age . . . Some of these procedures occurred in government-operated hospitals, while others occurred in facilities contracted by the federal government to provide health services to American Indians’: ibid., p. 1. See also R. Hansen and D. King, Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 254. 38 See, for example, J. Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (University of Regina Press, 2013). As Daschuk suggested, ‘The effects of the (Canadian) state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities . . . haunt us as a nation still. . .. This study has shown that the decline of First Nations health was the direct result of economic and cultural suppression’: ibid., p. 186.

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Enunciated in his 1 December 1862 letter to Congress, Lincoln’s words followed two years of civil war and were offered in defence of the Union effort: Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves . . . The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation . . . We – even we here – hold the power, and bear the responsibility . . . We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.39

Among the most famous sentences in US history, these words, according to historian Eric Foner, ‘remain among the most eloquent ever composed by an American president’.40 They were written, however, during a period not only of civil war, but also of Indigenous genocide. In December 1862, while Lincoln was writing to Congress and preparing the Emancipation Proclamation, the US–Dakota War was ending. Throughout that month, US forces incarcerated 303 Dakota men and 1,658

Figure 1.1 In December 1862, the US military maintained this concentration camp at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, surrounded by a 12-foot-high wooden stockade, to house nearly 1,700 Dakota men, women and children while 303 warriors awaited execution. (Minnesota State Historical Society)

39 As quoted in E. Foner, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), p. 237 (emphasis in original). 40 Ibid.

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of their extended family members in Minnesota, most at the US military post Fort Snelling. Earlier, on 9 November, the majority of these prisoners of war had been forcibly marched from their reservation community along the Minnesota River into St Paul. US soldiers kept watch over them and also attempted to limit mobs from attacking them. Shackled Dakota prisoners had been attacked and killed in the streets of New Ulm, and one child had died. As they awaited their sentences, Lincoln signed an executive order on 6 December commuting the sentences of 264 Dakota warriors, while sentencing 39 to death. On 26 December, in the largest mass execution in US history, 38 were hanged at Mankato for their participation in that summer’s war in which nearly 1,000 settlers, Dakota community members and US soldiers had all lost their lives.41 The Dakota War reconfigured the human geography of the region. It brought the elimination of the Dakota reservation and an abrogation of the 1851 Treaty which had included extensive cessions by the Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakota. The Treaty had also established their reservation, called for the allocation of ‘one million six-hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars’ to the tribe, and a mandated ‘annuity, the sum of forty thousand dollars’, among other stipulations.42 Like so many other treaties, however, the US violated it after ratification. Each spring, growing numbers of farmers squatted upon tribal lands, allowed livestock to roam upon the river beds, and pressured the state to gain more lands. After 1860, not only did the annuity payments cease altogether, but the few reservation officials charged with provisioning Dakota families sold their government supplies to whites. Such illegal – and unconstitutional – trade now flourished across western reservations. When hungry Dakota families confronted officials at the reservation’s supply centres, they were told to eat grass to feed themselves and their children.43 Following the executions and subsequent removals to South Dakota, a diaspora formed. Such forced removals and displacement were often, in fact, the expressed aim of US leaders. As General John Pope had written in 41 For a list of the ‘Names of the condemned Dakota men’, see W. A. Wilson, ed., In the Footsteps of Our Ancestors: The Dakota Commemorative Marches of the Twenty-First Century (St Paul: Living Justice Press, 2006), 25. 42 ‘Treaty with the Sioux – Sisseton and Wahpeton bands, 1851’ in Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, ed. C. J. Kappler, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), I I, 588–9. 43 G. C. Anderson, Kinsmen of Another Kind: Dakota–White Relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), pp. 261–79.

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September 1862, following his removal from command in northern Virginia, ‘I expect to be but a short time among you’, as he anticipated ‘exterminating or ruining all the Indians engaged’ in that summer’s conflict.44 One of over 100 nineteenth-century wars against Indigenous peoples, the Dakota War became a simultaneous colonial campaign for Indigenous extermination and an Indigenous struggle for survival. For generations, historians have examined the details of these and other campaigns. Among their findings, further assertions by US military leaders urging extermination, such as that uttered by Pope, are common. ‘It was not my intention to take any prisoners’, Colonel Patrick Edward Connor reported from the Bear River along the Idaho–Utah border in January 1863, just weeks after the Mankato executions. Surprising a Northern Shoshone encampment at dawn, Connor’s forces massacred over 300, and ‘destroyed over seventy lodges’ in what historians generally recognise as the largest massacre of Native Americans conducted by the US military.45 The following year, in November 1864, as Colonel John Chivington led 700 men of the First and Third Volunteer Cavalry out of Colorado’s Fort Lyon, on their way to Black Kettle’s Cheyenne and Arapaho village at Sand Creek, Colonel Chivington reportedly shouted, ‘Damn any man who is in sympathy with an Indian!’46 They also attacked at dawn, targeting women, children, and the elderly. Like Connor, they came in winter. As territorial Governor John Evans had reminded Cheyenne leaders in the months beforehand, ‘The time when you make war best is in the summer . . . My time is coming.’47 With the rise of settler colonial studies, scholars have built upon earlier works that had addressed genocides in the United States and in its colonial antecedents to assess more thoroughly the genocidal dimensions of these conflicts. Notwithstanding such analyses, as long as genocide remains temporally associated only with the twentieth century and conceptualised as a phenomenon geographically inapplicable to North America, the field will continue to popularise sanitised visions of US history and, as did Power, deepen nationalist claims about the nation as ‘the last, best hope on earth’. 44 Quoted in A. M. Josephy, Jr, The Civil War in the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 132. 45 Quoted in N. Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 263. 46 Quoted in E. West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998), p. 301. 47 Quoted in ibid., p. 300.

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Facts, Knowledge, Experience, Proof: Native American Genocide and the Rise of Settler Colonial Studies In the second half of the twentieth century, a small but growing cadre of scholars began re-examining the contours of US history and challenging its problematic temporalities. Lemkin had died in 1959 before he could complete his planned chapters on genocide against ‘American Indians’. But by 1968, scholars were writing about ‘the genocide of [Indigenous] Californians’, as well as about genocide ‘in the eastern states’.48 During the 1970s, more detailed studies of genocides against American Indians began to appear. In 1979, the Native American Studies scholar Jack Norton (Hupa/Cherokee) used the United Nations Genocide Convention in his book Genocide in Northwestern California. In 1987, the anthropologist Russell Thornton (Cherokee) addressed questions of genocide in US history in his work American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Then, in their 1990 anthology, The History and Sociology of Genocide, historian Frank Chalk and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn included chapters on genocide against Native people in colonial New England and in the nineteenth-century United States. These and other works influenced the historian David Stannard who focused on the issue of genocide in his 1992 American Holocaust, as did the Native American Studies scholar Ward Churchill in his 1997 book A Little Matter of Genocide.49 With these works, a near consensus emerged. By most scholarly definitions and consistent with the UN Convention, these scholars all asserted that genocide against at least some Indigenous peoples had occurred in North America following colonisation, perpetuated first by colonial empires and then by independent nation-states. These works, in short, challenged the temporal and spatial limitations that still constrained the US history field and, moreover, identified the violent decimation and attempted ‘elimination’ of North America’s Indigenous peoples. They have also informed subsequent analyses of US and Canadian expansion, Pacific colonisation and national infrastructure.50 Genocide against Native peoples not only occurred 48 T. Kroeber and R. F. Heizer, Almost Ancestors: The First Californians, ed. D. F. Hales (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1968), p. 19; works by W. C. Sturtevant and S. Stanley, cited in B. Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate: meaning, historiography, and new methods’, American Historical Review 120:1 (February 2015), 104. 49 Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 104–5. 50 For removal and US state formation in the nineteenth century, see, e.g., Ostler, Surviving Genocide. For Pacific and California history, see B. Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); and C. Harris, The Resettlement of British

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following colonisation but also influenced North American history thereafter. As the historian Benjamin Madley has suggested, ‘the near-annihilation of North America’s indigenous peoples remains a formative event in U.S. history’.51 Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism then offered new conceptual models for engaging Native American history. In one of the earliest studies to apply ‘settler colonialism’ as a paradigm for US history, the historian Margaret Jacobs in White Mother to a Dark Race (2009) examined the linked but varied histories of Indigenous child removal in the American West and Australia. While she used the term ‘genocide’ only once in her text, its themes informed her analysis. In her analysis of Australia’s Native Administration Act of 1938 under the leadership of its Chief Protector Auber Octavius Neville, for example, she relayed how activists of the time considered the Act overly authoritarian in its attempted elimination of Native peoples. It not only, they asserted, ‘places all coloured peoples, thirty thousand native born Australians . . . at the disposal of a dictator . . . [but also] aims at THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE NATIVE RACE’.52 These policies, Jacobs continued, ‘later scholars and activists would label genocide’.53 As Jacobs explained, beginning in the late 1800s, systematic, state-organised campaigns in both nations extracted tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their families. Less concerned about situating her analysis within debates about genocide, Jacobs nonetheless challenged the spatialised temporalities that Power and others had set out. Her analysis transcended nationalist historiographies. It conjoined assimilationist efforts from around the world and undermined efforts to erase Indigenous peoples and their ongoing traumas from historical inquiry. Indeed, ‘the scars of our settler colonial histories remain’, she concluded, as ‘indigenous individuals and families grapple with the legacies of decades of child removal’.54

51 52 53 54

Columbia: Essays on Colonialism and Geographic Change (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997). For discussions of the centrality of Indigenous dispossession and infrastructure, see Harris, Resettlement, pp. 160–93. See also M. Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Works, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). By 1943, ‘railroad companies would claim title to 131,350,534 acres, about 90 percent of it located west of the Mississippi River’ (p. 46). Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 99 (emphasis added). As quoted in Jacobs, White Mother, p. 421 (emphasis in original). Jacobs, White Mother, p. 421. Ibid., p. 430. For additional consideration of later twentieth-century projects of US child removal, see also Margaret D. Jacobs, A Generation Removed: The Fostering and Adoption of Indigenous Children in the Postwar World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014).

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Moreover, Jacobs’ conclusions underscore the process-orientated dimensions of Wolfe’s paradigm. Early-twentieth-century child removal programmes were not only histories of trauma, alienation and familial dislocation; they also shaped generations of Indigenous families thereafter. These painful pasts remain, as the 1997 report on the twentieth century’s ‘Stolen Generations’ of Aboriginal children – entitled Bringing Them Home – revealed, as this history corresponds with the 1948 UN Convention’s criminalisation of the act of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.55 Moreover, in what has become a central feature in settler colonial studies, Jacobs’ analysis exposed the centrality of child removal ideologies and practices to other features of national development, specifically the history of white women’s ‘quest for independence, public authority, and equality’.56 Given that so many white women led these assimilation campaigns, served in government-run boarding schools and, as adoptive mothers, worked to reform the presumed moral limitations of Indigenous children, Jacobs’ work illuminated the intersections of ‘gender and settler colonialism’. White racial formation, gendered forms of national citizenship, and Indigenous child removal programmes were, and remained, inter-related historical processes. As she concluded: Much as many Americans and Australians today might wish to avert our eyes from the violence and pain of our histories, two settler colonies that became two settler nations cannot ignore the injuries of the past; settlers not only removed most indigenous people from their land but also sought to remove indigenous children from their families . . . we might want to believe that most white women challenged these colonial policies and found common cause with indigenous women, [but] we must face the paradoxical truth that . . . many white women undermined Indian and Aboriginal women through their support for the removal of [their] children.57

A shared global history emerged from comparative analysis. Race and gender, struggles for increased social and moral authority, and state power all combine to offer an alternative vision of the history of Anglophone white womanhood – one that invites additional comparisons of gender and genocide. Indeed, as the historian Marilyn Lake recently determined in her comparative assessments of white women’s labour activism in the US and Australia, ‘Settler colonialism shaped a sense of kinship across the Pacific.’58 55 As quoted in Jacobs, White Mother, p. 430. 56 Jacobs, White Mother, p. 433. 57 Ibid. 58 M. Lake, Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), p. 17.

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If the ‘centrality of dispossession’ has become a feature of 21st-century critical theory, how might the ‘centrality of Indigenous genocide’ similarly reconfigure studies of the past? How might scholars better chart the chaotic centuries of violent transformations across Native societies in ways that draw upon multiple fields of study, as well as multiple geographic and ethnographic landscapes? Recent settler colonial histories offer guidance. They suggest that, far from being a single, ‘formative event’, or even set of events, America’s Indigenous genocides began in the decades following 1492. Genocide became a central, ongoing process in the making of North American history and helped to fuel the expansion of Anglophone colonisation across the planet. From the origins of plantation economies in the southern United States to the unilateral expropriation of over 100 million acres of reservation lands, settler colonialism both remade and unmade the fabric of Indigenous lifeways on the North American continent. While linked, settler colonialism and Native American genocide are not synonymous, and more work needs to be done to distil the commonalities between these overlapping conceptualisations. Such work is particularly needed to bridge studies across time, especially those for North American history before the rise of independent nation-states. Given settler colonialism’s focus upon the ‘logic’ of settlement, it fails in its current formulation to explain North American historical development before the formation of interior settlements. In fact, Native communities still dominated the vast geography of North America for generations, and in places for centuries, after the arrival on the coasts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century colonists.59 This recognition by no means limits the paradigm’s utility in examining subsequent processes of elimination initiated by various settler populations, particularly in the post-independence histories of the United States and Canada. On the contrary, such recognition should invite clarification and increased temporal precision in examining patterns of violence between Indigenous communities that also occurred during the earliest centuries of post-contact North American history.60 For such an 59 For example, by the early 1820s, Indigenous communities ‘still controlled between half and three-quarters of the continental landmass claimed by the hemisphere’s remaining colonies and newly independent states’. See B. Delay, ‘Independent Indians and the U.S.–Mexican War’, American Historical Review 112:1 (February 2007), 35–68; as quoted on 68. See also M. Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 60 Within ethnohistorical analyses, studies of violence have provided new paradigms for ‘going beyond the rejection of untenable notions of self-contained, stable local

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expansive paradigm, the historical and/or ideological origins of settler colonialism remain to be elucidated. Emergent theories of ‘colonial genocide’ provide useful heuristic and methodological direction, particularly when deployed with temporal and spatial specificity. In Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (2014), coeditors Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton established a clear bridge between the two paradigms, using more than modifiers to connect settler colonialism and genocide. Identifying the various genealogies behind their formulation, the editors sought to remedy the limitations of each paradigm. In particular, they recognised that many in Native American and Indigenous Studies have ‘been reluctant to use the concept of genocide, as doing so might suggest a fatalistic passivity, an absence of Indigenous creativity and adaptability, and the irrevocability of death’.61 There exists a similar reluctance to embrace ‘settler colonialism’ in many studies of North American history, especially for periods before US and Canadian independence. Scholars such as the historian Allan Greer avoid the concept when they examine early periods of post-contact North American history and worry that its application might reify subsequent political formations, demographic patterns, racial constructions and military outcomes.62 societies, and instead developing a conceptual framework for understanding conflict and change as part of the historical process underlying observed ethnographic patterns’: R. B. Ferguson and N. L. Whitehead, ‘The violent edge of empire’ in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. Ferguson and Whitehead (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992), 3. See also A. Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Greer cautioned that, while ‘some scholars speak of an “eliminationist” logic driving settler colonialism toward the utter destruction of natives . . . and though there are ample instances of deadly violence and forced migration in the annals of colonial North America, such “ethnic cleansing” is not the whole story . . . Without a doubt, major transformations occurred in the realm of landed property . . . “property” [became] a concept that fired imaginations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as never before . . . The philosophers Kant and Hegel wrote of property as a basic constituent of human personality and individual liberty . . . [And] with their finances in shambles during the war and its aftermath, both the states and the federal government looked to western lands as a potential treasure chest’: ibid., pp. 10, 389, 390, 391, 409. See also J. F. Lee, Masters of the Middle Waters: Indian Nations and Colonial Ambitions along the Mississippi (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). ‘The United States brought a new form of imperialism to the midcontinent. The United States planned to transform Indian Country into AngloAmerican homesteads. For centuries, colonists had sought two commodities: furs and souls. Now they fixated on land’: ibid., p. 196. 61 J. Benvenuto, A. Woolford and A. L. Hinton, ‘Introduction: colonial genocide in Indigenous North America’ in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Woolford, Benvenuto and Laban Hinton, 12. 62 See A. Greer, ‘Settler colonialism and empire in early America’, The William and Mary Quarterly (July 2019), 383–90.

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The concept of ‘colonial genocide’, however, drew connective tissues between the paradigms, as do the wide-ranging findings of the volume’s collected chapters. Most notably, the concept identifies many of the disruptive and unanticipated traumas associated with European contact, expansion and colonisation. As a formulation, it invites broader consideration of the unintended effects of European-introduced diseases, trading relations and gendered practices of intermarriage and racialisation. Moreover, it does so without necessarily defining a clear ‘logic’ or ‘intent’ within such everyday, quotidian practices. Violence and Indigenous death remain at the core of its formulation, as ‘colonial genocide’ allows for more varied considerations of indeterminate themes of historical analysis, such as failure, hybridity, misunderstanding, violence and mutual destruction, among others. Despite the growing prominence of settler colonial studies, insufficient numbers of US historians recognise the field’s findings. As Lemkin argued, ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’ remains a defining characteristic of genocide.63 Too few in the contemporary study of US history have either queried the ‘destruction’ of the ‘essential foundations’ of Indigenous life or approached such subjects across time and space. Indeed, some recent overviews of US history continue to do neither. Unlike ‘A Problem from Hell’, the historian Jill Lepore’s book These Truths: A History of the United States self-consciously tackled the entirety of US history. Like Power, she did so with a latent exceptionalism, if not bias. ‘Facts, knowledge, experience, proof. These words come from the law’, she begins. ‘By the eighteenth century, they were applied to history and to politics, too. These truths: this was the language of reason, of enlightenment, of inquiry, and of history.’64 Moreover, she continued, ‘understanding history as a form of inquiry – not as something easy or comforting but as something demanding and exhausting – was central to the nation’s founding’.65 For Lepore, in US history, there is something distinctive not only about the US past but also the evolution of historical inquiry within it. Such distinction is particularly identifiable within the practices of the nation’s founders: ‘the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution made an extraordinarily careful study of history. They’d been studying history all their lives.’66 63 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79; see also the quotation from this page in n. 24. 64 J. Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. xvii (emphasis in original). 65 Ibid., p. xvi. 66 Ibid., p. xv.

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While profiting from Indigenous land seizures and seeking to continue doing so, those who drafted the US Constitution excluded Native peoples from their visions of society and crafted a governing document that aided in dispossession. It offered little protection against the processes of colonisation then under way and, moreover, anticipated even greater land seizures to come. Indeed, according to legal scholar Gregory Ablavsky, the Constitution was written during a period of such intense interior land conflicts with powerful and unconquered Native nations that it became ‘a wartime document’.67 For Lepore, Indigenous peoples and history appear outside this analysis and have little bearing upon it. They recede throughout her five-century overview, with limited presence. Only one Indian woman, La Malinche, the teenage concubine of Hernán Cortés, appears in the text’s 789 pages, with no mention of any twentieth-century Native American subjects.68 Given the tight hold that nationalist historiographies exert upon historical analysis, bridging the fields of Genocide Studies and settler colonial studies may offer redress to such elisions. For many, evasions of the fact of Indigenous dispossession are more than wilful misunderstandings or scholarly omissions. They are forms of denial that mask the destructive horrors of European expansion and minimise the historical significance of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, there are clear, contemporary ramifications of this erasure, as contemporary Native American nations seek increased autonomy over their communities, members and non-tribal members. This unique form of Indigenous sovereignty sits, however, uncomfortably within a legal and cultural milieu in which the knowledge production of US state leaders, judges and representatives often shapes federal Indian policy. History writing can prove determinative in such proceedings, as ‘facts, knowledge, experience, proof’ inform a doctrine of Native American sovereignty. In fact, as EchoHawk has insisted, ‘the widespread lack of reliable information about Native issues is the most pressing problem confronting Native Americans’.69 Many believe it is time to name the historiographical erasure and end its perpetuation. Given the expansiveness of the subject and the calcified sediments of North American historiography, attempts at reorientation face 67 G. Ablavksy, ‘The savage Constitution’, Duke Law Journal (February 2014), 1038. 68 C. DeLucia, ‘The vanishing Indians of “These Truths”’, Los Angeles Review of Books (10 January 2019). See also N. Blackhawk, ‘The iron cage of erasure: American Indian sovereignty in Jill Lepore’s These Truths’, American Historical Review (December 2020), 1752–63. 69 Echo-Hawk, In the Courts of the Conqueror, p. 13.

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recurring challenges. To understand the decimation wrought by colonisation, as well as Indigenous responses to such ‘unfamiliar phenomena’, remains the task for current scholarship. Particularly in the study of US history, there remains a persistent inability to acknowledge, let alone to ‘repair’ ‘the immense damage inflicted over the centuries’ by these intertwined histories.70 Ultimately, North American history will remain as incomplete as it is unimaginable without sustained assessments of the attempted elimination of its Indigenous peoples. Fortunately, studies of North American genocide form a growing field. In 2011, historian Alfred A. Cave published Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia, in which he examined ‘episodes of genocide’.71 In 2016, Madley published An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.72 Three years later, historian Jeffrey Ostler released Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.73 And the volume that you hold in your hands contains six subsequent chapters on Indigenous genocides in North America. Additional projects are in preparation, including a sequel to Ostler’s Surviving Genocide. Still, more work is needed. To portray accurately colonial North America and the history of the United States requires detailed analyses of Indigenous genocide.

70 G. Horne, The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in Seventeenth-Century North America and the Caribbean (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), p. 192. 71 A. A. Cave, Lethal Encounters: Englishmen and Indians in Colonial Virginia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), pp. ix–xiii. 72 Madley, American Genocide. 73 Ostler, Surviving Genocide.

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2

A Very British Genocide Acknowledgement of Indigenous Destruction in the Founding of Australia and New Zealand tony barta

By 1837, the British government had been sending convicts, soldiers and livestock entrepreneurs to Australia for almost fifty years. A committee of its own House of Commons now reported the devastating effects on the Indigenous inhabitants, first around Sydney, then in Tasmania, most recently in the rush of squatters to the lands later called Victoria. There was no recognition that so many Aborigines had died defending their country; rather, they seemed mysteriously to ‘decay’: ‘Wherever Europeans meet with them they appear to wear out . . . they diminish in numbers: they appear actually to vanish from the face of the earth.’1 The word ‘genocide’ was not then invented, but the evidence of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ meant that the best minds of the Colonial Office were already exercised by the key question of intent. ‘Extinction’ did not just happen. That great harm to an Indigenous people could come from settlers who might have no clear aim of damaging them was recognised at the end of 1837 in the urgent question of extending British government to New Zealand. It was soon evident to the same high officials that good intentions and British law were not enough. The Protectorates established in Australia did not stem the deaths or the destruction of Aboriginal societies, and a treaty with Ma¯ori chiefs did not hold up the pressures on their peoples and their lands. By the end of the century, most of those lands were the property of immigrant farmers, as in Australia, and Ma¯ori, swamped after the gold 1 William Broughton, newly consecrated as first Anglican bishop of Australia, in Report of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (British Settlements), (London, 1837), as republished by the Aborigines Protection Society, pp. 10–11. Hereafter cited as Report; https://archive.org/details/reportparliamen00britgoog.

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rushes, tallied less than half of their pre-European numbers. There was open talk of ‘the passing of the Ma¯ori’ even as their population steadied and began to climb again. Now largely forgotten, this was a moment of genocide recognition in New Zealand in which the reasons for the disaster were openly canvassed. In Australia, recovery took longer and had more dire assaults to overcome. First, with dispossession, came the ‘concentration’ in missions that saved remnants of diverse tribes mourning their lost societies and cultures. Diseases took a terrible toll. Within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria had declined by 80 per cent. Most of Australia’s 750 Aboriginal languages lost their last speakers. In the 1930s, after a century of child stealing and family disruption, the official policy of ‘breeding out the colour’ was implemented. It was genocide, exactly as Lemkin was then trying to make it understood. It was not only about killings, but also about words and actions that signified an intention to destroy a human group.2 This chapter is, first of all, about perceptions. It foregrounds those who believed Britain was responsible for genocide, rather than the tally of victims and survivors. It assumes some knowledge of the large context in which recognition of Indigenous destruction was formed: colonialism, displacement and the unblinking intent to build European societies on lands appropriated for individual profit in the global capitalist economy. The aim is to illuminate genocidal relationships too often quarantined from genocide – as examples, instead, of frontier warfare, poor adaptability or regrettable susceptibility. The consequences of ‘British Settlements’ were outspokenly recognised in the 1837 report and its recommendations. Sometimes explicit in recognising intent, the parliamentarians, conservative and evangelical alike, looked for remedies rather than blame. In the founding of three new colonies in southern Australia, and a further ‘British Province’ in New Zealand, we too can see grim historical realities that the colonising authorities could not escape. 2 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944). For further important perspectives on colonial genocides, see the essays in A. Dirk Moses, ed., Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), esp. the essays by Dirk Moses, Docker, Wolfe and Stone in Section I; Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide (Houndsmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Several essays are relevant to Australia, including Tony Barta, ‘Decent disposal: Australian historians and the recovery of genocide’, in Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Dirk Moses, 296–322.

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New South Wales, from Sydney to ‘Australia Felix’ In 1768, Captain James Cook was ‘with the consent of the natives to take possession of Convenient Situations in the Country in the Name of the King of Great Britain’ and place any Indigenous inhabitants – here, their consent was not mentioned – under British rule. This Cook duly did, on 22 August 1770.3 The colony of New South Wales was founded in 1788 – not with the ideals that had swept America a decade earlier and then France a year later, but to secure naval supplies and to dump there the dregs of a society in transition: convict prisoners.4 The instructions to Captain Arthur Phillip in 1788 were more explicit than those to Cook and are well known: he was ‘to open an intercourse with the natives, and to conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them’. Less known is the warning that: ‘if any of our subjects shall wantonly destroy them, or give them any unnecessary interruption in the exercise of their several occupations, it is our will and pleasure that you do cause such offenders to be brought to punishment’, according to the degree of the offence.5 What would ‘wantonly destroy’ mean? How to show an ‘unnecessary interruption’ when a squatter had a licence to pasture stock on Aboriginal land already pasturing Aboriginal staples such as kangaroo? This was to be the basic principle of colonisation: the right, even the obligation, to transform the economy from hunting to purposeful capitalist exploitation. This was the necessary interruption (or ‘disruption’, as we now say) of Aboriginal life by European settlement. And to characterise its obvious destructive effects as ‘wanton’ was blocked by the ideology of every honourable official and enterprising pastoralist. Some of the first contacts were promising. Phillip in his early dispatches has lively reports of encounters that include dancing and exchanges of gifts.6 None of the founders set out to commit genocide, nor did the governments which had sent them. But the conflict between an expanding settlement and the Indigenous guardians of the land soon followed. In 1816, every subject, black as well as white, was commanded to obey a PROCLAMATION by the 3 Cook’s instructions from the Admiralty, 30 July 1768, available at www.nla.gov.au/con tent/secret. 4 Alan Frost, Botany Bay Mirages (Melbourne University Press, 1994). 5 Instructions from the king to ‘our trusty and well beloved Arthur Phillip esquire’, 23 April 1787, in Sharman Stone, Aborigines in White Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974), p. 19. 6 Phillip’s first dispatch, 15 May 1778: Stone, Aborigines in White Australia, pp. 19–20. For the accounts of Watkin Tench, David Collins and others, see Inga Clendinnen, Dancing with Strangers (Melbourne: Text, 2003).

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governor of the New South Wales colony, Lachlan Macquarie. He had begun his rule attempting to interest local tribes in adopting British ways; now, there would be a new policy. Over the three previous years, Aborigines had ‘manifested a strong and sanguinary spirit of Animosity and Hostility towards the British Inhabitants . . . murdering Men Women and Children, from whom they had received no Offence or Provocation’, and also killing stock, plundering property and causing ‘great Terror’ to the suffering inhabitants throughout the colony. Macquarie detailed, over several pages, his ‘reluctant’ necessity of forceful retaliation, that had seen a ‘few innocent’ victims fall, but which would hopefully ‘strike Terror amongst the surviving Tribes’.7 Aborigines were commanded not to carry weapons within a mile of any town, village or farm, and no more than six Aborigines could gather without being considered ‘enemies, to be driven away by Force of Arms by the Settlers themselves’ (emphasis added). Settlers might also apply to a magistrate ‘for aid from the nearest Military Station’. Macquarie duly informed his superior in London, Lord Bathurst, of the measures proclaimed.8 This was far from the mysterious ‘decay’ Bishop Broughton laid before the House of Commons Select Committee two decades later. To their credit, the Committee did not accept either his fatalism or the idea that acts of ‘extermination’ alone had destroyed the Aborigines. Clearly, ‘intercourse with Europeans has cast over their original debasement a yet deeper shade of wretchedness’. And in the next paragraph of the 1837 Report, the founding enterprise itself incurs a definite blame that deserved then, and deserves now, steady contemplation: These people, unoffending as they were towards us, have, as might have been expected, [emphasis added] suffered in an aggravated degree from the planting among them of our penal settlements. In the formation of these settlements it does not appear that the territorial rights of the natives were considered, and very little care has since been taken to protect them from the violence or the contamination of the dregs of our countrymen. The effects have consequently been dreadful beyond example, both in the diminution of their numbers and in their demoralization. 7 For the full Proclamation, see Stone, Aborigines in White Australia, pp. 33–6; or Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Governor’s Despatches to and from England, vol. IX: January, 1816 – December, 1818 (The Library Committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, 1917), pp. 141–5, http://arrow.latrobe.edu.au/store/3/4/9/0/3/public/B13 858427S1V9Frontcover,%20prelim&pages1-222.pdf (accessed 4 February 2022). 8 Documents in Stone, Aborigines in White Australia, pp. 31–5.

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The Committee’s indictment of the failure to see consequences that ‘might have been expected’ is telling. There were not just individual victims from the deliberate ‘planting among them’ of a settlement whose character was known. An obvious group of fellow humans was targeted as a group. There was a glaring neglect of their plain territorial rights. The ensuing violence, ‘diminution of their numbers’ and ‘demoralization’ must be added to the charge sheet. The evangelical fervour that had taken on the slave trade was now dominant in the British parliament and among many officials. The Committee chair, Thomas Fowell Buxton, was a leading light, regarded as the heir to Wilberforce. He did not reckon with infectious disease. Broughton testified that ‘diseases introduced among them’ were the reason that tribes close to large towns ‘almost became extinct’. He reported seeing only two or three Aborigines from ‘tribes which formerly consisted of 200 or 300’.9 Was Britain to blame? The Committee referred to an 1830 despatch from Sir George Murray on Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania): The great decrease which has of late years taken place in the amount of the aboriginal population, render it not unreasonable to apprehend that the whole race of these people may, at no distant period, become extinct. But with whatever feelings such an event may be looked forward to by those settlers who have been sufferers by the collisions which have taken place, it is impossible not to contemplate such a result of our occupation of the island as one very difficult to reconcile with feelings of humanity or even with principles of justice and sound policy; and the adoption of any line of conduct, having for its avowed or secret object the extinction of the native race, could not fail to leave an indelible stain upon the British government.10

In 1838, just a year after the Committee handed down its report, Governor Gipps faced the most atrocious stain yet to come to light. Eleven stockmen and a settler murdered twenty-eight peaceful blacks at Myall Creek Station and attempted to burn the bodies. Eleven duly stood trial. Over loud popular protest, Gipps not only approved their prosecution, he insisted on a retrial when all eleven were acquitted. It upheld the sentences of seven and Gipps had the sentences carried out. The seven were the only white men hanged for 9 Report, pp. 10–11. Frost, Botany Bay Mirages, ch. 10, deals with the claim that the devastating 1789 smallpox epidemic was started by the British. 10 Report, pp. 14–15. It is from this passage that Henry Reynolds took the title of his book An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne: Viking Penguin Books, 2001).

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murder of blacks in the history of New South Wales. The gaoler of the condemned men reported that each of the men ‘acknowledged to me their guilt; but implied, that as it was done solely in defence of their masters’ property’, they were ‘not aware that in destroying the aboriginals they were violating the law’ as it had ‘been so frequently done in the colony before’.11 This was the climate in which the main recommendation of the Committee landed. Gipps could not have been so staunch had he not had support from humanitarians at the Colonial Office as well as in parliament. It was not the way of such men to let slavery or other distant abominations continue. They were activists. Their immediate intervention was again a recognition that something very close to genocide was taking place. Unsurprisingly, the worst evidence came from Van Diemen’s Land, where conflict, notably with exconvicts, had ‘provoked a series of outrages which would have terminated in the utter extermination of the whole race [emphasis added] if the local government had not interposed to remove the last remnant of them from the island; an act of real mercy, though of apparent severity’. Their concern for ‘the Aborigines of New Holland’ (the Australian mainland) followed, and then the attempt at a remedy. Official ‘protectors of Aborigines’, with real powers, must be appointed. One of their duties, to report accurate statistics, should mitigate the previous ‘failure to redress’ population loss. ‘In many cases, the reality and magnitude of the evil has not been acquired until it was ascertained that some uncivilised nation had ceased to exist.’12 The Australia claimed as a vague New Holland was first governed as New South Wales. Only after three decades had British territory expanded securely out of the Sydney Basin to the north and south. Van Diemen’s Land, with its own lieutenant governor, was a prospering outpost of convict punishment and capitalist investment. By 1835, it was also being noted for the success in clearing the island of Aboriginal resistance. When Charles Darwin visited in February 1836, he was able to report that ‘Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.’ Lieutenant Governor Arthur, having achieved this distinction in strange conformity with his humanitarian principles, began to look across Bass Strait to extend his domain into the ‘empty’ grasslands of the southern mainland.13 11 See Stone, Aborigines in White Australia, pp. 56–8, and Edward Curr from his Recollections of Squatting in Victoria (Melbourne, 1883; republished Melbourne University Press, 1965), pp. 52–4. 12 Report, pp. 126–8. 13 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of a Naturalist (Oxford University Press, 1930 [1893]), pp. 457–8; James Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), pp. 18–19. Tom Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London,

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In 1835, an organised company of Tasmanian sheep farmers, led by the hunter of Aborigines John Batman, arrived in Port Phillip Bay on the mainland to found a new colony. Batman stood on the bank of the Yarra River and declared, ‘This will be the place for a village.’ It was indeed the site of the future city of Melbourne, but the plan to ‘purchase’ land from the local true Australians was speedily foiled by the governor in Sydney. Only the Crown could make such purchases, he reminded the interlopers, and only the Crown could on-sell the land to private buyers. Batman’s Treaty – still celebrated in Melbourne – was declared null and void.14 But the overland migration of people and stock could not be stemmed. After initial objection to the idea of a new colony, London, within months, embraced the addition of one more ‘flourishing province’. Under the light hand of a crown land commissioner and a police magistrate, very soon the whole territory of the future State of Victoria was taken up by individuals investing their capital in sheep. Before his retirement to London, Arthur was able to report that ‘the rage for Port Phillip seems quite unabated’.15 The Protectors of Aborigines suggested by Arthur and the Select Committee were expected to report atrocities; they were not appointed to curtail the advance of capital on four hooves into the grasslands. ‘Indeed’, notes James Boyce, ‘at the heart of the proposal, and of evangelical faith, was the assumption that harm to Aborigines was not intrinsic to the colonisation of their land.’16 There are few references to terra nullius in the record; it was plain who the possessors of the land were, but they could not continue to hold their unwritten title. In principle, and practice, savage black must give way to civilised white. The Sydney barrister Richard Windeyer told a meeting of the Aborigines Protection Society in 1838 that ‘he could not look upon the natives as the New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014) is the history most determined to sheet responsibility home to Britain. 14 Proclamation by Governor Bourke, 26 August 1835. See also Bain Attwood, Possession: Batman’s Treaty and the Matter of History (Melbourne University Publishing, 2009). 15 Boyce, 1835, p. 147. Curr’s Recollections give a lively sense of a young squatter’s energy and experiences (notably with Aborigines) in the grasslands that explorer Thomas Mitchell, in his 1836 expedition into western Victoria, called ‘Australia Felix’ (‘fortunate Australia’). On pp. 180–1, the 1965 edition of Curr’s book has a list of omissions from the 1883 text, especially those ‘many pages dealing with the north Victorian aborigines, now extinct’. 16 Boyce, 1835, p. 141; Frost, Botany Bay Mirages, ch. 9 on terra nullius and possession by cultivation. See also Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2007), for a powerful history of genocides caused by more advanced agricultural societies invading less advanced ones, including Australia.

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exclusive proprietors of the soil. Nor could he entertain the ridiculous notion that we had no right to be here. He viewed colonisation on the basis of the broad principle laid down by the first and great Legislator, in the command he issued “to multiply and replenish the earth”.’ Therefore, ‘The land, in fact belonged to him who should first cultivate it.’17 This was the ideological bedrock of genteel governors and rough frontiersmen alike. The Aborigines in this mindset were ‘primitive’ and ‘savages’. They had no respect for property or foreign law, and thus could not be admitted as witnesses in British courts. They learned languages, including English, with facility, but had no tradition of literacy so could not be regarded as equals. They were difficult to employ: they did not value work or money or set hours. Yet Edward Curr, struggling to produce wool on the frontier, did employ them. Thomas Mitchell, the New South Wales surveyor general, had a high regard for their skills, manners and intelligence: he would not have found the land route to ‘Australia Felix’ without them. The colonial government responded to complaints that better policing was needed – to protect squatters against Aborigines – and instituted the Native Mounted Police, able to track down Indigenous people accused of harming imported animals or persons. The pervasive method of securing land against Aboriginal resistance did not require official armed force. Memoir after memoir refers to shooting parties that would never say exactly how many were shot – only that there was no more trouble for shepherds or sheep. Protector Thomas reported that talk of elimination and extirpation of the blacks was an everyday matter. One of the wealthiest squatters told him: To go in search of them to pacify them I should not be able to get a single man to accompany me, but if I would go to search of them with the intent to exterminate them I would undertake that I could get 30 at least of men in the surrounding District who would willingly volunteer in the service.18

Henry Reynolds provides many such examples. He is also impressed by how knowledgeable the Colonial Office was of sentiments and actions on the frontier. The permanent under-secretary from 1836 until 1847, James Stephen, was persistently outspoken – and pessimistic: The causes and consequences of this state of things are alike clear and irremediable nor do I suppose that it is possible to discover any method 17 Paraphrase and quotation (with other similar sentiments, and some opposing ones) by Henry Reynolds, Dispossession: Black Australians and White Invaders (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), p. 6. 18 W. Thomas to G. A. Robinson, 6 August 1839, quoted in Reynolds, Indelible Stain, p. 93.

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[by] which the impending catastrophe, namely the extermination of the Black Race, can long be averted.19

Towards a Continental Crime The permanent frontier of Port Phillip – later Victoria – was only four years old when Charles Joseph La Trobe was appointed superintendent in 1839. By then, in 1825, a convict settlement had been established at the future site of Brisbane, a kernel of the later state of Queensland, and two new settlements in the south were authorised by London. They strategically spanned the whole continent, making an ill-defined New Holland into Australia, bordered entirely by sea. A modest Swan River Colony established in 1829 would evolve into the giant state of Western Australia, and the creation in 1834 of South Australia would ensure British control of all central Australia, right through to the far north coast. Each expansion in turn brought a much greater Indigenous population under the rule of Britain’s colonising settlers. The largest group of Aboriginal peoples was in Western Australia. Never formally delineated by the Dutch as New Holland, the territory was now claimed by Britain as an extension of New South Wales under Governor Darling, with eventual support from Colonial Secretary Murray. No special conditions were recorded then for treatment of Aborigines, though all authorities in London knew the House of Commons inquiry was under way. They also knew of Nyungar resistance to the Swan River regime of Lieutenant Governor Stirling. The years of worst conflict were right at the time surrounding the Select Committee. Yagan led a resistance movement from 1832; the Pinjarra massacre carried out under Stirling’s command occurred in 1834; there was another at Rottnest in 1838. Up to 150 Aborigines were encircled and killed at Pinjarra, and Stirling remained obdurate when the Select Committee advised that his refusal to recognise any owners before his European conquest would turn out badly. Rather, he mentioned in dispatches that the Aborigines ‘must gradually disappear’ and that only the ‘most anxious and judicious measures of the local government [could] prevent the ulterior extinction of the race’. The Select Committee had noted the ‘collisions’ between colonists and Aboriginal people in Western Australia and thought it right to ‘adopt the just language of Lord Glenelg’, the Colonial Secretary: ‘It is impossible to regard such conflicts without regret and anxiety, when we recollect how fatal, in too 19 Memo on Gipps to Glenelg correspondence, 6 April 1838: Reynolds, Indelible Stain, p. 89.

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many instances, our colonial settlements have proved to the natives of the places where they have been formed.’ He regretted that, despite black and white being equal before the law, ‘Western Australia records conflicts between the Europeans and the Aborigines, in which the former acted avowedly upon the principle of enforcing belligerent rights against a public enemy.’ Still, if Aborigines were to place themselves ‘beyond the pale of the law as a rule of their conduct to others, they will infallibly lose the advantages of it’.20 In 1834, just before setting up the Select Committee, the House of Commons passed an Act ‘to empower His Majesty to erect South Australia into a British Province or Provinces’. In its one reference to this development, the Select Committee noted that parliament had ‘passed an act disposing of the lands of this country without once adverting to the native population’. It was a ‘remarkable exception’, but at least the plans ‘acknowledge’ the ‘melancholy fact, which admits of no dispute, and which cannot be too deeply deplored, that the native tribes of Australia have hitherto been exposed to injustice and cruelty in their intercourse with Europeans’, and ‘lay down certain regulations to remedy these evils in the proposed settlement’.21 To this day, the state of South Australia celebrates its origin as a planned settlement for free emigrants with means, rather than as a penal settlement for convicts. A year and a half after the colony was established came an amending Act of July 1838, duly ‘adverting to the native population’. Already, however, on 12 December 1836, the new colony had been proclaimed and Colonial Office influence had ensured that more than half the founding proclamation dealt with the rights Aborigines would now gain, even as their ownership of the land was stripped from them. As British subjects, the new settlers were warned, any ‘acts of violence or injustice’ towards the Indigenous people would be punished ‘with exemplary severity’. Unfortunately, the reality would be different.22 Aboriginal rights to land, as the settlers expected, were impossible to survey as property. Power relations on the ground, not across the sea, carried the day. 20 Report, pp. 125–6. 21 Ibid., p. 12. 22 Robert Foster and Amanda Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence: The History and Memory of South Australia’s Frontier Wars (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2012), p. 2. On killings across the continent, there is a short history in Colin Tatz, Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Curtin, Australian Capital Territory: Xlibris, 2017), pp. 67–87 and 219–20; for a more thorough project, search for the Massacre Map and commentary by Lyndall Ryan, in L. Ryan, J. Fairbairn, G. Hedy, et al., ‘Colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1788– 1930’ (The Centre for 21st Century Humanities, University of Newcastle (acccessed 2 March 2021), https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres/map.php).

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Land and Lives in New Zealand New Zealand was founded in a unique moment of genocide awareness. In 1837, only three years before the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the Select Committee had shone Britain’s brightest light yet on the genocidal consequences of colonisation. Three pages after quoting Sir George Murray’s warning of ‘an indelible stain’ is the reaction of his successor as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Lord Goderich, to a murderous episode: It is impossible to read, without shame and indignation, the details which these documents disclose. The unfortunate natives of New Zealand, unless some decisive measures of prevention be adopted, will, I fear, be shortly added to the number of those barbarous tribes who, in different parts of the globe, have fallen a sacrifice to their intercourse with civilized men, who bear and disgrace the name of Christians . . . Considering what is the character of a large part of the population of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land, . . . I cannot contemplate the too probable result without the deepest anxiety.23

The first European arrivals in the Southwest Pacific had scant sense of obligation to British legalities. When the authorities in London reluctantly decided they could not remain aloof, they determined to be more effective in protecting the Indigenous owners in New Zealand than they had been in Australia. James Stephen eventually came down on the side of establishing British government over all of New Zealand, not only at the places where British subjects, mostly coming from Sydney, had settled. By December 1837, his political superiors accepted that, since settlement could not be stopped, the stark alternatives were ‘between a Colonization, desultory, without Law, and fatal to the Natives, and a Colonization organized and salutary’.24 By July 1839, it was decided to send Captain William Hobson as a lieutenant governor, responsible to the governor in Sydney but with the power to make a treaty with Ma¯ori chiefs to put beyond dispute the fundamental questions of land ownership and sovereignty. This the Treaty of Waitangi did not do. Still celebrated as the foundation of New Zealand and its relatively successful race relations, it was in fact worded – with different meanings in the English and 23 Report, pp. 18–19. For early, mutually profitable Ma¯ori–European relations in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia, see Matthew Wright, Convicts: New Zealand’s Hidden Criminal Past (Auckland: Penguin, 2012). 24 Glenelg to Durham, 29 December 1837, cited in Alan Ward, A Show of Justice: Racial ‘Amalgamation’ in Nineteenth Century New Zealand (Auckland University Press, 1995) p. 30, n. 22.

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(b)

Figures 2.1a & b The civilising mission of Britain – and (top) a European portrayal of Ma¯ori resistance to it in New Zealand. (Smith Collection/Gado / Getty Images)

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Ma¯ori texts – to leave the key issues open to interpretation.25 Stephen at the Colonial Office could see basic problems ahead. The British government was ‘embarking on a measure essentially unjust, and but too certainly fraught with calamity’ for Ma¯ori.26 In his pioneering history of land policies, Alan Ward agreed with Stephen. The ‘amalgamation’ policy foresaw the ‘permanent welfare’ of Ma¯ori being best served by giving up their own culture and adopting English language, law and work skills. ‘The saving of the Ma¯ori race involved the extinction of Ma¯ori culture.’27 Despite extreme pressures in the following decades, Ma¯ori culture was not extinguished. Because the defence of their land and treaty rights demanded engagement in the British governmental structure that claimed its sovereign right to adjudicate disputes at every level, Ma¯ori had no choice but instant and inexorable adjustment to English language, law and ideology. If the ‘amalgamation’ had involved a genuine incorporation of Ma¯ori authority at all levels of government, the outcome might have been closer to the optimism of idealists. Yet they too sought to entrench settler interests, flouting Indigenous interests at every stage. Ward quotes the Reverend Montague Hawtry warning settlement promoters tempted to copy the Australians by creating protected reserves. He predicted that Ma¯ori would end up ‘a separate and inferior race, without prospect of wealth or impulse to civilization, their numbers dwindling, their spirit broken, their untouched districts standing as melancholy blanks in the landscape of the century’s prosperity’. Eventually, all ‘bars to British enterprise’ would be ‘swept away, and the scanty remnants of the old lords of the lands dispersed as menials among the British settlers’.28 25 The deep differences in meaning between the English Treaty and the Ma¯ori Tiriti that persist into the present are mainly settled in favour of the Ma¯ori version as the authoritative text: Michael Belgrave, Waitangi Revisited (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 2004). See also Claudia Orange, The Treaty of Waitangi, 2nd ed. (Wellington: Port Nicholson Press with assistance from the Historical Publications Branch, Dept of Internal Affairs, 2011). 26 Ward, A Show of Justice, p. 31. One calamity not foreseen was perpetrated by Ma¯ori against others. André Brett, ‘“The miserable remnant of this ill-used people”: colonial genocide and the Moriori of New Zealand’s Chatham Islands’, Journal of Genocide Research 17:2 (2015), 133–52, adds a genocidal dimension also connected to the colonial pressures on Ma¯ori. 27 Ward, A Show of Justice, p. 38. For debate among New Zealand historians about whether Ma¯ori endured a ‘dark age’ in the nineteenth century, see Keith Sinclair, Kinds of Peace: Ma¯ori People after the Wars, 1870–85 (Auckland University Press, 1991). 28 Ward, A Show of Justice, p. 35. Russell McGregor, ‘Degrees of fatalism: discourses on racial extinction in Australia and New Zealand’ in Patricia Grimshaw and Russell McGregor, eds., Collisions of Cultures and Identities: Settlers and Indigenous Peoples (University of Melbourne, Department of History, 2006), 194–208, is one of

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If the land policy was bound to damage Ma¯ori society in the minds of both squatters and philanthropists, the wars of 1845–72 showed scant drive to extermination in either propaganda or campaigning. There were horrifying tales of atrocities perpetrated by Ma¯ori – some exaggerated – and hardships for communities on both sides. But neither side aimed at genocide. Because the British knew they were fighting a warrior people accustomed to bloody wars and eventual peace, their aims were limited to achieving a definitive subordination of Ma¯ori, not their elimination. In fact, the British never fought without ku¯papa, Ma¯ori allies who had a grievance against the resisters or were more decided in seeing a future with the Pa¯keha¯ (white settlers) as a better one. Those who took up arms against the British took up British arms – they, too, valued the trade and progress that linked them to the wider world. They fought for their secure independence in that world. Given the stakes, the fighting was less bitter and less bloody than might have been expected. It was also more equal. The British had the advantage in cannon but Ma¯ori countered with highly effective temporary fortifications where they could survive bombardment. Unlike Australia’s Aborigines, who rarely obtained guns, their firearms were adequate, and they learned very quickly how to counter by bushcraft a professional army of full-time troops. Since their fighters came from the hapu¯, the economic and social unit most important in daily life, the many wars between Ma¯ori peoples (iwi) had been short, sharp campaigns. Now both the warriors and their peoples had to battle an invading force designed to break all resistance to the new European order. James Belich concludes that British success was ‘very limited’.29 The eventual deployment of 12,000 British (often Irish) soldiers may nevertheless have been crucial in giving more confidence of state protection to the immigrant settlers who swung the population balance. Ma¯ori became ‘so geographically interspersed among, economically and socially interlocked with, and demographically outnumbered by Europeans that they lost their capacity to control engagement with them’.30

the few comparisons between Australian and New Zealand attitudes. It has many useful references – and an interpretation that carefully avoids genocide. 29 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (Auckland: Penguin, 1988), pp. 291–8. For a more recent interpretation and bibliography, see Vincent O’Malley, The New Zealand Wars (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2019). On the soldiers deployed, see research led by Charlotte Macdonald and others: ‘Soldiers of Empire’ project at www.soldiersofempire.nz. 30 James Belich, Making Peoples (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), p. 192.

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The demographic revolution could hardly have been more dramatic.31 The Treaty of Waitangi came just as the first wave of planned British migration was launched on a country where Ma¯ori could scarcely imagine a world in which they were not the norm hosting a tiny minority. In 1840, they outnumbered Pa¯keha¯ 99:1. Then came the boatloads of settlers: 10,000 from the New Zealand Company in the 1840s, with more children (3,800) than adult males, mainly to Wellington. By 1858, numbers were roughly equal, but with the gold rush in the succeeding decade there was another influx, at first mainly to the South Island: 13,000 came to Otago in 1861 alone. Of the almost 200,000 gold-seekers, 114,000 stayed. Meanwhile, Ma¯ori battled British soldiers and colonial irregulars to a standstill in the North Island. Then another 100,000 migrants were imported under Prime Minister Julius Vogel’s scheme to build a nation. By 1878, the tables were turned and Europeans outnumbered Ma¯ori 10:1, with a Pa¯keha¯ birth rate much higher than that of Ma¯ori.32 The cities began to grow, and so did the hunger for Ma¯ori land. Philippa Mein Smith ventures closer to recognising an objective pattern of genocidal relations than most Pa¯keha¯ have wanted to see. Ma¯ori poverty and ill health in the late nineteenth century stemmed from ‘changes in the Ma¯ori economy to individual property and wage labour, loss of resources, especially land, and loss of power’. Destructive pressure after the wars ended did not let up. ‘From the 1860s the sale of land through the Native Land Court had as radical an impact as confiscated land in rendering Ma¯ori vulnerable to poverty, disease and premature death.’33 Ma¯ori were no strangers to adaptation, or indeed to causing irreversible ecological change. Migrating from distant tropics, they had rapidly wiped out the major land source of protein, the giant moa. When Europeans arrived with modern agriculture developed for a temperate climate, Ma¯ori even more rapidly adopted the potato and a taste for the meat of pigs and sheep. Such convenient protein was accompanied by other easily accessed foods – notably, bread, salt and sugar. The first sealers and whalers brought the most unhealthy novelties: alcohol, tobacco and guns. The many lives lost to warfare were followed by catastrophic venereal disease, tuberculosis, measles 31 For population loss and later recovery, see Ian Pool, Te Iwi Ma¯ori: A New Zealand Population Past, Present and Projected (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1991), and the important study by Raeburn Lange, May the People Live: A History of Ma¯ori Health Development 1900–1920 (Auckland University Press, 1999). 32 Donald Denoon, Philippa Mein Smith and Marivic Wyndham, A History of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), pp. 81, 87–8. 33 Philippa Mein Smith, A Concise History of New Zealand, 2nd ed. (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 39, 72, 81.

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and influenza. The epidemic of venereal infections definitely reduced the chances of population replacement and, as the economy changed – the flax production camps concentrated Ma¯ori in damp, cold locations – new susceptibilities took hold. Without taking on the expense of another colony, Britain had appointed a ‘British Resident’ in 1832. James Busby was successful both in establishing good relations with Ma¯ori of the far north and in purchasing from them vast tracts of land. Proud to show Charles Darwin the wondrous replica of England already established in 1835, Busby was forthright about civilising as a process of supplanting. He even included a fatalistic Ma¯ori recognition of it. Disease and death prevail even amongst those natives who, by their adherence to the missionaries, have received only benefits from English connections; and even the very children who are reared under the care of missionaries are swept off in a ratio, which promises, at no very distant period, to leave the country destitute of a single inhabitant. The natives are perfectly sensible of this decrease; and when they contrast their own condition with that of the English families, amongst whom the marriages have been prolific in a very extraordinary degree of a most healthy progeny, they conclude that the God of the English is removing the aboriginal inhabitants to make room for them; and it appears to me that this impression has produced amongst them a very general recklessness and indifference to life.34

Thirty years later, Social Darwinism was popularised in imagery much repeated in writings on Ma¯ori decline: The Ma¯oris themselves are fully aware of this and look forward with a fatalistic resignation to the destiny of the final extinction of their race. They themselves say: ‘as clover killed the fern, and the European dog the Ma¯ori dog; as the Ma¯ori rat was destroyed by the Pakeha rat, so our people also will be gradually supplanted and exterminated by the Europeans.’35

Busby should be given more prominence in the national story because he is doubly representative of the revolution Ma¯ori had to deal with. Officially, he was sent to New Zealand to represent British interests. Individually, he 34 Busby to Colonial Secretary, 16 June 1837, quoted by Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 250. 35 Ferdinand von Hochstetter, New Zealand, its Physical Geography and Natural History, trans. from German (1865) in 1867, digitally republished (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013). His Darwinian predictions – wildly wrong as it turned out – came only six years after On the Origin of Species. For the context and continuing influence of such ideas, see Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).

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lost no time in advancing his own interests. Interests, I have come to see, are a key to understanding the historical process that can carry a people, often against their declared intentions, into genocide. The earlier observers all saw cause and effect in ‘civilisation’, without anyone intending harm in the process. Because genocide has entered the lexicon as a crime, most studies pivot on intent, on finding ‘smoking gun’ evidence for intent to destroy. And, because that is most readily found in declarations of policy, actions – often enough contradicting declared policy – are not always construed in a manner that illuminates the culture, ideology and interests of parties involved.

The Colonising Revolution: Economics, Ideology, Interests In the book where Raphael Lemkin defined his new word, though not in the same chapter, he made a considered judgement about responsibility for genocide that is almost always overlooked. Addressing the question of wider German complicity in Hitler’s crimes, Lemkin reached for a Latin tag, facit cui prodest – he in whose interest it was, did it. He then enumerated all the benefits, from Danish butter and Polish geese for German dinner tables to conscript labour and currency advantages for German industrialists.36 Had there been genocide in New Zealand, that would be part of the verdict: he in whose interest it was, did it. Genocide was arguably avoided in New Zealand. There, the destruction of Indigenous peoples did not repeat the events that Lemkin himself called genocide in Australia.37 There was economic impoverishment and starvation. There was a cultural and societal assault. And it is clear whose interest ‘the passing’ of Ma¯ori served. Early observers predicted that the European 36 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. xiv. The importance of this principle was noted in Ann Curthoys and John Docker, ‘Genocide: definitions, questions, settler-colonies’, introduction to special section on genocide, Aboriginal History 25 (2001), 11. See also Tony Barta, ‘“He in whose interest it was, did it”: Lemkin’s lost law of genocide’, Global Dialogue, 15:1 (Winter/Spring 2013), http://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p 72971/pdf/ch0150.pdf. 37 Writing about Spanish colonialism, Lemkin also observed that genocide is ‘largely a function of interest’. See John Docker, ‘Are settler-colonies inherently genocidal? Rereading Lemkin’, in Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Dirk Moses, p. 92, citing Box 8, Folder 12, of the Lemkin Archive of the American Jewish Historical Society in New York. For Lemkin on Tasmania, with an introduction by Ann Curthoys, see A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, eds., Colonialism and Genocide (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 66–100 – originally published in Patterns of Prejudice 39:2 (June 2005). Ann Curthoys reviews contributions before and after Lemkin in ‘Genocide in Tasmania: the history of an idea’ in Empire, Colony, Genocide, ed. Dirk Moses, pp. 229–52.

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occupiers would inevitably ‘destroy’, ‘extirpate and annihilate’ Ma¯ori unless British rule could civilise and protect them. The Europeans bore the responsibility, whether by intent, interest or inevitability.38 When a doomed-race extinction seemed to have evidence on its side, it was easy to accept as natural. ‘Most Europeans accepted this prognosis with equanimity’, in the judgement of Keith Sorrenson. ‘Some saw a shred of hope in the assimilation policy.’39 Either way would suit their interest. Ideology is always in somebody’s interest. About the ideology of the British when they decided on acquisition and colonisation there is still plenty to say. The remarkable humanitarian wave influencing parliament and government when they established formal rule over a small European settlement and a large Ma¯ori population can certainly be seen as the basis for the outcome celebrated today.40 It is clear that the early governors and their masters in the Colonial Office recognised the prior and continuing rights of Ma¯ori. Ma¯ori in their turn gave the colonisers every reason to believe that their benign civilising mission was welcome. It would be incorporated into Ma¯ori society and culture; it would not bear the seeds of destruction. Even in episodes of military contest, the founding values of respect would be upheld. David MacDonald, one of the few historians to face the issue squarely, sees that Ma¯ori resistance in the land wars maintained the physical identity of the iwi, and, from that base, even at the time of lowest numbers, an ability to sustain Indigenous agency. ‘While attempts at cultural assimilation and suppression are undeniable, there is little proof that colonial authorities envisioned completely destroying Ma¯ori identity. This may not necessarily show goodwill – it certainly (at least partially) reflects the numerical and cultural strength of Ma¯ori.’ A century after the low point, he quotes Lee Tamahori, director of Once Were Warriors, on a clear historical reason for confidence: ‘The Ma¯ori have a very strong place in New Zealand society . . . Unlike other indigenous peoples of the world, there was no genocide ever practised upon the Ma¯ori and they were never forcibly removed to other

38 Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Ma¯ori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland University Press, 2014) p. 240. 39 M. P. K. Sorrenson, ‘Ma¯ori and Pakeha’ in The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. W. H. Oliver and B. R. Williams (Oxford and Wellington: Oxford University Press, 1981), 141–66. 40 Alan Lester and Fae Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire, esp. ch. 6. See also Hannah Robert, Paved with Good Intentions: Terra Nullius, Aboriginal Land Rights and Settler-Colonial Law (Sydney: Halstead Press, 2019).

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areas, so, by and large, our history is one of an appreciation of both cultures and intermarriage amongst them.’41 ‘They were never forcibly removed.’ That was, and remains, the victory of the Ma¯ori resistance. In Australia, by contrast, Aboriginal peoples who escaped massacre could find refuge only on mission stations or government reserves that were very soon put under threat from settlers. In a second genocidal wave, dedicated to ‘breeding out the colour’ and destroying ancient cultures, children were kidnapped and forcibly removed to distant institutions.42 To a less catastrophic degree, but with unmistakeable genocidal intent, Native Americans were herded off their lands and onto reservations. From there, children were sent to schools designed to ‘kill the Indian in the child’.43 First Nations in the United States and Canada now see a way forward in a double identity they are allowed to foster. Ma¯ori took that as a given from the first days of colonisation. They had always taken the initiative in learning English, and they did not see boarding school as a threat to tribal identity. For someone as promising as Te Rangi Hiroa, the Ma¯ori selective school was an opportunity supported by his people. When he stood to comment on ‘the passing of the Ma¯ori’, it was obvious to him and to his audience that education would temper the numerical imbalance and create the New Zealand future.44

41 David B. MacDonald, ‘Daring to compare: the debate about a Ma¯ori “holocaust” in New Zealand’, Journal of Genocide Research 5:3 (2003), 383–403. 42 The policy is documented in Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities (Canberra: Government Printer, 1937). See also Russell McGregor, ‘“Breed out the colour”, or, the importance of being white’, Australian Historical Studies 33:120 (2002), 286–302; Robert Manne, ‘Aboriginal child removal and the question of genocide, 1900–1940’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 217–43; and Tony Barta, ‘Sorry, and not sorry, in Australia: how the apology to the stolen generations buried a history of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 10:2 (2008), 201–14. Child removal lives on in Australia – and New Zealand. In 2019, journalists brought to light shocking scenes of the ‘uplift’ of a newborn Ma¯ori baby by New Zealand Social Services. If a phone recording had not been made, would we know? And would we puzzle over the internalisation by Ma¯ori officers of cruel ‘protocols’? See Melanie Reid, Newsroom.co.nz: www.stuff.co.nz/national/113395638/new-zealands-own-stolengeneration-the-babies-taken-by-oranga-tamariki. 43 Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2014). Of the many individual testimonies, one of the most insightful is: Theodore Fontaine, Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools. A Memoir (Calgary: Heritage House, 2010). 44 Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck), ‘The passing of the Ma¯ori’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 55 (1924), 370–4.

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A Very British Genocide

When the House of Commons Select Committee reported in 1837, its language was robust. Using terms never admitted in colonising Australia, it recognised ‘the uncivilized nations of the earth’ (emphasis added) and their rights to territory and property: Too often, their territory has been usurped; their property seized; their numbers diminished; their character debased; the spread of civilisation impeded. European vices and diseases have been introduced among them, and they have been familiarized with the use of our most potent instruments for the subtle if violent destruction of human life, viz brandy and gunpowder.45

There would be a century of the ‘violent destruction of human life’: yes, individual lives, but surely in this context also the life of peoples. For that crime, a century later, Lemkin would invent the term genocide. Resistance to recognising the word as appropriate in colonisations, larded with declarations of good intentions, has continued into the present. That there should be popular resistance stimulated by political and economic interests is hardly remarkable. Stranger, given the clear definitions of Lemkin and the UN Convention, is the resistance of scholars. Their obtuseness usually shows in highlighting the declared good intentions, while failing to engage with the reality that actions and relationships and interests also declare intentions. The relations of genocide are constructed historically by forces greater than documented plots to destroy a people (the intentions so sought after by sticklers), and it is notable that the historical complex was recognised by the House of Commons Committee at the exact juncture when intellectuals as diverse as Adam Smith and Karl Marx were preoccupied with the processes that had transformed interests into dominating powers. A large history had created ‘The situation of Great Britain’ that ‘brings her beyond any other power into communication with the uncivilized nations of the earth.. . . [Her policy] has already affected the interests, and we fear we may add, sacrificed the lives, of many thousands [and] may yet, in all probability, influence the character and the destiny of millions of the human race.’46 The British recognised imperial expansion as Providence, a responsibility bestowed by God and history. A minority also saw disaster: ‘The mighty influence with which Providence has invested us, we have made the means of 45 Report, p. 77, appropriately quoted on the first page of Foster and Nettelbeck, Out of the Silence. 46 Report, pp. 3–4. On the concept of civilisation so powerful at the time, see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York: The Free Press, 1987).

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spreading devastation and ruin.’47 History and civilisation were Britain’s ultimate justifications – later to be invoked by Germans in Russia (triumphantly) and Israelis in Palestine (unofficially). Together with a raft of other C words – cultivation, culture, community, confidence, comfort, care – civilisation gave the constructive and celebratory tone to colonising. Who knows, if we deploy the alliteration as memory aids – the times tables of Genocide Studies – there could be a quantum increase in the understanding of a phenomenon much more complex than a piece of paper setting out an evil intention. There is a further set of alliterative questions for historians in the institutions and ideas established by Britain’s imperial reach. I have argued elsewhere that ‘most of the concepts we need to apply – ignorance, ideology, interests, identity – have interconnections that underlie intent. Perhaps because we share so many assumptions built into these words we find it hard to credit intent to destroy. Our own interests, our own identities do not have genocidal implications; could it have been true then?’48 This is especially the case when we resort to the benign results of colonisation – exactly those summed up in the broad concept of civilisation. The benefits of capitalist land use, whether pasturing of imported animals or agriculture, can hardly be argued with, except by defending a less productive, more primitive economy. The reach goes beyond private property, a tested legal system, education, railways, hospitals. It basically, and often violently, means a complete change of social organisation, culture and beliefs. In the disruption of established authority and customs, in the increased violence between tribes as well as from settlers, in the effects of firearms and alcohol, the Select Committee had no difficulty in discerning imminent ‘extirpation’ – the most radical form of genocide. They were not equipped to see that their conception of civilisation was itself genocidal. In Lemkin’s terms, even their treasured mission of Christianity was an assault on the identity and viability of a national, religious or ethnic group. Now we speak of First Nations and mourn their disappearance or traumatised survival. At the time, very few colonisers could see that the attempt to mitigate genocide by imposing Christianity was itself potentially genocidal. But the Aborigines Protection Society made an extraordinary admission. Its Preface noted that

47 Preface to Report, p. vii. 48 Tony Barta, ‘Liberating genocide: an activist concept and historical understanding’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 9:2 (2015), 103–19, http://dx.doi.org/10.5038/1911-9933 .9.2.1335.

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Spain, ‘with the Bible in one hand, and the sword in the other’ had founded an empire ‘pre-eminent for its hypocrisy’: The guilt of our own nation, though equal in degree, is somewhat different in its character. We have been content to assume the office of the murderer, without adding to it the baseness of the hypocrite. The lust of power, and the love of gain, have in our case been the open and avowed incitements to injustice. Borne away by these master passions, we have left to the helpless victims of our colonial policy one only choice – to fall by the sword, or to perish by famine.

This was not the later German policy in Southwest Africa, it was the very British genocide that seemed inexorably to result from ‘the acquisition of new territories, and the advancement of British ascendancy’. That meant displacing the inhabitants to make way for imported capital and private property – though, of course, with due Christian regard for the Indigenous peoples.49 ‘Destitute, afflicted, tormented, death has been their only refuge from suffering so intense, as almost to justify their curses upon the memory of him who first published to Europe the fact of their existence.’50 The ‘fatal impact’ of the imported British way of life destroyed forms of group life which – in Lemkin’s terms – were unique contributions to humanity. Ma¯ori, for centuries sharing a largely common language and history, had the more effective capacity to resist. Indigenous Australians, for millennia divided into hundreds of separate peoples and languages, could resist only in overwhelmed localities. It must now be doubted whether the many extinguished peoples can be traced. Without doubt, missions saved individual lives. In some places, they saved the life of a group. But the group would face ongoing and relentless pressures of destruction. Land would continue to be stolen, and so would children. Separation from family and country and culture was a uniquely cruel contribution to modernity’s record of inhumanity. It meant the damaged child and grieving group would have to survive what was too often intended: the idealistically benevolent and callously violent British form of genocide.

49 Missionary efforts were genuine and had limited successes in Australia as well. For examples, see indexed references to Christianity in Michael Cannon, ed., Historical Records of Victoria, vols. I I A and I I B (Melbourne: Victorian GPO, 1983); Bain Attwood, The Making of the Aborigines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989); Robert Kenny, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming (Melbourne: Scribe, 2010). 50 Preface to Report, pp xi–xii.

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Bibliographic Note In addition to the main documentary source used here, a great many relevant records are available in open-source web resources. They include official papers of the British Colonial Office and the colonies, dictionaries of national biography, and journal articles (including mine). These sources include more complete quotations and details than I was able to include in this chapter, but the links in the footnotes offer useful guides. Many books difficult to access in hard copy, such as the very valuable study by Lange, May the People Live, are available as e-books. Questions not followed up here can be researched by either author or subject via your search engine. For differing interpretations of colonial genocide – and the sources used – consult The Journal of Genocide Research and works by Ann Curthoys, John Docker, Alexander Hinton, Ben Kiernan, A. Dirk Moses, Dan Stone, Colin Tatz and Patrick Wolfe. To Andrew Woolford, I owe the term ‘reductive legal concept’ for the prevailing constrictions in writings on genocide; and in two more reflective articles, ‘Liberating genocide’, and ‘Realities, surrealities, and the membrane of innocence’, Genocide Perspectives 5 (2017), 161–74, I have tried to expand on my own approach. This chapter owes much to the expertise, engagement and editing of Rebe Taylor. Most regrettably, it could not include the important Indigenous voices recorded by colonists. For colonial Australia, searching the Internet for contemporaneous writers such as David Collins, George Augustus Robinson, Watkin Tench and William Thomas will lead to their conscientious attempts at accurate quotation. So too will reading the work of recent historians, including Bain Atwood, James Boyce, Richard Broome, Ian D. Clarke, Paul Irish, Grace Karskens, Bruce Pascoe, Henry Reynolds and Rebe Taylor. For colonial New Zealand, reach the original sources through Anne Salmond, Judith Binney, Claudia Orange, Keith Sinclair, James Belich and Vincent O’Malley. Do not neglect a growing number of powerful film and TV histories. For Australian productions, search Gerry Bostock, Rachel Perkins, David Gulpilil, Rolf de Heer, Fred Schepisi and Warwick Thornton; for Aotearoa, search for James Belich, Geoff Murphy, Merata Mita and Lee Tamahori.

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Settler Genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940 mohamed adhikari

The aboriginal peoples of southern Africa, collectively known as San or ‘Bushmen’, suffered widespread exterminatory violence as a result of settler colonial invasion of their territories, starting from about 1700 onwards in the Tulbagh region 100 km northeast of Cape Town. Being hunter-gatherers and racially stereotyped as the lowest form of humanity, they were particularly susceptible to mass violence from both settlers and colonial states throughout the subcontinent. This chapter will examine the genocidal destruction of the Cape San peoples in some detail, and provide a comparative overview of San–settler conflict by surveying four other cases. Hunter-gatherers were the earliest inhabitants of southern Africa, having lived in some parts perhaps for as long as 150,000 years. By the start of European colonisation of the Cape in 1652, Khoikhoi pastoralists and Bantuspeaking cultivators, both of whom had migrated into the region about 2,000 years ago, had largely displaced the San to drier, more rugged interior areas. In the Cape Colony, much of the dispossession and slaughter of San happened in the eighteenth century along its northern and northeastern frontiers under Dutch East India Company (DEIC) rule. These processes continued under the relatively benign auspices of British imperialism through the nineteenth century. The main agents of destruction were Dutch-speaking pastoralists whose murderous, land-grabbing and ecologically damaging farming practices led to the virtual extermination of the Cape San peoples.1 San traditionally lived in small, loosely knit, family-based bands of usually between ten and thirty people. In 1652, their population in what was to It is with gratitude that I acknowledge funding from the National Research Foundation and from the University of Cape Town’s University Research Committee, without which the research for this chapter would not have been possible. 1 M. Adhikari, The Anatomy of a South African Genocide: The Extermination of the Cape San Peoples (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), provides a comprehensive overview of this case.

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become the Cape Colony was no more than 50,000. Individual bands roamed within a defined territory, determined usually by the availability of water, as well as game and seasonal plant foods. There was a gendered division of labour in San society: men were hunters, and women did most of the gathering. San society needed to be extremely mobile and adaptable to exploit migratory game and unevenly distributed plant food that resulted from unpredictable rainfall. The San were not culturally homogeneous. Apart from regional variations in social customs, cosmology and material culture, they spoke a wide variety of languages, most of which were mutually unintelligible. Although they shared a similar mode of subsistence, San economies differed depending on the natural environment. Thus, while the concept of San is a colonial construct, specialist foraging communities did share a distinctive economy and way of life as opposed to pastoralists and cultivators.2

Expansion of the Cape Colony, 1652–1795 Soon after the DEIC set up a refreshment station at Table Bay, now overlooked by Cape Town, the Cape Colony started expanding. In 1657, the DEIC decided that allowing independent farmers to work the land was the most expeditious way of meeting its need for agricultural produce. The opening of an agrarian frontier, together with natural population growth, immigration from Europe, and a lack of economic alternatives in the colony ensured the continuous dispersion of colonists into the interior. It took roughly half a century for most of the arable southwestern Cape to be occupied by European farmers, at the expense of Khoikhoi herders. From about 1700 onwards, Dutch-speaking, semi-nomadic pastoralists known as trekboers rapidly infiltrated the dry Cape interior, the greater part of which was suitable only for transhumant pastoralism. From 1714, the DEIC started issuing grazing rights to extensive 6,000-acre loan farms beyond the arable freehold areas in return for an annual rental fee. That tenants were not tied to a particular tract of land accelerated the movement of colonists into the interior and helped disperse the population into tiny, isolated groups along the shifting frontier. Trekboer, which means migrant farmer in Dutch, refers to the need for these pastoralists to move with their flocks and herds in search of seasonally available grazing and water, using

2 For detail on San culture and cosmology, see M. Guenther, Tricksters and Trancers: Bushman Religion and Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

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Map 3.1 The location of San groups in southern Africa, c.1890. (Cartography by Liezel Bohdanowicz)

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their loan farms as a base. The poorest trekboers tended to live wayfaring lives out of tented wagons, looking for grazing and hopeful of finding a place to settle. Even the more prosperous trekboers with well-watered loan farms needed to engage in a degree of transhumance. Hardy and resourceful, but vulnerable because of their isolation, trekboers were generally ruthless in their appropriation of natural resources and their treatment of Indigenous peoples. The decision by the DEIC government in 1700 to lift its ban on livestock trading between colonists and Khoikhoi – derogatorily referred to as ‘Hottentots’ by colonists – was a major impetus not only for expansion into the interior but also for violence against Indigenous peoples. This policy change and the resultant push into the hinterland held dire consequences for the Khoikhoi peoples occupying the winter rainfall area of the western Cape as far north as Namaqualand. Freebooting colonists saw this as an opportunity to enrich themselves and set up as stock farmers. Within a few years, most Khoikhoi far into the colonial hinterland were stripped of their herds by marauding gangs of colonial raiders. Independent Khoikhoi society in much of this region had been destroyed by the time the DEIC re-introduced the prohibition on livestock trading in 1725. Most dispossessed Khoikhoi either resorted to hunting and gathering or worked for trekboers, while some moved beyond the reach of the colonial frontier. Khoikhoi forced into hunter-gathering also resisted settler advances into the interior, and in some instances joined San guerrilla attacks on trekboers. One may legitimately refer to such joint efforts as Khoisan resistance. By the end of the eighteenth century, most Khoikhoi in the employ of Cape colonial farmers were in effect forced labourers little better off than serfs. As they moved beyond the cultivable southwestern Cape from about 1700 onwards, colonists came into increasing conflict with hunter-gatherer peoples. The dynamic behind the confrontation with San was different from that with Khoikhoi. Whereas traditional Khoikhoi society crumbled in the face of colonial conflict, San society proved much more resilient. The Khoikhoi’s pastoralist way of life was fragile when confronted with the superior military force of trekboers who waged successful stock raids and deprived the Khoikhoi of grazing and water with relative ease. San bands were by comparison hardy and adaptable, being much more mobile and able to live off the land. Their dispersion in isolated groups across an extensive and rugged terrain made it considerably more difficult for sparsely spread colonists to subjugate the San. 72

Settler Genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940

Although trekboers did participate in commercial colonial markets by supplying meat, soap, butter, hides, tallow and other products to Cape Town and passing fleets, subsistence considerations, not market forces, drove the trekboer economy. DEIC demand for meat was limited, it set prices at levels favouring the Company, and the environment was harsh. Thus, trekboers were not so much commercial ranchers motivated by profit, as pastoralists with access to a market through which they could dispense of surplus to procure the goods and services on which their way of life depended. Wagons, guns, ammunition and an array of tools and household goods were their main requirements. Frontier farmers were particularly dependent on contact with Cape Town for guns and ammunition, without which they would not have been able to hunt, defend themselves or take the offensive against Indigenous peoples. The absence of an overriding profit motive, however, did little to mitigate the ultimate fate of hunter-gatherer peoples at the Cape as trekboer demographic growth, increasing DEIC demand for meat, and rapid exhaustion of grazing land drove colonial expansion into the interior. Because of limited water resources in the Cape interior and the nature of transhumant pastoralism, the trekboer economy was expansive, and a relatively small trekboer population appropriated large swathes of land. With a growing number of colonists entering the interior as farmers through the eighteenth century, and as the sons of trekboers set themselves up as independent stockmen, there was intensifying pressure on resources and a continuous drive to find fresh pastures. Trekboer numbers grew from no more than about 600 independent stockholders by 1770 to perhaps 1,000 by 1800. Superior military technology allowed them to take possession of springs and waterholes, which ensured control over surrounding grazing. Being able to defend their occupation of these strategic nodes, trekboers were able to exercise power over an area of land disproportionate to their numbers.3 From about 1740, the Cape colonial frontier advanced rapidly as trekboers started moving in northerly and easterly directions into the harsher environment of the escarpment formed by the Hantam, Roggeveld, Nieuweveld, and Sneeuberg mountains. The escarpment marks the transition between the Cape’s narrow coastal plains and the open expanses of the interior plateau, as well as between the winter and summer rainfall areas. Farmers needed to be even more mobile in this environmental zone to exploit both summer and 3 L. Guelke and R. Shell, ‘Landscape of conquest: frontier water alienation and Khoikhoi strategies of survival, 1652–1780’, Journal of Southern African Studies 18:4 (1992), 803–5.

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Settler Genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940

winter grazing. Across the escarpment lay the Cape thirstland, an uninviting prospect for both San and frontier farmers. Over the next three decades, a growing number of trekboers established loan farms along the escarpment in the face of intensifying resistance from San and Khoikhoi refugees unwilling to retreat into the arid reaches beyond. By the late 1760s, pressure on resources reached critical levels, initiating sustained and co-ordinated Khoisan guerrilla attacks against settlers along the entire frontier. During the last three decades of the eighteenth century, a combination of ecological barriers and San resistance halted colonist advances into the interior, and in places rolled it back. The stalling of the pastoral frontier precipitated a major crisis for trekboer society as it depended on continuous expansion to accommodate demographic growth and deteriorating pasturelands. From about 1770, trekboers, with the help of the DEIC government, embarked on an exterminatory military offensive against the San often referred to as the ‘Bushman wars’.4

The Dynamic of Frontier Conflict under DEIC Rule, 1700–1795 Trekboers severely disrupted the lives of San communities that had been living in the Cape interior for tens of thousands of years. San and trekboer clashed because they were in direct competition for the same resources: water, game and land. San bands suddenly found that they were denied access to traditional watering places by farmers occupying springs and waterholes. Trekboer livestock muddied and contaminated water supplies, and destroyed plants on which the San subsisted. Overgrazing damaged and, in many areas, permanently changed the ecology. Destructive trekboer hunting practices decimated herds of game, a primary source of food for San, while stock consumed the forage on which these animals depended. Trekboers shot game both for sport and to make biltong: dried, salted, meat strips that became a staple of the frontier diet and were also sold in Cape Town. Because game followed a migratory pattern similar to that necessary for pastoralism, San and trekboer competed for the same seasonal resources and habitations. The scarcity of game and environmental deterioration often left hungry San with little option but to raid trekboer livestock. Trekboer 4 See R. Elphick and H. Giliomee, eds., The Shaping of South African Society, 1652–1840 (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1989), and C. Hamilton, B. Mbenga and R. Ross, eds., The Cambridge History of South Africa, vol. I: From Early Times to 1885 (Cambridge University Press, 2012), for historical context to the processes described here.

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destructiveness went beyond damaging the subsistence base of the San. They also desecrated the landscape which was fundamental to San spirituality. In many areas, colonists eradicated entire herds of game – in particular, eland, which were central to San belief systems. Trekboers thus put San communities under enormous stress. During the eighteenth century, San responded to trekboer intrusion in two ways. The first was to withdraw. This was not an attractive option as it meant moving to inhospitable terrain and perhaps encroaching on another group’s territory. Antagonistic neighbours might include other San bands, Bantuspeaking peoples such as Xhosa to the east and Tswana in the northeast, or Khoikhoi-speaking pastoralists, such as Griqua or Korana to the north and along the Orange River. Displacement thus gave rise to intensified conflict between Indigenous groups as pressure on resources mounted. A second, increasingly common reaction was for San to resist trekboer encroachment. This included raiding or killing trekboer stock, slaying herders, destroying crops and attacking farmsteads, sometimes by burning them down. San usually attacked at night, striking where trekboers were most vulnerable: their herds. Stock raiders under pressure from pursuing farmers usually maimed or killed the animals to deny them to their foes. Raids were also intended to drive trekboers from San land. An eloquent example of their defiance is provided by the San warrior Koerikei, who had lived with trekboers long enough to learn Dutch. Having successfully evaded pursuing trekboers, Koerikei stood on a cliff out of range of their muskets and shouted, ‘What are you doing in my territory? You occupy all the places where eland and other game live. Why do you not remain where the sun sets, where you first were?’ When asked why he did not live in peace with colonists as he had done before, Koerikei replied that he did not want to lose the land of his birth, that he would kill their herdsmen and chase them all away.5 San attacks were at first sporadic and small scale but became ever more frequent and co-ordinated through the eighteenth century. From the early 1770s, San bands increasingly coalesced to fight off colonial intruders and were often joined by dispossessed Khoikhoi. Khoisan raiding parties attacking farms and rustling cattle were sometimes up to 300 strong, especially in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. There was also a degree of collaboration between San attackers and farm servants, many of whom were captives 5 This incident was narrated by commando leader David Schalk van der Merwe in November 1777, to Colonel Robert Jacob Gordon, commander of the Dutch garrison in Cape Town. See P. Cullinan, Robert Jacob Gordon, 1743–1795 (Cape Town: Struik, 1992), pp. 34–5.

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Settler Genocides of San Peoples of Southern Africa, c.1700–c.1940

or coerced workers. Increasingly, Khoisan deserters stole guns, lead shot, powder and horses. In some cases, it was farm servants who instigated attacks or committed acts of sabotage. Masters’ fear of betrayal goes a long way towards explaining their pervasive cruel treatment of servants and why they so severely punished desertion. Colonists responded to San attacks with individual acts of slaughter and massacre. They also organised retaliatory raids by armed, mounted militia units known as commandos. Beyond the limited reach of the garrison in Cape Town, the commando was the main institution of military force in the Cape Colony under Dutch rule, and the main instrument of war against Indigenous peoples. Whereas the DEIC initially organised commandos consisting of Company soldiers and servants as well as colonists, by 1715 officially sanctioned commandos consisting entirely of colonists and led by frontier farmers were being formed. The institution evolved through the eighteenth century to meet the military needs of trekboer society.6 Commandos mobilised men between the ages of 16 and 60, who were organised by district and were required to attend annual drills. These militias mounted state-sanctioned, punitive expeditions led by veldwachtmeesters (field sergeants), officials who represented the Dutch colonial government at the local level. Veldwachtmeesters, usually the DEIC government’s only agents in outlying districts, were themselves prominent frontier farmers. They were appointed by the landdrost, the chief administrator of the district, who was far removed from the frontier. Veldwachtmeesters thus had substantial autonomy and often acted in their own interest. They had the authority to raise commandos and only needed to report their activities to the landdrost afterwards. The DEIC government provided commandos with powder and shot, and gave instructions regarding aims and conduct. Instructions were often cursory and ignored by commandos. In addition to their principal functions of defending trekboer society and crushing Indigenous resistance, commandos served as a means of acquiring forced labour. The DEIC also sanctioned unofficial commandos. These posses, often nothing more than vigilante gangs, could be mobilised rapidly, and effectively allowed farmers to take the law into their own hands in relation to indigenes. They were formed on an ad hoc basis, usually for the purpose of hot pursuit, but also for land grabs, pre-emptive attacks against San considered a threat, or for razzias to round up forced labour. While leaders of 6 N. Penn, The Forgotten Frontier: Colonist and Khoisan on the Cape’s Northern Frontier in the 18th Century (Cape Town: Double Storey Books, 2005), ch. 4.

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unofficial commandos were required to submit a report to the veldwachtmeester upon returning, many such forays by trekboers against Khoisan went unreported. Several hundred of these unofficial sorties were mounted along the Cape frontier during the eighteenth century. Though most informal commandos consisted of smaller parties in pursuit of stock raiders, there were a number of larger, informal expeditions as deadly as any of the official commandos. Besides being necessary for countering Khoisan guerilla tactics, this flexibility and devolution of authority served DEIC interests. It allowed the Cape government to withdraw from military activity on the frontier by giving colonists a free hand against Indigenous peoples. Being a commercial enterprise concerned with its profitability and servicing its maritime empire, the DEIC was loath to bear the costs of frontier conflict. The commando system fulfilled its need for cheap frontier defence because trekboers bore the greater part of the expense. Members were not paid and brought their own provisions. They used their own guns, horses and wagons, all of which were costly items and suffered severe wear and tear while on commando. Although it tried to curb, and occasionally punished, trekboer excesses against indigenes, the DEIC generally overlooked the abuses of commandos because the system suited its interests so well. As frontier conflict escalated through the eighteenth century, going on commando for a few weeks each year became a way of life for trekboers and their dependents. From 1739, the DEIC made commando service compulsory for frontier farmers but allowed them to send substitutes, often a Khoikhoi servant. Wealthier trekboers or those not directly threatened were usually not eager to go on commando. Farmers resented these arduous tours of duty because they consumed valuable resources and exposed them to danger. Moreover, these operations removed them from their farms and left their families vulnerable to attack and insubordination by servants. Trekboers, nevertheless, went on commando because they perceived there to be little alternative to eliminating or containing the threat posed by San. There were some advantages to going on commando: it held out the promise of increased security, augmenting their workforce with captives, gaining a share of recovered livestock, and opening up new areas for grazing and colonisation. Official commandos against the San generally operated in early spring. Not only was this a time when there was enough water and fodder for horses in the veld, but it was also a quiet period in the annual agricultural cycle.7 7 P. van der Merwe, Die Noordwaardse Beweging van die Boere Voor die Groot Trek, 1770–1842 (The Hague: W. P. van Stockum, 1937).

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In the spiral of attack and counter-attack in these frontier confrontations, trekboers enjoyed huge military advantages – most obviously, firearms. Their front-loading muskets were effective at more than twice the range of San arrows, allowing trekboers to pick off San from a safe distance. Muskets fired in volleys were extremely effective when opponents were massed and allowed relatively small commandos to inflict severe casualties on much larger Khoisan raiding parties. For example, when a small informal commando gave chase after a gang of about 300 plunderers made off with 23 cattle belonging to wealthy farmer Jan Valck in the Sandveld along the Cape west coast in December 1728, the pursuers easily dispersed the mob of raiders who challenged them to a fight, after killing 12 of them with a volley of shots. Most trekboers also carried pistols and sabres. Importantly, the speed and power of horses gave trekboers major advantages in covering longer distances rapidly, in closer skirmishing and hot pursuit. The combination of guns and horses was particularly potent in open country. From about 1770 through till the late 1790s, official commandos against the San were organised annually, often more frequently, and generally consisted of between 40 and 100 armed men on horseback. The preferred modus operandi of the commando was to locate San camps by the light of their fires, surround the sleeping kraal under cover of darkness and attack at dawn. The small size of San hunting bands, which rarely had more than 8 males of fighting age, meant that they were outnumbered in most hostile engagements. With commandos having the advantages of guns, horses, numerical superiority and surprise on their side, San bands stood little chance against these stealth attacks. Many bands were exterminated in this way. Yet it was not always easy for commandos. It was difficult to hide their presence and San often lived in naturally fortified locations. San could retreat to remote, inhospitable areas where horses often could not follow, and where it became difficult to track them over stony ground. Mountainous country provided greater opportunities for defence as San took refuge in caves or behind boulders. This could result in protracted stand-offs, in which San usually came off second best if trekboers were prepared to lay siege to them. San on occasion rolled boulders down onto advancing trekboers from high ground. Mountains also held perils for San as commandos would massacre fleeing bands caught against cliff faces, at the edges of precipices, or in gorges. While commandos generally destroyed San kraals one at a time, there were a number of larger massacres. Swedish botanist Carl Thunberg, who led several field trips into the interior during his three-year stay at the Cape in the first half of the 1770s, reported the massacre of 186 San in the Roggeveld 79

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region in 1765. A decade later, in August 1775, veldwachtmeester Adriaan van Jaarsveld, at the head of a commando, and intent on retaliation for stock raids in the Sneeuberg region, shot several hippopotami at a pool along the Seekoei River on the northeastern frontier. Guessing correctly that San from the surrounding area would congregate around the kill for a feast through the night, they returned stealthily under cover of darkness. In the surprise dawn attack, van Jaarsveld’s commando reportedly killed 122 San and took 21 prisoners. The following year, in March 1776, veldwachtmeester Jacob de Klerk of the Nieuweveld, leading a powerful commando, attacked a sizeable contingent of ‘robbers’ ensconced in fortified caves, killing 111 San. In September 1792, an unusually large agglomeration of San raiders were attacked by a large and well-provisioned commando set up by the DEIC to clear the Nieuweveld of San. An estimated 300 San were killed and 15 captured in this assault, and a further 180 killed in a follow-up operation along the Sak River two months later.8 In eighteenth-century raids, commandos, with few exceptions, put San men to death on the spot. Commandos killed adult males because they were regarded as extremely dangerous and incorrigible savages who could not be schooled in productive economic activity. The chances for escape and revenge on the frontier were simply too great for many farmers to risk taking them as forced labourers. San men were regarded as particularly menacing because they gave no quarter in combat and generally fought to the death. Women and children were also often massacred. Some women were taken as servants in trekboer households or as concubines for Khoikhoi dependents. Female captives had added value in that their offspring would in time augment the farmer’s labour supply. Colonists prized San children because they were seen as tractable and more easily assimilated into the trekboer economy as menial labourers. They could, from a young age, be trained to work as herders and to do a variety of tasks. The vulnerability of child captives and children born into captivity made them an ultra-exploitable class of labourers. From 1775, what was effectively a system of child slavery became institutionalised by the DEIC through the apprenticeship system whereby Khoisan children could be bound to masters until the age of 25. Farmers were generally able to coerce apprentices into remaining in their employ until they were much older – in many cases, for life. The bartering and gifting of San, especially children, were common on the frontier. San assimilated into trekboer society as forced 8 See Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide, pp. 48–9.

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labourers were usually referred to as ‘Hottentots’, and in time many came to see themselves as such. This effacement of San identities formed a significant part of the genocidal process. Captured San were slaves in every sense except that they could not be sold legally.9 Khoikhoi servants were frequently complicit in violence against San, and many participated in commando raids. One reason was that it was usually Khoikhoi herdsmen who bore the brunt of San attacks, with several hundred being killed. Historian Susan Newton-King counted at least 107 herdsmen slain by San in the Camdeboo district alone, in the eighteen months following July 1786.10 Also, Khoikhoi dependents allowed to keep stock were equally threatened by San raids. Most importantly, farmers who were reluctant to go on commando sent Khoikhoi servants instead. Khoikhoi constituted the majority in some commandos, particularly in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Khoikhoi were skilled scouts and trackers, routinely deployed in dangerous situations where trekboers were not prepared to risk their own skins. There were also incentives for Khoikhoi to go on commando. They often got a share of the spoils, including captured San women. Many probably also felt that being part of a commando gave them a degree of status, and protection against trekboer violence. Racism was an important determinant in the extreme violence visited upon San. From the outset, most colonists regarded the San as racially inferior. Such people judged them to be on the very lowest rung of the racial hierarchy – certainly below the despised Khoikhoi. Being hunter-gatherers, San were viewed as living in a feral state not far removed from animals. Because of their nomadic way of life, San were also seen as not owning land but rather, ranging across it, much as animals do. Many colonists also thought that the San did not even have a fully developed capacity for language. Unsurprisingly, San as well as other Indigenous peoples were referred to as ‘schepselen’ (creatures). Such racial attitudes towards indigenes were pithily summed up by landdrost Lodewijk Alberti from Uitenhage in 1805: ‘According to the unfortunate notion prevalent here, a heathen is not actually human, but at the same time he cannot really be classed among the animals.. . . His word can in no wise be believed, and only by violent measures can he be brought to do good and shun evil.’11 9 J. McDonald, ‘“We do not know who painted our pictures”: child transfers and cultural genocide in the destruction of Cape San societies along the Cape Colony’s northeastern frontier, c.1770–1830’, Journal of Genocide Research 18:4 (2016), 519–39. 10 S. Newton-King, Masters and Servants on the Cape Eastern Frontier, 1760–1803 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 106–7. 11 A. Du Toit and H. Giliomee, Afrikaner Political Thought: Analysis and Documents, 1780– 1850 (Cape Town: David Philip, 1983), p. 84.

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Figure 3.1 Tracing of a rock painting depicting a clash between San stock raiders and a pursuing trekboer commando. Note the flash flames from the trekboer muzzle-loading muskets, the paths traced by bullets, as well as several therianthropic figures depicted. San rock paintings are deeply symbolic and spiritually charged interpretations of shamanistic experiences in the spirit world and in altered states of consciousness, rather than representations of the everyday. (Patricia Vinnicombe, People of the Eland: Rock Paintings of the Drakensberg Bushmen as a Reflection of Their Life and Thought (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1976, p. 25) / Courtesy of the Rock Art Research Institute)

Some frontiersmen shot San with impunity, arbitrarily, and often on sight. As conflict intensified through the eighteenth century, trekboer society developed an exterminatory attitude towards San, regarding them as little better than vermin to be eradicated. Writing in 1775, Anders Sparrman, the Swedish naturalist who travelled extensively through the Cape interior, related: ‘Does a colonist at any time get sight of a Bushman, he takes fire immediately, and spirits up his horse and dogs, in order to hunt him with

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more ardour and fury than he would a wolf or any other wild beast.’ Louis de Grandpré, a French army officer who visited the Cape in 1786–7, accused trekboers of being even more bloodthirsty than the conquistadors because ‘they have hunted the Boschis as one would hunt hares; their dogs are trained for it’. A quarter of a century later, John Barrow, private secretary to Lord Macartney, described how ‘the name of Bosjesman is held in horror and detestation; and the farmer thinks he cannot proclaim a more meritorious action than to murder one of these people’.12 There was a clear pattern to trekboer–San conflict that played out repeatedly as the frontier moved inland. First, trekboer intrusion into new areas put San communities under increasing pressure. Then, escalating San resistance, sometimes over a decade or more, eventually precipitated systematic, exterminatory reprisals by commandos seeking to clear entire areas of San. By the 1770s, many indigenes were killed for no other reason than that they were thought to be San, and commandos generally operated as mobile death squads. It was not unusual for larger commandos to kill several hundred San in expeditions lasting several weeks. The largest of these state-sponsored operations, the General Commando of 1774 which mobilised about 250 men in an attempt to purge the entire frontier zone of San, reported 503 San killed and 239 taken captive. In 1927, W. M. Macmillan, generally accredited as the leading South African historian of his generation, succinctly summarised settler exterminationist attitudes towards San: ‘The well-established colonial tradition came to be that the Bushman is a wild animal to be shot at sight; and unhappily it was on this inadequate theory that the Bushman of earlier days was usually dealt with and destroyed.’13 While commandos generally operated with local exterminatory intent, 1777 marked a radicalisation in DEIC government policy towards San. Whereas governors had previously instructed commandos to subdue only hostile San, in 1777 the Cape colonial government sanctioned exterminating independent San whenever they were encountered. Up to that point, the Cape government held some hope that the San threat could be contained either through a show of force, as with the General Commando, or through some peace initiative, such as negotiating with San leaders. By 1777, the government had lost hope of any such outcome as a result of escalating San attacks in the preceding years. Still, this policy shift was of greater symbolic than practical significance, in that the governor sanctioned what 12 For further detail, see Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide, pp. 53–5. 13 W. Macmillan, The Cape Colour Question: A Historical Survey (Cape Town: Balkema, 1968), p. 27.

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was already being practised on the frontier. Under pressure from frontier farmers to act decisively against intensifying San resistance, the governor and Council of Policy acceded to the requests of commando leaders that they be given freedom to deal with the San as they saw fit. Although trekboers enjoyed great advantages in this conflict, it was not at all easy for them to defeat the San comprehensively or annihilate San society completely. Trekboers were thin on the ground and commandos could operate only sporadically, at most for a few weeks at a time. Significantly, San society consisted of a large number of small social units scattered over a vast, often inhospitable, landscape which they knew intimately, and to which they were well adapted. In addition, San resisted fiercely, their guerrilla tactics extremely effective and difficult to counter. San had, nonetheless, suffered severe loss of land and life by the end of the eighteenth century. At a conservative estimate, as many as 10,000 San were killed in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, and between 2,000 and 3,000 taken prisoner.14 This does not take into account the substantial number of San who died of starvation, dehydration and disease as a result of colonial invasion, nor the considerably negative impact on fertility rates caused by the social disruption. The San peoples of the Cape Colony were, however, far from vanquished.

Attrition under British Rule, 1795–c.1880 The dynamic of frontier violence against the San changed at the end of the eighteenth century. When the British occupied the Cape Colony in 1795, they were disconcerted by the incessant frontier violence. They had humanitarian concerns, but also wanted to maintain social order and cut the high costs of the conflict. Meat production had been severely affected by chaos on the frontier and an increasing number of farmers had defaulted on their loan farm rentals. British administrators realised that, despite trekboer complaints of depredations by San, it was the San who were the victims. The British favoured a policy of assimilation: turning the San into sedentary pastoralists and farm labourers. Pastoralism was appropriate for that natural environment, and British policy-makers saw it as the next step up on the evolutionary ladder from hunter-gathering. The first British administration tried a three-pronged approach to putting an end to the relentless violence against San. Starting with a proclamation 14 Adhikari, Anatomy of a South African Genocide, pp. 85–7.

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issued by Governor George Macartney in July 1798, the British encouraged farmers to make gifts of livestock to San. Veldwachtmeesters were to collect sheep and goats from farmers through voluntary subscription and distribute them among San. In addition to being a goodwill gesture and a practical step in short-circuiting the cycle of violence, administrators hoped that it would encourage San to abandon foraging. Second, British policy-makers promoted missionary activity among hunter-gatherer communities as another way of ‘taming’ San and teaching them the benefits of a sedentary existence. Administrators regarded San as lacking both the intellectual means and the moral principles for independently fashioning a ‘civilised’ way of life for themselves, and saw missionaries as best equipped to overcome these deficiencies. Missionaries from the London Missionary Society (LMS), founded in 1795, arrived at the Cape at the end of March 1799. While missionary activity targeting San was couched in terms of their ‘upliftment’ and ‘moral redemption’, it was predicated on breaking down their way of life and altering their world view. Third, the Cape government declared the area known as Bushmanland, the northern Cape between the colonial boundary and the Orange River, to be a reserve for San, and forbade colonists from entering the territory, which trekboers used for hunting and occasional pasturage. British administrators tried to curb violence against San with threats of criminal action against perpetrators and warnings that ammunition supplies would be cut off. They also issued an injunction that San not be molested and that commandos against them cease – except in cases where San aggression justified self-defence. It was this qualification that allowed for continued state-sanctioned violence against San, and official commandos against them, into the 1830s. San casualties resulting from commando activity were considerably lower under British rule. For example, between 1813 and 1824, 97 San were reported killed in the Graaff-Reinet magistracy, and 280 taken prisoner. The ratio of roughly 4 San killed for every 1 taken prisoner under DEIC rule was inverted to 1 San killed for every 4 taken prisoner under the British administration.15 Intermittent informal commando activity and vigilantism nevertheless continued to take a toll of San life. All three British initiatives to ‘civilise’ the San failed. First, gifts of livestock did not work because the plan, though well intentioned, was ill conceived and patchily implemented. Although some farmers were prepared to try the experiment in the hope of breaking the cycle of violence, many were reluctant to participate. The gift-giving scheme was doomed mainly because the 15 Ibid., pp. 72, 87.

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San, in desperate need of food, were more likely to eat the stock they got than to try and farm with them in the semi-desert of the Cape interior. San society was also extremely egalitarian and everyone had an obligation to share food with the community, rather than selfishly retaining animals for farming. Moreover, San with stock were vulnerable to raids by other San and the array of stock-keeping peoples on the frontier, including unscrupulous trekboers. Second, attempts at converting San to Christianity had little success. Few showed interest in abandoning their world view in favour of missionary teachings. The missionary effort itself was sporadic, with eight failed mission stations aimed specifically at the San being established between 1799 and 1846 along the northeastern frontier. They all closed within a few years because of extreme isolation and inadequate funding from the LMS. Drought, repeated stock theft and the antagonism of Indigenous peoples, including independent San bands, played a role. Missionaries, in addition, faced hostility from trekboers. Not only did missionaries occupy desirable land and use water resources, they were accused of depriving farmers of labour. ‘Meddling missionaries’ also roused the ire of government officials for challenging colonial policy. As for the Bushmanland reserve, trekboers simply ignored this proclamation. Policing the Cape hinterland was an impossible task for the colonial government, and it was not capable of preventing trekboers from entering the area. Colonial hunting parties and roving stock farmers regularly traversed the territory, depleting its resources. While British peace initiatives had some success in reducing frontier lawlessness and turbulence, they failed to eliminate violence against San. The unremitting warfare of the last decades of Dutch rule gave way to a fragile and uncertain peace punctuated by periodic bloodshed. More settled frontier conditions only spurred trekboer penetration of the interior. Although some San groups were ‘pacified’ by the new approach, others remained hostile. Violence on the frontier continued sporadically through the first half of the nineteenth century, with San raiding trekboer stock, and farmers retaliating with both formal and informal commandos against them.16 Under the brittle peace of British rule, there were divergent tendencies in the destruction of San society on the northern and northeastern frontiers during the first half of the nineteenth century. The predominant trend along the northeastern frontier was for the incorporation of surviving San into 16 J. Philip, Researches in South Africa, 2 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1828), has much useful firsthand observation on the condition of San communities on the frontier.

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colonial society as a servile underclass. Farmers’ need for labour and diminishing possibilities for pursuing a foraging lifestyle in this more densely populated region promoted this outcome. Intense commando activity in this region over the preceding decades had sapped San resistance. A few bands might for a while have eked out a living by combining foraging on unused land between white farms with livestock theft. Hunting bands under intense pressure sometimes handed over children to farmers in return for a few sheep or goats, feeding the practice of bartering San children. It was not unusual for groups of San first to enter the service of farmers as clients, while still practising a degree of foraging. Over time, the tendency was for such groups to become tied to farmers through threats of violence, the retention of women and children on the farm, and growing dependence on farmers for food. After 1810, San resistance, which had stalled colonial penetration north of the Sneeuberg since the 1770s, gave way under continued pressure. Stock farmers were able to press on, resulting in the Orange River in 1824 being proclaimed the new colonial boundary in the northeast.17 Along the drier, sparsely colonised northern frontier, and beyond in Bushmanland, it was still possible for independent San bands to subsist as hunter-gatherers through the first half of the nineteenth century, though such an existence became increasingly precarious. Independent San society continued to be undermined by trekboer incursions into Bushmanland, which further diminished San options for leading a foraging existence. As frontier farmers infiltrated areas occupied by San, there was ongoing competition for land and water. Farmers often resorted to violence and the formation of informal commandos to settle disputes or to grab coveted land and water sources. Under conditions of insecure peace and unequal military power, the San invariably found themselves on the back foot when trekboers took the offensive. The colonial government in 1847 formally recognised the reality of trekboer penetration into Bushmanland by pushing the northern boundary of the Cape Colony to the Orange River. In the northern Cape, Indigenous stock keepers such as Griqua, Koranna and Tswana communities also killed San. Through the nineteenth century, San of the northern Cape found themselves greatly outnumbered by pastoralists who had access to superior technologies of war. San were thus increasingly hemmed into the drier parts of Bushmanland. This, together with periodic drought, led to the

17 See M. Szalay, The San and the Colonization of the Cape, 1770–1879: Conflict, Incorporation, Acculturation (Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 1995), for further detail.

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starvation and massacre of many San bands there. Others were forced to enter the service of farmers as virtual serfs. The discovery in the mid nineteenth century that merino sheep were able to acclimatise to the semi-desert conditions of Bushmanland, and the development of borehole technology to tap ground water, held dire consequences for San. In addition, from the 1850s, copper mining in Namaqualand gave rise to a demand for foodstuffs. As a result, hundreds of thousands of woolbearing and fat-tailed sheep were introduced into the region. The semi-desert scrub of the northern Cape to which surviving San had been confined now had economic value, guaranteeing rapid trekboer incursion into Bushmanland. These commercial opportunities and growing environmental pressures precipitated a series of massacres of San bands by intruding trekboers in the 1850s and 1860s, which brought an effective end to independent San society in Bushmanland. The final throes of primary resistance by San within the Cape Colony came during the Korana wars of 1868–9 and 1878–9 along the middle reaches of the Orange River, when remnant groups of San joined forces with Korana against encroaching trekboers and the Cape colonial forces supporting them. Although the Korana were generally hostile towards hunter-gatherers who preyed on their livestock, by the late 1860s both were under sufficient pressure from white farmers taking control of grazing along the southern bank of the Orange River for them to be pushed into an alliance against their common enemy. An unknown but substantial number of San, including women and children, were among the approximately 2,000 war casualties who either were killed, starved to death as a result of disruption caused by the two conflicts, or were taken prisoner by colonial forces consisting of commandos, border police and detachments of the Cape Colonial Forces. Farmers indentured some of those taken prisoner, while authorities sentenced some fighters to hard labour in the Breakwater Prison at the Cape Town docks.18 Despite relatively benevolent British colonial policies, San society within the Cape Colony was nevertheless extinguished during the nineteenth century through ongoing land expropriation, enforced labour incorporation and periodic massacres. At most, a few hundred San survivors eked out a bare existence as downtrodden farm labourers or vagrants along the semi-desert margins of Cape colonial society. A few independent bands managed to 18 See T. Strauss, War along the Orange: The Korana and the Northern Border Wars of 1868–69 and 1878–79 (Cape Town: Centre for African Studies, 1979), for details of these conflicts.

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survive on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, giving rise to a common contemporary misconception of the San as a ‘desert people’. The destruction of Cape San peoples and their societies was not simply the unintended consequence of land alienation and the blind pursuit of selfish economic interests by colonists. It was also the consciously desired outcome of a sustained and extremely violent drive rooted in Cape colonial society’s vision of itself and its future as one in which there was no place, territorially or socially, for hunter-gatherer peoples – and is therefore genocide.

Transorangia, c.1810 – c.1840 During the first half of the nineteenth century, while trekboers were eradicating hunter-gatherer societies south of the Orange River, Griqua polities north of the middle Orange, in what came to be known as Transorangia, were doing the same. The Griqua were stock keepers consisting largely of Khoikhoi and people of Khoikhoi and Boer descent known as Bastards, but also of refugees from the Cape Colony, and San, as well as Sotho- and Tswana-speakers who converged in Transorangia from the late eighteenth century onwards. Here, they formed two well-organised and flourishing polities centred on Griquatown and Philippolis, making strategic use of missionaries and adopting the economic and military methods of Cape colonial society. The Griqua economy was largely pastoral, modelled on trekboer practices, and produced for colonial markets that expanded considerably after British re-occupation of the Cape in 1806. Having acquired both horses and firearms, and having adopted the institution of the commando, the Griqua polities were dominant in the region from the 1810s to the mid nineteenth century. The Transorangian Griqua had invaded the lands of San communities who had been living there for millennia. As competition for resources between the two intensified, conflict erupted, with San raiding Griqua stock. Griqua retaliated with what quickly escalated into genocidal commando campaigns, in which they slaughtered San indiscriminately, took many San captive as forced labourers, and drove others from Transorangia. Between the early 1810s and the end of the 1830s, Griqua commandos denuded Transorangia of its aboriginal inhabitants. They were doing so for the same reasons, and using the same methods, as trekboers. The diaries of missionaries and travellers – along with many pointed observations by landdrost Andries Stockenström, who investigated these killings – reveal the efficiency with which Griqua commandos perpetrated exterminatory violence against San. The resolve 89

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with which Griqua sought to exterminate San is neatly captured in the testimony that trekboer Johannes Coetzee provided to Stockenström in 1830. Recalling a conversation with Willem Barend, a Griqua man, about their recent annihilation of ‘a quiet and peaceable’ San kraal ‘without the least provocation’, Coetzee reported that he had: asked him why they act so cruelly towards the Bushmen, who had done no harm – he replied the Bushmen steal our Cattle, we are determined to exterminate them, so that our Cattle may graze unmolested day and night, and I asked him why they murdered the women and children, he said the children grow up to mischief and the women breed them.19

The Transorangian Griqua case indicates clearly that, although genocidal struggles between Indigenous peoples and European colonists have often been cast as the product of racial antagonisms, they were not principally racial in character. They were essentially about incompatible ways of life vying for the same scarce resources and the right to occupy particular areas of land. Despite being Indigenous, Griqua settlers became as determined slaughterers of San as were the European colonists.

Colonial Natal, 1837 – c.1900 As Griqua commandos were completing their bloody mission of ridding Transorangia of its aboriginal communities, San bands in what would later become the British colony of Natal started feeling the pressures of European colonisation. For several decades prior to this, San communities east of the Drakensberg Mountains had been suffering attrition as a result of Sotho agropastoralists pushing up from the south and being caught against Zulu chiefdoms in the north. Though often violent, relations between San and Bantu-speakers also included co-operation, acculturation and clientship. San society nonetheless tended to be displaced and its independence compromised so that it was considerably weakened by the time it faced threats from European invaders. The first whites to colonise what would become Natal were some 6,000 ‘trekkers’ – Dutch-speaking emigrants from the eastern Cape Colony disenchanted with British rule. These trekkers crossed the Drakensberg Mountains 19 Quoted in E. Cavanagh, ‘“We exterminated them, and Dr. Philip gave the country”: the Griqua people and the elimination of San from South Africa’s Transorangia region’ in M. Adhikari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers: When Hunter-Gatherers and Commercial Stock Farmers Clash (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 103.

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in August 1837. They settled south of the Tugela River where they founded the Boer republic of Natalia, which the British annexed in 1843. By 1851, more than 5,000 mostly British colonists had settled there. Although most trekkers left for the interior as a result of the British occupation, the newcomers established a growing number of stock farms in the fertile Natal midlands. This further jeopardised the San hunter-gathering economy, and progressively displaced bands to higher and less productive stretches along the Drakensberg range. From the early 1850s, settlers also started displacing Sotho people into shrinking San territory. San raids on colonists’ farms started soon after the trekkers arrived, and persisted sporadically until the early 1870s when surviving San society no longer had the capacity to resist. Most attacks were by smallish groups, usually of less than a dozen San, who made off mainly with cattle, but also with horses. The intermittent and limited nature of their forays indicates the fragility of San society by this time. Although San raided stock mostly for immediate consumption, to replace game wiped out by Europeans, they also did so to maintain a longer-term food supply by adding stock keeping to their subsistence strategies. Some plundered to obtain commodities for barter – mainly with Bantu-speakers, but also with Europeans – and with which to obtain the protection of Bantu-speaking chiefs. Some of the larger raiding parties included Bantu-speaking allies. Levels of violence were considerably lower in Natal than on the Cape colonial or Transorangian frontiers. San very seldom killed herders and never resorted to arson, while farmers often set out in hot pursuit against San rustlers but never formed substantive informal commandos. The colonial government tried negotiation with San leaders, setting up strategically located garrisons, and forming buffer zones by moving landless Africans to ‘barrier locations’. It only deployed official commandos as a last resort, partly because it lacked the resources to respond with sustained military force. Only five substantive commandos were organised against San raiders over a period of twenty-two years, none with the devastating consequences of the larger Cape offensives. Government actions were mainly to deter, contain and deflect San aggression, rather than to extinguish their societies. Besides having more urgent problems to contend with, the Natal administration lacked the resources to mount an exterminatory campaign. Although independent San society east of the Drakensberg Mountains was eradicated by the end of the nineteenth century, it was not through genocide. The Natal colonial establishment lacked genocidal intent. This slow thinning 91

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out of an already small and weakened San population did not have the systematic violence and forethought necessary for genocide. That it eventually had the same outcome – the complete destruction of San society – also does not make it genocide.

German Southwest Africa, 1907–1915 On the other side of the subcontinent in German Southwest Africa (GSWA), San communities faced the prospect of genocide in the early twentieth century. After the remarkably brutal wars between 1904 and 1908 in which German forces killed about 80 per cent of the Herero and 50 per cent of the Nama peoples, colonists started expanding along the northeastern frontier beyond Hereroland into territories occupied by Namibian San. The post-war colonial economy boomed with the completion of the railway line from the port of Swakopmund to the extremely rich copper deposits in the OtaviTsumeb region in 1907, and with the discovery of diamonds around Lüderitz in 1908. Between 1907 and 1911, the settler population tripled to 14,000, as did the area being farmed. Rapid economic growth accentuated the acute labour shortage caused by the genocides of 1904–8. The invasion of San land and destruction of game sparked conflict between San and settler. German farmers flooded into the as yet uncolonised areas occupied by San after the completion of the railway line provided newcomers with easier access to markets. The higher rainfall and numerous springs, especially of the Grootfontein-Outjo region, made this among the most attractive cattle-ranching land in GSWA. Ranchers took every opportunity to quell San resistance violently and force them into farm labour. German farmers had the full support of the state in their quest to ‘tame’ San, and were allowed to take the law into their own hands in dealing with them. The colonial state’s post-war policies were focused on forcing Indigenous people into the colonial economy as cheap, rightless workers. This predictably led to fierce San resistance from 1907 onwards, with raids on ranches, farmers being murdered, and stock being driven off. San attacks intensified over the next few years. By 1911, there was a degree of public hysteria over the ‘Bushman plague’. Attacks on Ovambo migrant workers passing through San territory intensified the panic. That the first half of the 1910s were years of severe drought undoubtedly helped fuel San attacks. Governor Theodor Seitz responded to this instability on the northeastern frontier by setting up military and police patrols throughout the area from 1908 onwards. The patrols had two key functions – namely, to crush San 92

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resistance, and to round them up as captive labour. These patrols either killed San, often indiscriminately, or captured them for deportation to mines or farms. In addition, farmers either killed San – often shooting them on sight – or seized them for forced labour. They did so with impunity, freely admitting to such behaviour without fear of prosecution. Farmers were particularly keen on obtaining San children as they, unlike adults, were seen to be more easily resocialised as captive servants. The frequency and range of patrols increased throughout this period, and in 1911 a government proclamation gave patrollers the right to shoot San in case of ‘the slightest insubordination’, or if they tried to flee and did ‘not stop on command’. Anthropologist Robert Gordon regarded the proclamation ‘in effect’ to have been a ‘warrant for genocide’, given the vagueness of its wording, that San habitually – and with good reason – fled when confronted with armed, mounted and uniformed colonists, and that they were hardly likely to understand a command to stop shouted in German.20 This proclamation provided legal underpinning for the accepted practice towards San generally referred to as Ausrottung (extermination). While there are no reliable casualty figures, it is clear that colonists, together with the state’s armed forces, killed, or took prisoner, several thousand San between 1907 and the end of German rule in August 1915 when South African forces invaded the colony. Although this concerted assault on San society did not culminate in genocide, the settler establishment, especially the state, harboured genocidal intent towards San. Given more time, genocide would very likely have been the outcome. Namibian San society survived to become possibly the most intensely studied aboriginal society in anthropology.

Bechuanaland, 1895–c.1940 In a counterexample to the preceding case studies, anthropologist Mathias Guenther showed that colonial relations between San of the Ghanzi region in western Bechuanaland – present-day Botswana – and incoming Boer pastoralists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were largely peaceful, even cordial. Instead of waging genocide against the San, as occurred in other parts of southern Africa, relations between Boer pastoralists and Bushman hunter-gatherers soon stabilised into patterns of patronage. 20 R. Gordon, ‘Hiding in full view: the “forgotten” Bushman genocides of Namibia’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 4:1 (2009), 34–5.

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Because Boers occupied a different ecological niche from hunter-gatherers, they were able to share Ghanziland with its aboriginal inhabitants. First, extensive tracts of unoccupied land between Boer farms offered enough forageable food to allow San to continue their traditional lifestyle. Second, the region was relatively rich in game, and the Ghanzi Boers were not eradicatory in their hunting practices, leaving the San with a major source of sustenance largely intact. This, together with Boer need for San labour, and many San over time becoming dependent on farmers for food, allowed relations of clientship to develop. The potential for violence arising from both white supremacism and economic exploitation was defused by mutual obligations arising from their patron–client arrangement and helped forge close emotional bonds between Boer and San. With Boers living in Bushman-style wattle-and-daub huts, Boer children being reared by San nannies, farmers becoming fluent in San languages and developing extensive knowledge of San cultural practices, the likelihood of conflict was further dampened. The presence of missionaries and three inquiries by the League of Nations during the 1920s and 1930s into the status of San in Bechuanaland also limited the potential for violent behaviour towards them. An important factor explaining the exceptional outcome in Ghanziland was that, although Ghanzi Boers had access to markets, because of their isolation and the semi-desert environment, they were more in the nature of subsistence pastoralists than capitalist ranchers.

Conclusion Although the histories of San–settler interaction in many parts of southern Africa are yet to be written, this overview of the better-known cases demonstrates that it ranged over a wide spectrum, from genocide to relatively benign paternalism. It is nonetheless apparent that there has been a distinct tendency towards exterminatory violence by colonial societies against hunter-gatherers on the subcontinent, as was the case in western global expansion generally. That foraging societies were viewed in highly racialised fashion by westerners – as the lowest of the low in the racial hierarchy, usually as not even fully human and comparable in many respects to animals – contributed greatly to the dehumanisation that made it easier to kill and abuse San. That they were often regarded as doomed to extinction and as an impediment to progress also encouraged violence against them. The low population densities and migratory lifestyles of hunter-gatherers made them further vulnerable to exterminatory violence and settler visions of their 94

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complete removal from the landscape. Importantly, almost any degree of sustained or organised violence against foraging societies took on the aspect of total war because of their small-scale social organisation. It would appear that access to global markets was key to determining levels of violence, as the maximisation of profit provided a major impetus to genocidal behaviour on settler frontiers. While part of the six-century-old history of the expansion of Europe, these conflicts were also part of a much older saga spanning 12,000 years – of farming communities displacing and annihilating hunter-gatherer peoples.

Bibliographic Note It is only since around 2010 that the paradigm of genocide has been applied to the destruction of San societies. While the vanquishing of Cape San societies has been relatively well documented, Adhikari’s Anatomy of a South African Genocide was the first to emphasise the exterminatory nature of settler conflict with San on the Cape frontier, and to argue that it constituted genocide. Since then, scholars such as Jared McDonald and Lance van Sittert, in their chapters in Adhikari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers, and Mohamed Adhikari, ed., Civilian-Driven Violence and Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies (University of Cape Town Press, 2020), respectively, have elaborated on the theme: the former on the genocidal nature of San child confiscation, and the latter through a microstudy of the Graaff-Reinet magistracy, among other aspects. To date, Cavanagh’s study ‘“We exterminated them, and Dr. Philip gave the country”’ is the only one to present the annihilation of San communities in the Transorangia region through the lenses of settler colonialism and genocide. Though written half a century ago, John Wright’s Bushman Raiders of the Drakensberg (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1971) remains the standard work on settler–San relations in colonial Natal. Robert Gordon, The Bushman Myth: The Making of a Namibian Underclass (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000) has pioneered investigation into mass violence against Namibian San during German colonial rule, while Mathias Guenther has published extensively on San societies in southern Africa, not least in Botswana – for instance, ‘Why racial paternalism and not genocide? The case of the Ghanzi Bushmen of Colonial Bechuanaland’ (in Adhikari, ed., Genocide on Settler Frontiers).

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A Case Lacking Contemporaneous Local Sources The ‘Sack of Novgorod’ in 1570 cornelia soldat

Background The author of this chapter has become relatively sure that, although historians have been writing about it over the last 200 years, there is no evidence that even a sacking, let alone a genocidal massacre, happened in Novgorod in 1570. I have reached this conclusion after reading the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources on this alleged massacre, in the contexts of their appearance. I believe these sources, rather than being an account of a Russian genocide in Novgorod, are more likely to represent, in one case, a thinly disguised parable warning against imperial German power, and, in another, a determined Polish attempt to influence Vatican policy on Russia. It is these European texts and various subsequent iterations of them, not any Russian primary sources, that have formed the basis for the heretofore accepted history of what happened in Novgorod in 1570. No Indigenous Russian source about a 1570 Novgorod massacre appeared before the seventeenth century. However, six texts on this alleged massacre appeared or were written in the German (Holy Roman) Empire and the Polish kingdom in the period 1570–82. Of these six sources, only one appeared in 1570, the year the massacre allegedly took place; all others are later and show a distinctive literary dependence on the first, which was neither Russian, nor a primary source. The conventional narrative of Ivan the Terrible’s sack of Novgorod is told by historians as follows: in 1570, the tsar, Ivan IV, accused the Novgorodians of treason. He and his army approached the town in secrecy and killed everyone they met on the way. Near Novgorod, he made camp and had his soldiers sack and plunder the town, the countryside and many

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monasteries, and kill many Novgorodians; especially mentioned are women and children. The purported death toll varies, rising over time from 2,770 in the 1570 source, to 12–15,000,1 160,0002 and even 700,000.3 The corpses were hacked to pieces and thrown into the Volkhov river that flows through the city. The tsar himself humiliated the city’s archbishop and had him killed. Some sources tally the economic losses of the Novgorodians as ‘everything they had collected over 20 years’.4 When the tsar turned to the nearby town of Pskov to do the same there, he was hindered by certain persons, and did not harm the town or its people. Afterwards, he took his booty and went 1 G. vom Hoff, Erschreckliche / greuliche und unerhorte Tyranney Iwan Wasilowitz / itzo regierenden Großfürsten in Muscow / so er vorruckter Jar an seinen Blutsverwandten Freunden / Underfürsten / Baioaren und gemeinem Landtvolck unmenschlicher weise / wider Gott und Recht erbermlich geübet. Den jenigen / welche seines theils / und sich böser meinung an ihnen zubegeben willens / zur warnung in druck verfertigt (n.p., 1582), unpaginated. 2 Pskov I Chronicle (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Eduarda Pratsa, 1848) (= PSRL 4), p. 343. 3 J. Horsey, ‘Travels’ in Rude & Barbarous Kingdom: Russia in the Accounts of SixteenthCentury English Voyagers, ed. L. E. Berry and R. O. Crummey (Madison, Milwaukee and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 262–369, at 269. 4 A. Guagnini, Etliche Historien. Von des ietzigen Groß fürsten inn der Moscha Johan. Basiliadis grawsamer Tyranney. Auß der beschreibung Sarmatiae Europae Alexandri Guagnini gezogen und verteutscht. mit einer vorrede, Getruckt in der Key: freyen Reichstatt Speir / Bey Bernhard Dalbin. M. D. LXXXII (Speyer, 1582), p. 27; A. Schlichting, ‘De moribus et imperandi crudelitate Basilij Moschoviae Tyranni brevis ennaratio’ in ‘Die Aufzeichnungen Albert Schlichtings über Ivan Groznyj als historische Quelle’, ed. C. Proksch (Inaugural PhD dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen, 1963), I, 39–98, at 18.

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home to his court in Aleksandrov. This narrative would lead to the conclusion that Ivan the Terrible’s sack of Novgorod in 1570 meets Leo Kuper’s definition of a genocidal massacre, though, in this case, it would be a massacre of a non-foreign and non-minority group within a realm.5 Historians put Ivan the Terrible’s sack into the context of the previous sack of Novgorod by his grandfather, Ivan III, in 1471–8. That sack, by contrast, is well documented in contemporary Russian sources.6 The reason for it and for the inclusion of the vast Novgorod and Pskov area into the dominion of the Grand Prince of Muscovy was economic. Novgorod and Pskov dominated the trade from Muscovy to the Baltics and western Europe. Before his sack of Novgorod, Ivan III had forged the realm of Muscovy into a strong and unified dominion, but soon lacked the resources to pay his military servitors who were usually subsidised by grants of land to exploit. Historians see his sack of Novgorod as a means to acquire land in order to pay the higher ranks of Muscovy for their military service.7 A sack of Novgorod by Ivan IV in 1570 must be seen against this background. Yet, according to the main sources, it supposedly happened because the tsar suspected the Novgorodians of treason. There would seem little reason to accept this. The town, as well as the lands belonging to it, had been part of the Muscovite realm for 100 years. Since the fifteenth century, servitors from Moscow had been settling there or had received land there in exchange for military service. Moreover, the trade from Novgorod and Pskov with the Baltics through Hanse merchants had continued from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries without significant interruption. This shows the degree of integration of the Novgorod town and lands, as well as the people, into the Muscovite realm. Novgorodians were seen as part of the people of Muscovite Rus’; the servitors owning the lands were working for the tsar. Novgorodians were not a different people from other Muscovites; they wrote and spoke Russian; their churches belonged to the Russian Orthodox Church headed by the Metropolitan of Moscow. However, according to the existing sources, it is not only the purported

5 B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 13–15. 6 Tipografskaia letopis: Moskovskii letopisnyi svod kontsa XV v. (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk, 1949; 2nd ed., Moscow: Jazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2004) (= PSRL 5). For an overview, see A. A. Frolov, ‘Konfiskatsii votchin novgorodskogo vladyki i monastyrei v poslednei chetverti XV veka’, Drevniaia Rus‘ 4:18 (2004), 54–62, www.drevnyaya.ru/vyp/stat/s4_18_5.pdf (accessed 10 March 2020). 7 S. B. Veselovskii, Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny (Moscow: Akademiia, 1963), p. 172.

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reason for the sack of Novgorod in the sixteenth century – ‘treason’ – that is unclear,8 but whether it happened at all. I will now show that the conventional narrative of the 1570 Novgorod sack did not appear in Russia before the end of the seventeenth century, and that its sources do not derive from sixteenth-century Russian sources, but exclusively from sixteenth-century German and Polish sources, while a 1570 Swedish primary source from Novgorod itself contradicts the story altogether. As I will show, the seventeenth-century narrative of a Novgorod genocide, as well as other exclusively seventeenth-century Russian sources referring to it, all derive from these western European narrative sources. These sources and their inter-textual inter-relationship will be identified.

Description of the Sources The Earliest Sources The main sources for Ivan IV’s sack of Novgorod are six texts. Four of them are published German printed pamphlets that appeared between 1570 and 1582. The other two are letters: one from a former mercenary in Muscovy to the German emperor, from 1579; and one is a 1571 Latin letter from the Polish king to the pope from that derives from the Vatican archive, but copies of which were disseminated across northern Italy from 1571 on. The earliest source is a pamphlet that appeared in 1570 in the town of Leipzig.9 In the German empire, pamphlets were published not only in print but also in moveable letters so that they could easily be reprinted in editions of more than 1,000. Talking of pamphlets means talking of widely disseminated information and relatively common knowledge in the central towns with marketplaces.10

8 R. Crummey, ‘New wine in old bottles? Ivan IV and Novgorod’, Russian History 14:1 (1987), 61–76, at 62f. 9 Eigentliche Warhafftige Beschreibung etlicher Handlung / so sich in Reussen / zur Moscaw / pleßkaw / Naugarten / Schlaboda / Narfa / Reuel / Derpt und andern Stätten verloffen und zugetragen. Item / wie ernstlich / Tyrannisch und grausamlich die Inwohner und anderer diser ort / mit Mord / Todschlag / Raub / Brandt / Ertrencken / grosser Marter / Teurung / Hunger und Pestilenz sein heimgesucht unnd uberfallen worden.. . . (Frankfurt am Main: Nikolaus Basse, 1572). 10 On German pamphlets and their function, see C. Soldat, Erschreckende Geschichten in der Darstellung von Moskovitern und Osmanen in den deutschen Flugschriften des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts / Stories of Atrocities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century German Pamphlets about the Russians and Turks (Lewiston, Queenston and Lampeter: Mellen Press, 2014).

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This pamphlet can be read within the historical situation of the German Empire, where from 1563 to 1570 a severe case of breach of the emperor’s peace had taken place. This was the so-called ‘Grumbach affair’. In October 1563, the Frankish knight Wilhelm von Grumbach sacked the town of Würzburg. He had the bishop – his liegelord – killed, and had the town as well as the countryside, and especially cloisters and monasteries, plundered. This is not only a rough outline of Grumbach’s violence in the Empire, but also roughly the content of all the sources giving details of a sack of Novgorod in 1570. The town was captured; the bishop killed; cloisters, monasteries, as well as the town and its environment, were plundered. However, the story told in this 1570 Leipzig pamphlet also bears a similarity to imperial ambassador Sigismund von Herberstein’s 1549 description of Ivan III’s earlier sack of Novgorod. Herberstein tells us that the Novgorodians had to pay ‘a lot of money’ to the Grand Prince in 1471, and that in 1478 he subjugated the Novgorodians with the help of their archbishop, Theophilus, and drove away about 300 carts of booty to Moscow. Already in Herberstein, then, the main participants had appeared: Grand Prince, archbishop, Novgorodians, gold and silver.11 Also, a long text by Friedrich, the later bishop of Würzburg,12 circulated as a pamphlet, makes the case against Grumbach in roughly the same words as in the pamphlet about the sack of Novgorod in 1570.13 As the pamphlet was being printed in Leipzig in 1570, the German Estates discussed the Grumbach affair again in the imperial diet in Speyer. The affair had shown that the executive power of the emperor within the Empire was 11 S. von Herberstein, Rerum Moscoviticarum Commentarii (Vienna, 1549); English translation in Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society: Notes upon Russia (London: Hakluyt Society, 1851), I, p. 24: ‘This Ivan Vasilievich was so successful, that he overcame the people of Novgorod in battle at the river Scholona, and reduced them to acknowledge him as their lord and prince, on certain proposed conditions. He granted them a large sum of money and then left them, after having first appointed a representative to supply his place; then again returning after the lapse of seven years, he entered the city with the cooperation of the Archbishop Theophilus, reduced the inhabitants to the most abject servitude, and seizing the gold and the silver and all the goods of the citizens, carried off more than three hundred wagons full of booty. He himself was only once engaged in war, when the principalities of Novgorod and Tver were taken possession of.’ 12 Deß Friederichen Bisch. zu Würtzburg . . . Verantwortung . . . des schand und lasterbuch, welches . . . Wilh. von Grumbach . . . und Ernst von Mandesloe . . . in Truck außgehen . . . lassen (n.p., 1565, p. 1v), urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10153077-8 (accessed 6 May 2018). 13 C. Soldat, ‘“Dem frommen deudschen Leser zur ettlin und besserung in druck verfast” or how to restrict the power of the emperor: the “Grumbach affair” and German Oprichnina Pamphlets in the second half of the 16th century’ in Die autokratische Herrschaft im Moskauer Reich in der ‘Zeit der Wirren’ 1598–1613, ed. D. Ordubadi and D. Dahlmann, (Göttingen: Bonn University Press, 2019), 155–75.

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too weak to prevent such an internal breach of peace. Emperor Maximilian II therefore asked for a reform of the imperial executive order that would allow him to deploy his troops within the Empire to uphold peace and order, and get paid for this by the Empire.14 In this context, a pamphlet about Muscovy showing how the tsar exceeds his powers and sacks one of the major cities of his realm may be seen as a subtle warning against conceding too much power to the German emperor, even if the story about Novgorod in 1570 resembled Herberstein’s description of the 1471–8 events there. Ivan the Terrible in this context may have been used only as an allegorical figure for the German Empire, to enable the German author of the pamphlet to avoid an accusation of treason.15 For more than 100 years now, a letter found in the Vatican archives, sent to the pope in 1571 by the Polish king, has been seen as one of the most reliable sources not only on the sack of Novgorod, but also on all other atrocities ascribed to Ivan IV.16 The letter contains a description of Muscovy by a certain Albert Schlichting, a former captive in Muscovy, who from 1563 to 1570 worked as a servant and translator for the tsar’s personal physician, then defected to Poland around the end of 1570.17 Schlichting’s description had been sent from Poland to Rome with the papal nuncio Portico, with the explicit aim of influencing the pope to refrain from an alliance with Muscovy against the Turks. This was successful, not least because of Schlichting’s biased description.18 Though historians were aware that Schlichting’s text was a means for a character assassination of the Muscovite tsar,19 the text has been used through the twentieth century to corroborate most of the other sources on Ivan IV. Since about 2010, Igor’ V. Dubrovskij, analysing correspondence about Muscovy in sixteenthcentury Rome, has suggested that at least three copies of the Schlichting 14 M. Lanzinner, ‘Friedenssicherung und Zentralisierung der Reichsgewalt. Ein Reformversuch auf dem Reichstag zu Speyer 1570’, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 12:3 (1985), 287–310. 15 Soldat, Stories of Atrocities, pp. 198–211. 16 N. Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 311. 17 Schlichting, ‘De moribus’: English translation, ‘A brief account of the character and brutal rule of Vasil’evich. Tyrant of Muscovy (Albert Schlichting on Ivan Groznyi)’, trans. H. Graham, Canadian-American Slavic Studies 9 (1975), 213–66. 18 A. Kappeler, Ivan Groznyj im Spiegel der ausländischen Druckschriften seiner Zeit. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des westlichen Russlandbildes (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, etc.: Lang, 1972), p. 56. 19 C. Soldat, ‘Priemy diskreditatsii “Velikogo kniazia” v opisanii Moskovii A. Shlikhtinga’, in Vos’mye Zubovskie chteniia – Epokha Ivana Groznogo I ee otrazhenie v istoriografii, pis’mennosti, iskusstve, arkhitekture, 2 vols. (Vladimir: Tranzit-IKS, 2018), I, 149–66.

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text arrived in Rome in 1571.20 The nineteenth-century finder of the Vatican manuscript, Paul Pierling, noted that, before 1917, the text existed in nearly all of the libraries in Rome,21 while Dubrovskij has described nine manuscripts he found in various north Italian and Roman libraries and archives.22 According to his analysis, more manuscripts may be found, as the Schlichting texts were really popular in the second half of the sixteenth century in northern Italy, and among Italian politicians of the time.23 In fact, Schlichting’s text seems to be the basis of all of the later texts on Ivan the Terrible’s atrocities, as my analysis of the texts on the Novgorod genocide will show. Given the popularity of Schlichting’s text in northern Italy, it is no surprise that a 1572 German pamphlet from Frankfurt am Main24 repeats most of Schlichting’s description. According to Andreas Kappeler, it stems from one or more of the north Italian pamphlets.25 In 1578, a Polish noble of Italian ancestry, Alexander Guagnini, published a Latin book with the title Sarmatiae Europeae Descriptio. It consists of five parts, the fifth being a close copy of Schlichting’s letter.26 Guagnini’s book can be seen against the background of the struggle between the Polish nobility and the king. In 1578, the Polish king granted major rights to the nobility, especially their own jurisdiction in the crown tribunals, which in the end led to the nobility’s control of the executive, the judiciary and the legislative powers.27 In the first four parts of his book, Guagnini develops the history of the exclusive rights of the Polish nobility in opposition to the king; in the fifth part, he gives a warning of what happens if the ruler rules against the interests of his nobility. For this purpose, Schlichting’s description was the right 20 I. Dubrovskij, ‘Moskoviia v svidetel’stvakh inozemtsev’, Russkij Sbornik 24 (2018), 30–98, 35. 21 P. Pierling, ‘Pie V et Ivan le Terrible. Tentative pour établir des relations diplomatiques entre Rome et Moscou’, Revue des questions historiques 31 (1882), 581; P. Pierling, Rome et Moscou (1547–1579) (Paris, 1883), p. 148. Quoted after I. V. Dubrovskij, ‘Novye dokumenty po istorii otnoshenii Rossii I Italiei pri Ivane Groznom’, Russkii Sbornik 24 (2013), 7–72, 13, n. 14. 22 I. V. Dubrovskij, ‘Novye dokumenty o Rossii Ivana Groznogo’, Russkij Sbornik 11 (2012), 25–58. The relatively small number of manuscripts can be explained through the tribulations of the twentieth century, especially the two world wars. 23 Dubrovskii, ‘Novye dokumenty po istorii otnoshenii’, 13. 24 Eigentliche Warhafftige Beschreibung etlicher Handlung. 25 Kappeler, Ivan Groznyj, p. 43. 26 Novoe izvestie o Rossii vremeni Ivana Groznogo. ‘Skazanie’ Alberta Šlichtinga, trans., ed. and commentary A. I. Maleina (Leningrad: Akademiia nauk SSR, 1934), p. 11; see also Proksch, ‘Die Aufzeichnungen Albert Schlichtings’, pp. 20, 31 et passim. 27 R. Frost, ‘The nobility of Poland–Lithuania 1569–1795’ in The European Nobilities in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, vol. I I: Northern, Central and Eastern Europe, ed. H. M. Scott, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke and New York: Longman, 1995), 266–310, at 267.

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source, because he shows atrocities of the ruler against his ruling elite, making the ruler a tyrant. Guagnini’s book enjoyed great success in Europe. In 1582, there appeared a translation into German published in Basel, and in 1584 and 1602 more German translations appeared in Frankfurt am Main. In the east, translations appeared in Czech and Polish.28 Already in 1582, a translation only of the fifth part of the book had appeared in German in Speyer, making the text more popular in the Empire and writing it into the German anti-Muscovite discourse of the time.29 This means that, apart from the existence of the Schlichting manuscripts in northern Italy, from 1578 onwards, Schlichting’s text was available in Latin translation, and from 1582 on, also in various other translations throughout Europe. There also existed at least two early new High German translations of the Schlichting text in Munich and in Vienna. The provenance of the Munich manuscript suggests that the texts were circulated by the emperor to the other prince-electors of the Empire to inform them about his foreign policy. In the year 1578/9, a former mercenary in Muscovy, Heinrich von Staden, wrote a letter to the emperor that may be seen as a job application to get a commanding position in the emperor’s army. This text has four parts: the biography of the author; the supplication letter to the emperor; a plan of the proposed military conquest of Muscovy; and a description of Muscovy.30 The whole text was written in the winter of 1578/9 at the Castle of Lützelstein, now Petit Pierre, in Alsace, by Heinrich von Staden.31 The manuscript derives from the German Reichsarchiv and was found there at the end of the nineteenth century.32 There is no real proof, yet, that Staden saw a manuscript of Schlichting’s letter in German, but one might deduce that, if the Schlichting manuscripts were really distributed by the emperor to high imperial officials such as the prince-electors, then Staden – as a protégé of George John I von Veldenz, Count Palatine of Veldenz, and one of the highest officials of the Empire – 28 A. Gvan’ini, Opisanie Moskovii, perevod s latinskogo, introduction and commentary G. G. Kozlovoj (Moscow: Greko-Latinskij Kabinet Ju. A. Shichalina, 1997), p. 6. 29 Guagnini, Etliche Historien. 30 H. von Staden, Aufzeichnungen über den Moskauer Staat. Nach der Handschrift des Preußischen Staatsarchivs in Hannover herausgegeben von Fritz T. Epstein, 2., erweiterte Auflage (Hamburg, 1964) (= Abhandlungen aus dem Gebiet der Auslandskunde, 34), p. 12*. 31 A. L. Choroshkevich, ‘Vstuplenie’ in H. von Staden, Zapiski o Moskovii v dvukh tomakh (Moscow: Drevnechranilishche, 2008), I, 8–56, at 26. 32 Staden, Aufzeichnungen, pp. 7*–11*. See also Cornelia Soldat, Russland als Ziel Kolonialer Eroberung: Heinrich von Stadens Pläne für ein Moskauer Reich am 16. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2022).

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might have seen the manuscript.33 More certainly, there is textual proof of a dependency of Staden on Schlichting. Staden’s description of Muscovy was written to justify a war against Muscovy. Therefore, Staden described Muscovy as an extremely unjust state. He uses twenty-three pages for a discussion of injustice in Muscovy, to give the German emperor an excuse for a just war. Twenty-two pages of Staden’s manuscript are dedicated to atrocities committed by the Muscovite tsar. In this part, Staden gives a description of thirty atrocities, all of which can be found in Schlichting’s manuscript. Staden does not cite any additional event that would suggest that he had witnessed any atrocity himself. Therefore, we may suggest that Staden relied on Schlichting in his description of the Novgorod genocide. This conclusion is also true for the last German pamphlet of 1582,34 which is normally referred to as authored by two Livonian mercenaries, Johann Taube and Elert Kruse.35 According to the theory that the editor of a sixteenth-century pamphlet is also its author, historians also suggest that the author is a certain Georg vom Hoff, a Saxonian tax collector.36 In this pamphlet appear four atrocious events that did not occur in pamphlets already published in the years before Guagnini. But twenty-eight atrocious events derive from former sources – Schlichting or Guagnini, as well as the pamphlets from 1570 and 1572. The inter-dependency of these texts as shown here undercuts the claims of many historians that they were written by eyewitnesses.37 Their compositions and compilations contain the same episodes, related over and over again in the same manner. All of the texts tell of the Novgorod genocide, which means that the sources on this event are highly dependent on one another, and no other sources corroborate the event. Moreover, the diary of the Swedish Bishop Paul Juusten, who lived in Novgorod in January 1570, the time of the alleged Novgorod sack, tells 33 Neue deutsche Biographie, vol. V I: Gaál–Grasmann (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1964), pp. 221–2; P. Kittel, Georg Hans (1543–1592) von Gottes Gnaden, Pfalzgraf bei Rhein, Herzog in Bayern, Graf zu Veldenz und Lützelstein: Gründer von Pfalzburg 27. September 1570 (Éditions du Musée de Phalsbourg, 2003). 34 Vom Hoff, Erschreckliche/greuliche und unerhorte Tyranney. 35 C. Soldat, ‘Looking up what others wrote: eyewitnesses and the literary framework of 16th-century German pamphlets about Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina’, Canadian– American Slavonic Studies 55:2 (2021), 111–35. 36 Soldat, ‘Dem frommen deudschen Leser zur ettlin und besserung in druck verfast’. On editorship and authorship in early modern Germany, see Soldat, Erschreckende Geschichten, pp. 301ff. 37 Crummey, ‘Old wine in new bottles’, 64, quoting Kappeler, Ivan Groznyj, pp. 40–3.

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nothing of atrocities there, let alone a genocide. Juusten had been forced to stay in Novgorod for the most part of his delegation to Muscovy that began in July 1569.38 He tells of very rude behaviour by the Muscovites, such as stealing clothing and valuables from the ambassadors, in revenge for the similar treatment to which the Muscovite embassy had been subjected in Stockholm under King Johan. Afterwards, the Swedish Embassy was sent to Moscow.39 Juusten’s account does not tell of any looting, soldiers in the streets, or victims of a genocide. Nor do contemporary Muscovy sources tell of a Novgorod genocide, either. The Russian sources, mostly Chronicles, appear to be later compilations that cannot be trusted to record narratives of participants or eyewitnesses.

The Later Sources In the west, most stories about the atrocities of Ivan IV that appear in descriptions of Muscovy – for example, in Giles Fletcher’s and Jerome Horsey’s accounts – derive from the German pamphlets. Horsey describes the 1570 Novgorod raid on the basis of two German pamphlets. He even takes from the pamphlets the name of Nikola and identifies him as the person who admonished the Grand Prince and had him spare the city of Pskov – although, as noted above, who hindered the tsar is unknown and may have included more than one person.40 In the east, the Novgorod and Pskov raids appear in Chronicles only, mostly in Chronicles related to Novgorod or Pskov. Official Chronicles such as the seventeenth-century Nikon Chronicle, compiled in the vicinity of the tsarist chancelleries, do not tell of any atrocities perpetrated by Ivan IV at all. Ivan Timofeev, a Novgorod writer, gives one of the longest explanations of the events of the Time of Troubles (1598–1613). He witnessed the 1611 occupation of Novgorod by the Swedes. His work, the Vremennik, consists of sixty-two separate sections; the last seem to have been written around 1630, while the bulk of them date from the 1611 Swedish occupation.41 Concerning 1570, Ivan Timofeev tells of the murders of people and the tossing of their corpses in the River. It is worth noting that Timofeev began to write after the 38 The Tragic Mission of Bishop Paul Juusten to Tsar Ivan the Terrible: The Itinerary of the Delegation to Moscow, trans., with introduction and commentary, by Iiro Kajanto (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1995) (= Annales Academiae Scientiarum Fennicae, 276), pp. 93f. 39 Ibid., pp. 100f. 40 Horsey, ‘Travels’, 268. 41 D. Rowland, ‘Towards an understanding of the political ideas in Ivan Timofeyev’s Vremennik’, Slavonic and East European Review 62:3 (1984), 371–99, 373–7.

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(b)

Fig. 4.1a Copper candlestick base, c.1600. The only existing visual image of somebody normally identified as a member of Ivan the Terrible’s troops, an oprichnik. The rider with broom and dog reflects descriptions of the oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible in several German pamphlets. But it cannot be dated to the reign of Ivan (1533–84). It is a later, crude engraving that reflects western sources, and was probably made at a time when Russia began to have access to these sources, even in translations. Fig. 4.1b The other side of the same candlestick, bearing the inscription: ‘The tsar left the city with the brethren and went to the monastery’ (остави град и гдальися скрь со братию в монастырь).

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Polish occupations of 1605 and 1610, which might have brought the earlier Polish publications into Muscovy.42 Russian Chronicles that tell of the 1570 sack of Novgorod are the following: The Piskarevskii Chronicle, dated to the middle of the seventeenth century, has a short paragraph about the 1570 raid on Novgorod.43 The Pskov first Chronicle covers the years 859–1609. The main part derives from 1547, but it obviously received its last redaction in the beginning of the seventeenth century, as it includes tales from the Time of Troubles (1598–1613).44 The Pskov second Chronicle covers events until the middle of the seventeenth century.45 The second Novgorod Chronicle came to us in two main manuscripts: one from the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century; and the other from the end of the eighteenth or the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Chronicle tells of events until 1572, and gives some information for 1573, 1581 and 1587. It is one of the main sources for the events of Ivan the Terrible’s terror regime.46 The Novgorod Chronicles, as the second and third Novgorod Chronicles are called, underwent their last redaction around 1673, though some scholars think it was 1699, or even 1722. Manuscript versions derive from the end of the seventeenth or the eighteenth centuries. Especially the tale of the Novgorod raid of Tsar Ivan Vasil’evich is seen to be a redaction made in the nineteenth century.47 An analysis of the narratives will show that the Russian sources, like the western ones, also appear to be highly literarily dependent on each other – and on the

42 Indeed, fragments of Guagnini’s book appeared in Russian translation after this time. See, e.g., Aleksandr Gvan’ini, ‘Zamechaniia inostrantsa 16-go veka o voennykh pokhodach Russkikh togo vremeni I predannosti ich k Gosudariu svoemu’, Otechestvennye zapiski 69 (1826), 92–100. 43 J. G. Solodkin, ‘Letopisec Piskarevskii’j’ in Slovar‘ knizhnikov I knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi, Vyp. 3 (XVII v.), Chast‘ 2, I-O (Saint Petersburg: Bulanin, 1993), 269–74, at 269; Piskarevskii letopisets (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Nauka’, 1978) (= PSRL 34), p. 191. 44 V. I. Okhotnikova, ‘Letopisi Pskovskie’ in Slovar’ knizhnikov I knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi. XIV–XVI v., Chast’ 2 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1989), 27–30, at 28. 45 Pskovskie letopisi, Vypusk vtoroj (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk, 1955) (= PSRL V, 2), p. 6. 46 V. K. Ziborov, ‘Letopis’ Novgorodskaia II’ in Slovar’ knizhnikov I knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi. XIV–XVIv, 51. 47 Novgorodskiia letopisi (Tak nazyvaemyia Novgorodskaia vtoraia I Novgorodskaia tret’ia letopisi, izdanie Arkheograficheskoj kommissii) (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskoi Akademii Nauk, 1879), pp. xiv–xx.

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western sources. And, as it often appears in an open source context, the later redactions give the more complex narratives. The second Novgorod Chronicle, in spite of its being one of the most original sources about the Novgorod genocide,48 records only that there was destruction. It relates that, after the destruction, the town was cleaned and a castle built for the Grand Prince. The third Novgorod Chronicle, being the latest, dating from the end of the seventeenth century, has the most complex and extensive narrative of the events. Therefore, though nearly all of the events are included, they occur in a more complex order. Though the author of this Chronicle has tended to describe the events not in the western manner, inserting into his narrative more or less Russian categories and translations of offices, he nevertheless used every part of the western narrative while inserting only one feature of his own. It is intriguing that most of the historians working on the Novgorod genocide have used this Chronicle as their main source.49 As the recording of events shows, the Novgorod Chronicles are highly dependent on the three main western narratives – Schlichting, Guagnini, as well as G. vom Hoff – and have fused the events from these sources into a new and complex narrative. Also intriguing is that the Russian Chronicles tend to reduce the tale of the Novgorod raid to the murder of monks and the ravaging of monasteries. Obviously, the authors of the Chronicles were not as obsessed with class as were their western sources. But they were intrigued with the murder of clerics, as nearly all of them also mention the tale of the murder of the archbishop of Novgorod. The Novgorod Chronicles, compiled in Novgorod itself at the end of the seventeenth century, are seen not as a source that used other sources to compile a master narrative, but as a native source that used the accounts of eyewitnesses from the sixteenth century, although these Chronicles describe nothing that had not already been described in sixteenth-century foreign sources. As textual comparison shows, the Novgorod Chronicles used the foreign sources to tell a story about Ivan the Terrible for which they completely lacked Indigenous eyewitness or participant accounts or other sources. The master narrative of the Novgorod Chronicles is a summary of various stories that had been published 100 or 150 years before and were now used by the 48 Ziborov, ‘Letopis’ Novgorodskaia II’, 51. 49 E.g., A. A. Zimin, Oprichnina (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Territoriia’, 2001).

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chroniclers in their fight with the official church and tsar after the schism of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1666. In the light of this fact, one should use the utmost caution when stating that sixteenth-century foreign sources ‘corroborate’ the events depicted in the Novgorod Chronicles. The narrative supports the view that a tsar can become evil and turn against his faithful subjects in the cities of Novgorod and Pskov, which were strongholds of Old Belief in 1700. By assassinating the character of Ivan the Terrible, the Novgorod chroniclers attacked the character of their contemporary seventeenth-century tsars, Aleksei Mikhailovich, Ivan Alekseevich, Fedor Alekseevich and Petr Alekseevich (‘Peter the Great’), all of whom adhered to the reformed Russian Orthodox Church and were persecuting Old Believers in their realm.

Perpetrators and Victims By the middle of the sixteenth century, Muscovite Rus’ had become a vast empire that dominated trade on a north–south and on an east–west basis, with Moscow the most important centre for stock turnover. The Orthodox Metropolitan as well as the Grand Prince lived in this centre and actively profited from it. With the conquest of the empires of Astrakhan and Kazan, the Muscovite tsar rerouted trade from the east through Moscow. But already from the early Middle Ages on, in the eighth and ninth centuries, the people of Rus’, as the state was called from early times, dominated the trade routes between ‘the Greeks and the Varangians’, between the Black Sea and the Baltics, by travelling on the rivers north and south. Pre-Mongolian Rus’ had its centre in Kiev in the south, then moved north in the middle of the thirteenth century, first to Vladimir, and then to Moscow. The Muscovite historical consciousness saw the lands that participated in this trade that first was dominated by Varangian traders as part of their territory, Rus’, with a common history. In the north, the trade centres of Novgorod and Pskov, being part of the Hanse, guaranteed trade with the west and Scandinavia. As members of the Slavia Orthodoxa, the people of Rus’ saw themselves as from the same ethnicity. Over the centuries, the Empire included Indigenous regional peoples, as well as Mongolian Muslims after their conquest in the thirteenth century, but ethnicity and religion did not play a role when it came to serving within the state. Only in the seventeenth century did the politics of the Empire change and the laws favour members of the Orthodox Church. However, the question of ethnicity was never an issue in the Muscovite 112

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government. Christianised Muslims were included within two or three generations into the service system, without regard for them being Mongols.50 Also, from the beginning of the Middle Ages, the social and governmental system developed in the same way in all of Rus’, with the Grand Prince and his entourage being the main and dominant people in the great and smaller trade centres. Novgorodians, for their part, saw themselves as part of the Rus’ people, like the population of Muscovy. They shared a historical background and consciousness, as well as the same religion, language and script. It is difficult to apply terms such as race or ethnicity to them. It is true that, up to the fifteenth century, Novgorod constituted a political entity with its own regime, dominated by the archbishop and an assembly of the social strata headed by rich merchants and boyars, who elected a ruler from the Riurikid family for military purposes. But, by the time of Ivan IV, Novgorod was already integrated into the Muscovite realm, so a political cause for a sack can be ruled out, unless one credits the accusation of treason. A structural analysis of the content of the various written sources shows that the narrative of the 1570 sack of Novgorod at first appeared in western sources in the Holy Roman Empire, as well as in Poland and northern Italy (Schlichting). Only at the beginning of the seventeenth century did Russian Chronicle writing take up this narrative and insert it into their native narrative of Novgorodian or Pskovian history. Note that no other sources from the grand princely archive, today the Russian Archive of Old Acts (RGADA), mention a raid on Novgorod around 1570, much less a genocidal massacre. Archaeologists, too, have found no traces of a genocidal massacre. No mass graves have been located in the last 500 years; no bones in the river Volkhov, at the foot of the old bridge; no instruments of torture or jagged swords have been found – not even traces of the burning of wax, tallow, etc.51 The sources reveal a story not of a genocidal massacre, but of history writing, especially in Russia. At some time around the year 1600, during the Time of Troubles, Muscovites became aware of western interpretations of the history of Muscovy, and of the atrocities that western authors had ascribed to Ivan IV long ago in pamphlets, and, in the case of Guagnini, in 50 Janet Martin, ‘The Novokreshcheny of Novgorod: assimilation in the 16th century’, Central Asian Survey 9:2 (1990), 13–38. 51 The late Anna Choroshkevitch thought the search for archaeological traces of the genocide futile. For her, the genocidal massacre had taken place as Stalin’s massacres have taken place. But we have to remember that there are, indeed, archaeological remnants of Stalin’s massacres, as well as Russian sources about show trials, interrogations and persecution, though they might be in secret state archives.

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history books. The textual dependence of the Russian narratives on these sources shows that certainly Guagnini and the pamphlet by Georg vom Hoff were used by Russian Chronicle writers during the seventeenth century to ‘complete’ their own sources, inserting and disseminating hitherto unknown tales of the atrocities of the Grand Prince of Muscovy. We also see a tendency of Russian sources to pick out only acts against the clergy or monasteries. The deeds of Ivan IV in these sources are framed rather by a religious struggle than by a discussion of tyranny – hence the focus of Russian sources on the murder of the archbishop or other clerics, the solution of the conflict mostly by religious people or religious admonitions, as well as an early attempt to rehabilitate the tsar in the so-called ‘Sinodik opal’nykh’.52 What we can see from the sources is that, sometime in 1570, Ivan IV might have been in Novgorod. But what might have happened there, for sure, no one can tell.

An Assessment of the Role of Questions of Race, Religion, Ethnicity, Gender and Territorial Ambition Many of the sources assert that the Novgorodians planned treason, citing this as a reason for the Grand Prince’s assault on the city. But there do not exist any other documents that would support this explanation. As the sources tell it, people in Novgorod were murdered only because they were there, and not because they were accused of committing a certain crime or because they belonged to a certain class. As the Novgorodians were people of Rus’, like the Muscovites, questions of race, ethnicity, religion or gender do not play a role in the sources’ explanation of the massacre. Also, historians rule out that there was any territorial gain to be made, as that had already been made in 1470, by Ivan III.

52 The Sinodik Opal’nykh is a memorial list that can be mostly found in monastery books of the seventeenth century. The earliest manuscripts stem from the beginning of the seventeenth century, rather than being what they state: a list that Ivan sent to several monasteries in remembrance of his victims. See R. G. Skrynnikov, ‘Sinodik opal’nykh Ivana Groznogo kak istoricheskii istochnik’ in Voprosy istorii SSSR XVI–XVII vv. (Leningrad: n.p., 1965), 22–65. Note that Skrynnikov’s ‘reconstruction’ of the original text betrays, again, a dependency on Schlichting and Guagnini. A. Bulychev sees the Sinodik Opal’nykh as pacifing the ‘undead’ victims of the tsar. See A. Bulychev, Mezhdu sviatymi I demonami. Zametki o posmertnoi sud’be opal’nykh tsaria Ivana Groznogo (Moscow: Znak, 2005).

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Therefore, my conclusion is that the ‘Sack of Novgorod in 1570’ may well have never taken place in the way that the earliest sources, designed to destroy the character of the Grand Prince in the eyes of the pope, described it. To sum up, this chapter does not argue that no genocide or massacre took place in Novgorod in 1570. Rather, no extant contemporary evidence from the city or elsewhere in Russia indicates that such an event occurred. No contemporary Russian source mentions it. Neither does a contemporary Swedish source from Novgorod itself. Later Russian sources show such a strong resemblance to the sixteenth-century European sources that they cannot be seen as independent corroboration of those texts. And those European texts, both precisely contemporary and subsequent, do not record mass violence in Novgorod. They appear to be derived not from sources there or elsewhere in Russia, but rather are based on European events thinly disguised by a Russian location.

Bibliographic Note At least from the nineteenth century on, a sack of Novgorod in 1570 appears in histories of Russia and Novgorod as well as in biographies of Ivan the Terrible. However, historians have tended to take the later texts as original sources, rather than as textually dependent on other sources. The first to retell the Novgorod Chronicle narrative, abetted by Georg vom Hoff’s 1582 German account, was Nikolai Karamzin in his still famous and widely used ‘History of the Russian state’ that appeared in the 1820s (Istoriia gosudarstva Rossiiskago, vol. I I I: Vyp. IX–XII (reprint Kaluga: Zolotaia alleia, 1993), pp. 60– 5). A short and selective review of the existing literature on Ivan the Terrible and his alleged raid on Novgorod shows that, since the time of Karamzin, nobody has inspected the sources properly and differentiated between the Indigenous and foreign sources. In 1894, the tsarist psychiatrist Pavel Kovalevskii used Karamzin’s narrative about the Novgorod raid to support his theory of Ivan’s mental illness.53 Soviet historians – such as Alexander Zimin in Oprichnina (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘Territoriia’, 2001), Stepan Veselovskii in Issledovaniia po istorii oprichniny (Moscow: Akademiia, 1963), and Ruslan Skrynnikov in Tsarstvo terrora (Moscow: Nauka, 1992) – repeated the story according to the Novgorod Chronicles when writing about Ivan, his time and especially his 53 Pavel Ivanovich Kovalevskii, Ioann Groznyi I ego dushevnoe sostoianie (Char’kov: Zil’berberg, 1893, Psikhiatricheskie eskizy iz istorii, 2), pp. 163–7.

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terror regime, known as the Oprichnina. See also Skrynnikov’s other works on Ivan the Terrible and on Novgorod, not specially quoted here but used in preparation of this chapter: R. G. Skrynnikov, Tragedija Novgoroda (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Imeni sabashnikovych, 1994) – p. 66 seeing Staden and Schlichting as eyewitnesses; R. G. Skrynnikov, Tretij Rim (Saint Petersburg: Bulanin, 1994) – p. 144 seeing the unknown author of the pamphlet from Frankfurt am Main as an eyewitness; and R. G. Skrynnikov, Ivan Groznyi (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2002) (= Istoricheskaia biblioteka), p. 252, uses Taube and Kruse, as well as Schlichting, as sources. These historians bear witness to the fact that Russian and Soviet textology, in contrast to western historiography, usually give preference to the longest version of a tale (D. Ostrowski, ‘Reviews’, Kritika 9:4 (Fall 2008), 939–49, 949). Boris Floria, in his 1999 biography of Ivan the Terrible, Ivan Groznyi (Moscow: Molodaia gvardia), pp. 233–46, uses not the Novgorod Chronicles, but the German sources that are at the basis of their narrative. In their book Ivan the Terrible: Profiles in Power (London: Longman, 2003), pp. 147–52, A. Pavlov and M. Perrie use these Chronicles, and the secondary works by Ruslan Skrynnikov which also rely on the Novgorod Chronicles. I. de Madariaga’s work with the same title (Ivan the Terrible (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005)), pp. 245–50, uses Schlichting and Staden as well as vom Hoff, and secondary literature reiterating them. I. Grey’s biography (Ivan the Terrible (n.p.: The History Book Club, 1966)), pp. 178–81, uses Karamzin exclusively. The Soviet historian R. J. Wipper, writing in the Stalin era (Iwan Grosny (Moscow: Verlag für fremdsprachige Literatur, 1947)), pp. 138–43, used Schlichting and Staden as sources. Even the newest biography of Ivan the Terrible by Charles Halperin, Ivan the Terrible: Free to Reward and Free to Punish (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), p. 194, recounts the Novgorod raid on the basis of the Novgorod Chronicles as well as secondary literature. In her article ‘Novgorod counter histories around 1700: the story about Ivan the Terrible’s Raid of Novgorod reconsidered’, Russian History / Histoire Russe 48 (2021), pp. 231–86, Cornelia Soldat proves that the Novgorod Chronicle’s Tale of the Novgorod Raid is merely a translation of the sixteenth-century Taube and Kruse pamphlet. Further, Soldat’s book, Russland als Ziel Kolonialer Eroberung: Heinrich von Stadens Pläne für ein Moskauer Reich am 16. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2022), p. 229, demonstrates that Heinrich von Staden was either unaware of the Novgorod Raid before he read Guagnini or was not convinced by that account, or Staden would arguably have drawn on Guagnini more extensively in his writing. 116

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K. Jonassohn and K. S. Björnson, who treat the Novgorod raid as a case study in genocide in Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998), pp. 202–5, rely exclusively on biographies of the 1960s and 1970s and not on any primary sources. Surprisingly enough, most historians omit the fact that the Novgorod Chronicles’ focus is religious rather than political. Instead, they repeat the narrative of Soviet historians who, by definition, regard class struggle as primary to the religious struggle and tend to explain the Novgorod raid as a struggle of the tsar with his boyars over dominion in the state – for examples, see R. G. Skrynnikov, Rossiia posle oprichniny (Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Universiteta, 1975), p. 81; and R. G. Skrynnikov, Rossiia nakanune ‘smutnogo vremeni’ (Moscow: Mysl’, 1980), p. 7.

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5

Atrocity and Genocide in Japan’s Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598 nam-lin hur

Introduction In the late sixteenth century, Choso˘ n Korea, as Korea was known under the Choso˘ n dynasty (1392–1910), had a population estimated at between 6 and 10 million. Across the Tsushima Strait, neighbouring Japan had recently been unified by the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi after a turbulent period known as the Warring States (c. 1467–1573). Yet it remained a collection of regional fiefs each closely ruled by their own daimyo. Japan’s population in the late sixteenth century is estimated at between 10 and 15 million. (See Map 5.1.) On the lunar calendar date of 1592/3/13 (the thirteenth day of the third lunar month), Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered his mobilised daimyo generals to invade Choso˘ n Korea with full force across the sea from Tsushima.1 His order, known as ‘The Matter of Troops Crossing the Sea to Ko¯rai [Korea]’, consisted of two parts. The first part specified how many troops each assigned daimyo should lead, as well as how the whole force should be organised in the military operation. The second part detailed what actions the troops should take in crossing the sea and attacking Choso˘n Korea. As a conclusion, Hideyoshi summed up what goal the invasion aimed to achieve: ‘in order to force Ko¯rai [Choso˘ n Korea] to surrender [to Japan]’.2 Based on Hideyoshi’s order, a month later, on 4/13, the first division of Japanese troops, which Konishi Yukinaga commanded, crossed the sea from This work was supported by the Laboratory for the Globalization of Korean Studies (AKS2013-LAB-2250001). 1 Dates that correspond to the lunar calendar (used in the Choso˘ n, Ming and Japan) are indicated as year/month/day. 2 See Kobayakawake monjo, no. 501, and Mo¯rike monjo, no. 885. The Japanese called the Choso˘ n Kingdom either, more frequently, Ko¯rai (the name of the Koryo˘ dynasty (918– 1392)) or Cho¯sen (the name of the Choso˘ n dynasty (1392–1910)). In this chapter, the Choso˘ n dynasty is referred to as Choso˘ n or Choso˘ n Korea.

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Map 5.1 Japan and Korea in the 1590s. (Cartography by Raphael Ryu)

Tsushima and attacked the fort of Pusanp’o. Japan’s invasion of Korea, commonly known as the Imjin War (the war of the year imjin (1592)), had begun. Hideyoshi’s order of 3/13, which specified an attack on Choso¯n Korea, was responsible for Japan’s war against Korea that would continue for over

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six years, until 1598/11. Hideyoshi’s goal was to bring Choso˘ n Korea to heel by military force. Back in 1589, Hideyoshi had ordered So¯ Yoshitoshi, the daimyo of Tsushima, to make the king of Choso˘ n Korea pay a visit to Japan’s imperial court in Kyoto – a visit which Hideyoshi considered would be an indication of Korea’s willing submission to his authority. So¯ Yoshitoshi did not dare to convey to Korea his overlord’s abrupt demand verbatim. Instead, he appealed to the Korean monarch, saying that Hideyoshi, who had just unified Sengoku (‘Warring States’) Japan, was eager to welcome a congratulatory delegation from the Korean king. In 1590, Choso˘ n Korea, which had occasionally suffered from Japanese pirates plundering its southern coast, dispatched an embassy of ‘communication of trust’ (t’ongsin in Korean) to Kyoto in consideration of coastal security. Initially, Hideyoshi mistook the Korean delegation as being an expression of submission to his authority, but soon realised that it was not. He got angry. From then on, he frequently repeated that he would ‘punish’ (seibai) Korea through a military strike.3 The term seibai, which he first used in 1587 in reference to Choso˘ n Korea, became the settled rationale for the invasion. What made Hideyoshi think that Choso˘ n Korea should submit to his authority? He never specified why but his understanding of the Korean peninsula was in rapport with the general perceptions held by court nobles, Buddhist leaders and upper-class samurai in central Japan, who by and large believed in the myth of Empress Jingu¯’s fabled subjugation of the three ancient kingdoms in the Korean peninsula – perceptions somehow ingrained into the collective psyche of the Japanese by the late sixteenth century.4 Hideyoshi saw how a subordinate Choso˘ n Korea could be utilised to consolidate his incipient regime – a regime based on a delicate arrangement of power with a group of semi-autonomous daimyo who, all together, controlled four to five times more territory of the country than Hideyoshi’s direct rule could cover. Hideyoshi decided to wield despotic authority to mobilise the country’s daimyo for a common cause and turn it into a tool of his own power consolidation. During the process of national unification, which offered 3 See ‘ Myo¯manji monjo’ in Toyotomi Hideyoshi Cho¯sen shinryaku kankei shiryo¯ shu¯sei 1, 1585– 1592, ed. Kitajima Manji (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2017), 17. 4 Haruko Wakabayashi, ‘The Mongol invasions and the making of the iconography of foreign enemies: the case of Shikaumi jinja engi’ in Tools of Culture: Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000–1500s, ed. Andrew Edmund Goble, Kenneth R. Robinson and Haruko Wakabayashi (Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 2009), 105–6.

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him wisdom and taught him lessons, Hideyoshi entertained the idea of exploiting an inferior Choso˘ n Korea in a common cause for his political goals. In 1591, Hideyoshi was convinced that the all-out punishment of Choso˘ n Korea, which had angered him by refusing to yield to his authority, would benefit, not damage, his regime, which was in need of strengthening. As we will see, Hideyoshi’s calculated anger translated into slaughtering Korean people in a reckless manner as the invading Japanese forces swept through the Korean peninsula.

A Blood Festival in the First Phase of the Invasion The first target of Japan’s invading force of about 18,000, led by Konishi Yukinaga, was the fort of Pusanp’o (or Pusan), which the Korean magistrate Cho˘ ng Pal defended, along with a handful of soldiers and hundreds of residents who had fled there from nearby villages for safety. The Korean defences collapsed before the overwhelming force of the invaders equipped with muskets. Yoshino Jingozaemon, a vassal of Matsura Shigenobu, witnessed what happened once his fellow troops poured into the fort: They [Koreans] hid between houses or under the flooring, and those who could not find anywhere to hide ran to the east gate to escape. They put their hands together kneeling down and uttered words we had never heard, incomprehensible words that sounded like ‘manora [stop!], manora’ as if begging for help. [The Japanese troops] ignored these words, slashed them, and trampled them to death. Regardless of male and female, even dogs and cats, all were cut down.5

This was the opening scene of what Hideyoshi meant by ‘punishment’, which his troops were expected to conduct once they set foot on Choso˘ n Korea. Jingozaemon, obviously jubilant, praised the conduct of this unmerciful slaughter as a ‘festival of blood’ dedicated to Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu, a military god popularly worshipped by the Japanese samurai class. After having taken the Pusanp’o fort, on the following day (4/14) the Konishi forces advanced to the Tongnae fort filled with some soldiers and nearby residents, the key administrative seat of the Pusan area, and quickly sealed it off. Fierce battle ensued for about half a day. Those Koreans who were able to escape from the carnage amid the havoc were very few. Tenkei, a Japanese Buddhist monk who accompanied his lord (So¯ Yoshitoshi) brushed

5 Yoshino Jingozaemon oboegaki (Zoku gunsho ruiju¯).

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on (wrote in) his diary that the Japanese ‘beheaded 3,000 Koreans and took 500 as captives’.6 The cruelty of the Tongnae battle was vividly revealed in a part of the buried moat site in front of the fort, which was excavated in 2005 and 2007 – the only section of the battle site from the Imjin War that had somehow remained underground to the present day.7 Korean forts had a front moat built to deter the enemy from intruding. The many littered skulls and skeletons found there, including those of young children and women, again testify to how the ‘festival of blood’ was paired with Hideyoshi’s calculated anger. Right after the Tongnae carnage, So¯ Yoshitoshi dispatched a report to Hideyoshi, who was still on his way to Nagoya, the military headquarters set up in the northwestern port of Kyushu. Hideyoshi was thrilled at news of the performance by the Konishi soldiers, who, he wrote back, ‘have truly worked their fingers to the bone’.8 Japan’s invading force soon snowballed as other divisions arrived in Pusan, one after another, amounting all together to probably around 100,000 – a formidable force indeed, although it was still far less than the 137,550 troops assigned by Hideyoshi. Once assembled in Pusan, the Japanese intruders marched in a rush towards the capital of Korea, Hanso˘ ng (also called Hanyang or Kyo˘ ngso˘ ng), along three routes. The Choso˘ n court panicked at the news that the enemy had overrun a major defence assembled at Ch’ungju, a place considered to be the last hurdle before the capital. King So˘ njo now abandoned his capital and moved towards the north amid the chaos. In the early morning of 1592/5/3, the Konishi division marched into Hanso˘ ng through the Eastern Gate, and the second division of Kato¯ Kiyomasa soon followed suit through the Southern Gate, all without encountering any resistance. However, this did not mean that Korean defence was entirely absent. In the south, Yi Sunsin, the commander of the ‘Left’ navy of Cho˘ lla, led his fleet and destroyed a number of Japanese warships near Okp’o off Ko˘ je island on 5/7, and another group of Japanese warships at Cho˘ kchinp’o on the following day. It was just the start of a series of successful strikes that would continue for about three months against the enemy naval forces.9 6 Tenkei, Seisei nikki (1592/4/14). Also see So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1592/4/14). 7 For details, see Kyo˘ ngnam munhwajae yo˘ n’guwo˘ n, Pusan chihach’o˘ l 3-hoso˘ n (Suan cho˘ nggo˘ jang) ko˘ nso˘ l pujinae Tongnae upso ˘ ˘ ng haeja II: ponmun purok (Pusan: Kyo˘ ngnam munhwajae yo˘ n’guwo˘ n, 2010), pp. 414–24. 8 So¯ke monjo (Kuksa p’yo˘ nch’an wiwo˘ nhoe). 9 For details, see Yi Min’ung, Imjin Waeran haejo˘ nsa (Seoul: Ch’o˘ ngo˘ ram midio˘ , 2004), pp. 93–7.

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Furthermore, resistance groups, commonly known as ‘righteous armies’ ( u˘ ibyo˘ ng), began to spring up in various pockets of the country, particularly in the southern provinces. They made surprise attacks on Japanese troops, who were thinly deployed along the corridors from Pusan to the capital and in the central provinces. On 5/16, Hideyoshi received the first report that the capital of Korea had been taken. Hideyoshi quickly determined that Choso˘ n Korea was now a done deal. He rushed, in his delirium, to determine further that Ming China was also within reach of Japanese occupation. He immediately announced that the Japanese emperor would be relocated to the capital of the Great Tang (referring to China), and that chunks of the Ming territory in China would be given out to his loyal followers.10 Hideyoshi ordered his daimyo generals in Korea to speed up and achieve the seizure of Ming China. Hideyoshi’s daydream did not last long. On 7/14, he received a chilling report that the fleet of Japan’s major naval forces had been almost wiped out by Yi Sunsin’s Korean navy in the strait near Hansan island on 7/8. To prevent further damage, Hideyoshi issued an urgent order banning the Japanese navy from confronting the Korean navy, while annulling the previous order for a military operation targeting the Ming even before it had been delivered to his daimyo generals in Korea.11 Awakened from his illusions, Hideyoshi found himself suddenly losing an appetite for military operations, as a series of troubling items of further news reached him, one after another. The report that Zu Chengxun, a Ming general, led about 3,500 Chinese troops and attacked the Konishi forces in Pyongyang was also quite disturbing, even though the latter fended off the attack soundly.12 The Japanese troops, which suffered from a shortage of supplies and were incessantly harassed by Korean fighters, had gradually turned into mobs of murderers and plunderers of food sources and valuables. Upon receiving the news that his mother was gravely ill, on 7/22 Hideyoshi returned to Osaka and delegated the daily operation of military affairs in Nagoya to Tokugawa Ieyasu and Maeda Toshiie. Korea was far from being occupied by the Japanese troops, who had turned to the defensive. On 10/6, about 13,000 Japanese troops launched a massive attack on the Chinju fort, which was defended by about 3,800 fighters under the command of Kim Simin – the magistrate whom the Japanese knew as Chinju Mokuso, 10 Koseki buncho¯ (Sonkeikaku bunko). 11 Ko¯sanko¯ jitsuroku jo¯kan (Osaka: Seibundo¯ shuppan, 1998), p. 69. Also see Kobayakawake monjo, no. 324. 12 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1592/7/1) and So˘ njo sillok (1592/7/26).

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a Japanese mispronunciation of the Korean term moksa (magistrate). Chinju was a key gateway to Cho˘ lla, the country’s most grain-rich province, which had remained intact despite numerous Japanese attempts at its penetration from several points.13 Having tried a series of four intensive attacks, the Japanese eventually gave up, collected and burned the corpses of their fallen soldiers, and retreated back to the Pusan area on 10/10. It was a bloody battle that had lasted five days and nights. For Hideyoshi, the Chinju ‘Mokuso’ (Kim Simin) thereafter became the symbol of what had foiled his campaign of ‘punishment’ of Korea. In the Hamgyo˘ ng province, where Kato¯ Kiyomasa had set up a line of forts of control, Korean fighters led by Cho˘ ng Munbu began to deal a series of sharp blows to the Japanese troops hunkering in their bases during the cold winter. Kato¯ became desperate as stocks of war supplies were dwindling fast. Time and again, he reported the dire situation to Hideyoshi, asking for help, and repeatedly urged his own domain in Higo of Kyushu to ship food and weaponry, all without much effect. More than anything else, communication between Kato¯ and Hideyoshi did not work at all in a situation where one-way delivery of letters took more than two months. Hideyoshi realised that his military expedition of punishment was foundering. He blamed the ‘rebellion’ (ikki) of the Koreans for spoiling his war goals, and directed his anger at it. With the aim of suppressing the Korean rebellions with full force, he appointed Toyotomi Hidekatsu, one of his nephews, as top commander, but without knowing that Hidekatsu had already died of disease a few weeks earlier, on Ko˘ je island. Foiled, Hideyoshi then ordered the Japanese troops to stay away from Korean fighters until he himself crossed the sea to Korea in the coming year, when he would wipe out the Korean rebels, a promise that was never – or, more precisely, could not be – kept.14 The trouble did not stop with Korean rebellions. King So˘ njo’s vigorous diplomacy towards the Wanli emperor helped to persuade the Ming to send a rescue force of about 37,000 to Korea – a massive force supervised by Song Yingchang and commanded by Li Rusong. The Ming troops crossed the Yalu/Apnok River in the twelfth month of 1592 and launched an attack on the Konishi forces in Pyongyang early in the following month. The attack lasted two days, from the morning of 1/7 to the evening of 1/8 in 1593. The Japanese somehow withstood it, amid heavy casualties on both sides. In a deal that offered them safety in return for evacuation, the Japanese troops in 13 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1592/4/1).

14 Kobayakawake monjo, no. 342.

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Pyongyang retreated to Hanso˘ ng at once – a retreat that also brought the withdrawal to Hanso˘ ng of all other Japanese divisions north of the capital.15 The Ming’s triumphant mood, however, was short-lived. Li Rusong’s elite troops suffered painful losses in a surprise attack by Japanese troops in the valley of Pyo˘ kchegwan north of Hanso˘ ng, late in the first month of 1593. Worse still, the Ming army suffered from food shortages, disease and cold weather. The situation of Japanese troops gathered in Hanso˘ ng was not so different. All this led both sides to find an exit from their risky confrontation through negotiation. The Japanese field generals decided on their own to opt for a truce, without Hideyoshi’s approval. The Ming envisioned that Hideyoshi would withdraw all Japanese troops from Korea (which would amount to ending the war) in return for China granting him investiture (the Ming emperor sanctioning Hideyoshi as the legitimate king of Japan). In contrast, Hideyoshi, who was later forced to approve the negotiated truce, sought to cut Ming China off from the war and then, hopefully through Ming pressure, to extract a prince-hostage from Korea. Hideyoshi intended to use a prince-hostage as evidence of Korea’s submission to his authority. The Ming emperor adhered to the ideology of universal sovereignty, while Hideyoshi had to salvage his leadership in an uneasy situation by declaring victory in the war and, thereby, justifying the massive military mobilisation he had imposed upon the daimyo of his country. According to a temporary truce struck in the third month, all Japanese troops withdrew south to the Pusan area by late in the fourth month – a setting for starting negotiations to end the war.16

A Kill-Everyone Campaign against Chinju in the Second Phase of the Invasion Before the negotiations proceeded any further, Hideyoshi first decided to take revenge on the Korean people who had spoiled his desire for punishment by staging rebellions (or resistance) throughout the country. To quench his anger, he picked out one particular town, Chinju, which the Japanese forces had tried to take in the tenth month of the previous year but failed, due to the effective defence led by the Mokuso (Kim Simin). Hideyoshi ordered his daimyo generals to pull out all forces and to destroy Chinju completely. On 5/1, Hideyoshi stressed one more time to the daimyo generals gathered in Pusan that nobody in Chinju must be left alive, before they proceeded on to 15 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1592/1/1).

16 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1592/4/1).

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subjugate the Cho˘ lla province.17 On 5/20, Hideyoshi issued a jindate (military formation) for an upcoming attack on Chinju, specifying how a full force of more than 120,000 should be organised.18 Unlike in the previous military operations, Hideyoshi now dispatched twelve inspectors, chosen from among the commanders of his own standing army, to Korea, charging them: ‘Stay near the troops and observe every single day what they do. Once every ten days, choose two inspectors from among yourselves and have the two deliver a report, which is signed by all inspectors, to Nagoya.’19 As we have seen, back in 1592 Hideyoshi had mobilised a comparable number of troops with the stated aim of ‘punishing’ Choso˘ n Korea, and even dreamed – if fleetingly – of conquering Ming China. A year later, he was pouring the full military capacity of the invading force into one local Korean town. Failed military operations aside, all this spoke to how desperate and irritated he was. He directed his burning feelings of revenge to the Korean people who had derailed his invasion from its goals. Upon receiving intelligence that the Japanese troops were on the verge of attack, the magistrate of Chinju (So˘ Yewo˘ n) called widely for help. A few hundred fighters rushed to the fort of Chinju but the total number of defenders, including a far greater number of civilians who took up positions, was about 3,000 – a muster that amounted to less than 3 per cent of the Japanese force.20 Song Yingchang tried to dissuade the Japanese from the charge, but not all that aggressively. The Ming troops stationed at towns not far from Chinju ignored the appeals for help coming from Chinju. The Ming generals were more interested in resolving the war through diplomacy, and thus, to refrain from provoking the Japanese side, kept their troops at a distance from Chinju.21 Chinju was like an island in eerie isolation. The Japanese attack on Chinju started on 6/22: ‘[Japanese] banners filled the sky, shouts thundered the ground, and the Chinju fort, which was under siege, was like a lonely boat floating on the turbulent sea.’22 Throughout the night of 6/22, waves of attacks and of defence were repeated until the early dawn. In the morning of 6/23, the Japanese drained water from the moat dug around the northwestern side of the fort and filled it with earth. On this day, three battles raged during the daytime, and four more battles that night, one after another. Both sides suffered casualties. On 6/24, the Japanese again 17 Mo¯rike monjo, no. 894. 18 Shimazuke monjo, no. 955. 19 Nakano Hitoshi, Hideyoshi no gunrei to tairiku shinko¯ (Tokyo: Yoshikawa ko¯bunkan, 2006), p. 214. 20 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1593/6/1). 21 So˘ njo sillok (1593/6/29). 22 So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1593/6/1).

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continued to launch a series of attacks, and the Koreans fended them off. These mortal struggles continued for four more days. On 6/29, the walls of the fort began to collapse at several locations amid heavy rain and, once the fort was cracked further open, the Japanese poured into it and began to slaughter everyone they met.23 How many Koreans were killed? A few days later, the governor of the ‘Right’ Kyo˘ ngsang province, Kim N u˘ k, dispatched a detailed report on the fall of Chinju, saying that a count of Korean deaths reached 2,844 people.24 It is not known how many more corpses floated down the Nam River that meandered past the southern cliff of the fort, as Korean investigators reported later.25 On the fifth day of the seventh month, Hideyoshi received a report on the successful destruction of Chinju. He reacted: ‘As the report says, the fort of Mokuso [the magistrate of Chinju] in Korea was now taken and [the Koreans in it] were all killed one by one. As soon as the forts for garrisoning [the troops] are constructed, the troops will be pulled back [from the battlefield].’26 On 7/11, Hideyoshi wrote to Ukita Hideie, the top commander of the Japanese forces in Korea: The report that on the past 28th day [your troops] attacked and took the fort of Mokuso and killed everyone without leaving a single person alive has reached me. In particular, you collected the head of Mokuso with your own hands and the head has been delivered . . . Once you return back to Japan, you will be granted more land. I further congratulate [you] that the heads of [Korean] soldiers and generals who deserved death were also cut off. Specially, the heads of [Korean] generals have all been collected by Konishi Yukinaga. I cannot be more pleased.27

On 7/20, the head of Chinju Mokuso, who was assumed to be Kim Simin, who had fended off the Japanese attack in the tenth month of the previous year, was delivered to Kyoto and displayed on the bridge near Jurakutei, as Nishinodo¯in Tokiyoshi, a Kyoto aristocrat, wrote in his diary. The pillorying of the head of Chinju Mokuso at a busy street of Kyoto was intended to publicise Hideyoshi’s glory spreading beyond the confines of Japan. However, Hideyoshi was not aware that Kim Simin (Mokuso) had already died more than seven months before the attack on Chinju. Nevertheless, being satisfied that the kill-everyone carnage order was 23 Kobayakawake monjo, no. 349, and Asanoke monjo, no. 84. 24 So˘ njo sillok (1593/7/22). 25 So˘ njo sillok (1593/7/16). 26 Tamaru monjo (Shiryo¯ hensanjo). 27 Quote from Nakano, Hideyoshi no gunrei to tairiku shinko¯, pp. 221–2.

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fulfilled, Hideyoshi announced that half of the troops would be withdrawn from the Korean peninsula. On 8/3, Hideyoshi wrote to his principal wife, Kitanomandokoro: ‘I will be arriving in Osaka on 9/25 or 9/26.. . . Around 8/ 10 there will be a triumphant return [of the troops from Korea]. I am so pleased.’28 After the Chinju carnage, the Ming and Japan started a long process for a negotiated settlement of the war and, in this bilateral process, Korea was by and large bypassed. The Ming aimed to make Hideyoshi withdraw all Japanese troops from Korea in return for a favour he would receive from the Ming. By the favour, the Ming meant the investiture of Hideyoshi as king of Japan, according to the protocol of the Ming emperor’s universal sovereignty. In contrast, Hideyoshi sought ways in which he could conclude the war with the rhetoric of victory exacted from the country he had originally targeted for subjugation, and, for that, he hoped to use Ming China, which stood as an obstacle to his goals. Hideyoshi believed that Ming China could still exercise influence over Korea as its suzerain state. He figured that acceptance of the Ming emperor’s investiture would mean an end to the conflict between the Ming and Japan, and, thus, would naturally lead to cutting the Ming off from the war. Once the Ming exit was achieved, Hideyoshi thought he could focus on extracting, hopefully through the leverage of the Ming, a prince-hostage from Korea – a symbol with which he could declare Korea’s submission to Japan. The goals which the Ming and Hideyoshi sought in their respective schemes were unbridgeable, no matter what tactics or tricks both sides tried to insert into the negotiations, simply because the Ming could not afford to force the Korean king to swallow the pill of surrender and send one of his sons to Hideyoshi as a hostage. In the ninth month of 1596, after a prolonged process of uneasy negotiations, Hideyoshi accepted the Ming emperor’s investiture. But when the Ming demanded that Hideyoshi withdraw all Japanese troops immediately from Korea, which would amount to an emptyhanded end to his war, he burst into rage and declared that he would relaunch a massive attack on Korea.29 His fury was directed at Korea, which, in his view, showed no sign whatsoever of capitulation. However, the resumption of another massive invasion, which would require a further round of massive military mobilisation from the country’s daimyo, who had already made huge sacrifices for nothing, was a risky 28 Ho¯taiko¯ shinsekishu¯, no. 38. 29 Shenzong shilu 308:5765, and Hwang Sin, Ilbon wanghwan ilgi (1597/9/6).

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enterprise. For more than eight months, until the fifth month of the following year, the Hideyoshi regime tried to get, in return for a closure to the war, a prince-hostage or any other usable material-symbol by appealing directly to Korea, but all to no avail. Choso˘ n Korean leaders kept turning a deaf ear to Japan’s repeated calls and, instead, poured their whole energy into bringing Chinese troops back and undercutting the Japanese position as much as possible. All this only built up Hideyoshi’s anger at Korea to breaking point.

Genocide in the Third Phase of the Invasion In the fifth month of 1597, Hideyoshi’s new strategy emerged – one which Konishi Yukinaga soon leaked to the Korean side in hopes of luring Korea to the negotiating table and a truce. What Konishi disclosed later came true. According to Konishi’s letters, Hideyoshi was enraged: ‘Each time Korea deludes me. I can no longer suppress my anger. Korea refuses to submit to me because the two provinces of Cho˘ lla and Ch’ungch’o˘ ng still remain intact.’30 Hideyoshi’s order was unmistakeable: ‘Mobilize the entire troops and thoroughly trample on the whole range of Cho˘ lla province.’31 Hideyoshi continued: ‘In case the job cannot be easily completed, station the troops along the southern seashores and, then, plunder inner villages, particularly populous and rich ones, until Korea begs for truce.’32 In the seventh month of 1597, Cho Kyo˘ ngnam, a local Korean former official, obtained information on what Hideyoshi had ordered Kobayakawa Hideaki, the overall commander of the Japanese invading forces, to do: ‘I will send more troops year after year, kill Koreans one by one, and empty their country . . . A man has two ears but just one nose. With a nose cut, replace a head. In case you capture one alive, first cut his or her nose off, then you are allowed to keep him or her as a prisoner.’33 Japan’s resumed attack was first directed at the Korean navy under the command of Wo˘ n Kyun, the replacement of Yi Sunsin who had been fired from his position due to a political mishap. The attack almost wiped out the Korean navy in the Ch’ilch’o˘ nryang harbour of Ko˘ je island on 7/16 of 1597. Wo˘ n Kyun lost his life and only a handful of warships were able to escape from the destruction.34 Upon hearing the news, King So˘ njo rushed to reinstall 30 So˘ njo sillok (1597/6/14). 31 So˘ njo sillok (1597/5/18). 32 So˘ njo sillok (1597/6/14). 33 Cho Kyo˘ ngnam, Nanjung chapnok (1597/7/16). 34 For details, see Yi Min’ung, Imjin Waeran haejo˘ nsa, pp. 226–35; So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1597/7/ 1); and Mo¯rike monjo, no. 911.

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Yi Sunsin to his previous naval commander position, but the prospects of defence were gloomy, given that Ming troops, which were still to be mobilised, were far from the front of the Japanese intrusion. Korean military forces were too weak and too small to confront the enemy. The Japanese forces of about 120,000, commanded by Kobayakawa Hideaki and organised into two divisions, started to advance along two routes into Cho˘ lla and Kyo˘ ngsang provinces, respectively, all towards Cho˘ nju, the provincial capital of Cho˘ lla. Along the way, the Japanese soldiers pillaged villages, slaughtered Koreans, and mutilated them in a brutal manner.35 On 8/13, the left division of the Japanese troops fell upon Namwo˘ n, a town not far from Cho˘ nju, firing muskets into it from all sides. Under siege and overwhelmed by the massive enemy forces, on 8/14 Yang Yuan, a Ming general assigned to defend the town along with Korean soldiers and residents, attempted to make a truce with the Japanese. Konishi Yukinaga demanded unsuccessfully that Yang evacuate all Chinese troops and hand over the fort to the Japanese. On 8/16, the Japanese troops further sealed the fort from all sides, kept firing muskets into it, and began to climb the walls during the night. Amid the pre-dawn chaos and confusion, Yang Yuan escaped through the western gate in darkness, along with a few guards.36 Those who failed to escape were then subjected to slaughter by the Japanese troops. Keinen (also called Kyo¯nen), a Japanese monk who accompanied his lord ¯ ta Kazuyoshi of the Usuki domain, as a physician, brushed on his daimyo, O diary, later known as A Record of Days in Cho¯sen (Choso˘ n), what he witnessed in Namwo˘ n during the attack. ‘Men and women in the fort were all cut down with no one saved. Those who had surrendered were also cut down . . . At dawn I saw outside the fort. Dead people were scattered all over the place like sand.’37 Indeed, the Chinese/Korean soldiers totalling about 3,500, and a large number of civilians, were almost all slaughtered. Later, neighbouring local residents who had survived the war collected the remains of the dead, buried them in a collective grave, and called it the ‘Righteous Mound of the Innumerable Souls’ (man’in u˘ ich’ong), which still stands in Namwo˘ n. Hideyoshi’s inspectors dispatched a report on what the Japanese troops had achieved at Namwo˘ n. One surviving letter of merit-confirmation which Hideyoshi sent to To¯do¯ Takatora reads: ‘[Your] report dated 8/16 was presented to me, which says that [the troops] surrounded [the Namwo˘ n] 35 Cho Kyo˘ ngnam, Nanjung chapnok (1597/8/3–6). 36 Shenzong shilu 313:5858 (1597/8/19). 37 Cho¯sen nichinichiki kenkyu¯kai, ed., Cho¯sen nichinichiki o yomu: Shinshu¯so¯ ga mita Hideyoshi no Cho¯sen shinryaku (Kyoto: Ho¯zo¯kan, 2000), pp. 17–18.

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fort on 8/13 and attacked [it] during the night of 8/15, and that you have cut 269 heads off. 269 noses have arrived. This is what your hard work has achieved . . . Keep doing your best at upcoming combats.’38 In the letter addressed to a Shimazu general, Hideyoshi confirmed that he had received 421 noses.39 Other surviving letters of merit-confirmation that Hideyoshi ¯ ta Kazuyoshi and wrote include ones addressed to Kato¯ Yoshiakira, O Kurushima Michifusa. What Hideyoshi meant by ‘trampling’ Cho˘ lla was exposed in full: to kill all Koreans, whoever was found in the path of the invasion, including women, children and non-combatants, and to present the evidence of these killings by delivering to Hideyoshi the noses cut from the slain bodies. In order to make sure that his order was carried out strictly and without deception, Hideyoshi implemented a system of supervision according to which a group of inspectors followed the ‘trample-trails’ of daimyo generals assigned to the campaign of freewheeling slaughter. The field inspectors were charged to verify the number of noses they received each time from a daimyo general, to issue a receipt of confirmation to the daimyo in question, to pack the noses so collected and salted in charcoal-filled caskets, and to ship the caskets to Hideyoshi.40 The whole process of killing and nose-cutting was systematic. After Namwo˘ n, the left division of the Japanese troops took Cho˘ nju easily, and then spread out in all directions for a killing spree. In turn, on 8/17, the right division of the Japanese forces, led by Kato¯ Kiyomasa, Nabeshima Naoshige and Kuroda Nagamasa, assailed the Hwangso˘ k mountain fort near the pass in the northwestern corner of the Kyo˘ ngsang province leading to Cho˘ nju. On the same day, three inspectors issued Kuroda Nagamasa a co-signed receipt confirming that they had received 13 heads, 25 noses and 2 hostages.41 Hideyoshi’s letter of praise, which was addressed to Kuroda on 9/22, indicates that Kuroda troops also killed 353 more Koreans near the mountain fort.42 On 8/22, Inspector Kumagai Naomori issued Nabashima Naoshige a receipt for 90 Korean noses that the latter had submitted, and, on 8/23, a receipt for 7 Korean noses submitted by Kuroda Nagamasa.43 38 To¯do¯ monjo (Shiryo¯ hensanjo). 39 Kagoshimaken shiryo¯ kyu¯ki zatsuroku ko¯hen 3, no. 303. 40 Jurgis Elisonas, ‘Inseparable trinity: Japan’s relations with China and Korea’ in The Cambridge History of Japan, vol. I V: Early Modern Japan, ed. John Whitney Hall, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 291. 41 Akizuki Kurodake monjo (Akizuki kyo¯dokan) and So˘ njo sillok (1597/9/1). 42 Akizuki Kurodake monjo. 43 Respectively, Nabeshimake monjo, no. 119, and Akizuki Kurodake monjo.

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By the end of the tenth month, the Japanese troops were fully engaged in a campaign of what they called ‘cutting down all by combing down’ (nadegiri) in all regions of Cho˘ lla, Ch’ungch’o˘ ng and Kyo˘ ngsang provinces in the absence of major defences from the Chinese/Korean side. Not only slaughtering Koreans and mutilating their slain bodies, the Japanese invaders were also busy looting valuables and setting fire to houses and buildings after pillaging them (including many Confucian schools and Buddhist temples). What they did is vividly testified by a number of ‘nose-receipts’ (hana uketorijo¯) that have survived for more than four centuries, although these receipts represent only a tiny fraction of the information on what happened. On 8/26, Kumagai Naomori (an inspector) issued a receipt for 264 noses to Nabeshima Katsushige;44 on 8/26, a receipt for 346 noses, and, on the following day, another one for 36 noses, all to To¯do¯ Takatora;45 on 8/28, Nabeshima Katsushige received a receipt for 170 noses he had submitted to Kumagai;46 on 9/2, Hayakawa Nagamasa issued a receipt for 480 noses to Kikkawa Hiroie.47 On 9/5, Hayakawa again issued a receipt for 792 noses to Kikkawa Hiroie and, on 9/6, a receipt for 3,000 noses to Kuroda Nagamasa.48 Transactions like these took place several times almost every single day between daimyo generals and field inspectors. On 9/7, a Chinese force of about 2,000 was able to block the Kuroda troops at Chiksan, a border town between Ch’ungch’o˘ ng and Kyo˘ nggi provinces, preventing them from advancing further north towards the capital. They were forced to turn back to the south.49 But this one-time defence was far from deterring the Japanese troops in the southern provinces from killing civilians, as surviving nose-receipts continue to testify: a receipt for 358 noses issued to Kikkawa Hiroie on 9/8;50 a receipt for 250 noses issued to the Shimazu force on 9/6–9;51 a receipt for 641 noses on 9/10 and another one for 437 noses on 9/12, all issued to Kikkawa Hiroie;52 a receipt for 61 noses issued to the Shimazu on 9/ 12;53 a receipt for 241 noses issued to Kuroda Nagamasa on 9/14;54 a receipt for 1,551 noses issued to Nabeshima Katsushige on 9/14;55 a receipt for 510 noses on 9/15 and another one for 457 noses on 9/16, all issued to Kuroda Nagamasa.56 44 46 48 49 50 52 53 55

¯ saka tenshukaku). 45 Ko¯sanko¯ jitsuroku jo¯kan, pp. 108–9. Nabeshimake monjo (O Nabeshimake monjo, no. 117. 47 Kikkawake monjo, no. 716. Kikkawake monjo, no. 717, and Akizuki Kurodake monjo. See So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1597/9/1); So˘ njo sillok (1597/9/9); Shenzong shilu 314:5875 (1597/9/ 22) and 315:5883–4 (1597/10/4). Kikkawake monjo, no. 718. 51 Omotetaka Rencho¯bo¯ Ko¯rai nikki (1597/9/6–9). Kikkawake monjo, no. 719 and no. 720, respectively. Omotetaka Rencho¯bo¯ Ko¯rai nikki (1597/9/12). 54 Akizuki Kurodake monjo. Nabeshimake monjo, no. 118. 56 Akizuki Kurodake monjo.

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On 9/17 the reinstated Korean admiral, Yi Sunsin, achieved a miraculous victory with a small force of 13 warships against a massive Japanese fleet of 133 warships, in a narrow strait called Ultolmok or Myo˘ ngnyang in the southwestern corner of the Cho˘ lla province.57 But, again, this single naval victory did not damage the Japanese troops or discourage them from indulging in carnage on land in the southern provinces. On 9/18, Kikkawa Hiroie received a receipt for 1,245 noses and, on 9/22, another one for 870 noses that his troops had submitted to the field inspector.58 On 10/2, Nabeshima Katsushige, in place of his father Naoshige who had left for Ch’angwo˘ n, led troops to K u˘ mgu (in the north) and Kimje, and collected 3,369 more Korean noses.59 In the Kyo˘ ngsang province, the troops of Kato¯ Kiyomasa ‘trampled’ through Hamch’ang, Sangju and Indong, and then moved towards Taegu. Kato¯ ordered each of his soldiers to produce at least 3 noses to prove their dutiful military service. The troops of Kuroda Nagamasa, who turned back from Chiksan, received a receipt for 372 noses acquired in Ch’o˘ ngsan in the Ch’ungch’o˘ ng province on 9/18, and then proceeded to the Kyo˘ ngsang province. On 9/20, Kuroda received a receipt for 300 noses cut off in Kaenyo˘ ng, and, farther down south, another receipt for 223 noses collected in Hyo˘ np’ung on 9/30.60 In the Cho˘ lla province, Kikkawa Hiroie secured a receipt for 10,040 noses collected in Chinwo˘ n and Yo˘ nggwang on 9/27, and another one for 3,487 noses on 10/9.61 Kikkawa Hiroie was, by no means, particularly evil. He was simply one of the daimyo generals who did the same things as all the others did. Currently, it is known that twenty-eight receipts have survived at various places in Japan: twelve receipts for a total of 5,439 noses, which were issued to Kuroda Nagamasa from 1597/8/16 to 1597/9/29; nine receipts for a total of 18,350 noses, which were issued to Kikkawa Hiroie from 1597/9/4 to 1597/10/9; five receipts for a total of 5,444 noses, which were issued to Nabeshima Katsushige from 1597/8/21 to 1597/10/1; and two receipts for a total of 382 noses, which were issued to To¯do¯ Takatora on 1597/8/26 and 8/27, respectively.62 The total number of noses specified in these extant twenty-eight receipts represent only four daimyo out of the more than forty daimyo engaged in the 57 See So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (1597/9/1); Yi Sunsin, Nanjung ilgi (1597/9/17–18); and Kurushima monjo. 58 Kikkawake monjo, no. 721 and no. 138, respectively. 59 Nabeshimake monjo. 60 Akizuki Kurodake monjo. 61 Kikkawake monjo, no. 722, no. 139. 62 For details, see Tsuno Tomoaki, ‘Kuroda Nagamasa ate hana uketorijo¯ ni tsuite’, Jinbun kagaku kenkyu¯ (Ko¯chi daigaku jinbungakubu) 17 (2011), 2–13.

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Korean carnage. These four daimyo led, altogether, just under 30,000 troops, or about a quarter of the entire Japanese force of around 120,000. In addition, their nose-receipts cover, on an average per daimyo, seven workdays only during the period of fifty-three days from 8/16 to 10/9 – probably less than a quarter of the total workdays. Nevertheless, the total number of noses indicated on these extant receipts amounts to 29,615. Given this, it is estimated that at least 400,000 – or even up to half a million – Koreans, were slain and mutilated in 1597. In Kyoto on 9/28, a grand Buddhist ritual was held in front of a massive earthen mound newly built near Hideyoshi’s prayer temple called Daibutsuji. Upon Hideyoshi’s order, Seisho¯ Jo¯tai, a leading Buddhist monk, presided over the ceremony designed to pacify the Korean souls of the dead whose noses had been shipped to Japan. Seisho¯ had his words of admiration for Hideyoshi carved on the stele placed beside the mound: Due to the distance, our troops sent noses for Hideyoshi’s inspection. Upon inspection, the lord did not bring up revengeful feelings about the dead enemies and instead deepened his mind of compassion. Thereupon, the lord ordered the clean priests of Gozan [Five Mountains, referring to the five top Rinzai Zen temples in Kyoto] to erect an auspicious altar, and perform a memorial service for the peace and harmony of those souls.63

Seisho¯ Jo¯tai pronounced that Hideyoshi intended to bring peace to the souls of the Korean enemies whom his soldiers had killed, through a memorial service, evoking the rhetoric of compassion, known in Japanese Buddhism as the ‘equality of enemy and friend’ (onshin byo¯do¯). But the ceremony over which Seisho¯ Jo¯tai presided featured a ritual measure designed to prevent the grudging souls of the killed Koreans from inflicting harm on Hideyoshi. It is not known how many Korean (and Chinese soldiers’) noses were buried in the Kyoto mound, later called, curiously, ‘Mimizuka’ (‘ear mound’ rather than ‘nose mound’). Given that it took more than four weeks to transport anything from Korea to Kyoto, the noses buried in this mound were likely mutilated in the seventh and eighth months of 1597.64 (See Figure 5.1.) In addition to the one in Kyoto, it is known that there are at least five more mounds or burial sites of Korean noses shipped from Korea during the Imjin War. These are, respectively, in Bizen and Tsuyama in Okayama Prefecture, 63 Gienjugo¯ nikki (1597/9/27). 64 For instance, the Ch’ilch’o˘ nryang battle took place on 7/16, but Hideyoshi’s letters of merit-confirmation, which he issued to the daimyo generals involved in the battle, were written on 9/13 – almost two months later.

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Figure 5.1 The ‘Mimizuka’ and its stele in Kyoto. (Photo: Nam-lin Hur)

Kagoshima in Kagoshima Prefecture, Hitoyoshi in Kumamoto Prefecture, ¯ da in Shimane Prefecture.65 and O Despite this intensive carnage, Hideyoshi’s goal of obtaining a princehostage from Korea fizzled out as the Japanese troops retreated back to the southern coastlines, where they built forts and settled in them during the winter. In the meantime, the Ming troops geared up to strike one of the forts, the Ulsan fort of Kato¯ Kiyomasa. For thirteen days, from the twenty-third day of the twelfth month of 1597, 45,000 Ming troops launched a series of attacks on Kato¯’s fort, to no avail.66 After the Ulsan battle, the Japanese troops, who had lost much of their appetite for fighting, were somewhat disoriented. From the spring of 1598, they occasionally came out from their bases and pillaged nearby villages or busied themselves with kidnapping Koreans to take to their home domains. Konishi Yukinaga and Kato¯ Kiyomasa again tried to approach the Korean side for a truce deal, but all failed in getting any reaction. 65 For details, see No So˘ nghwan, Ilbon p’oro Ilbon ui ˘ sin i toeda (Seoul: Minsokwo˘ n, 2014), pp. 366–74. 66 Asanoke monjo, no. 254.

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On 1598/8/18, Hideyoshi died. He had achieved nothing in the war of invasion he had started. After his death, Japan’s interim leaders decided to withdraw all troops from Korea. The allied forces of Ming and Choso˘ n Korea assaulted them one more time at three key locations. The Japanese troops withstood the strikes. When the Konishi troops at Sunch’o˘ n tried to evacuate by sea, the naval forces of Choso˘ n and Ming, which Yi Sunsin and Chen Lin commanded, respectively, tried to block them – a blockade that led to the final battle of the war, commonly known as the Noryang naval battle. Yi Sunsin lost his life and the final fleet of Japanese troops, much damaged, were somehow able to escape to Pusan, and then to Japan. The war was finally over, but the scars the Japanese invaders had inflicted lingered on in Choso˘ n Korea: agonising memories of innumerable deaths that I estimate amounted to more than half a million. Among the victims were included those who fell prey to the genocide of ‘nose-cutting’ carnage – a genocide in which the Japanese invaders butchered at least 400,000 Koreans. To be sure, there is simply no way to know the exact number of Korean victims who succumbed to the madness of that coldblooded killing spree, but information gleaned from surviving witness accounts, records and monuments (such as ‘mounds of noses’), currently points to a massive slaughter conducted by the Japanese invaders. Given that the population of Choso˘ n Korea in the late sixteenth century is roughly estimated to be in the range of 6 million to 10 million, the genocide slashed at least 3 to 5 per cent off the entire population in less than six years.

Conclusion What did Japan’s invading troops achieve in Korea? Hideyoshi, the mastermind of the invasion, achieved nothing despite the strenuous effort, into which he put the maximum military force he could mobilise. His dictatorial power that helped to mobilise more than 100,000 troops was indeed formidable and unprecedented in Japanese history, but his troops failed to deliver what he wanted. More precisely, it was not simply a failure, but turned out to be the death knell to his own regime. After his death in the eighth month of 1598, his regime was inherited by his young son, Hideyori, but it did not last long. In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu, whom Hideyoshi had begged to be loyal to Hideyori, overthrew his regime. Ieyasu then established a new regime known as the Tokugawa bakufu (shogunate). Fifteen years later, Ieyasu proceeded to kill Hideyori, who had been confined to Osaka Castle. 136

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In the final analysis, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Choso˘ n Korea turned out to be an act of self-destruction – one that also touched off a genocidal destruction of innumerable innocent lives who had nothing to do with his regime. The Korean people had not done anything, whatsoever, to either Hideyoshi or Japan, but he began, out of the blue, to incubate feelings of denigration, anger and hatred towards Choso˘ n Korea. When his sudden demand for submission was not met, he decided to invade Choso˘ n Korea as ‘punishment’, and when his invasion began to derail, he tried to quench his anger by killing the Koreans and plundering their property. Soon after his initial invasion, Hideyoshi called Koreans’ efforts of self-defence an ikki (rebellion), implying that it was unjust and unforgivable and, thus, deserved further punishment. His anger at Koreans’ resistance to his authority translated into an all-out attack on the Chinju fort in the sixth month of 1593 – an attack that was solely focused on killing every single Korean in it. When his disparagement of Choso˘ n Korea was refuted despite a prolonged effort to extract a prince-hostage, he spiralled into madness that drove him to determine that the southern three provinces of Korea should be destroyed. By destruction, Hideyoshi meant slaughtering Korean people, mutilating their bodies, and kidnapping them to Japan. His daimyo generals followed their overlord’s order with full strength and began to butcher Koreans in the path of their invasion, and shipped the noses cut from the slain bodies to Japan for their overlord’s inspection. Nevertheless, by the time of his death, Hideyoshi was not able to quench his self-inflicted thirst for revenge on the Korean people. A foreign invasion is often wrapped in words of solemn ideas and values. However, it usually comes down to killing many innocent people and destroying their families. Hideyoshi uttered self-aggrandising words proclaiming the conquest of foreign countries, the glory of a divine Japan, and Japan’s reputation for unsurpassable military authority. But what he caused his troops to do was simply the destruction of hundreds of thousands of innocent human lives who had nothing to do with his regime. Hideyoshi’s insane perceptions, ill feelings and emotions towards Choso˘ n Korea, which he calculated could also be exploited as an instrument for his political goals, were solely responsible for the campaign of genocide he inflicted upon the Korean people in 1592–8.

Bibliographic Note There are very few works in English on this subject: Elisonas, ‘Inseparable trinity’, 235–300; Ben Kiernan, ‘Guns and genocide in East Asia’ in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from 137

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Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 112–32; Kitajima Manji, ‘The Imjin Waeran: contrasting the first and the second invasions of Korea’ in The East Asian War, 1592–1598: International Relations, Violence, and Memory, ed. James B. Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 73–92; Nam-lin Hur, ‘Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s invasion of the Choso˘ n kingdom, 1592– 1598’ in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (Oxford University Press, 2020), online; J. Marshall Craig, China, Korea, and Japan at War, 1592–1598: Eyewitness Accounts (London, New York: Routledge, 2020). Informative primary sources on the overall progress of Japan’s invasion of Choso˘ n Korea can be grouped into three, in the Korean, Chinese and Japanese languages, respectively: So˘ njo sillok (The Veritable Records [of the Choso˘ n Dynasty during the Reign] of King So˘ njo) and So˘ njo sujo˘ ng sillok (The Revised Veritable Records [of the Choso˘ n Dynasty during the Reign] of King So˘ njo) for Choso˘ n Korea; Shenzong shilu (The Veritable Records [of the Ming Dynasty during the Reign] of Emperor Shenzong), for Ming China; and the documents of daimyo houses (such as Kikkawake monjo, Shimazuke monjo, Kuroda monjo and To¯do¯ monjo), and a collection of documents related to Hideyoshi (such as Ho¯taiko¯ shinsekishu¯ and Toyotomi Hideyoshi monjoshu¯, 9 vols. (Tokyo: Yoshikawa ko¯bunkan, 2015– )), for Japan. In describing the progress of the war, this chapter draws on these primary sources available in original format and indicated by recorded dates or catalogue numbers. Information on the genocide that the Japanese invaders committed is based on a range of original primary sources that offer specific statistical data on the victims. In particular, for what the act of genocide entailed, this chapter draws on a group of primary sources of what are known as ‘receipts for noses’ (hana uketorijo¯), which the field inspectors issued to the daimyo generals who submitted Korean noses to them in the field. The original copies of these remarkable ‘receipts for noses’ examined in this chapter are all available in Japanese local libraries or museums, whether catalogued or not. Some auxiliary information on the carnage is also seen in witness accounts, diaries (nikki) and memoirs (oboegaki). Secondary literature has been consulted when original information cannot be found elsewhere or when considered helpful for, or critical to, contextual understanding. This chapter is by and large based on primary sources that offer the closest evidence of what happened to the victims of the genocide during the invasion.

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6

The English Conquest of Ireland, c.1530–c.1650 nicholas canny

It seems reasonable that a history of global genocides should include a chapter on the English conquest of Ireland, because those Irish people who survived that ordeal to record their experiences in vernacular recollections contended that the society, polity and religion they cherished had been cast aside, and that many who had resisted the English assertion of power had been killed or forced into exile.1 Some exiles who found refuge in Catholic countries wrote documented histories of the episode, usually in Latin. There they contended that the conquest had been religiously motivated and its victims Catholic martyrs.2 Authors writing from the perspective of the victors acknowledged that government forces had frequently engaged in mass killings to expedite English victory. However, they attributed responsibility for the Irish loss of life to the barbaric perversity of Irish leaders who, by attacking government supporters, had invited retaliation, or who, by refusing to submit to superior English forces, had condemned their subordinates to becoming victims of the famines created by government troops.3 All authors acknowledged that frightening things had happened. These different interpretations from opposing perspectives remained constant until the late nineteenth century. Narratives then became complicated because of interpretative disagreements that arose among scholars writing from the vantage point of the victors. The author who clung most faithfully to the inherited official view was James Anthony Froude, a rigid English Tory 1 The most enduring vernacular verse narrative was ‘Tuireamh na hÉireann’: Cecile O’Rahilly, ed., Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1977), pp. 50–82; more generally, see Nicholas Canny, Imagining Ireland’s Pasts: Early Modern Ireland through the Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 111–21, 200–11. 2 The most influential of such was Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Historiae Catholicae Hiberniae Compendium (Lisbon, 1621); Canny, Imagining Ireland’s Pasts, pp. 45–50. 3 Canny, Imagining Ireland’s Pasts, pp. 89–103.

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who knew Ireland well. He argued that the English government then, as also in his own time, had a moral obligation to assert its authority over Ireland, given ‘the incompleteness of character’ in the Irish, who ‘as a nation [had] done nothing which posterity will not be anxious to forget’.4 In this prejudgement, Froude acknowledged that the English authorities had left a trail of destruction when promoting ‘systematic colonization’ that, he insisted, was ‘long understood to be the only remedy for the chronic disorder’.5 However, when detailing the desolation and death that had resulted from government action, Froude pronounced that the Irish could not be considered ‘victims’ since they had repeatedly brought destruction upon themselves by resisting progressive measures. The extreme actions that successive governments had taken had also proven necessary, he asserted, because of the ‘mistaken tenderness’ and ‘religious indulgence’ of some English governors that had tempted the Irish to resist.6 For Froude, it was not until Oliver Cromwell had comprehensively suppressed rebellion that Ireland enjoyed a governor prepared ‘to rule Ireland for Ireland’s good’. When supporting this assertion, Froude detailed Cromwell’s infamous actions at Drogheda in 1649, arguing that the slaughter there of civilians, as well as the garrison, was justified because of the thousands of Protestant settlers that, he alleged, had been killed by the Irish in their rebellion of 1641. This led to Froude’s core argument that, if Cromwell’s fair, but stern, policies had been adhered to, ‘Romanism’ – which Froude considered responsible for the rebellion of 1641 – would have been extinguished, just as Protestantism had been eliminated from Spain and Italy.7 As Froude described the mass killings that Cromwell, and also several English governors of the sixteenth century, had engaged upon, he suggested it had never been the intention of any of these to exterminate all of Ireland’s population. Their concern, rather, was to destroy the ruling elite and the Catholicism that sustained them, and to reduce the surviving population to a subservient status within a country that would become part of an English Protestant polity governed from Westminster. Froude’s arguments provoked outrage within Ireland’s Catholic and nationalist communities, at home and in exile. More surprising is that W. E. H. Lecky, an Irish Unionist landowner and intellectual resident in London who had come to be considered a seer on Irish affairs, also joined this criticism. As Lecky apologised for what he considered England’s 4 J. A. Froude, The English in Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 3 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1872), pp. I, 2–3; Canny, Imagining Ireland’s Pasts, pp. 280–8. 5 Froude, English in Ireland, I, pp. 50–1. 6 Ibid., pp. 68–72, 120. 7 Ibid., pp. 137, 140.

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mismanagement of Ireland during this period, he became Froude’s most formidable adversary. Lecky believed that it was only in the reign of Henry VIII that ‘royal authority became in any degree a reality’ in Ireland, and that it was from this foundation that the government of Queen Elizabeth ‘crushed the native population to the dust’. During this process, said Lecky, government troops became involved with ‘isolated episodes . . . as terrible as anything in human history’. It came as no surprise to him, therefore, that the Irish should have concluded that what the English were engaged upon was a ‘war of extermination’. However, Lecky denied that it had been such and pronounced that it was an English appetite for the ‘confiscation of Irish land’, rather than any desire to exterminate the people or to convert them to Protestantism, that had driven forward what became a conquest. Lecky nonetheless considered that it was the Irish belief ‘that they were to be driven from the soil’ which explained the many conflicts of the early modern era that were ‘not wars of races [and] not to any considerable degree wars of religion’. Resistance, said Lecky, led to defeat and further degradation, the most comprehensive of which was that administered by Cromwell. Here Lecky, like Froude, detailed the massacre at Drogheda in 1649, and the subsequent Cromwellian military victories – all of which, Lecky averred, had left the Irish ‘poor, broken, miserable and friendless . . . aliens in nationality and Papists in religion’. However, unlike Froude, Lecky did not believe that this experience had made the Irish better subjects. On the contrary, he considered that it had made them more determined to resist since, ‘the name of Cromwell . . . [had acted] as a spell upon the Irish mind, and [had] a powerful and living influence in sustaining the hatred both of England and Protestantism’.8 If Froude and Lecky differed in their explanations for the repeated conquests of Ireland, and differed also over the consequences of those conquests, they were agreed on several fundamental matters. They were, for example, satisfied that the country had been conquered more than once by English government forces that had engaged repeatedly in mass killings. In this, they endorsed Irish Catholic/Nationalist narratives. Moreover, Lecky as well as Froude differed from Catholic/Nationalist authors in insisting that it had never been the intention of the authorities to exterminate Ireland’s population. 8 W. E. H. Lecky, History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, 5 vols. (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1892), pp. I, 81, 82, 89, 102–5; Canny, Imagining Ireland’s Pasts, pp. 327–32.

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Given the interest that the exchanges between Froude and Lecky aroused in the nineteenth century, it is astonishing that their discourse and consensus were largely ignored when, from the second half of the twentieth century forward, academic historians in Ireland began to investigate Ireland’s early modern history. The editors of a conference volume entitled Age of Atrocity, published in 2007, set out to explain why this discourse was deliberately ignored.9 The compilation did not detail the nineteenthcentury debates, but the editors of what, in their words, was ‘in essence, a book about killing’, brought the issues raised by Lecky and Froude back into focus. They claimed that those who had preceded them as academic historians in Ireland had fostered a ‘prolonged neglect of early modern violence’ because ‘many historians had good reason to feel they were acting in the best interests of Irish history by attempting to counter the traditional manipulation of the past for political and confessional ends’.10 In order to de-politicise history, these well-meaning academic historians had, according to the editors of Age of Atrocity, chosen to write about parliamentary, religious and administrative matters as if Irish history was a Hibernian variant of the history of England. The editors of Age of Atrocity thus sought to restore what they believed had been excised from the record, but they also wished their volume to serve as an antidote to the work of scholars of their own generation that went by the description of ‘British’ – or even ‘New British’ – history. Those associated with this particular scholarly stream had also been explaining their agenda in prescriptive conference volumes, one of them entitled, Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History. The editors of this compilation encouraged fresh scholarship that would explain how the development of the ‘British’ state had progressively brought the populations of the four jurisdictions of England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland into a common polity that was guided by similar, if not identical, institutions and principles.11 In opposition to this, the editors of Age of Atrocity held a dim view of this ‘new subject’, believing that, where Irish history was concerned, it was doing no more than resuscitating

9 David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007); the book resulted from conferences held in 2002 and 2004. 10 Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity, pp. 19, 15, 16. 11 Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995); similar issues were discussed in S. G. Ellis and S. Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: The Fashioning of the British State, 1495–1715 (London: Routledge, 1995).

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jingoistic history once favoured in Britain that had celebrated ‘the expansion of English government under the Tudors and Stuarts’.12 By a happy coincidence, John Morrill, one of the leading exponents of ‘British’ history, contributed to each of these two conference volumes. In his chapters, Morrill challenged the presumptions of the editors of Age of Atrocity, and also prescribed methods that he considered best suited to encouraging a ‘British’ perspective. Thus, in his contribution to Uniting the Kingdom?, Morrill praised the achievements and goals of the ‘national histories of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales’, but argued that ‘British history’ was more sophisticated than such teleological narratives since it addressed how these various ‘national’ experiences had become intertwined. In Age of Atrocity, Morrill provided a practical demonstration of what he meant by intertwining when he examined Oliver Cromwell’s association with Ireland as well as with England, Scotland and Wales. Here, he focused on the ‘massacre’ at Drogheda in 1649, for which Cromwell admitted responsibility, and which, according to Morrill, exceeded ‘in scale [and] in the range of its brutalities’ any other bloody incident of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–52.13 However, even as he acknowledged the merciless character of the slaughter at Drogheda, Morrill insisted that this did not constitute evidence that Cromwell was more hostile towards his opponents in Ireland than to those who had challenged his authority in England and Scotland. The reality, said Morrill, was that ‘Cromwell was not amongst the most anti-Catholic and probably not amongst the most anti-Irish of Englishmen in the 1640s and 1650s’. To support this, Morrill suggested that, if circumstances had enabled Cromwell to take the town of Farington in England in 1645, he would likely have treated the besieged population there as he did that of Drogheda in 1649. Essentially, as Morrill put it, Cromwell had ‘been building up to an explosion of anger against anybody who defied God’s judgement’. Moreover, he stated, the actions of Cromwell were not particularly anti-Irish, because ‘at Drogheda, he killed English, Anglo-Irish, and Irish indiscriminately, if anything singling out the English for severity . . . and those who were spared death and transported to slave-conditions in Barbados were Irish’.14 12 Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity, p. 14. 13 John Morrill, ‘Three kingdoms and one commonwealth? The enigma of midseventeenth-century Britain and Ireland’ in Uniting the Kingdom? ed. Grant and Stringer, 170–90, at 190; Morrill, ‘The Drogheda massacre in Cromwellian context’ in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, 242–65, at 263. 14 Morrill, ‘Drogheda massacre’, 264, 242, 265; by Anglo-Irish, Morrill meant those conventionally known as Old English; by Irish, he meant those of Gaelic ancestry; and by English, he meant the English royalists who were in command of the garrison.

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Morrill thus challenged the belief that Irish sufferings had been unique by comparing what had happened there with what might have happened in England. This method of comparing events in Ireland with nearcontemporary events in England was already being employed by others and continued to be imitated by those wishing to write ‘British’ history rather than the history of one nation. Thus, in 2014, Brendan Kane adopted ‘a queen’s eye view’ when arguing that Queen Elizabeth had drawn no distinction between rebellion in Ireland and in England, and expected her officers to treat with equal severity all who were found guilty of rebellion in either jurisdiction. In this, Kane showed that, at the conclusion of the Revolt of the Northern Earls in England in 1569–70, the queen insisted that as a sign of her disapproval of rebellion more people be killed than had been put to death up to then by her officers in the field. Her insistence left one such officer fretting that further executions by martial law would ‘leave many places naked of inhabitants’. Kane found this pertinent to Ireland because it reminded him of similar concerns that were voiced about Ireland in the sixteenth century as vast expanses of the countryside there were laid to waste when government troops suppressed rebellion.15 This method of relating incidents in Ireland to contemporary happenings in England was, in the opinion of the editors of Age of Atrocity, masking the exceptional level of violence that had characterised the history of Ireland from c.1530 to c.1650. Such practitioners, they argued, were wishing violence away, and the purpose of the volume was to counter these efforts by reintroducing ‘violence into the Irish historical record’. To advance their mission, they recommended that historians take account of ‘the rhetoric of ideological justification of violence and atrocity’, and accept ‘just how widespread, and how shockingly extreme, was the use of martial law in Tudor and Stuart Ireland’.16 They gave credit to literary scholars with ‘theoretical and methodological advances’ in this direction, and, among historians of previous generations, they isolated D. B. Quinn as one who had ‘revealed more about the centrality of violence and atrocity in the English pursuit of colonial expansion than the work of any previous writer’. My own work from the 1970s was also exempted from their general condemnation because I had ‘acknowledged . . . the violence of the sixteenth century’. However, they

15 Brendan Kane, ‘Elizabeth on rebellion in Ireland and England: semper eadem?’ in Elizabeth I and Ireland, ed. Brendan Kane and Valerie McGowan-Doyle (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 261–85, at 283. 16 Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity, pp. 18–19.

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believed my efforts had been insufficient to counter ‘the sanitizing effect’ of other authors.17 Edwards charged these ‘sanitizers’, or ‘reform-centred scholars’, with assuming that Tudor rulers hoped ‘to extend crown authority by reform rather than by conquest’, and with accepting that any violence that officers of the crown engaged upon was ‘inadvertent’ and confined largely to the closing decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.18 Since Edwards recognised that these authors accepted that the English government in Ireland had occasionally deviated from its normal conciliatory path during the 1580s and 1590s, he devoted his chapter, entitled ‘The escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland’, to a consideration of the government’s activities from the 1530s through the 1560s, to demonstrate that the use of violence was constant. Thus he explained that, when, in 1534, King Henry VIII had furnished an army of 2,300 English soldiers to suppress the rebellion of the Fitzgeralds, earls of Kildare, the rebels had been treated with ‘unparalleled ruthlessness’ and ‘unbridled state terror’. This, as Edwards described it, resulted in the destruction of the Fitzgerald army, followed by a sequence of revenge ‘massacres’, and then the gruesome execution in London of Thomas, Earl of Kildare, with his five uncles, notwithstanding the promise given to that earl by the king’s governor, that his life would be spared. What happened in Ireland, according to Edwards, was also different from contemporary practice in England because ‘significantly more rebels’ were executed in 1534–5 in Ireland than were put to death two years later in England when the Pilgrimage of Grace was suppressed.19 In Ireland also, according to Edwards, ‘mere victory was insufficient’, as the government forces set out to annihilate the leading rebels and their supporters ‘to deter other prospective opponents from taking the field’. Then also, according to Edwards, ‘despite claiming sovereignty over the island, the English troops treated the country more as an enemy territory or “strange realm” than a subject jurisdiction’, which, he contended, was ‘a typical feature of colonial conflicts’. 17 Ibid., pp. 18, 15; the work by Quinn they had particularly in mind was the chapter entitled ‘Horror story’ in D. B. Quinn, The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 123–42; the publications of mine to which they refer are Nicholas Canny, ‘The ideology of English colonisation: from Ireland to America’, The William and Mary Quarterly 30 (1973), 575–98; and Canny, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: A Pattern Established, 1565–1576 (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976). 18 David Edwards, ‘The escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland’ in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, 34–78, esp. 34–7. 19 On this point, Edwards was challenging a comparison that had been advanced in Steven Ellis, Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603 (London: Longman, 1985), p. 142.

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The entire campaign, according to Edwards, established that, in Ireland, ‘subject status (and English lineage) did not have the same value’ that was accorded it in the north of England.20 Edwards argued further that, following this exemplary suppression of the Kildare rebellion, the crown, after 1546 and until 1566, had set about securing its position more firmly ‘by the creation of a cordon sanitaire around the Pale’. This area, lying to the west and north of Dublin and populated largely by people of English descent, had been the principal bridgehead of English influence in the country since the twelfth century. The expansion of this area, according to Edwards, entailed clearing the neighbouring Gaelic districts of inhabitants before ‘re-peopling’ them with recruits from England, in a scheme later known as the plantation of Laois/Offaly. This plantation, which Edwards described as ‘the government’s first great colonial project’, was accompanied by efforts by successive governors to extend crown influence and seize territory in east Ulster, and to place extensive areas of the province of Leinster, which had remained in Gaelic possession, under the command of English captains endowed with commissions of martial law.21 Once in position, as Edwards has explained and as John Derricke depicted at the time (see Figure 6.1), they ‘entered the field two or three times a year’, and frequently employed draconian measures to suppress opposition, or even to anticipate it with pre-emptive strikes. To such injustice, he contended, was added occasional massacre, the most notorious being that at Mullaghmast in County Kildare in 1578. This incident, which had been previously studied by Vincent Carey, occurred a decade later than Edwards’ terminal date of 1566. However, as Carey had explained, this atrocity was one product of the Laois/Offaly plantation.22 The totality of what occurred, says Edwards, makes it difficult to accept ‘that the royal government did not have a policy of conquest’, even if none of the mid-century monarchs ‘approved a programme of military expansion that envisaged the immediate subjugation of the whole country’.23 Edwards details ‘the prolonged, intensive warfare’ and the use of scorchedearth policies to effect submissions of their opponents as proof of ‘the crown’s embrace of expansion by conquest’. He establishes also that the number of troops in government pay increased steadily over time, and that they were able to kill their Irish opponents more efficiently because they had more 20 Edwards, ‘Escalation’, esp. 54–60. 21 Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, pp. 34–7. 22 Edwards, ‘Escalation’, esp. 63–71; Vincent Carey, ‘John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney and the massacre at Mullaghmast, 1578’, Irish Historical Studies 31 (1999), 305–27. 23 Edwards, ‘Escalation’, 78.

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Figure 6.1 Woodcut from John Derricke, The Image of Ireland (London, 1581). (Courtesy of The University of Edinburgh)

ready access to guns.24 This gives Edwards reason to challenge what he describes as ‘the reform-centred orthodoxy’, in which authors discounted the violence that occurred in Ireland when seeking to dovetail events there with narratives of England’s history. The efforts of Edwards and his colleagues have certainly restored to the historical mainstream the violence that characterised much of the government’s endeavour in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. They also present a plausible case that, from the 1530s to the 1560s, the government was bent on conquest, and they show that government efforts were marred by atrocity throughout. Oddly, they disregard the evidence employed by those who contend that the ambition of government was to reform, rather than destroy, Irish society. Had they looked critically at such evidence they would, 24 Edwards, ‘Escalation’, 65.

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I suggest, have been confirmed in their view that the desire of the government to complete the conquest of Ireland seldom flagged. The two instruments of government that have been credited with underpinning the reform strategy were: the passage by the Irish parliament of 1541/2 of an Act declaring King Henry VIII to be king of Ireland; and the adoption by the government of a scheme described by historians of later generations as the policy of ‘surrender and re-grant’.25 Brendan Bradshaw believed that these instruments were interdependent and that those who sponsored them believed they would provide the crown with the opportunity to extend its influence in Ireland by moderate means. Bradshaw, and those who follow his lead, credit Sir Anthony St Leger, the governor of the time, and the chancellor, Sir Thomas Cusack – who was a member of a distinguished Old English family within the Pale – with being the authors of these two devices, which, Bradshaw further argued, were inspired by Erasmian humanism.26 Whatever about Erasmus, we have it on no less an authority than John Bale, a rigid English Protestant divine, that St Leger and Cusack were among the few committed and informed Protestants he had encountered during his brief sojourn in Ireland.27 On the issue of surrenders, Cusack and St Leger each explained that they had negotiated settlements with Gaelic lords out of necessity rather than principle, because the government lacked the military resources to pursue a war that seemed likely to become widespread if it ever got under way.28 They were all the more concerned over this once it became clear that the attention of King Henry VIII was shifting from Ireland to France, where from 1544 to 1546 he conducted a major military campaign.29 Even the Act of Kingship can be seen to have had more to do with conquest than with reform, since the stated ambition of its framers was to have ‘both English and Irish’ in Ireland ‘recognize’ Henry as ‘their sovereign by the name of their king’, according to the ‘style and name of “Rex 25 Christopher Maginn, ‘“Surrender and regrant” in the historiography of sixteenthcentury Ireland’, Sixteenth Century 38 (2007), 955–74. 26 Edwards, ‘Escalation’, 36; Brendan Bradshaw, The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 1979). 27 John Bale, The Vocaycon of John Bale in The Harleian Miscellany, vol. V I (London, 1810), pp. 437–64, p. 449. 28 For the file of related correspondence, see Steven G. Ellis and James Murray, eds., Calendar of State Papers Ireland: Tudor Period, 1509–1547 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2017), pp. 308–47; here, each document is summarised at about onethird of the original. Given that I am arguing against received wisdom in the next few paragraphs, I have chosen to quote from nineteenth-century editions that printed most of the relevant documents in full. 29 Neil Murphy, The Tudor Occupation of Boulogne: Conquest, Colonization and Imperial Monarchy, 1544–50 (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

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Hibernie” [King of Ireland] put in the place of “Dominus Hibernie” [lord of Ireland]’. This change was to dispel ‘many fantasies and opinions out of Irishmen’s heads . . . and especially that abominable error that the most of them reputed the Bishop of Rome as head and king of this land’. This newly designated kingdom, according to enthusiasts for the Act, would be recognised ‘as united and knit to the imperial crown of the realm of England’.30 Independently of the Act, crown officials had been seeking, with the king’s agreement, to terminate the ongoing conflict by entering into compacts with Irish lords with whom they had been at war. Those confident of a successful outcome were cautioned by Cusack that the only benefit to the state would be that lords who surrendered to the crown would henceforth hold the ‘captainship’ of their respective ‘countries’ ‘by the King’s appointment’ rather than by custom. Where this happened, said Cusack, the surrendering lords would identify successors from among their legitimate sons, who would then become royal wards and be placed with families either in the English Pale in Ireland or in England, where they were ‘to learn the English tongue and to wear their habit’. The steps to civility identified by Cusack were to be monitored by commissioners to ensure that lords would remain obedient and that the poor would be relieved of unjust exactions. Whenever these conditions were ignored, insisted Cusack, the arrangements would become void and the lordships would revert to the crown.31 Cusack conceded that those surrendering would retain some of their ‘power’ until ‘they be somewhat trained and feel the commodity of a civil life’.32 However, the king stipulated that, whenever his representatives negotiated with any lords, they should draw a pragmatic distinction between what was demanded of those whose territories lay close to the Pale and who might ‘easily’ be compelled to accept ‘reasonable conditions’, and those in the 30 Lord Deputy and Council to King Henry VIII, 24 October 1541, in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, pp. 339–44. The ‘error’ stemmed from the belief that King Henry II had been declared lord of Ireland by Pope Adrian IV in 1154, under the terms of the bull Laudabiliter, and that this papal donation had justified Henry’s conquest of Ireland in 1172; see F. X. Martin, ‘Diarmait Mac Murchada and the coming of the AngloNormans’ (43–66, at 57–66) and ‘Allies and an overlord, 1169–72’ (67–97, at 89) in A New History of Ireland, vol. I I : Medieval Ireland, 1169–1534, ed. Art Cosgrove (Oxford University Press, 1987); ‘An Act that the King of England, his heirs and successors, be Kings of Ireland’ in Statutes at Large . . . 1310–1786, vol. I (Dublin, 1786), 176–7. 31 Thomas Cusack to Privy Council, n.d., ‘Cusack’s device to your most humble and honourable Wisdoms’ in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document no. 347, 326–30. 32 Lord Deputy and Council of Ireland to King Henry VIII, 28 August 1541 in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document no. 343, pp. 313–17.

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remote provinces who were being embraced as subjects only because they could not be expelled ‘without a great force’. Cusack believed that accepting outliers to mercy would, in itself, make them more conducive to peace and stability because previously they had been categorised as ‘Irish enemies’, thus leading them to believe ‘that one day Englishmen [would] banish them, and put them from their lands forever’.33 The correspondence relevant to the various submissions negotiated in 1541/2 – particularly those concerning lordships remote from Dublin – makes it clear that all were considered as short-term solutions to chronic problems. Thus, while St Leger stated in 1541 that the ‘submission of O’Neill’ would induce other Irish lords to do likewise, he privately admitted that he would have preferred to have seen O’Neill expelled from his lordship.34 This was consistent with what St Leger and his Council had stated as recently as August 1541, when they had described O’Neill as the ‘very gall and poison’ of the realm and ‘the only disturber of the common weale of the same’.35 St Leger had refrained from recommending the expulsion of O’Neill only because he feared this would trigger a general revolt of all Gaelic lords. This arose from his belief that, since the other Irish lords knew that O’Neill had agreed to surrender, they would interpret any attack made upon him as a ‘signal’ that the crown was intent on ‘a general conquest’. St Leger hesitated also because, in the event of O’Neill’s lordship being ‘conquered and the said O’Neill banished or slain’, the government would have been left to rule over an extensive territory lacking in castles since the government did not have the resources to ‘erect castles and send people to inhabit the same’, without which the lordship would ‘remain as a land waste’. Therefore, St Leger recommended that O’Neill be received to mercy only because his overthrow would result in his lordship being occupied by ‘some other as evil as the said O’Neill’.36

33 King Henry VIII to the Lord Deputy and Council in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document no. 348, pp. 330–6; for a discussion of the more stringent conditions imposed on lords close to the Pale, see Christopher Maginn, ‘Civilizing’ Gaelic Leinster: The Extension of Tudor Rule in the O’Byrne and O’Toole Lordships (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005), pp. 65–76, esp. p. 66. 34 Lord Deputy St Leger to King Henry VIII, 17 December 1541 in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document 355, pp. 350–5; the reference here was to Conn Bacagh O’Neill who would be created earl of Tyrone in 1542. 35 Lord Deputy and Council to King Henry VIII, 28 August 1541 in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document no. 343, pp. 313–17. 36 Council of Ireland to King Henry VIII, n.d., ‘Recommendation for accepting O’Neill’ in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, part I I I contd, document 337, pp. 355–8.

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Even as arrangements with O’Neill and other Irish lords were being considered, the king sought assurance that all agreements were potentially reversible and that crown title to Irish lands was not being frittered away. The king was cautious because he too believed that conceding terms to Irish lords was a pragmatic second-best option. His particular concern was that the arrangements would become a ‘hindrance’ should he, or his heirs, have a future opportunity ‘to enterprise a general extirpation of these traitors’.37 Essentially, as far as the king and his advisors in both Ireland and England were concerned, the lords who were submitting were trespassers upon property that belonged rightfully to the crown as a result of the twelfthcentury conquest. However, Henry VIII came away satisfied that the compacts being entered upon strengthened, rather than weakened, crown title to the lands in question, because these trespassers on crown property were willing ‘to [ac]knowledge and confess his title which they had ever refused’. These ‘honest conditions’ would, his advisors assured the king, help to ‘reduce’ the Irish to civility and obedience. However, should they break their pledges, the king’s title would be ‘of no worse case, but rather . . . better than before’. The king was advised therefore ‘to assaye this experiment’ which, if it proved unsuccessful, would justify him in having ‘a conquest by his wisdom and choosing’, rather than having one forced upon him when he lacked the resources to ensure a successful outcome.38 These exchanges demonstrate that all parties with responsibility for managing Ireland were agreed that conquest offered the best means of establishing stability. However, they had no choice but to settle for a conciliatory policy, because the king had decided to dispatch an army of 36,000 men to France with the purpose of seizing by conquest the town of Boulogne and refashioning it, and the surrounding countryside, as a physical extension of the English realm. The Boulogne expedition has been studied by Neil Murphy, who reveals what precisely Henry VIII and his advisors had in mind when they spoke of conquest. The English army laid siege to Boulogne and other fortified positions and forced the defending garrisons to capitulate. Then, after the civilian population of the town had been evacuated to parts of France still controlled by their king, the English troops cleared the surrounding countryside of people and crops by scorched earth methods, to ensure that no local 37 The Council with the King to the Council in London, 1 Aug. 1541, Letters and Papers, Henry VIII, vol. X V I, document 1058. 38 Council in London to the Council with the King, 11 August 1541 in State Papers Ireland, Henry VIII, vol. I, part 2, document 154, pp. 668–74.

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support, or provisions, would be available to any relieving French force. Then, after the entire area had been depopulated, the English army secured it from enemy attack by constructing fortified positions. The vacant territory was then surveyed and mapped and thus made ready for repeopling from England’s commercial and farming communities (ideally from Kent), and for establishing the Church of England on what had been French soil.39 Murphy explains that the course followed, in what proved an expensive, destructive and, ultimately, futile campaign at Boulogne, was consistent both with the methods used by English and French forces during the Hundred Years’ War, and with those employed by other European monarchs in the sixteenth century when seeking to conquer parts of neighbouring kingdoms. He also shows that what was being attempted at Boulogne was popular in England, and continued to be represented positively for decades following England’s loss in 1558 of its continental bridge-head at Calais that had been extended briefly to Boulogne.40 This popularity demonstrates that the English government and its subjects were more interested in retaining a foothold across the English Channel in France, than in securing its borders with Scotland, much less expanding its authority in distant Ireland. What happened at Boulogne in the 1540s was, according to Murphy, a resumption of the campaigns pursued in France by Henry VIII earlier in the century. This explains why it is reasonable to attribute the harsh measures employed by English troops in Ireland during the suppression of the Kildare rebellion of the 1530s, which David Edwards has detailed, to earlier English involvement with France, because Sir William Skeffington and Lord Leonard Grey, who led the suppression of the rebellion in Ireland, had each served apprenticeships in these 1520s campaigns of Henry VIII in France.41 What held true for the 1530s was more apparent in the 1550s and 1560s because, as Murphy demonstrates, many of the commanders, soldiers and artisans employed at Boulogne were redeployed either to establish fortified positions on England’s border with Scotland or to promote the plantation in Laois/Offaly.42 Murphy challenges the argument of Edwards and others concerning the innovative character of the Laois/Offaly plantation. Instead, he contends that it, like the Boulogne enterprise, was designed to expand the boundaries of an existing English Pale – in this case, the English Pale in Ireland as opposed to that in the vicinity of Calais. This was to be achieved by 39 Murphy, Boulogne, pp. 21–65, 86–105, 129. 42 Ibid., pp. 104, 180, 181, 182, 183.

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40 Ibid., p. 237.

41 Ibid., p. 44.

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depopulating the captured area, and securing it with a chain of fortified positions, and surveying and mapping it as a preliminary to converting it into an extension of England, to be populated by English settlers who would be responsible thereafter for their own defence. What happened at Boulogne, and later in the Laois/Offaly plantation, was not, claims Murphy, a harbinger of later English colonisation in Ireland and in North America, as several scholars have contended, ‘but rather the English crown’s final attempt to establish colonies overseas through the use of state resources alone’.43 Murphy’s study has proven revelatory because it clarifies that, when English people spoke of conquest, they meant deploying military forces for the displacement and killing of people on a large scale. He reveals also that many of the personnel associated with the Boulogne expedition of the 1540s were eventually settled in Ireland, which set a precedent for future demobilisations. The next major English military disbandment was that of the army commanded by Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, that had become redundant following another futile effort in 1562/3 to establish an English foothold in France, this time at Le Havre. Several of its officers were invited by Sir Henry Sidney, brother-in-law to Warwick and governor of Ireland, to take the places of those he was dismissing who had served in Ireland with Sussex. Of these, many, like Sussex himself, were veterans of the Boulogne campaign.44 In the years immediately following, the recruits from England who filled casual vacancies in the ranks of the crown’s army in Ireland were generally considered unfit for service. However, when the size of the English army in Ireland was increased to 8,000 troops in the 1580s and to 20,000 in the later 1590s, to deal with major rebellions, the government assigned to Ireland those who had served in various campaigns in Brittany, Flanders and the Netherlands. Service in Ireland enabled these troops to continue in government pay, and they were lured to the Irish theatre by figures such as Sir Philip Sidney and the second earl of Essex, who had experience in European warfare.45 Then, when they in turn were demobilised at the conclusion of the Nine Years’ War, they were assigned positions or land in the various Irish plantations of the early seventeenth century.46 Later again, at the conclusion of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, 1638–52, officers and soldiers from 43 Ibid., p. 5. 44 Ibd., pp. 237–8; Canny, Elizabethen Conquest, pp. 43, 70. 45 Rory Rapple, Martial Power and Elizabethan Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594 (Cambridge University Press, 2009); John McGurk, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The 1590s Crisis (Manchester University Press, 1997). 46 Joseph M. McLaughlin, ‘The making of the Irish Leviathan: 1603–25: state building in Ireland during the reign of James VI and I’ (PhD thesis, National University of Ireland, Galway, 1999).

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England’s parliamentary armies agreed to take farms of land in the Cromwellian settlement of Ireland as compensation for arrears in pay.47 One consequence of all such deployments was that many of those appointed to uphold English interests in Ireland throughout the entire period were people who had experience of some of the most gruesome conflicts being fought in Europe. It is not surprising that, in Ireland, such individuals employed the same methods that had proven effective in these various theatres. At the same time, military propagandists – notably, Thomas Churchyard who had served at Boulogne – praised the continued dastardly deeds of their heroes, such as Humphrey Gilbert, whom they had accompanied to Ireland.48 Some, like Gilbert, undertook adventures elsewhere, but many with continental experience remained in Ireland as captains of garrisons, as proprietors of property that came into government hands by various means, as members of the Council appointed to advise the governor in Dublin, and as presidents or council members of the Provincial Presidencies that governed the provinces of Munster and of Connacht from 1569 forward. Most strove to secure futures for themselves at the expense of recalcitrant landowners, even when their ambitions were curbed either by the various compacts the crown had entered into with Irish lords, or by the reluctance of Queen Elizabeth to countenance the conquest that many wished to pursue. These self-seekers got further opportunity to advance themselves because none of the compacts agreed upon under the ‘surrender and re-grant’ scheme led to the envisaged easy transition for Gaelic lords to become English-style proprietors. In every instance, the arrangements entered upon provoked tension within the particular lordships, which provided the government with the pretext either to dismiss the compacts, or to enforce subdivisions of power and property between some of the rival claimants to succession. The course of events was further complicated because neither the central administration in Dublin nor its ambitious servants were in a position to advance any consistent policy for Ireland. For her part, Queen Elizabeth was unwilling to supply the level of military support, such as Henry VIII had 47 John P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (London: Longman, 1865); the findings of Prendergast have recently been challenged in David Brown, Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars (Manchester University Press, 2020), where that author argues that it was English ‘adventurers’ who invested in Irish land in 1642, rather than soldiers in the Cromwellian army who benefitted mostly from that confiscation. 48 Murphy, Boulogne, pp. 236–8; Thomas Churchyard, A generall rehearsal of warres, called Churchyardes choise (London, 1579).

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made available for the Boulogne campaign, that would have been required to implement any of the many comprehensive projects for settling Ireland that were proposed to her by servants and projectors.49 However, the queen was equally unwilling to turn her back on such schemes, even when the actions of some of her agents were driving members of Ireland’s social elite to take up arms against English rule. Under these circumstances, some of the more prominent of the governors of Ireland, described by Ciaran Brady as ‘programmatic’, developed strategies to advance innovative schemes without increasing cost to the English exchequer.50 One stratagem devised by Thomas Radcliffe, Earl of Sussex, and expanded upon by Sir Henry Sidney in the 1570s, required local communities in Ireland, initially within the Pale, to contribute towards the cost of maintaining the English troops that had been introduced to defend and discipline them. Such attempts at having communities pay for the privilege of enjoying the benefits of English order, if not law, were extended into Munster and Connacht once Provincial Presidencies had been instituted in these two provinces.51 Another stratagem was to encourage people from England to invest their personal resources, or those of their associates, in re-establishing title and possession to extensive territories that had once belonged to the crown, or to their own ancestors, following the English conquest of the twelfth century. Several of the individuals attracted by such possibilities – including Secretary of State Sir Thomas Smith, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, Sir Nicholas Bagenal, Sir William Drury and Sir Peter Carew – had had previous experience in the campaigns in either Boulogne or Calais, and they conducted themselves in Ireland as they had done in France.52 These adventurers looked to such precedent, or to colonisation practices of ancient Rome, to justify the expulsion or slaughter of existing proprietors – regardless of whether they were of Gaelic or English ancestries – to make way for English settlers. These endeavours proved to be innovative also in establishing the practice that would be followed in later colonisation efforts in both Ireland and North America: of harnessing private resources to advance radical schemes. Queen Elizabeth approved such schemes, believing they would

49 David Heffernan, ed., Reform Treatises on Tudor Ireland, 1537–1599 (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2016). 50 Ciaran Brady, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536–1588 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). 51 Ibid., pp. 113–58. 52 Murphy, Boulogne, pp. 180, 182–3, 232, 236–7.

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increase the crown’s reach in Ireland without cost to the English exchequer.53 Successive administrations in Dublin, recognising, and regretting, that they lacked the resources necessary to expand government authority throughout Ireland, limited themselves to piecemeal action while they distanced themselves from private ventures undertaken by such as Smith and Carew. Officials remained conspicuously aloof from the ‘Ulster project’ of the 1570s led by Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, once it ran into difficulty and became associated with atrocity.54 However, few in Ireland were convinced by the official distinctions that were being drawn between private undertakings that had been approved from London, and the normal work of the Dublin administration. Such distinctions rang hollow, not least because, during the sixteenth century, the crown convened parliaments in Ireland only when they required communal endorsement for whichever religious settlement was favoured by succeeding monarchs, or for whatever land confiscation and projected settlement the government wished to pursue in the aftermath of rebellion. Even then, some of the parliamentary assemblies were perfunctory, the citing of local grievance was discouraged, and the Great Council, which had customarily given a voice to the nobility of the Pale in the formulation of policy, fell into abeyance. Provincial Presidencies also became associated with arbitrary rule, as they gave greater attention to imposing order through martial law than to promoting English common law. Also, while the presidencies were purportedly concerned to undermine the authority that Irish lords held over their subordinates, they actually consolidated this power by requiring lords to present the authorities with lists, or ‘books’, of those for whose conduct they would be responsible, thus empowering the presidents to execute by martial law those for whom nobody was answerable. Distinction between the conduct of official business and the activity of private agents was also blurred because the Provincial Presidencies were responsible for identifying land and resources to which the crown, or the Church, might establish title, prior to making grants to private adventurers. The consequence, as I phrased it in 1976, was that, in the eyes of landowners, presidencies became ‘stalking horses for colonization’.55 53 D. B. Quinn, ‘Sir Thomas Smith and the beginnings of English colonial theory’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 89 (1945), 543–60; Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, pp. 85–8. 54 Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, pp. 88–92; David Heffernan, Walter Devereux, First Earl of Essex, and the Colonization of North-East Ulster, c.1573–6 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2018). 55 Canny, Elizabethan Conquest, pp. 114–15.

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Such activity, added to the threats presented by the private enterprising that had been licensed by the crown, provoked a sequence of rebellions in every province of Ireland during the 1570s and 1580s. Several rebels claimed they were resorting to arms to defend Catholicism, which justified their bids for military support in Catholic Europe. Whenever this occurred, the queen denied that her subjects in Ireland had grounds for religious grievance. She also denied that she wished to conquer the country, despite evidence that some of her appointees had been responsible for atrocities. The most notorious of such in the 1570s were those associated with the expeditions to Ulster sponsored by Thomas Smith, her secretary of state, and by Walter Devereux, Earl of Essex, before his death in Ireland in 1576. Such ambivalence, and the chaos created by these private ventures, convinced Sir Henry Sidney, who served as governor in Ireland for much of this time, that colonisation was ‘no subject’s enterprise, a prince’s purse and power must do it’.56 This desire came closer to being realised whenever the queen’s opponents in Ireland solicited support from the papacy and from Spain. When this occurred, the English military presence in Ireland, as already mentioned, was increased dramatically. The enhanced forces were used in the 1580s to confront rebellion in the province of Leinster and then also in Munster, where the earl of Desmond and his subordinates resisted English intrusion. Then, in the late 1590s and into the next decade, the queen’s army, which then reached its greatest strength, confronted the countrywide confederacy led principally by Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and supported by Philip III of Spain. The troops employed on these occasions were, as we saw, veterans from continental warfare, and their commanders – Arthur Lord Grey de Wilton in the 1580s, and Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, and then Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, in the 1590s – were men with experience in France, the Low Countries and farther afield. The Smith and Essex colonisation efforts of the 1570s had become infamous because of the havoc and massacres with which they were associated, but these were minor incidents compared with the devastation that Lord Grey inflicted upon Munster in the 1580s and Mountjoy inflicted upon Ulster, and George Carew again upon Munster during the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. Grey’s creation of famine conditions that he considered necessary to compel his opponents in Munster to surrender is best known from the graphic description by the poet Edmund Spenser. However, Spenser’s

56 Ibid., p. 90.

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depiction drew upon the prosaic observations of John Hooker, published in Holinshed’s Chronicle, describing how a fertile province was made so barren both of man and beast that whosoever did travel from the one end to the other of all Munster . . . he should not meet any man, woman or child saving in towns and cities; nor yet see any beast but the very wolves, the foxes and other like ravening beasts; many of them lay dead being famished, and the residue gone elsewhere.57

Fynes Moryson provided equally moving portrayals of the starvation and cannibalism to which the population of Ulster had been reduced by the famine that had been deliberately created by Mountjoy’s army during the closing stages of the Nine Years’ War. The pamphleteer Barnaby Riche concluded from his own observations that Ireland could ‘be settled’ only ‘by force . . . yet famine must be an especial means to accomplish it’.58 When such issues were debated in London, Queen Elizabeth and her senior officials blamed the loss of life that occurred on the perverse unwillingness of their opponents to submit, and continued to insist that ‘conquest’ had never been their purpose.59 This official position changed once victory had been achieved, and Sir John Davies, solicitor general (1603–6) and then attorney general (1606–19) for Ireland, exulted on how a ‘new conquest’ had been accomplished by Queen Elizabeth. This, pronounced Davies, gave ‘the lordship paramount of all the lands in the realm’ to her successor King James VI and I, which entitled him to allocate whatever he pleased to servants and warriors ‘or to such colonies as he will plant immediately upon the conquest’ as had been the practice in ancient Rome. Davies conceded that James, as a ‘conqueror’, might forgo his entitlement, and receive some of the ‘natives or ancient inhabitants . . . into his protection and avoweth them for his subjects’, and permit them to ‘continue their possessions . . . by good title . . . according to the rules of the law which the conqueror hath allowed or established if they will submit themselves to it’.60 This, for the most part, claimed Davies, was what King James had opted for, and Davies rejoiced how the Irish population (excepting the lords) had 57 Edmund Spenser, A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. W. L. Renwick (Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 104; Hooker in Holinshed’s Chronicle, 2nd ed. (1587), pp. 459–60. 58 John McGurk, ‘The pacification of Ulster, 1600–3’ in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, 119–29; Rich, ‘To the queen’s most excellent Majesty’, Washington, DC, Folger Skakespeare Library, Folger, V 6 214ff. 236r–242r. 59 McGurk, ‘Pacification’, 121–2. 60 ‘ The case of Tanistry’ in A Report of Cases and Matters in Law Resolved in the King’s Courts in Ireland Collected and Digested by Sir John Davies (Dublin, 1762), 111.

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begun to shift allegiance from their former lords, whom they had seen defeated ignominiously, to ‘the Crown of England’ which was ‘brai’d [braided] (as it were) in a mortar with the Sword, Famine & Pestilence’. In doing so, claimed Davies, the people now ‘altogether submitted themselves to the English government, received the laws and magistrates, and most gladly embraced the King’s pardon and peace in all parts of the realm, with demonstrations of joy and comfort’. All this, asserted Davies, was consequent upon the government having ‘made indeed, an entire, perfect and final conquest of Ireland’.61 For Davies, the positive dimension to this was that, once the people who had survived the conquest came to enjoy the benefits of English common law and the possessive individualism associated with it, they would appreciate the benefit of sending ‘their children to schools, especially to learn the English language’, after which he anticipated ‘the next generation [would] in tongue & heart, and every way else become English so as there [would] be no difference or distinction but the Irish sea betwixt us’.62 As Davies imagined this glorious outcome, he acknowledged the dramatic means, including the employment of famine as a weapon of war, required to have ‘the conquest . . . established in the hearts of all men’.63 What had been accomplished, as Davies described it, conformed with what had been prescribed in 1596 by Edmund Spenser in A View of the Present State of Ireland. There, Spenser had recommended that the army should effect a severe depopulation of the country through famine in order to force a general submission, after which the government would employ martial law to eliminate specified categories of people who cultivated historical memory. Such procedures, pronounced Spenser, would ensure that ‘in short time’ each individual who remained alive following the conquest would ‘learn quite to forget his Irish nation’.64 What was recommended by Spenser and exulted in by Davies highlighted their acceptance that the conquest they favoured involved the death or exile of broad swathes of the country’s population following their defeat in war, and depriving the survivors of their previous religious and cultural identities. To achieve this second objective, the advocates of conquest wanted rid of Catholic priests, and also members of the Gaelic learned orders who had been holding people to their traditional loyalties. The positive outcome for the apologists for conquest was that those Irish people who would survive the 61 Sir John Davies, A Discovery of the True Causes why Ireland was never Entirely Subdued . . . Until the beginning of his Majesty’s happy reign (London, 1612), sig. k4 r. 62 Ibid., sig. Mm 2 r and v. 63 Ibid., sig. k4 r. 64 Spenser, View, p. 156.

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military onslaught and co-operated with reform measures would become indistinguishable from English Protestants. Davies’ assertion that the conquest of Ireland had produced the desired outcome was nullified only by his belief that King James had been unnecessarily lenient towards Ireland’s elites, and excessively tolerant of Catholicism, when he had been presented with the opportunity to extinguish both. This opinion was shared by many of Davies’ English contemporaries in Ireland, and by many of the generation that succeeded them who controlled government for most of the first half of the seventeenth century. These hoped to recover the ground that had been lost by provoking elements of the surviving elite into taking rash action that would result in a piecemeal loss of their property and power.65 Thomas Viscount Wentworth (earl of Strafford from 1640), who was appointed from England by King Charles I to govern Ireland, 1633–41, wanted a more dramatic solution, and contemplated a reconquest of Ireland to bring society there to conform with what he represented as English social norms. Wentworth’s revival of these sixteenth-century ambitions was exceptional, and may have been inspired by Spenser’s View, which was published for the first time in 1633 at Wentworth’s request.66 What seemed extreme in the 1630s became commonplace following the Irish rebellion that burst forth in Ulster in October 1641 and quickly engulfed the entire country. Rebellion took the form of an attack by the dispossessed Irish upon the settler population who had prospered from the land and resources that had once been theirs. The Protestants in Ireland who survived this onslaught were quick to claim that it had been fomented by the papacy with the intention of massacring all the Protestants who had settled in the country. However, given the interlinked civil wars that were fought in Scotland, England and Ireland until 1652, the survivors from 1641 and the governments in Dublin and London had limited opportunity to engage in retaliatory action until 1649, by which time the English parliamentary forces had prevailed over the supporters of the king in England. With victory secure in England, the Rump Parliament dispatched Oliver Cromwell, at the head of an army 12,000 strong, to re-establish English control over Ireland, and to wreak vengeance on all they considered responsible for the rebellion of 1641. The achievements of this force, supplemented by many of the Protestant troops already in Ireland, as well as the atrocities associated with their 65 Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 164–275. 66 Ibid., pp. 275–98, esp. p. 287.

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actions, are well known.67 More relevant to our present purpose is that it has been estimated that the military campaign that was conducted between 1649 and 1652 led not only to the defeat or expulsion from Ireland of all forces that opposed it, but to the loss through killing, exile, famine and disease of at least 20 per cent, and perhaps 40 per cent, of the country’s population.68 This Cromwellian military success in Ireland was described as a conquest by victors as well as vanquished. It can also be seen to have been an act of attempted genocide because, once the Cromwellians had achieved military victory, their objective was to clear three of the four provinces of Ireland of all existing inhabitants, with the purpose of creating an entirely English Protestant society in these three provinces. This society was to be composed of those English (but not Scottish) Protestants in Ireland who had survived the 1641 rebellion and the ensuing warfare, together with proprietors, tenants and merchants to be brought directly from England or discharged from the parliamentary armies already in the country. Existing inhabitants in these three provinces were to be removed westwards across the Shannon River into the inhospitable Province of Connacht or County Clare. Once this ‘transplantation’ – such was the term used – had been accomplished, these resettled Natives were to be cut off from the outside world by soldier settlers who would occupy a strip of land 3 miles wide along the lines of the Shannon River and the sea coast. As a further assurance against disorder, this transplanted population was to be culled of potentially disruptive elements, which were to be sent either as labourers to the British West Indies or as soldiers to continental Europe to perish in the service of foreign powers.69 This scheme in social engineering, like all colonisation efforts, failed to produce the neat result promised by its authors, not least because the new grantees insisted that land was worthless without people to cultivate it for them. However, the fact that the concept became official policy for a brief interlude, illustrates the extreme deviation between the treatment considered appropriate for the defeated in Ireland and for those in England or Scotland. The fundamental difference was that all rulers of England, or their chief advisors, from Henry VIII to Oliver Cromwell, saw the conquest of Ireland as 67 James Scott Wheeler, Cromwell in Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macillan, 1999); Micheál Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008). 68 P. Lenihan, ‘War and population’, Irish Economic and Social History 24 (1997), 1–21. 69 Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement; Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 93–4.

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a desirable objective. What they understood by conquest, as we have witnessed from happenings at Boulogne in the 1530s, in the province of Munster in the 1580s, in Ulster during the 1590s and the early 1600s, and throughout the entire country during the Cromwellian epoch, was tantamount to genocide. This judgement can be made because it involved not only killing, including the deliberate killing of civilians, on a large scale, but also a determination to sever the historical memory of the survivors from the slaughter. This conclusion would hardly have surprised historians, regardless of their religious or political affiliation, writing of early modern Ireland, at any time previous to the twentieth century, even if some would have demurred at describing what was attempted as genocide. They would have been agreed, however, that the country had been conquered repeatedly, and that conquest had involved deplorable actions. They were not therefore disputing the facts, and the issue being debated was whether what the Irish had suffered was a deserved punishment brought upon themselves by a perverse population, or the product of the greed of English adventurers bent on profiting from the ruination of anybody who stood in their path. We are indebted to the editors and contributors to Age of Atrocity, for bringing us back to where this debate left off, and for reminding us that England’s involvement with Ireland over the years c.1530 – c. 1650 was characterised by the persistent denigration of its various populations, and by intermittent massacres, breaches of promise, murders and the summary executions of hundreds of people by martial law. Our argument here is that such actions alone did not amount to conquest, much less genocide. However, by provoking resistance and rebellion, they paved the way for eventual conquest. The reality, as Henry VIII and his associates had realised, was that it was beyond the capacity of government in Ireland to proceed to conquer the country without a dramatic augmentation in the military resources at its command. Such resources were made available to it only in the aftermath of rebellion during the last two decades of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and again with the arrival of the Cromwellian army. The available evidence leaves little doubt that, on both occasions, these military forces were consciously committed to a conquest of Ireland that, by modern definition, amounted to attempted genocide.

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Early modern Ireland was a land of war, subjected to more than a century of sustained and bloody violence from the 1540s. The Cromwellian conquest in the 1650s is widely acknowledged as one of its most traumatic and destructive episodes. Such was the scale of the devastation that a contemporaneous poet, Seán Ó Conaill, described it as ‘an coga do chríochnaig Éire [the war that finished Ireland]’.1 English expeditionary forces rarely displayed restraint in their dealings with the Catholic Irish. In addition to summarily executing captured soldiers and Catholic clerics, they also targeted non-combatants and deliberately destroyed buildings and crops to deprive the enemy of shelter and supplies. These brutal, indiscriminate tactics triggered widespread famine, which in turn facilitated the spread of diseases such as plague and dysentery, killing tens of thousands in the process, ‘to the desertinge not onely of houses and homes but cittyes and whole shyres’, according to one horrified eyewitness.2 Following their military victory, the English transplanted surviving Catholic Irish landowners and their dependents to the western province of Connacht, to make way for a new Protestant settler elite on the more fertile lands in the east and south of the country. They also shipped over 40,000 Irish troops into Spanish and French service on the continent and forcibly transported thousands of men, women and children to work in sugar plantations in the Caribbean. Only a handful of these émigrés ever returned home. Estimates of Ireland’s overall population loss in the 1650s range as high as 40 per cent, with their opponents at the time accusing the English of I would like to thank Robert Armstrong, Peter Ballagh, David Brown, Mark Hennessy, Éamonn Ó Ciardha and Gerard Farrell for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. David Brown also assisted Matthew Stout in preparing the map of the conquest. 1 C. O’Rahilly, ed., Five Seventeenth-Century Political Poems (Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies, 1977), p. 75. 2 ‘ The Aphorismical Discovery of Treasonable faction’ in A Contemporary History of Affairs in Ireland from 1641 to 1652, ed. J. T. Gilbert, 3 vols. (Dublin: Irish Archaeological and Celtic Society, 1879–80), I I, 98.

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pursuing a policy of total extermination. Surprisingly, given all that happened during these tumultuous years, the historiographical debate continues to focus narrowly on the leading English general, Oliver Cromwell, and two notorious massacres at the towns of Drogheda and Wexford that marked the outset of his campaign in late 1649.3 Few (if any) today would attempt to justify the excesses of the conquest, but to date nobody has specifically addressed the charge of genocide. This chapter will determine whether there is in fact a case to answer. *** In early December 1649, just over three months after Oliver Cromwell had landed in Dublin, Irish Catholic bishops gathered at the historic monastic site of Clonmacnoise. They issued a declaration warning their congregation not to expect reasonable conditions from the newly arrived invaders. Only through unity could they ‘preserve the Nation against the extirpation and the destruction of their Religion and fortune resolved on by the Enemy’.4 David Edwards argues that, in the sixteenth century, the Tudors used the word ‘extirpation’ exclusively in the context of total extermination.5 By the 1640s, however, it appears to have acquired a broader definition, meaning to destroy, uproot or banish, but not necessarily to kill. Indeed, the Catholic bishops stated that the English intended to achieve their objective of ‘extirpation’ either through ‘the Massacring or [emphasis added] banishment of the Catholique Inhabitants’.6 Cromwell immediately penned a stinging rejoinder, affirming his commitment to punish those guilty of crimes since the beginning of the war in 1641, but challenging the Catholic prelates to provide any evidence of actions tending towards ‘the destruction of the lives of the Inhabitants of this Nation’. He denied claims that the extirpation of the Catholic religion from Ireland would result in wholesale slaughter, and asserted his determination not to ‘take or suffer to be taken away the life of any man not in Armes, but by the Triall to which the People of this Nation are subject by Law’.7 As the number of atrocities by English forces escalated, Cromwell’s reassurances

3 For an example of this restricted approach, see M. Bennett, R. Gillespie and R. Scott Spurlock, eds., Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives (Liverpool University Press, 2021). 4 Certain acts and declarations made by the ecclesiastical congregation at Clonmacnoise (Kilkenny, 1649), p. 6. 5 D. Edwards, ‘Tudor Ireland: Anglicisation, mass killing and security’ in The Routledge History of Genocide, ed. C. Carmichael and R. Maguire (London: Routledge, 2015), 23–37, at 30. 6 Certain acts and declarations, p. 3. 7 A Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, for the undeceiving of deluded and seduced people (Cork, 1649) pp. 19–21.

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about due process did little to assuage the growing fears of Irish Catholics that he intended to annihilate them entirely. The intemperate exchange between the Catholic bishops and Cromwell reflected the frequently toxic nature of Anglo-Irish relations, dating back to the original English invasion of the late twelfth century. Those advocating harsh solutions to the ‘Irish problem’ included the Cambro-Norman cleric, Giraldus Cambrensis, who in 1185 infamously argued that the Gaelic Irish ought to be ‘disabled or totally destroyed’.8 The first English conquest, however, remained incomplete and, despite sporadic outbursts of violence, the medieval period witnessed a significant degree of cultural integration between the Gaelic Irish and the colonists – known later as the Old English – with the latter adopting many local customs, including widespread use of the Irish language. Four centuries later, as western Christendom divided along sectarian lines, the Tudor political elite rediscovered Cambrensis and readily embraced his views about the irredeemably barbarous nature of the Gaelic Irish and the need for tough, uncompromising measures to subdue the country in the interests of England. Successive monarchs from Henry VIII brutally asserted their authority through force of arms, in a savage ethno-religious conflict marked from the outset by a deep enmity between Irish and English, Catholic and Protestant. Ireland’s constitutional status as a dependent kingdom of England since Henry VIII’s Act of Kingly Title in 1541 further complicated matters. This Act unilaterally recognised all the inhabitants of Ireland as subjects of the English crown, but the Gaelic Irish rarely enjoyed the legal protections afforded their counterparts in England. Instead, warfare in Ireland shares many characteristics with colonial conflicts elsewhere in the Atlantic world, particularly regarding the scale and intensity of violence. Bruce Lenman includes the Tudor conquest of Ireland in his account of England’s colonial wars from 1550 to 1668, while Ben Kiernan outlines in convincing detail how English forces in sixteenth-century Ireland, as later in North America, utilised genocidal massacre as a deliberate military strategy.9 On the specific charge of genocide, however, David Edwards argues that, as the term ‘presupposes one nation or race setting about the annihilation of 8 For this translation of the Latin text, see Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1978), pp. 244–7. 9 B. Lenman, England’s Colonial Wars 1550–1688: Conflicts, Empire and National Identity (Harlow: Longman, 2001); B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 169–212.

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another’, the evidence remains somewhat equivocal.10 While fully acknowledging the traumatic consequences of the conquest for the indigenous population, he points out how English military commanders sometimes formed temporary alliances with Gaelic Irish leaders. Similarly, Tudor government policy vacillated between coercion and conciliation, seeking ultimately (if belatedly) to incorporate rather than totally eradicate the island’s inhabitants, though in a subservient role.11 Gaelic Irish resistance to English colonial expansion finally collapsed in the face of a sustained military onslaught during the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), thus closing the last internal political/military frontier in the newly established composite Stuart monarchy, which incorporated England, Scotland and now Ireland. For almost four decades thereafter, Ireland remained officially at peace, but the outward appearance of calm proved illusory. Recent research demonstrates how state violence directed against combatants and non-combatants alike continued to underpin colonial rule, principally through the ruthless and expansive enforcement of martial law.12 Moreover, English authorities in Ireland adopted an aggressive policy of Anglicisation – or de-Gaelicisation – in an effort to impose religious, legal and linguistic uniformity. As Gerard Farrell explains, rather than eliminate the Gaelic Irish, the government in Dublin sought instead to destroy their distinctive culture.13 The newly appointed attorney-general for Ireland, Sir John Davies, expressed the hope that, through interaction over time, natives and newcomers ‘might grow up together in one Nation’, albeit an exclusively English one, based on the Protestant faith, as well as the English language and common law.14 State-sponsored settler plantations, especially in the northern province of Ulster, re-emerged as a key weapon to transform the social, economic and political landscape of Ireland, through the forcible dispossession of Gaelic Catholic landholders and their replacement by Protestant newcomers from England and Scotland. Support for these policies was not restricted to callous military entrepreneurs or manipulative civil administrators. As Christopher Hill explained, the English intelligentsia, from Edmund Spenser through Francis Bacon to John Milton, ‘all shared the view that the Irish were culturally so inferior that their 10 Edwards, ‘Tudor Ireland’, 24. 11 Ibid., 25. 12 D. Edwards, P. Lenihan and C. Tait, eds., Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010), pp. 9–33. 13 G. Farrell, The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster (Cambridge: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 284. 14 J. Davies, A discoverie of the true causes why Ireland was never entirely subdued . . . (London, 1612), p. 281.

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subordination was natural and necessary’, displaying a ‘conscientious enthusiasm for conferring the benefits of English civilization on the natives, whether they liked it or not’.15 Deep-seated hostility towards Catholicism reinforced this cultural contempt. Writing in the 1630s, the renowned Puritan divine, William Gouge, denounced Catholics as the ‘deadliest enemies that Christ’s true Church ever had’.16 These enemies now included the ‘Old English’ in Ireland, who, along with the Gaelic Irish, had rejected religious reform and remained resolutely Catholic, experiencing sporadic persecution and political exclusion as a result. King James VI & I famously described them as mere ‘half subjects’, who gave their political loyalty to the crown but spiritual allegiance to Rome.17 English Protestant officials in Dublin, therefore, increasingly identified all Catholics as Irish, regardless of ethnic origin. This fatal intertwining of religious and ethnic animosities ensured a continuously fractured and frequently violent interaction between the Catholic Irish and English Protestants throughout the early decades of the seventeenth century. Systematic political and religious discrimination generated major discontent, and yet the magnitude of the rebellion that began in October 1641 genuinely took the government by surprise. A targeted but unsuccessful strike by Catholic landowners from Ulster, to disable the administration in Dublin before negotiating a settlement with James’ successor, Charles I, inadvertently sparked a nationwide, populist uprising, directed against Protestant settler communities throughout Ireland. The subsequent bloodshed demonstrated the complete failure to reconcile the Gaelic Irish to the new post-conquest settlement. As law and order collapsed across the localities, the kingdom spiralled into an increasingly savage cycle of violence and counterviolence. Detailed case studies suggest that thousands of Protestant men, women and children perished during the winter of 1641–2 at the hands of insurgents, or from exposure and hunger, while similar numbers of Catholic civilians died due to retaliatory actions by government forces.18

15 C. Hill, God’s Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London: Penguin, 2000), pp. 109–10, 117. 16 W. Gouge, God’s Three Arrows: Plague, Famine, Sword in Three Treatises (London, 1631), p. 213. 17 20 April 1614, Speech of King James I in the Council Chamber in Whitehall, in Calendar of the State Papers relating to Ireland, vol. I V: 1611–1614 (London, 1877), p. 472. 18 See H. Simms, ‘Violence in County Armagh, 1641’ in Ulster 1641: Aspects of the Rising, ed. B. MacCuarta (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, 1993), 123–38; K. Nicholls, ‘The other massacre: English killings of the Irish, 1641–3’ in Age of Atrocity, ed. Edwards, Lenihan and Tait, 176–91.

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A crucial question is how much of this violence was planned, organised and directed on either side. From the outset, panicked government officials claimed that the rebels sought ‘the total and final extirpation of all the English and Protestants’.19 In fact, the first allegation of a general massacre of the settler population actually predated any killings.20 As the conspirators gathered in Dublin on 22 October 1641, one of them allegedly confessed to a Protestant kinsman, Owen Connolly, that ‘the Irish had prepared men in all parts of the Kingdome to destroy all the English inhabiting there tomorrowe morning by ten of the clock’.21 Connolly immediately informed the authorities, who arrested the ringleaders. A proclamation by the Lords Justices, Sir John Borlase and Sir Henry Tichborne, blamed the plot on ‘evill affected Irish Papists’, deliberately interpreting it in crude ethnoreligious terms.22 The Catholic elite expressed outrage at this universal attribution of guilt, leading to a subsequent retraction. This failed, however, to assuage Catholic Irish concerns about the blatantly sectarian response of the Dublin administration to the crisis. Despite their provocative claims, the authorities struggled at first to produce convincing evidence of a general conspiracy directed against the entire Protestant community in Ireland. Over the coming months, however, thousands of Protestant refugees fleeing from rebel-controlled territory provided damning testimony to government-appointed commissioners, much of it based on hearsay and speculation. According to one deponent, the blame lay with the Catholic clergy, who ‘did frequently in their sermons & otherwise perswade the rest of the Romish faction to extirpate & roote out all the protestants of this Kingdome’.23 To many settlers, it appeared that the rebels ‘would not cease vntill they had extirpated all the English out of the kingdome & would not have any English government hereafter in Ireland’.24 In the confused circumstances of the early stages of the insurrection, many Protestants in Ireland sincerely believed that their community faced total 19 26 November 1641, Lords Justices and Council to Leicester in Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquess of Ormonde, new series (hereafter ‘HMC Ormonde MSS, n.s.’), vol. II (London: Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1903), p. 26. 20 A. Clarke, ‘The 1641 massacres’ in Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. M. Ó Siochrú and J. Ohlmeyer (Manchester University Press, 2013), 37–51, at 38. 21 22 October 1641, Examination of Owen Connally, Trinity College Dublin (hereafter ‘TCD’) MS 809, fos. 13r–14v. 22 A Great Conspiracy by the Papists in the Kingdome of Ireland Discovered by the Lords Justices and Counsell at Dublin and Proclaimed There Octob. 23, 1641 (London, 1641), p. 1. 23 Deposition of Donatus Connor, Artramon, 28 October 1642, TCD MS 818, fos. 110r– 113v. 24 Deposition of John Anderson, Belturbet, 11 July 1642, TCD MS 833, fos. 98r–99v.

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extermination. These fears resonated strongly with an English audience, long subjected to stories of native Gaelic Irish barbarity. The shocking news from Dublin, published in scores of London newssheets and pamphlets, merely confirmed existing prejudices, and provided further justification for decisive military intervention to crush the rebellion. In March 1642, Dean Henry Jones travelled to London to present an account of events in Ireland, based on the sworn statements collected by his fellow commissioners. Jones claimed before the House of Commons that the insurrectionists sought a ‘generall extirpation, even to the last and least drop of English blood’.25 Graphic descriptions of violence allegedly perpetrated against Protestant settlers, including tales of children ripped from the womb and fed to pigs or boiled alive in cauldrons, created a powerful though entirely inaccurate picture of irredeemable cruelty, committed by ‘inhumane, blood-sucking Tygers’.26 According to Jones, swift action by the authorities in Dublin had thwarted rebel plans but the threat of a general massacre remained. English MPs enthusiastically endorsed the dean’s remonstrance and agreed to dispatch an expeditionary force, financed by loans using land seized from Irish Catholic rebels as collateral. An Act for the speedy and effectuall reducing of the Rebells in his Majesties Kingdome of Ireland (or ‘Adventurer’s Act’) received royal consent shortly afterwards. Leaving aside the complex constitutional question of whether the English parliament could legislate for the kingdom of Ireland, this act clearly signalled Westminster’s predatory ambitions.27 The Catholic elite denied any involvement in the violence and responded indignantly to claims that they sought to slaughter or banish all Protestants from Ireland. A declaration in March 1642 instead accused the Lords Justices of exploiting the crisis to launch a campaign of annihilation against Irish Catholics through the indiscriminate ‘killing and murdering of men, women, and children . . . wherever their strength could prevaile’.28 Such merciless government reprisals, perpetrated by notorious figures such as Charles Coote and William St Leger, ultimately convinced many of the Old English to ally with the Gaelic Irish in Ulster. By the summer, however, following a series of military setbacks, the Catholic rebels faced defeat until growing tensions in 25 H. Jones, A remonstrance of divers remarkeable passages concerning the church and kingdome of Ireland (London, 1642), p. 7. 26 Ibid., p. 8. 27 Statutes of the Realm, vol. V: 1628–1680 (London, 1819), pp. 168–72. 28 ‘The Generall Grievances of the Peers and Gentrie of the kingdome of Ireland – 25 March 1642’ in History of the Irish Confederation and War in Ireland, ed. J. T. Gilbert, 7 vols. (Dublin: Gill & Son, 1882–91), I I, 6.

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England, exacerbated by the crisis in Ireland, led to the outbreak in August of civil war between king and parliament. This brought the government offensive in Ireland to a shuddering halt, allowing the insurgent leadership to organise themselves into a confederate association, headquartered in the city of Kilkenny.Despite this temporary lull in hostilities, the conviction remained on both sides that any sort of compromise would prove impossible. The Lords Justices in Dublin opposed all attempts at conciliation, arguing that ‘the English do plainly forsee it can never be safe for them to cohabit with [the native Irish]’.29 Traditional racial and confessional hostility, reinforced by graphic propaganda about the massacre of Protestant settlers in 1641, legitimised for many the harsh treatment of all Catholic Irish. In a 1642 pamphlet entitled The Teares of Ireland, the Puritan clergyman James Cranford accused them of ‘cruelties and tortures exceeding all parallel, unheard off among Pagans, Turks or Barbarians, except you would enter into the confines of Hell it selfe’.30 According to Cranford, the rebels, incited by their priests, had already murdered ‘fifty thousand’ Protestant men, women and children, but at the day of recompense God would ‘make his arrowes drunke in their bloud’.31 In July 1643, the English parliament published an official account of the rebellion in Ireland, which declared emphatically: ‘That one hundred and fifty four thousand Protestants, men, women, and children, English and Scotch, were Massacred in that Kingdom, between the 23 of October, when the Rebellion brake forth, and the first of March following.’32 The detailed narrative presented previously vague statements about plans for a general massacre of settlers as incontrovertible fact. MPs had obtained the vastly inflated estimate of casualties, far greater than the entire Protestant population of Ireland in 1641, from Archdeacon Robert Maxwell in County Armagh. Maxwell stated in a lengthy deposition that the figure ‘was credibly tould him’, but without specifying his source.33 Widespread violence undeniably claimed the lives of thousands on both sides in the early months of the rebellion but, as Aidan Clarke points out, the vast majority of fatalities occurred through exposure, starvation or disease, and that number is unknowable.34 Maxwell’s precise figure nevertheless received official 29 Lords Justices and Council to the King, 16 March 1643, in HMC Ormonde MSS, n.s., II, p. 251. 30 J. Cranford, The Teares of Ireland (London, 1642), p. 3. 31 Ibid., pp. 21, 73. 32 A declaration of the Commons assembled in Parliament, concerning the rise and progresse of the Grand Rebellion in Ireland (London, 1643), p. 21. 33 22 August 1642, Deposition of Robert Maxwell, Tynan, County Armagh, TCD, MS 809, fos. 5r–12v, fo. 8v. 34 Clarke, ‘1641 massacres’, 49.

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sanction, and ensured that Irish Catholics could expect little mercy when the day of reckoning finally arrived. For the moment, however, English parliamentarians remained distracted by their conflict with the king, so the reconquest of Ireland would have to wait. At this same time, in addition to seeking an alliance with Charles I against the English parliament, the Irish confederate Supreme Council reached out to Catholic powers on the continent, requesting financial and military support by framing the conflict as a religious war. In a letter to the Spanish governor of Flanders, the council explained how they had ‘first entered upon the present just war to defend themselves and their religion from imminent extirpation by the Puritans’.35 Like Cranford, the council drew on international comparisons, writing to the State of Genoa how ‘the inhumanity of the Puritans exceeds belief. Compared with their nefarious deeds, the cruelties of Pagans and Turks, as told in histories, might be regarded as acts of clemency.’ While publicly declaring their loyalty to King Charles, they asserted in similar language to the Lords Justices in Dublin that ‘between the Irish and the Puritans there can be no peace. The Irish must either conquer or be extirpated.’36 Using intentionally inflammatory rhetoric, each side claimed that the other intended a general massacre, but neither could provide conclusive evidence to substantiate the charge. For the remainder of the 1640s, an effective military stalemate brought a relative calm compared to the general slaughter of the first twelve months of the rebellion. It could not last. Victory over royalist and Scottish opponents in 1648, and the execution of King Charles in January 1649, finally enabled the English parliament to divert military and financial resources across the Irish Sea. MPs at Westminster viewed Ireland, despite its complicated constitutional and legal relationship with England, essentially as a colony, ripe for exploitation, where ‘the English Nation might with Justice assert their Right and Conquest’.37 For many scholars, the defeat of Gaelic Ireland in the late sixteenth century marked the end of the colonial phase of Anglo-Irish history. They portray the subsequent conflict that engulfed England, Scotland and Ireland in the 1640s as a series of civil wars in the composite Stuart state. In reality, Ireland remained a place apart.38 Christopher 35 Supreme Council to Don Francisco de Melos, Governor of Flanders, 8 August 1643, in History of the Irish Confederation, ed. Gilbert, I I, p. 342. 36 Supreme Council to the State of Genoa, 23 November 1644, in History of the Irish Confederation, ed. Gilbert, I V, p. 77. 37 Henry Ireton’s words are quoted in E. Ludlow, Memoirs of Edmund Ludlow Esq., 2 vols. (Vivay, 1698), I, p. 375. 38 The debate over Ireland’s status as a kingdom or colony has dominated early modern historiography for decades but for a more nuanced opinion, eschewing a straightforward binary approach, see David Armitage, Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Hill observed that many Englishmen at that time spoke of the Irish ‘in tones not far removed from those which the Nazis used about Slavs, or white South Africans use about the original inhabitants of their country. In each case the contempt rationalized a desire to exploit.’39 The new English republican regime, deeply unpopular at home due to the regicide, hoped to attract support through military action overseas, directed against the Catholic Irish, universally loathed following the wildly exaggerated reports of massacres in 1641–2. More importantly, perhaps, the conquest of Ireland and confiscation of Catholic-owned land would also help to repay those merchant adventurers who had financed the English parliamentary war effort, as well as potentially covering the arrears of 30,000 soldiers in the New Model Army. With the invasion under way, the English Council of State instructed Thomas Waring and John Hall to revisit in print the bloody outbreak of the 1641 rebellion, based primarily on the witness testimony of Protestant survivors.40 The ensuing publication reproduced graphic accounts of murderous assaults on the settler community in Ireland. The authors chillingly avowed that there could be ‘no safety in cohabitation’ with Irish Catholics, describing them as ‘meerly a kind of Reptilia . . . creeping on their bellies, and feeding on the dust of the earth’.41 This official pamphlet concluded that the English could ‘warrantably and righteously endeavour the extirpation’ of those who had in turn endeavoured ‘to make us to be no more a people’.42 Preaching in August 1649, the Puritan William Cooper similarly rejected any idea of a compromise, arguing that total destruction was necessary to advance the cause of reform, both political and religious, in Ireland – ‘the rise of Sion’ required ‘the fall of Babylon’.43 The religious radical William Hickman concurred, and stated in a letter to Oliver Cromwell that ‘God hath marked out that people for destruction.’44 With the ideological ground for the resumption of harsh military tactics so well prepared, the subsequent indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Ireland generated no public criticism in England.45 (See Map 7.1.) 39 Hill, God’s Englishman, pp. 109–10. 40 For authorship of this publication, see J. Cunningham, ‘Milton, John Hall and Thomas Waring’s Brief Relation of the Rebellion in Ireland’, Milton Quarterly 53:2 (2019), 69–85. For the Council of State order on publication, see, 8 January 1650, TNA SP 25/63/2, fo. 246. 41 T. Waring, A Brief Narration of the Plotting, Beginning & Carrying on of that Execrable Rebellion and Butcherie in Ireland (London, 1650), pp. 38, 41–2. 42 Ibid., p. 64. 43 Quoted in C. Gribben, God’s Irishmen: Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 22. 44 William Hickman to Oliver Cromwell, 16 November 1650, in Original Letters and Papers of State Addressed to Oliver Cromwell, ed. J. Nickolls (London, 1743), p. 29. 45 N. Carlin, ‘The Levellers and the conquest of Ireland’, Historical Journal 30 (1987), 269–88.

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Map 7.1 The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, 1649–53. (Cartography by Matthew Stout and David Brown)

Cromwell, appointed as commander of the invasion, arrived in Dublin in mid-August 1649 with a formidable army and immediately denounced the ‘barbarous and bloud thirsty Irish’.46 A few weeks later, at the storming of 46 See A Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages in Parliament. From Monday August 20 to Monday August 27. 1649. No. 317, p. 2688.

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Drogheda on 11 September, his forces butchered the entire garrison, alongside, according to an official army report, ‘many inhabitants’.47 The same happened during the subsequent assault on Wexford. These savage actions shocked opinion in Ireland and abroad but the victories confirmed Cromwell’s belief in the providential nature of the campaign, which many Protestants viewed as ‘merely the latest stage in the unfolding war between Antichrist and the elect’.48 ‘I am perswaded’, he wrote, days after the massacre at Drogheda, ‘that this is a righteous Judgement of God upon these Barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.’49 As the eminent Victorian historian S. R. Gardiner stated bluntly, the fact that Cromwell as an Englishman and Puritan ‘should have been guilty of the slaughters of Drogheda and Wexford is a matter for regret, not for surprise’.50 Cromwell needed to make an example of the Catholic Irish and avenge Protestant blood. Instead of shortening the campaign, however, his brutality generated fierce resistance, as Catholics, outraged and horrified in equal measure, vowed to fight on against a ruthless opponent seemingly determined on their annihilation. Cromwell left Ireland after only nine months, in May 1650, to lead an invasion of Scotland. He never returned, but the war now entered an intensely bloody phase that lasted three more years. Population figures for this period remain speculative, but the Cromwellian surveyor-general, William Petty, estimated that Ireland suffered a mortality rate in the region of 40 per cent, ‘wasted by the Sword, Plague, Famine, Hardship and Banishment’.51 The most recent analysis by Pádraig Lenihan suggests a more conservative figure of 20 per cent, while admitting it was probably much higher in those regions ‘exposed to the full rigours of reconquest’.52 These numbers compare to an estimated 3 per cent population loss in England during the civil wars of the 1640s and, as Lenihan concludes, amounted ‘to nothing less than a demographic disaster’.53 Indeed, the scale of this violence mirrors Spanish and English campaigns against the Indigenous populations in the Americas and, despite the excesses of the Thirty Years’ War, was clearly not ‘normal’ in a European context. 47 Cromwell used the phrase ‘many Inhabitants’ in a letter to Lenthall on 27 September 1649. See Letters from Ireland relating the Several Great Successes it hath Pleased God to Give unto the Parliament’s Forces there (London, 1649), pp. 13–14. 48 Gribben, God’s Irishmen, p. 4. 49 Cromwell to Lenthall, 17 September 1649, in Letters from Ireland, p. 9. 50 S. R. Gardiner, Cromwell’s Place in History (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1897), p. 57. 51 W. Petty, The Political Anatomy of Ireland (London, 1691), p. 18. 52 P. Lenihan, ‘War and population’, Irish Economic and Social History 24 (1997), 1–21, 13. 53 Ibid., p. 21.

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Figure 7.1 Statue of Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) outside the British Houses of Parliament, Westminster, London. (silkfactory / Getty Images)

The conduct of the English military away from the frontline further highlights this Irish anomaly. In early 1651, faced with intensified activity by irregular enemy units and a hostile local population, the authorities in Dublin declared large tracts of the countryside to be outside of protection, and ordered those residing there to move into specially designated areas. Anybody who failed to relocate could be ‘taken, slain and destroyed as enemies’.54 The following year, 54 ‘Orders of State: Commissioners of Parliament for the Affairs of Ireland, 27 February 1650[1]’, BL Egerton MS 1761, fos. 6v–9v.

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in April 1652, English parliamentary commissioners in Dublin conducted a census of all those living within these safe zones, each of whom received a pass, the equivalent of a modern identification card. Those not in possession of a pass faced summary execution. The commissioners acknowledged the harsh nature of these policies but stressed that, it ‘being done in time of war and out of necessity, as affairs now stand shall not be any precedent or rule for future times’.55 These assurances provided scant consolation to the victims, as significant swathes of rural territory and many urban centres suffered from ruinous depopulation. Numerous accounts of mass killings survive, such as the case of 500 ‘poor labourers and women’ hanged in County Tipperary, ‘guilty of no other crime but being found within the imaginary lines drawn by the Govenors of the several Garisons in the said County’.56 Moreover, the uprooting of people from their homes exacerbated famine conditions and thousands died from hunger, exposure and disease. Few could escape the horrors of war. According to one London newssheet, the security situation had grown so bad ‘that the Cure must be as violent as the Disease, and the only way to save that Land, is to destroy it’.57 Accounts from both sides, as well as from independent observers, testify to the ruthless nature of the English conquest. The Catholic cleric John Lynch, for example, accused the governor of Wexford, Colonel George Cooke, of the ‘indiscriminate massacre’ of thousands of men, women and children. According to Venetian sources in London, ‘this slaughter lasted four days running’.58 An English army colonel wrote that, by 1652, as a consequence of war, ‘Plague and Famine had swept away whole Countrys, that a man might travel twenty or thirty miles, and not see a living creature, either Man, beast or Bird, they being either all dead, or had quit those desolate places.’59 In July of that year, Cromwell granted to his son-in-law Charles Fleetwood full authority as commander-in-chief to destroy the enemy ‘by all wayes and meanes whatsoever’.60 For the English, the pursuit of victory took precedence over

55 ‘Orders of State: Commissioners of Parliament for the Affairs of Ireland, 29 April 1652’, BL Egerton MS 1761, fos. 93–100. 56 A Collection of Some of the Murthers and Massacres Committed on the Irish in Ireland (London, 1662), p. 21. 57 The Weekly Intelligencer of the Commonwealth, 13–20 January 1652, p. 327. 58 Advices from London, 18 April 1652, in CSP, Venetian, 1647–1652 (London: HMSO, 1927), p. 224; J. Lynch, Cambrensis Eversus, 3 vols. (Dublin: The Celtic Society, 1848–52), I I I, p. 193. 59 R. Lawrence, The Interest of Ireland in its trade and wealth stated (London, 1682), p. 86. 60 Oliver Cromwell to Charles Fleetwood, 10 July 1652, in A collection of the state papers of John Thurloe, ed. T. Birch, 7 vols. (London, 1742), I, p. 212.

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any other consideration, including adherence to widely established codes of conduct in warfare. Eventually, however, the spiralling costs of the conflict, alongside stubborn enemy resistance, forced the English to agree surrender terms with individual Catholic Irish military commanders. In return for laying down arms, Catholic soldiers received permission to depart for the continent. These men provided a lucrative source of revenue to military entrepreneurs with shipping at their disposal. From 1652 to 1654, as many as 40,000 troops departed from Irish shores on English vessels, with the vast majority entering Spanish service in Iberia or Flanders. Many subsequently enjoyed successful careers, but few ever returned home. The remaining Irish civilian population posed a different challenge. As with the soldiers, the authorities sought to rid the country of potentially the most troublesome elements. From the 1620s, England had developed lucrative sugar plantations on Barbados and other Caribbean islands. African slaves provided most of the field labour, but a demand also existed for indentured servants of European stock. Forced shipments began in late 1649, when Oliver Cromwell ordered the exemplary transportation to Barbados of a handful of surviving soldiers from the Drogheda garrison.61 Over the next ten years, English merchants, many temporarily excluded from the African slave trade, transported convicts from Irish jails across the Atlantic, alongside thousands of displaced Catholic men, women and children. The authorities in Dublin, increasingly concerned by the ‘great multitudes of poore swarming in all parts of this nacion’, welcomed this trade in human cargo as a means of clearing the country of vagrants.62 Working under harsh conditions in a hostile environment, the majority of those shipped overseas died within months of arriving in the Caribbean. The resumption of the African slave trade in the late 1650s brought these involuntary transportations from Ireland to an abrupt end, but the bitter legacy lasted for centuries.63 On the domestic front, the question remained of what sort of country would emerge from the chaos of conflict. In a conversation with his colleague Lieutenant-General Edmund Ludlow, Cromwell allegedly described how Ireland ‘was as a clean paper’, ready to be remodelled in the interests of 61 17 Sept 1649, Cromwell to Lenthall, in Letters from Ireland, pp. 8–9. 62 12 May 1653, ‘Declaration printed by the Council’ in J. P. Prendergast, The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (New York: P. M. Haverty, 1868), 177. 63 See D. Brown, Empire and Enterprise: Money, Power and the Adventurers for Irish Land during the British Civil Wars (Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 175–81.

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England. The fate of the surviving population remained unclear.64 In August 1652, the English established a High Court of Justice to prosecute those Catholic Irish – potentially thousands of individuals – accused of murder during the conflict. These war trials, however, only targeted a tiny fraction of rebels, principally any leaders still alive and in English custody. As Jennifer Wells argues, the trials served primarily to legitimate the authority of the new English republican regime in Ireland, rather than any process of justice.65 With the number of deaths in Ireland already in the hundreds of thousands, and the country’s infrastructure in ruins, attention now turned to the future. Since 1642, the Adventurers Act at Westminster had provided the basic outline of a post-war settlement in the event of an English parliamentary victory. The only questions lay over the full extent of the confiscations from Catholic landowners and how best to divide the spoils among the victors. The length of the war had greatly increased the cost of the conquest, creating pressure for an even larger redistribution of property than originally envisaged by English MPs a decade earlier. In August 1652, the English parliament passed the Act of Settlement, outlining their plans for Ireland. The preamble reassured the Catholic Irish that the English Commonwealth did not intend ‘to extirpate the whole nation’, offering instead to extend mercy and pardon ‘to all husbandmen, plowmen, labourers, artificers and others of the inferior sort’, as long as they lived ‘peaceably and obediently’ under English rule.66 This statement reflected the thinking of those who, like Cromwell, held the Catholic elite, both lay and clerical, primarily responsible for misleading the majority, who acted more in ignorance or through a misguided sense of loyalty. The Act now set about eliminating this upper echelon of society and seizing their lands. A series of clauses excluded from pardon for their lives, in addition to those deemed guilty of the massacre of Protestant settlers, all clergy and over 100 named political and military leaders. Subsequent clauses condemned Catholic landowners to full or partial confiscation of their estates depending on the extent of their activities during the war. As Cromwell had explained earlier, ‘was it not fit to make their Estates to defray the charge who had caused the trouble?’67 The Act neglected to stipulate when and how this mass dispossession would take place. Ten months later, in June 1653, the English Council of 64 Ludlow, Memoirs, I, p. 319. 65 J. Wells, ‘English law, Irish trials and Cromwellian state building in the 1650s’, Past and Present 227 (2015), 77–119. 66 An act for the settling of Ireland (London, 1652). 67 Declaration of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, p. 22.

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State declared the rebellion in Ireland ‘appeased and ended’, commanding the authorities there to survey all forfeited lands, so ‘that satisfaction may be made unto the Adventurers, Officers, Soldiers and other persons aforesaid’.68 Further instructions, a few days later, outlined how those Catholic proprietors entitled to retain a portion of their estates had until 1 May 1654 to ‘remove and transplant themselves into the western province of Connaught’, effectively a native reservation, isolated from the rest of the country, where they would receive new lands worth either a third or two-thirds of their original estates. Landowners refusing to move would be ‘reputed as Spies and Enemies’, liable to the death penalty.69 On 26 September, the parliament at Westminster passed the Act of Satisfaction, confirming the council’s instructions. By May of the following year, the authorities had received certificates of transplantation containing thousands of names of those intending to cross over the River Shannon into Connacht, although the number who actually moved remains unknown.70 Corruption, exemptions and continued enemy military activity all severely disrupted the transplantation scheme. Many landholders remained on their estates or took to ‘the bogs, woods and other fast and desert places of the land to commit murders, rapine and spoil upon the well affected’.71 To compound these difficulties, the expected influx of Protestant settlers from England never materialised, and thousands of soldiers quickly sold their prospective holdings in return for desperately needed cash, allowing existing landowners, or Old Protestants, to expand and consolidate their estates. In response to these problems, a narrow clique of army and religious radicals based around Cromwell’s son-in-law Charles Fleetwood, appointed as Lord Deputy of Ireland in August 1654, advocated the implementation of harsher policies, including the forcible removal of the entire Catholic population from three of the four Irish provinces.72 68 29 June 1653, ‘ Instructions to Charles Fleetwood . . . ’ in An act for the speedy and effectual satisfaction of the Adventurers for lands in Ireland: and of the arrears due to the soldiery there (London, 1653), 3. 69 ‘Further instructions [2 July 1653]’ in Act for the speedy and effectual satisfaction of the Adventurers, 123–4. 70 For a list of names of some of those who transplanted to Connacht, see J. O’Hart, The Irish and Anglo-Irish landed gentry when Cromwell came to Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Son, 1884), pp. 328–72. 71 27 August 1656, Council in Dublin, in Ireland under the Commonwealth, ed. R. Dunlop, 2 vols. (Manchester University Press, 1913), I I, p. 619. 72 ‘The humble petition of the officers within the precincts of Dublin, Catherlough, Wexford and Kilkenny’ in Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement, 108.

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Such radical pronouncements appalled many Old Protestants, though for practical rather than necessarily humanitarian reasons. Deprived of any income from their estates during the war, they sought to minimise further disruptions to the economy. They understood the importance of retaining rent-paying tenants and labourers, whose local knowledge and skills would also ensure strong yields and big profits from the land. In early 1655, the Munster planter Vincent Gookin published a pamphlet attacking Fleetwood and his supporters.73 With the most troublesome elements among the Catholic Irish now either dead or exiled, the surviving population – ‘poor, laborious usefull simple Creatures’ as he termed them – would play a key role in enabling the Protestant settler class to exploit fully the country’s economic potential.74 He enthusiastically promoted nonsegregated communities in the new settlements, believing, like Sir John Davies before him, that superior English culture, working in tandem with the Reformed faith, would eventually triumph over Irish Catholic customs and beliefs. This conversion of the Irish nation to English customs, manners and religion would, he argued, be ‘a more pious work than their eradication’.75 Not surprisingly, Lord Deputy Fleetwood condemned Gookin’s ‘strange scandalous book’.76 The Baptist governor of Waterford, Colonel Richard Lawrence, replied directly in print, cautioning against ‘the exercise of too much lenity and tenderness towards a People that are likely enough to ill requite it, and to take advantage thereby’.77 The colonel vigorously denied the existence of plans for a universal transplantation of the Catholic Irish, without ruling out that possibility sometime in the future.78 He maintained, from the experience of previous Tudor and Stuart plantation schemes, that, in order to protect themselves, ‘the English inhabiting in that Nation should live together in distinct Plantations or Colonies, separated from the Irish’.79 A decade earlier, a former leading member of the Dublin administration, John Temple, had made the same point in his influential account of the Irish rebellion, arguing for a ‘wall of separation set up betwixt the Irish and the British’ for defensive purposes.80 The disagreement, therefore, revolved 73 V. Gookin, The great case of transplantation in Ireland discussed (London, 1655), p. 9. 74 Ibid., p. 22. 75 Ibid., p. 29. 76 Lord Deputy Fleetwood is quoted in T. Barnard, ‘Crises of identity among Irish Protestants, 1641–1685’, Past and Present 127 (1990), 39–83, 62. 77 R. Lawrence, The interest of England in the Irish transplantation stated . . . as an answer to a scandalous, seditious pamphlet entitled ‘The great case of transplantation in Ireland discussed’ (London, 1655), p. 8. 78 Ibid., p. 12. 79 Ibid., p. 15. 80 J. Temple, The Irish Rebellion or An History of the Beginnings, and first Progresse of the General Rebellion raised within the Kingdom of Ireland, in the Year 1641 (London, 1646), p. iv.

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primarily around the scale of the proposed transplantation and the issue of ethnic segregation. Both sides advocated the dispossession and banishment of the Catholic elite, but diverged sharply on whether to let the landless classes remain as a subservient working population. Neither Gookin nor Lawrence, however, saw any future for Gaelic Irish culture or the Catholic faith in Ireland. Tensions between Cromwellian newcomers and existing Protestant landowners continued to escalate until Oliver Cromwell, facing major challenges both at home and abroad, intervened decisively on behalf of the pragmatists. In July 1655, he appointed his son Henry as commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, and invited his son-in-law, Fleetwood, to return to England. The young Cromwell, who replaced Fleetwood as Lord Deputy in November 1657, actively sought the support of the Old Protestants, sidelining army and religious radicals in the process. Nonetheless, the transplantation programme continued. By the late 1650s, Catholic landownership had declined from almost 60 per cent of the total to about 14 per cent, concentrated exclusively in Connacht. This constituted one of the largest transfers of land anywhere in Europe during the early modern period, but the idea of moving the entire Irish population no longer found favour in official circles.81 The subsequent collapse of the English republic and restoration of the monarchy in 1660 initially raised, but ultimately disappointed, Catholic hopes of a major recovery. Charles II proved unwilling to antagonise the Protestant elites in the three Stuart kingdoms and instead confirmed the Cromwellian land settlement. In Ireland at least, unlike in England, the clock would not be turned back. *** Ireland experienced unprecedented levels of bloodshed and devastation in the mid seventeenth century. After the initial panic triggered by the 1641 insurrection abated, government authorities in Dublin ruthlessly exploited the crisis to pursue their own rapacious ambitions. Murderous attacks by the insurgents, especially in Ulster, provided a veneer of justification for the indiscriminate targeting of civilians and the dispossessing of Catholic proprietors. Following the execution of Charles I in January 1649, propagandists revisited the crimes of Catholic Irish in the early days of the rebellion to justify the resumption of brutal military tactics by the newly established English republic, and the 81 See M. Ó Siochrú and D. Brown, ‘The Down Survey and the Cromwellian land settlement’ in The Cambridge History of Ireland, I I: 1550–1730, ed. J. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 584–607.

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subsequent reconquest took a heavy toll on the civilian population. In addition to the catastrophic loss of life and widespread destruction of the country’s infrastructure during the war, the subsequent land settlement proved transformative. John Morrill describes it as ‘possibly the greatest act of ethnic cleansing in European history’, although in the seventeenth century alone, the Moriscos of Spain could surely advance similar claims.82 Whatever the case, a tiny Protestant elite would now dominate Irish political and economic life for the next 200 years, until the great land reforms of the late nineteenth century. The surviving Catholic population remained in place for the most part, but primarily as landless labourers, a ready-made underclass, exploited by an elite that treated their culture and religion with contempt. But did English actions during the 1650s constitute a deliberate, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to exterminate the Catholic Irish? There is no doubt that Cromwell’s military forces perpetrated a series of horrendous war crimes throughout the decade, including mass killings, the indiscriminate targeting of non-combatants and the physical destruction of entire communities. While the practical needs of the Old Protestant community eventually trumped the inflammatory rhetoric of Puritan preachers and the radical ideology of military officers, by the time of Cromwell’s death in 1658 English authorities had nonetheless already overseen the callous eradication or removal of a large proportion of the peoples of Ireland. Even in the context of Europe’s bloody seventeenth century, Ireland experienced exceptional levels of violence, more in line with European expansion throughout the Americas. The attendant population loss was unquestionably genocidal in scale. This may not have been the stated intention of the English, but, as Kiernan contends, genocide can occur, ‘in whole or in part’, even in the absence of a deliberate plan to eliminate everybody, and, furthermore, does not require a consensus among a perpetrator ethnic group.83 Responsibility ultimately lies not with any one individual, but with the English republican government and its ruthless determination to complete the reconquest and resettlement of Ireland, whatever the cost.

Bibliographic Note In 1989, the premier Irish historical journal, Irish Historical Studies, published ‘Nationalism and historical scholarship in modern Ireland’, an incendiary article by the renowned Cambridge academic Brendan Bradshaw (Irish 82 J. Morrill, ‘Introduction’ in The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland, and Ireland 1638–1660, ed. J. Kenyon and J. Ohlmeyer (Oxford University Press, 1998), xx. 83 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 16, 22.

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Historical Studies 26 (1989), 329–51). Bradshaw decried what he saw as the deliberate politicisation of Irish history by virulently anti-nationalist figures in the Irish historical establishment, primarily in response to the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland. According to Bradshaw, this historical revisionism manifested itself through efforts to sanitise the past by downplaying or removing the violence from the colonial experience, denigrating acts of resistance by the Irish people, while at the same time ignoring the persistent use of extreme force by the English. The so-called ‘Revisionist controversy’ rumbled on for decades, although the Good Friday peace accord in 1998 largely de-commissioned the rancorous debate – publicly at least. The primary contributions to the Revisionist controversy are helpfully brought together in C. Brady, ed., Interpreting Irish History: The Debate on Historical Revisionism, 1938–1994 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 1994). More recently, scholars of the early modern period such as David Edwards and Pádraig Lenihan (for example, in Edwards et al., eds., Age of Atrocity) have turned the spotlight on the savagery underpinning the colonial conquest of Ireland, while Ben Kiernan’s pioneering work (for example, in his chapter on Tudor Ireland in Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 169–212) has also kept the issue of colonial violence on the historical agenda. Most of the research to date, however, focuses on Tudor Ireland rather than the Cromwellian conquest of the 1650s, where a perceived lack of source material for the mid seventeenth century has resulted in historians endlessly raking over the same scraps of evidence. A fire in the Irish Public Records Office at the outset of the Irish Civil War in June 1922 did indeed destroy the vast bulk of English governmental records from the 1650s, although some collections survived, mainly in print form. A project led by Trinity College Dublin, entitled Beyond 2022 (https://beyon d2022.ie), is attempting to reconstruct the lost archives, using hitherto unidentified transcriptions authorised by the nineteenth-century Irish Records Commission. Results to date have proved promising, though it must be stressed that the rediscovered material focuses primarily on the coloniser not the colonised, whose voice was often deliberately silenced or lost. It may be years before the results from Beyond 2022 feed through into historiographical discourse, but other initiatives have already made key material available to scholars. The 1641 Depositions project (https://1641.tcd.ie), also led out of Trinity College Dublin, has transcribed, and published, both online and in twelve volumes, a unique collection of over 8,000 witness statements from Protestant refugees at the outbreak of the rebellion in Ireland in that year. Similarly, another Trinity College Dublin venture, The Down Survey project 183

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(https://downsurvey.ie), has published online thousands of contemporaneous maps and ancillary material relating to the Cromwellian land settlement. The accompanying Books of Survey and Distribution, tabulating all the land transfers from the Catholic Irish to the Protestant English, will be published in five volumes by the Irish Manuscripts Commission. Far from experiencing a dearth of material, the mid seventeenth century is in fact awash with manuscript sources, detailing the course and nature of the colonial conquest. In contrast to these major advances in accessing primary material, the secondary literature on Cromwellian Ireland remains patchy and narrowly focused. Few historians seek to straddle the chronological divide between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or to examine the degree of continuity in the process of colonisation throughout the early modern period. Nicholas Canny’s magisterial study of the impact of Anglicisation in Ireland, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001), is an important exception, while Farrell’s innovative reinterpretation of the Ulster plantation, The ‘Mere Irish’ and the Colonisation of Ulster, challenges many cherished orthodoxies, and places developments firmly in a broader global framework, with an emphasis on the economic imperatives driving the English colonial project. Similarly, William Smyth provides a wideranging geographical and cultural analysis of the early modern period in Map-Making, Landscapes and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland c.1530–1750 (Cork University Press, 2006), emphasising, like Farrell, the full trauma of the native experience in the context of European expansion in the Atlantic world. A handful of monographs continue to dominate the historiographical landscape of the 1650s. Toby Barnard’s classic book from the 1970s, Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (Oxford University Press, reissued in 2000), explores the mechanics of English rule in Ireland in key areas such as finance, trade and the law, while M. Ó Siochrú, God’s Executioner: Oliver Cromwell and the Conquest of Ireland (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), focuses on military and political developments throughout the decade. Gribben, in God’s Irishmen, investigates the ideological underpinnings of the conquest and its immediate aftermath, primarily from a religious perspective. Both John Morrill, in ‘The English Revolution in British and Irish context’ (in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. M. Braddick (Oxford University Press, 2015), 555–76), and Patrick Little, in Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), analyse the interactions between the three former Stuart kingdoms, with an emphasis 184

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on the impact of English intervention in Scotland and Ireland. In addition to that of Farrell, the last few years has witnessed the emergence of exciting new work on the period by scholars such as Wells, on the imperial dimensions of English involvement in Ireland (‘English law, Irish trials and Cromwellian state building in the 1650s’), and Sarah Covington on Cromwell’s legacy in Irish memory and folklore (‘The odious demon from across the sea: Oliver Cromwell, memory and the dislocations of Ireland’ in Memory before Modernity, ed. E. Kuijpers et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 149–64). David Brown recently provided a detailed, forensic examination of the Cromwellian land settlement in Empire and Enterprise, highlighting the key role of leading London merchants, in both bankrolling the war in Ireland and then subsequently using Irish land to finance a range of imperial projects across the globe, including the African slave trade. For the future, the rediscovery of so many primary sources from the mid seventeenth century will undoubtedly generate further significant publications, reinvigorating the debates on this tragic and violent period in Anglo-Irish history.

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Genocide in the Spice Islands The Dutch East India Company and the Destruction of the Banda Archipelago Civilisation in 1621 frank dhont

A nineteenth-century Dutch historian wrote that the Banda Islands ‘form a whole of ten islands, of which 6 were inhabited . . . The people that lived there when the Dutch came to the Indies, is no more. The sword of [the governor general of the Dutch East India Company in 1621] Jan Pieterszoon Coen has left a bloodstain there on the map.’1 According to modern Indonesian statistical data, the Banda Archipelago district of the Central Moluccas comprises 172 square kilometres consisting of six inhabited islands (Neira, Banda Besar, Rhun, Ai, Hatta, Syahrir) and five uninhabited islands (Gunung Api, Karaka, Manukang, Nailaka, Batu Kapal).2 (See Map 8.1.) Now peaceful and somewhat remote, these islands – part of modern Indonesia – were once considered extremely valuable as the sole source of the world’s nutmeg and mace. The Banda Archipelago was also the site of a human tragedy four centuries ago, when in 1621 Dutch forces killed or expelled over 90 per cent of the local population of 15,000 people. Despite subsequent centuries of explosive population growth in the Netherlands Indies, and then the Indonesian Republic, in 2017 no more than 19,816 people resided on the Banda Archipelago.3 Yet its once great historical importance in the world is reflected in the fact that, even today, the sea in that region is marked on any map as the Banda Sea.

1 J. K. J. de Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië: verzameling van onuitgegeven stukken uit het oud-koloniaal archief, vol. I I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1863), p. 172. 2 Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Maluku Tengah, Kabupaten Maluku Tengah Dalam Angka (Masohi: BPS Kabupaten Maluku Tengah, 2018), pp. 7, 9. 3 Ibid., p. 71.

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Manukang (Suanggi)

Banda Islands

INDONESIA

N

B A N D A

S E A Karaka

Banda Neira

Batu Kapal

Syahrir (Pisang)

Banda Api Nailaka

Ai

Rhun

Gunung Api Lonthor

B A N DA I S L A N D S 0 0

3 5

Selamon Neira

Combir Urtatang

Banda Besar (Lonthor Island)

6 mi

Hatta (Rosengain)

10 km

Map 8.1 The Banda Archipelago and major Indigenous settlements, c.1621. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

The Bandanese Civilisation Throughout history the anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, antibacterial and aromatic compounds in cloves, mace and nutmeg have made these spices highly coveted. Used in households from China to Europe, these three spices were endemic to the Moluccas, with nutmeg and mace (harvested from the same plant) found only on the Banda Islands. The Bandanese civilisation was built on nutmeg and mace, and the desire for control over these valuable spices also brought it to a brutal, violent end. The people of Banda had traditionally sold the naturally growing nutmeg to various local polities and on Java. Inter-island trade in the Indonesian archipelago involved foodstuffs from Java and pepper from Sumatra as well as mace, nutmeg and cloves from the Moluccas and

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Banda.4 After the arrival of Arab traders in 1322, Islam began to spread in the Moluccas, and by the fifteenth century trade with Java had increased.5 The Bandanese were also the only people who sold their local spices directly in the large emporium of Malacca, transporting their own products to that market.6 The Bandanese were by now clearly aware of their economic resource and were actively managing the price. They had set a 1:7 price ratio for mace and nutmeg, and were known to burn some of their own nutmeg production at times.7 This abundant natural resource blessed the islands but also caused havoc. As Tomé Pires observed in his account of Banda, ‘they are richer now than they used to be, because now they sell their mace better and for better prices’.8 In fact, the Bandanese began to depend on trade for their foodstuffs because of the increase in the spice trade and use of their land for spice crops.9 Eager to cut out the Asian middlemen, first the Portuguese and Spanish, and later the Dutch and English, sought to reach this lucrative market in the Moluccas. These islands had seen local and other Asian traders for centuries but, from the sixteenth century, they began to encounter the western powers. The Portuguese were the first to arrive. In 1512, Juan Serano wrote: ‘From here we stood to the east until the Bandan Islands, and we found near this, which gives its name to the others, twenty islands. . . . A profitable commodity is found in Banda, namely nutmeg, which grows in great quantity and kinds.’10 The first Dutch ship arrived in 1599.11 Dutch 4 M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), p. 23. 5 O. Warburg, Die Muskatnuss: ihre Geschichte, Botanik, Kultur, Handel und Verwerthung sowie ihre Verfälschungen und Surrogate zugleich ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte der BandaInseln (Leipzig: Von Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897), p. 46. 6 John Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, Modern Asian Studies 15:4 (1981), 732–3. 7 Duarte Barbosa, A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, trans. Henry E. J. Stanley (London: Hakluyt Society, 1866), pp. 199–200. 8 Tomé Pires and Francisco Rodrigues, The Suma Oriental of Tomé Pires: an account of the East, from the Red sea to Japan written in Malacca and India in 1512–1515. The book of Francisco Rodrigues: rutter of a voyage in the Red sea, nautical rules, almanack and maps, written and drawn in the East before 1515, ed. Armando Cortesão (London: Hakluyt Society, 1944), I, p. 206. 9 Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence, p. 95. 10 Barbosa, Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, p. 227. 11 François Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën, vol. I I I : Naaukeurige verhandeling van Banda, Behelzende een Nette Landbeschrijving van de Eylanden Daar onder behorende, als mede een Verhaal van de Zaaken Tot nu toe aldaar voorgevallen (Dordrecht and Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam – Gerard onder de Linden, 1726), p. 75.

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naval power would grow exponentially after the various local Dutch trading companies that had started to sail to Asia were amalgamated into the Dutch East India Company (known by its Dutch initials, VOC: Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) by 1602.12 The Bandanese had considerable military strength and used it regularly to further their political goals. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese settled on the Lonthor coast at Combir where they were allowed by the Bandanese to trade only until they were raided and killed after a dispute.13 Unlike in the Moluccan islands to the north, the Bandanese prevented the Portuguese from establishing a fortress or factory on their islands, and the Portuguese faced Bandanese resistance.14 In fact, when the Portuguese tried to settle in Amboina in the islands north of Banda, the Bandanese and the Javanese stopped them from gaining a foothold.15 An English report from 1631 stated: ‘Banda consists of six islands, viz., Lantar or Great Banda,16 Pooloroon,17 Pooloway,18 Rosingyn,19 Neira, and Gunong Api;20 all the nutmegs and mace in the world come from the first four islands . . . producing yearly 100 tons mace and 400 tons nutmegs.’21 Another estimate from 1622 stated that Lonthor alone yielded 800–1,000 tons of nutmeg and mace yearly.22 This data indicates that Banda was already an extremely well-established centre of nutmeg and mace trade in the seventeenth century, as the world’s sole producer. Cloves, mace and nutmeg continue to be an important Indonesian export product, despite the fact that they now can also be grown elsewhere in the world. In 2017, Bandanese plantations produced as much as 922.5 tons of nutmeg.23 12 D. G. E. Hall, A History of South-East Asia (London: Macmillan, 1955), p. 233. 13 F. W. Stapel, Pieter van Dam’s Beschrijvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie 1639–1701, vol. I I.1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1931), p. 4. 14 Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, 745. 15 Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence, p. 161. 16 Lonthor or Banda Besar, Lonthor being the name of the major settlement on the island. 17 Pulau Rhun or Rhun Island. 18 Pulau Ai or Ai Island. 19 Rosengain, now renamed Hatta Island after the first Indonesian vice-president, Mohammad Hatta. 20 Gunung Api. 21 ‘East Indies: May 1631’ in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies and Persia, vol. V I I I: 1630–1634, ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1892), 154– 64: British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/eastindies-china-japan/vol8/pp154-164 (accessed 24 May 2020). 22 ‘East Indies: August 1622’ in Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East Indies and Japan, vol. I V: 1622–1624, www.british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-chinajapan/vol4/pp51-64 (accessed 24 May 2020). 23 Badan Pusat Statistik Kabupaten Maluku Tengah, Kabupaten, p. 223.

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A volcanic eruption around 1614 on Gunung Api had destroyed the nutmeg production on that island and on Neira.24 Only the Gunung Api plantations were not replanted.25 The trade between Java and Banda was impressive, and the spices brought in revenue for the Bandanese and various groups of traders involved in bringing these spices to the tables of customers all over Asia and Europe. Yet conflict was looming as the Dutch wanted a monopoly on this resource, and the Bandanese had built their civilisation on trade with all who paid their price. More demand for their produce simply made it easier for them to sell their harvest and obtain the commodities they required themselves. Unlike the other Europeans, the Dutch, because of their function as middlemen in the European trade in spices, realised that spices had a limited market in Europe and therefore the price needed to be kept within bounds for the trade to remain profitable.26 Competition with other European powers risked driving up the prices and impacting profits, and the Dutch had also made heavy capital investments in the trade with Asia, to a degree far larger than the other European traders. The Bandanese civilisation was based on community consensus and a high degree of autonomy and freedom. They did not recognise kingship, but were politically astute enough to follow the commands of kings such as those in the Moluccas occasionally, when it suited them.27 Banda’s political leaders were a group of elders referred to as orang kaya, with a syahbandar in charge of each individual village.28 The system of rule shared by elders seemed to have been a fairly recent transition: at the beginning of the sixteenth century, four kings seem to have ruled over the Banda Islands, but they had lost their power and become merely respected members of society with only local authority, the government being run by the orang kaya and religious people.29 The group made the decisions. Islam had taken hold before the Portuguese arrival and was strong on the Bandanese coast due to trade, but its impact on people’s 24 ‘East Indies: May 1631’. 25 J. M. Janse, De Nootmuskaat-cultuur in de Minahassa en de Banda-Eilanden (Batavia and The Hague: G. Kolff, 1898), p. 20. 26 Hall, A History of South-East Asia, p. 237. 27 Barbosa, Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar, p. 200. 28 Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, 728. 29 P. A. Leupe, ‘Beschrijvinge van de Eijlanden Banda, soo die gegeert sijn in de jaren dat onse scheepen daer eerst begonnen te negotijeren ende hoe deselve nu beseth sijn’, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-indië 3:1 (1854), 78. This contribution is probably written by Aertus Gijsels.

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lives and behaviour remained limited.30 By the early seventeenth century, an eyewitness in the Dutch army that landed there in 1621 related that Bandanese men were fine soldiers armed with shield and sword, but also equipped with bows and arquebuses.31 The total number of armed men was estimated in the early seventeenth century to be 4,000, of a population of 15,000.32 Bandanese nutmeg plantations were most likely communal lands.33 The Bandanese eagerly guarded and defended this source of their livelihood. Originally, the Bandanese were probably a mixture of refugees, escaped slaves, and people banished from surrounding societies who, over time, coalesced into their own society.34 The four monarchies show that there had been a certain political division, but also some form of centralisation of power. In the early seventeenth century, disputes between the different communities were commonplace. An intricate system of rights and privileges belonging to each community had evolved; disputes were settled with weapons and the taking of heads.35 Two large factions had emerged by the end of the sixteenth century, and the cause seems to have been a conflict over the share of the anchorage and toll fees that Banda received from the traders who came to the ports.36 These factions controlled different villages, with the Oelilima gravitating around Islam, and the Oelisiba around the ancestors – or even Christianity, through Portuguese conversion.37 On Banda Besar or Lonthor Island, the important settlement of Lonthor was part of the Oelisiba faction, and the important settlement of Selamon was part of the Oelilima faction.38 When an outside threat manifested itself or when important communal decisions or treaties had to be made, these skirmishes were quickly put aside. Bandanese society had even developed an institution for such negotiation. A sacred tree in the neutral village of Urtatang on Lonthor Island was the site of meetings that involved all the Bandanese, with the Oelisiba sitting on the west and south, and the Oelilima in the east and north, arranged according to rank and age.39 (See Figure 8.1.)

30 Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, 731. 31 Leonard Blussé and Jaap de Moor, eds., Een Zwitsers leven in de tropen. De lotgevallen van Elie Ripon in dienst van de VOC (1618–1626) (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2016), p. 87. 32 Leupe, ‘Beschrijvinge van de Eijlanden Banda’, 76. 33 Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, 729. 34 Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, II, p. 172. 35 Lucas Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda: de conqueste getoetst aan het recht van den tijd’ (PhD dissertation, Utrecht University, 1943), 23. 36 Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, II, p. 173. 37 Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 22. 38 Leupe, ‘Beschrijvinge van de Eijlanden Banda’, 74. 39 Ibid., 75.

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Figure 8.1 A Dutch map from 1612 showing the islands of Banda Api, Neira, and Lonthor with its main settlements of Lonthor, Urtatang and Combir. Selamon (unmarked) is also shown, as the houses visible at the top right-hand corner of Lonthor Island. (From Johann Theodor de Bry, Illustration of the two cities Ortattan and Londer, located on the island of Banda (1612))

The Encroachment of Dutch Power on the Banda Islands Until the end of the sixteenth century, the vibrant Bandanese society flourished and resisted foreign domination. Yet, in a single major blow in 1621, their civilisation would come to an end.

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In Europe, the Dutch were struggling for independence from Spain, and their project in Asia had economic as well as strategic and political aims.40 Opposing their European rivals in Asia would weaken them in Europe. Their encroachment on the Banda Islands began innocently enough. On 16 March 1599, the Dutch received permission to conduct free trade in Banda and to establish residence for their merchandise.41 This was in line with the Bandanese economic policy of selling their produce to whoever could pay. The Bandanese were eager to trade with the Dutch. In 1599, they allowed the Dutch to build a representative office in the capital city of Banda Neira, but the people of Lonthor Island also wanted a Dutch presence.42 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, about 1,500 Javanese traders were active on Banda.43 Portuguese and Javanese now both saw their interests in the region threatened, and the Dutch were almost kicked out of Banda by a force of 1,500 Javanese, but the Bandanese protected them until a Dutch fleet arrived in 1600, to the great relief of the Dutch merchants there.44 In this struggle for power, influence and profits, the Bandanese sought to maintain their position as a free-trade port, a position that had made them a wealthy civilisation. The Dutch based on Neira and Lonthor maintained good relations with the Bandanese, and this aided in the conclusion of a treaty in 1602.45 However, the treaty began the erosion of Bandanese power. It stated that the religions of all parties would be mutually respected and that the Bandanese would protect the Dutch against the Portuguese and Javanese, but also that, if the Dutch needed it, then nutmeg and mace would be supplied only to them.46 The Dutch would soon try to leverage the advantage this treaty had given them, even though this stipulation was intended merely to prevent other merchants buying so much cargo that the Dutch would not be able to acquire sufficient spices.47 The Bandanese also could not possibly yet have known that, in 1602, the individual Dutch trading companies had merged into one enormous Dutch East India Company (the VOC). In 1605, the VOC made a new treaty wherein the 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Hall, A History of South-East Asia, 235. Stapel, Pieter van Dam’s Beschrijvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, p. 165. Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I, p. 209. P. A. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 7: 1606–1610, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 32:1 (1884), 94–5. Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I, p. 228. Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 31. Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I, p. 264. Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 32.

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Bandanese again agreed to sell only to them.48 By then, the English had also arrived in the area. The Bandanese continued to sell their nutmeg freely, and to the Dutch it seemed that the Bandanese did not respect the treaties. In 1608, a Dutch fleet sailed to Banda and received little co-operation, causing the Dutch greatly to resent the Bandanese.49 Apparently, some Spanish had also arrived in Banda, and had killed some of the Dutch there.50 The Dutch paid low prices but the English became alternative buyers for Bandanese produce; the English were allowed to establish an office on Ai Island.51 In 1609 came the first major escalation between the Dutch and the Bandanese. Acting on orders from the Netherlands, the Dutch planned to build a fortress on Banda and to conclude a beneficial treaty there for themselves.52 Their instructions were clear: ‘The islands of Banda and the Moluccas are the main target that we are aiming for . . . they are to be tied to the company by treaty or use of force.’53 These orders made it very difficult for Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff, the Dutch admiral in charge. A peace treaty with Spain was about to be signed and the Dutch East India Company wanted to gain as much ground as possible before it came into effect.54 Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587–1629) had been appointed as junior merchant (onderkoopman) and had left the Netherlands in December 1607 in the fleet of Admiral Verhoeff.55 The Dutch wanted to make sure the Bandanese would supply only them with their spices, and wanted to build a fortress on Neira.56 As soon as the Bandanese heard the demands, they responded and deployed 2,000 men to guard the Dutch office, fortified the southwest coast of Neira, and stalled the negotiations. However, they did not seek English protection.57 The Dutch had come with a mixed fleet of 13 armed merchant ships and over 1,900 men.58 The Bandanese could not prevent the Dutch from refurbishing an abandoned Portuguese fort on Neira.59 They were no match for the Dutch 48 J. K. J. de Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië: verzameling van onuitgegeven stukken uit het oud-koloniaal archief, vol. I I I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1865), p. 38. 49 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 7, 86. 50 Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, p. 90. 51 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 7, 86–7. 52 Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I I, p. 94. 53 Ibid., p. 95. 54 Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 36. 55 Antonio Van Diemen, De opkomst van de VOC in Azië (Amsterdam: Pallas Publications / Amsterdam University Press, 2011), p. 83. 56 Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 37. 57 Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I I, p. 96. 58 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 7, 86–7. 59 Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I I, p. 97.

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naval power that had arrived, but they tried to use subterfuge. Under the pretext of negotiations, they lured Admiral Verhoeff to a meeting, and ambushed and killed him.60 Coen, a member of Verhoeff’s party, would not forget this day. Twelve years later, Coen would take bloody revenge on the Bandanese. But in 1609, the death of Verhoeff escalated the situation. Several Dutch merchants residing on Lonthor were killed, and the Dutch destroyed all the Bandanese villages and ships on Neira, killing all who could not escape the island.61 The Bandanese thus lost Neira Island, and the Dutch now had their fortress there. When the Dutch tried to capture more territory and attacked Lonthor Island, the Bandanese beat them back, inflicting heavy losses.62 The Bandanese now signed a peace treaty accepting Dutch authority over Neira, and promised to sell spices only to the Dutch.63 In the years that followed, the Bandanese typically ignored the treaty, selling to the English and to anybody else who wanted to buy spices. The English had only a small presence, with offices in Ai and later Rhun, but this irked the Dutch, who could not dislodge them.64 In 1611, the Dutch built a bigger fortress on Neira.65 Elsewhere in the region, the Dutch also continued to establish themselves on Java, where Jan Pieterszoon Coen would build the VOC headquarters in Batavia. The Dutch East India Company now became increasingly worried that its costly attempts to monopolise the spice trade were not generating the hopedfor profits. Its attitude began to harden. Coen had shown himself to be promising, and was appointed in 1614, by VOC Governor General Reynst, as Director-General of all the VOC offices in Asia.66 That made him the most powerful man after the governor general himself. He was young, ambitious, very capable, and he had the trust of the heads of the VOC in the Netherlands. He also remembered what had happened to Verhoeff in Banda in 1609. Coen was of the opinion that the VOC had to have not only fortresses in place but also a colony planted with its own people in order to be in stronger control, and he wrote in a letter of 10 November 1614: ‘It is true that we are masters of the sea . . . but what can be done with that, just like with all the strong fortresses in the Moluccas, Banda, Amboina and Solor, unless, along with the planting of a colony, we attempt to obtain mastery of Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 7, 97. Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag in Oost-Indië, I I I, p. 99. Ibid., pp. 99–100. Ibid., p. 101. J. A. van der Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden (1599– 1621), p. 57. 65 Ibid., p. 60. 66 Diemen, De opkomst van de VOC in Azië, p. 84.

60 61 62 63 64

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the field?’67 Coen was already then in favour of replacing the original inhabitants with people loyal to the VOC. He goes on to suggest that the VOC ‘make ourselves master of Banda, go into these islands by force; that is what we should do and populate the area, or leave the land, because otherwise, nothing will come of [our attempts to dominate] Banda’.68 Coen was clearly aware that the Dutch were not the only European traders in Banda, and that the Dutch could not control the Bandanese and their nutmeg. The Company had invested a lot but where were the profits? It seems that the VOC saw this in the same way. On 30 April 1615, in a written instruction to Coen, the Company ordered: ‘We understand that our fortresses in the Moluccas are now strong enough defensively and that we now have a large quantity of ships at the others, so we now find it advisable, if possible, that our forces and ships be used to do something major to the detriment of the enemy with them and conquer the Bandanese, exterminate and chase out their leaders, and to preferably repopulate the land with heathens.’69 The Dutch concern was not unfounded. The English had sold some weapons to the Bandanese on Ai.70 The Bandanese were a people, but they were also many communities, represented by their individual orang kaya as leaders. The orang kaya from Ai and Run had not signed the agreement with the Dutch that the other orang kaya had previously signed, but the Dutch did not let that stop them from denying the English access to the spices. Meanwhile, the Bandanese retained formidable fighting forces. In 1615, when the English came to trade on Ai Island, the Dutch tried to prevent the Bandanese trading with the English by sending troops over from Neira, but the Bandanese routed the Dutch, forcing them to retreat.71 In 1616, however, the Dutch returned with 12 ships and 1,000 men. They drove off or killed all the Bandanese inhabitants on Ai, and repopulated Ai island with 794 people from various other regions.72 An anonymous Dutch source who took part in the raid estimated that there were 1,800 people on Ai before the Dutch attacked.73 Over 400 of them drowned trying to escape to the other islands of the Banda 67 H. T. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, vol. I (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1919), p. 57. 68 Ibid., p. 85. 69 H. T. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, vol. I V (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1922), p. 307. 70 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: January 1617’ in Calendar of State Papers, Volume III, www .british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol3/pp1-15. 71 Hall, A History of South-East Asia, p. 242. 72 Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, p. 96. 73 P. A. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde van Nederlandsch-indië 2:1 (1854), 394.

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Archipelago.74 Tellingly, the Dutch built a fortress on Ai and named it ‘Fort Revenge’.75 The English and the Bandanese continued to be a major threat to the Dutch monopoly, and the fact that this fortress was built so quickly shows how high the stakes were for the Dutch. The Dutch policy and pattern of thought became more discernible when, on 25 July 1616, the Dutch commander of Fort Revenge wrote to Coen that those ‘diabolical Bandanese’ had only made peace to gain an opportunity to kill the Dutch later, and should be totally excluded from Ai.76 The Bandanese were seen as treacherous devils who were better off gone. By then, the balance of power was tilting increasingly in the Dutch favour. They had the capital and the resources to build armed settlements, and they did so on the small island of Ai in an archipelago where they already had two fortresses on Neira. The Bandanese resisted the Dutch, but they fought a losing battle against an opponent fixated on seeing its investment in this trade pay off. Meilink-Roelofsz has warned against hasty comparison based on incomplete data, but gives a figure of twenty-nine ships sent from England to the whole of Asia from 1613 to 1617, and fifty-one from the Netherlands, but adds that the Dutch numerical advantage only grew in the following years.77 The English had some ships and troops in the Indonesian archipelago but were outnumbered by the Dutch juggernaut, and forced to retreat when the Dutch gathered any sizeable fleet in the region. The Bandanese fought for their interests, but both they and the English were up against the odds. After being expelled from Ai, the English were left with a foothold on the smaller island of Rhun and the tiny adjacent islet of Nailaka, connected by a reef. The English placed some of their naval guns on Rhun to contest the Dutch and assist the Bandanese, and they were ready to defend that area by January 1617.78 The English also placed these cannons on the fortified islet of Nailaka.79 The English only barely held on; the Dutch could simply blockade Rhun.80 On Java, it was the other way around. In 1618, Coen had become Governor General of the Netherlands Indies, and for two intense years the Dutch just managed to hold on to their foothold on Java before they defeated the local Indigenous rulers, supported by the English, in 1619. Their victory led to the foundation of the city of Batavia and opened the way to 74 Ibid., p. 395. 75 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 90. 76 W. P.Coolhaas, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, vol. V I I (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1952), pp. 152–3. 77 Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence, p. 194. 78 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: January 1617’. 79 Hall, A History of South-East Asia, p. 243. 80 Ibid., pp. 243–4.

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Dutch dominance in the region. Coen himself had managed to sail away to the Moluccas, where the Dutch had expected the English fleet, to gather a Dutch relief fleet and was finally able to relieve Jakarta in 1619.81 Coen became a hero to the Dutch for centuries to come. Asians and Europeans were playing a similar game of political alliances to defeat enemies in Asia as well as in Europe. But a treaty between the English and the Dutch, made in Europe in 1619, settled the balance of power in Banda, with two-thirds of the spice trade going to the Dutch and a third to the English, with the Spanish being excluded by both. In 1620, this treaty became known in Jakarta. Coen then wrote to the VOC board of directors that it was a pity they had neglected to bring people from other areas to populate Amboina82 and Banda.83 Now the opportunity arose for the Dutch to settle the situation with the Bandanese on the main island of Lonthor. In the meantime, in 1618, the orang kaya of Lonthor had received assurances that the English on Rhun would stay and fight the Dutch.84 Robert Randall, who was based on Lonthor Island, then witnessed the formal surrender in November 1620 of Lonthor by the Bandanese to the English, just as in the case of Rhun in 1616.85 The English had now received a formal ceding to the English crown of Ai, Rhun and Lonthor by the Bandanese, but that did not stop the Dutch from killing the local Bandanese. The Bandanese were clearly hoping for support against the Dutch by putting themselves under the English crown. But they were not aware of the balance of military power in the Indonesian archipelago and the wider diplomatic manoeuvring between the English and Dutch in Europe. The agreement signed between the English and Bandanese on Lonthor dates from 24 November 1620. In it, King James I is formally proclaimed the king of the country of Banda, based on a consensus of the orang kaya of the Banda peninsula.86 The agreement 81 Ibid., pp. 244–5. 82 Cloves grew more widely spread out on the Moluccan islands north of Banda; the history of that struggle remains beyond the scope of this chapter. The Dutch had managed to concentrate clove production on Ambon to a large extent, away from the Moluccan kings farther north. 83 J. K. J. de Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch gezag in Oost-Indië: verzameling van onuitgegeven stukken uit het oud-koloniaal archief, vol. I V (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1869), p. 213. 84 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: April 1618’ in Calendar of State Papers, Volume 3, www .british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol3/pp146163. 85 ‘East Indies: August 1622’. 86 Thomas Salmon, Modern History: or the present state of all nations, describing their respective Situations, Persons, Habits, Buildings, Manners, Laws and Customs, Religion and Policy, Arts and Sciences, Trades, Manufactures and Husbandry, Plants, Animals and Minerals, vol. I I (London: Golden Key, 1725), pp. 69–71.

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itself reads as a marvellous diplomatic work of art signed between two desperate parties, yet it could have caused serious problems for the Dutch, had the English been able to enforce it. The reality would soon catch up with the Bandanese and the English. In fact, it may have provoked the Dutch to act fast. The Dutch had spent decades working to obtain a monopoly over the Banda Islands’ nutmeg and mace. That goal could have slipped out of their hands completely, had this agreement stood.

The 1621 Genocide on Banda Extant sources on what happened next are sparse, limited and sometimes conflicting. On 27 February 1621, a Dutch fleet arrived in Banda.87 British history relates that the local English factor, Robert Hayes, informed the Dutch admiral, Coen, that Lonthor was now under the English crown, but that the Dutch tried to make the orang kaya from Lonthor formally dismiss the English, and captured the town militarily when the Bandanese refused to do so.88 Coen related this differently: he received word from Hayes, but dismissed the English.89 Coen did not want to let the English keep a trading post on Lonthor.90 Dutch history describes how the Bandanese offered Coen a permanent agreement to deliver their spices exclusively to the Dutch.91 Dutch sources show that the Bandanese initially put up a good fight, considering that their settlement was in range of the Dutch naval guns. It had always been their strategy to retreat into the interior as their settlements could be bombarded easily from the sea, and farther inland they could deploy their soldiers in battle out of the range of enemy naval guns. Lonthor was very well fortified. The ships shot at its defences but the several fortified settlements, one after another, used the ridge of the mountains on Lonthor as cover so naturally effective that normally only a blockade and starvation could bring the Bandanese to their knees.92 In addition, the English had supplied the Bandanese with four naval guns.93 Dutch records reveal that Coen brought a dozen armed ships and 1,500 troops, with 155 additional troops from Amboina and 286 Javanese prisoners.94 Randall, the chief Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, pp. 101–2. Salmon, Modern History: or the present state of all nations, p. 72. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, pp. 626–7. P. A. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel’, vol. 9, 1618–1623, Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde 36:1 (1887), 253. 91 Stapel, Pieter van Dam’s Beschrijvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, p. 171. 92 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 127. 93 Stapel, Pieter van Dam’s Beschrijvinge van de Oostindische Compagnie, p. 171. 94 Ibid.

87 88 89 90

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merchant on Lonthor, who was one of the very few English sources there at the time of the attack, later testified that 16 Dutch warships with 4,000 men and 40 Javanese pirogues had come to Neira.95 Though these estimates do not match, they indicate that massive military power had gathered. The Bandanese were assumed to have a total of 4,000 armed men, among a population of 15,000.96 Not all of these were defending Lonthor where the Dutch attacked. The Bandanese also had their four guns, but they also had their fortifications and home-terrain advantage, and the knowledge that they were defending their home. Although an unequal fight, the Dutch capture of Lonthor was not that easy. The Dutch fleet had been at anchor around Neira since 23 February. On 3–4 March, the Dutch began sailing ships around the island of Lonthor in an attempt to frighten the population.97 On the night of 5–6 March, they attempted an amphibious landing on Lonthor, but the Bandanese fired at their main ship with a cannon and the attack failed.98 On the night of 7 March, the Dutch army landed between Combir and Urtatang and attempted to climb the hills there to surprise the Bandanese, but Bandanese fortifications proved too difficult to assail.99 The Bandanese had set up heavy guns to guard that location and the Dutch were forced to pull back.100 Dutch historian Van der Chijs later wrote that, if the Bandanese had been more aggressive in repelling the attack and pressing their advantage, they could have destroyed a large section – or perhaps even the whole – of the attacking Dutch army.101 The Bandanese were clearly able to fight back. Their defensive strategy was working and it seemed that, despite Dutch military might, the Bandanese would keep the Dutch from capturing their settlement. However, a defector who had come to Neira in October the year before showed the Dutch how to scale the cliffs to penetrate the Lonthorese defences.102 On 11 March, the Dutch sent a small number of troops up steep cliffs, whilst others distracted the Bandanese. The Bandanese saw the Dutch sail to the area but assumed they were on reconnaissance, and allowed the Dutch to land in a small bay and climb the cliffs.103 Van der Chijs again stated that 50 to 100 Bandanese could have stopped the Dutch by causing them to fall off the cliffs, but the group climbed unopposed and unsuspected.104 The Swiss

95 97 98 102 103 104

‘East Indies: August 1622’. 96 Leupe, ‘Beschrijvinge van de Eijlanden Banda’, 76. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 120. Ibid., pp. 120–1. 99 Ibid., pp. 122–3. 100 Ibid., p. 123. 101 Ibid., p. 122. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 398. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 125. Ibid., p. 125.

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mercenary Elie Ripon was part of the assault force. His memoirs give us an extremely rare first-hand account, but his dates are often wrong and he also only shared fragments of what happened. He related how he sailed with Coen’s fleet to Banda with the goal of besieging Lonthor, and how he climbed up the cliffs with the troops.105 The Dutch had landed on both sides of the fortress, hurling a frontal assault at the Bandanese even as some of their troops climbed the steep cliffs and slipped into the settlement unopposed.106 Ripon related how the Bandanese had set up a cannon in the settlement. The Dutch troops managed to turn and fire the cannon on the Bandanese themselves, and they all ran and jumped in droves into the sea whilst the Dutch took prisoners.107 The Dutch had now captured the settlement of Lonthor, a foothold for their troops on the island as a whole. The Dutch had also captured the English merchants based on Lonthor, and only released them on 19 March 1621 after peace between the English and the Dutch was proclaimed. On 15 March, the English Captain Humphrey Fitzherbert sailed to Neira on the ship Royal Exchange and got Randall out of the Dutch jail on 19 March. He reported 14 capital ships with 80 Javanese pirogues, as well as about 2,600 soldiers on the shore.108 The deposition of Chief Merchant Randall does not shed direct light on what happened to the Bandanese. But it does offer a glimpse of what the Dutch could do. Randall testified that the Dutch tied up him and his English and Chinese helpers before a Japanese mercenary beheaded three of his Chinese assistants. They were then brought before the Dutch military commander and his staff, and the heads of Chinese and Bandanese were thrown at them. They were also beaten and locked up.109 Captain Fitzherbert retrieved Randall and found him ‘bound to the stake, and with a halter made fast to his neck’.110 The only other testimony of an Englishman on Lonthor was that of Abraham Woofe, who had come to Rhun in 1618 and was in Lonthor with Randall. Woofe stated that 80 Japanese had attacked his house and that he thought the Dutch had ordered the Japanese to execute him and his staff, but that they were spared because of a misunderstanding. He also stated that they had been severely beaten and locked up by the Dutch.111 Frederick Houtman is identified in Blussé and Moor, eds., Een Zwitsers leven in de tropen, p. 78. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 628. Blussé and Moor, eds., Een Zwitsers leven in de tropen, p. 79. ‘East Indies, China and Japan: March 1621’ in Calendar of State Papers, Volume 3, www .british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol3/pp418425. 109 ‘East Indies: August 1622’. 110 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: March 1621’. 111 ‘East Indies: August 1622’. 105 106 107 108

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another record as the Dutch commander who stopped the Japanese, whether by accident or intentionally.112 These testimonies show an overwhelming Dutch use of force, and a willingness to kill that was not uncommon in Dutch and other armies’ military raids of the era. We also have the testimony of another Englishman at the scene. Captain Fitzherbert had sailed to Banda to retrieve the English captives, and when he arrived on Rhun on 14 March 1621, he was told by Hayes, the English chief factor there, that the Dutch not only had taken Lonthor but also had landed 500 men on Rhun on 11 March.113 Another English record dating from 1625 tells us that Coen had sent 16 ships and 40 frigates with a total of 4,000 men to Banda, and landed 2,500 men in Lonthor and 1,500 on Rhun.114 These records also confirm that the English had fortified Lonthor and considered it English territory, and that on Rhun the Dutch tore down the town’s defences and destroyed the weapons in the forts.115 The testimony of Hayes on Rhun is perhaps the most indicative of what was in store for the Bandanese. After the Dutch had landed 500 men in a surprise attack on Rhun, the Bandanese asked Hayes if he would defend them. The British Official Records report his response, and the actions of the Dutch on Rhun: the blacks asked Haies whether he would defend them, for if he would, they would fight it out to the last man, but Haies answered ‘he was not able nor could not’. Meanwhile the Dutch landed, asked the blacks how they durst deliver their island to the English, and what amends they would make the King of Holland and their General, and made them deliver up their arms in general. ‘This miserable people being thus disarmed, the Dutch went to their towns, which was (sic) walled round about, and forced them with their own hands to throw down the said wall, so that before night there was not one stone left upon another; and ranging the whole island, caused all the walls, little and great, to be made even with the ground, not so much as sparing the monuments of the dead.’ In fine they were compelled to give the island to the Dutch by presenting them with a nutmeg tree in a basin, as the custom of these parts is in like cases. They put up the Dutch colours on one of the pieces of ordnance in the English fort, and with the spoil of the whole island departed for Neira, ‘to the great grief of the inhabitants and the terror of the English’.116

On 12 March, after the fall of Lonthor, the other Bandanese on Lonthor Island immediately requested peace. They were told to give up their weapons 112 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: March 1621’. 113 Ibid. 114 ‘East Indies: November 1625’ in Calendar of State Papers, Volume 6, www.britishhistory.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol6/pp103-122. 115 Ibid. 116 ‘East Indies, China and Japan: March 1621’.

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and dismantle their defences.117 The Dutch saw that they were stalling, but on 17 March they did comply to an extent.118 The Bandanese remained a considerable force. In a report of 27 March 1621, the English estimated that 1,000 Bandanese still held out against the Dutch on Lonthor.119 The English by then retained only some cannons on the treeless islet of Nailaka, which the Dutch decided not to attack directly for political reasons.120 On 27 March, the Dutch started building their own new fortress in Lonthor.121 Several of the crewmembers, soldiers and the Javanese prisoners were forced to construct it.122 Fort Hollandia became the fourth Dutch fortress on Banda. An uneasy peace between the overwhelming Dutch military power and the vanquished Bandanese, resentful of the terms imposed on them but powerless to resist, set in as the Bandanese promised to comply. On 6 April, a meeting of the Dutch officers decided that those who had fled from Lonthor would be allowed back if their orang kaya handed over their children as hostages.123 On 12 April, at a further meeting between Coen and the orang kaya, the orang kaya of Selamon were asked to help with those of Lonthor.124 The plan was that those from Lonthor would be dispersed into the areas of the various orang kaya from other parts of the island, who would then become responsible for them.125 The Bandanese seemed not to be very responsive. Coen later wrote that he noticed how the Bandanese handed in poor-quality rifles and kept good ones, and that they did not tear down their houses as ordered but built new structures, while only slowly giving up their children to the Dutch as hostages. In response, the Dutch decided to depopulate Banda completely.126 On 15 April, the Dutch war council of officers on Banda met again and decided to remove the Lonthorese from the land and treat as enemies those from Selamon if they also dared to oppose the Dutch. The commanders of the Dutch fleet decided to ‘voluntarily or with violence chase them off the land and use the help of those from Selamon and associates, and if these were found wanting then to consider all of them enemies and use violence against them’.127 On 19 April, Coen decided that the Lonthorese and all other non-cooperative 117 118 119 121 122 124 125 126 127

Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 629. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, pp. 130–1. ‘East Indies, China and Japan: March 1621’. 120 Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, pp. 102–3. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 135. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 404. 123 Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 158. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 136. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 256. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 630. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 137.

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Bandanese must leave Banda.128 The group of Bandanese based in Selamon on Lonthor Island was not included at this point. When this was related to the Bandanese on 20 April, it caused great sadness, but the Dutch promised them a good home, freedom of religion, and personal freedom, while threatening those who did not comply with treatment as hostiles.129 Those taken on board Dutch ships, if they survived the voyage, soon found themselves in the marshland of Batavia, near present-day Jakarta, only to be sold later into slavery.130 From here, the story becomes somewhat vague. Many of the people from Lonthor town had fled into the hills. The Dutch tried to get the orang kaya from Selamon to persuade them to surrender. Many Bandanese were sent down to surrender to the Dutch and to be taken aboard their ships.131 Yet, on 24 April, Coen gave the order to attack and clear the whole Banda Archipelago. This included the Selamon part of the island and Rosengain Island. Elie Ripon, in his memoirs, related how a young man, a hostage of Coen, accidentally revealed to Coen a plot by the Bandanese orang kaya to murder him.132 This seems to be the consensus of the primary sources. An anonymous source says that the people from Selamon, pretending to cooperate, wanted to ambush the Dutch.133 It is not even implied that the moral convenience of the existence of such a plot was what Coen or his troops needed to kill the Bandanese. Yet the evidence for the plot is very meagre: some confessions extracted under torture, and a story supposedly heard by Coen from an adolescent. The situation on Lonthor Island was very tense. Historian Van der Chijs, based on the anonymous sources, added to his account a strange story of an accident with a lamp falling, causing Dutch troops to fire their guns, creating more panic and in that way, almost accidentally, preventing the Bandanese ambush from taking place.134 The anonymous source, however, also writes that the orang kaya from Selamon asked the Dutch what was going on, only to be reassured.135 Was this really a planned ambush that failed due to a coincidence? The Dutch sources argue that, on 23 April, Coen found out from a young hostage sent to him that the orang kaya had the plan to kill the Dutch during the night of 21–22 April, but 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

Kiers, ‘Coen op Banda’, 163–4. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 630. Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, p. 107. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 408–9. Blussé and Moor, eds., Een Zwitsers leven in de tropen, pp. 80–1. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 410. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, pp. 141–2. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 411.

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the accident with the lamp had alerted the camp and the plan could not be carried out.136 These events are all important to take into account because it is hard to reconstruct exactly how Coen could have come to his decision to clear the whole island of Lonthor. Various factors must have played a role. The Dutch had beaten the Lonthor settlement of Bandanese, but many Bandanese had fled into the mountains and, from the Dutch perspective, there seemed to be no real solution in sight. The Bandanese were, in general, already considered treacherous by the Dutch by that time. Coen himself had been part of Admiral Verhoeff’s group that had been ambushed on Banda in 1609. There was also the additional problem that the Dutch were only in control as long as they maintained large numbers of troops on the island of Lonthor; this could not be maintained indefinitely and the Bandanese would probably have challenged Dutch authority again in the future, as they had done numerous times before. The Lonthorese clearly did not want to submit to Dutch authority, and an initial Dutch plan to spread some of these people from the defeated Lonthorese settlement over other areas throughout the island of Lonthor, under the supervision of different local orang kaya to keep them pacified, was probably also for Coen clearly unlikely to be effective. The Dutch were also concerned by the general Bandanese reluctance to surrender their weapons and destroy their houses and defences. Coen himself had argued for the depopulation of Banda in the past, and the VOC’s orders had authorised it. The Dutch had already been on Lonthor for several weeks by the middle of April but the tension had only risen. The Dutch war council seemed to favour allowing the Lonthorese who had fled to return. But this changed after Coen told them the news of the plot against them in a meeting on 24 April 1621.137 The order was then given by Coen the same day to capture or kill all the Bandanese.138 The principal Selamon orang kaya were first invited to talk with the governor general, but captured when they arrived to do so.139 Until that time, the Selamon group did not know they would also be targeted, but the Dutch now thought that the Selamon Bandanese would betray them. Therefore, this was a crucial moment, because it settled the fate of the whole of the Bandanese people. Up to 24 April, it was only the Lonthor area of Banda Besar, or Lonthor Island, that had been cleared, with the Lonthorese being targeted. Coen offered the council of officers the choice to act and destroy the Bandanese or to leave them on the island.140 The Dutch 136 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, pp. 141–2. 137 Ibid, p. 147. 138 Ibid, p. 150. 139 Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 419. 140 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 147.

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war council on Banda on 24 April advised Coen ‘to drive them voluntarily or forcefully off the land and transport them if it so pleases the Governor General’.141 Coen decided that, because the Bandanese people were treacherous, he would ‘undertake a military campaign to burn houses everywhere, to confiscate or destroy the remaining ships, and to force the Bandanese to come to the Dutch out of need or to leave the land’.142 If there was any moral question for Coen, or the Dutch in Banda on the expedition, then this news on 23 April of a plot to assassinate him and his officers probably suggested once again that there was no other recourse than to exterminate them, the Bandanese, as they simply would not go along with Dutch plans. Coen gave the order to clear the whole of Lonthor Island and then left himself, letting Martinus Sonck, the newly appointed governor of Banda, do the dirty work.143 Sonck had been appointed as governor on 14 April 1621.144 Rosengain Island was also to be cleared, but was found empty when the Dutch landed there.145 The Dutch cleared the whole of the Banda Archipelago, except for the Bandanese on Rhun. There seems not enough evidence to say what Coen was thinking, exactly. Building a fortress on Lonthor in March 1621 seems to indicate a strategy for gradual subjugation of the Bandanese. Yet, by 24 April 1621, the Dutch approach was simply to exterminate or capture the Bandanese. Was that plan to kill the Bandanese something the Dutch had all along, or was it something that was implemented after it seemed to turn out to be the most convenient way to deal with the Bandanese problem? Was it really the only way to settle this conflict? Was Coen merely following orders given already years before by the VOC, as a loyal soldier? Was there really even a plot against the Dutch by the Bandanese in April 1621, or was it purely an excuse to take that final step against a section of the Bandanese that had made peace with the Dutch and were complying with Dutch demands? The truth is shrouded in the fog of 400 years.

Cataclysm There is very limited evidence on the extent of the actual killing. Apparently Dutch troops started to loot once Coen had ordered them to capture or kill the Bandanese.146 On 1 May 1621, Coen reported that all the cities and 141 143 144 145 146

Ibid., p. 148. 142 Ibid. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 150. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 259. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 152. Ibid., p. 150.

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fortresses of Banda had been taken, destroyed or burned, with about 1,200 prisoners in total taken by the Dutch.147 Coen had retreated to his ship, and in a meeting there on the same day ordered his men to pursue the remaining Bandanese in the hills until they gave up through hunger.148 Dutch armed ships were placed strategically around the island to prevent Bandanese from escaping.149 The war council advised Coen to starve them out.150 The supply of food for the Bandanese was a defensive weakness. Tomé Pires had already noticed this, one century before, when he observed that there were almost no foodstuffs except for some sago on Banda, as food had to be imported from the surrounding islands.151 The Bandanese were very vulnerable to starvation. The Dutch tried to cut off access, and, although some Bandanese escaped to Ceram Island, most hid in the hills.152 When the Dutch tried to climb the hills on 2 May, they found entrenched Bandanese who fought back.153 On 6 July the Dutch attacked the hills of Selamon and fought for an hour with Bandanese who were armed only with stones and spears before running away.154 On top of the hills, the Dutch found 1,800 empty huts, 1,500 pirogues and 600 to 700 graves.155 The starvation strategy had worked. On 8 July, on another mountain, they captured a few dozen Bandanese and found 1,000 empty houses.156 Governor Sonck, left in charge by Coen on Banda, related how cold the mountains shrouded in fog were – ‘as in our winter’.157 Initially, the Dutch had captured 1,200 prisoners. Then, from 16 May to mid-July, they rounded up another 476 Bandanese.158 Our anonymous source states that 1,322 prisoners were captured after Selamon fell.159 When the rest of the territory was stormed, those who refused to surrender had to be ‘beaten to death’.160 Coen himself, in a letter to the heads of the VOC in the Netherlands, claims 2,500 were killed by the violence, misery and hunger, with at most 300 more who apparently escaped.161 Even those few Bandanese left on Rhun would be captured one year later, in July 1622. These

147 150 151 152 153 154 157 158 159 160 161

Ibid., p. 148. 148 Ibid., p. 154. 149 Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 428. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 156. Pires, Suma Oriental, p. 208. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 642. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 155. Ibid., p. 162. 155 Ibid., pp. 162–3. 156 Ibid., p. 163. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 259. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 163. Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 420. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 643. Ibid.

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160 men were condemned to death by Sonck, having apparently planned to kill some guards in an attempt to escape the island as they were starving.162 Many Bandanese did drown at sea, but not all. Some escaped. Johann Jacob Saar mentioned that, in 1646, when he sailed to the Kai and Aru Islands area, he found in Aru many Bandanese who hated the Dutch, since they had been pushed out of their homes on Banda and were unable to return.163 In May 1621, an orang kaya from Banda went to Ceram and incited the population there against the English and Dutch, relating what had happened on Banda.164 Herman van Speult on Amboina assumed, in August 1621, that there were 1,100 Bandanese on Ceram who wanted to recapture Banda.165 In September 1622, he estimated a force in Luhu on Ceram numbering as high as 3,000 to 4,000 Bandanese and inhabitants of Ceram.166 Some of the Bandanese had clearly managed to escape from the Banda Archipelago. These were the main causes of the demise of the Bandanese who did not manage to escape: some were captured and expelled, some were killed in the slaughter that followed the order to capture or kill them, some committed suicide by jumping into the sea, others drowned trying to reach safety when their boats sank. But most of the Bandanese were probably starved to death, holding out for months in the hills after the initial capture of Lonthor in March 1621. When the heads of the VOC in the Netherlands found out about all of this, they wrote to Coen: ‘We would have preferred that the matter could have been settled with more restrained means. They have paid dearly for their previous unfaithfulness. It will create awe but no favour.’167 This was a very mild reproach, but the fact that it was deemed serious enough to be brought up in correspondence with Coen showed an unease that permeated Dutch historiography for 400 years. In fact, after Coen had found out about the plot on 23 April, and immediately before he launched the attack to kill the Bandanese, he ordered the orang kaya deemed responsible for the plot against the Dutch to come to his ship with their families and possessions, where he detained them.168 A lot of the prisoners were taken before the actual final attack of 24 April. On Coen’s orders, Governor Sonck headed a military 162 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 261. 163 Johann Jacob Saar, Reise nach Java, Banda, Ceylon und Persien, 1644–1660. Neu herausgegeben nach der zu Nürnberg im verlag von Johann Daniel Tauber (1672) gedruckten verbesserten ausgabe des im jahre 1662 zum ersten mal erschienenen textes (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1930), p. 56. 164 Coolhaas, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, V I I, p. 698. 165 Ibid., p. 773. 166 Ibid., Part 2, p. 1009. 167 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 258–9. 168 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, pp. 149–50.

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tribunal on Neira. As a result of this, on 8 May, Japanese mercenary soldiers executed forty-four orang kaya in gruesome fashion, cutting them into quarters.169 The Dutch soldiers made to witness the executions returned to their barracks stupefied, ‘having found no pleasure in such trade dealings’.170 Coen estimated 2,500 were killed, and Van der Chijs commented that this is ‘of course a completely unfounded number’. Coen also identified hunger and violence as the main causes of the death toll.171 Van der Chijs is correct, but the figure Coen came up with should be regarded as a minimum figure. It is strange that Coen also wrote in his letter dated 16 November 1621: ‘We have not yet heard that of the whole of Banda more than about 300 Bandanese escaped.’172 Apparently Coen’s main goal was either to capture, or to cause death for, as many Bandanese as possible. He did not want them outside of his control. It seems he wanted them captured or dead. Coen also wrote in a letter of 6 September 1622 to the heads of the VOC in the Netherlands: ‘How fortunately last year by the grace of God all the islands of Banda were vanquished and the wilful Bandanese completely (except for those of Rhun Island, who were pardoned) exterminated and those lands were brought into a peaceful possession for the Company, [as] your honour understood before arrival of this [letter].’ And then he went on to estimate that 2,500 VOC people, both free and slaves, were already on Banda, with more needed to repopulate the islands, and 1,388 people were left on Rhun, where many of the Bandanese refugees had gathered.173 However, when the Dutch arrested the free Bandanese left on Rhun in 1622, they found only 160 Bandanese men.174 The English later lamented that it was impossible to get restitution for Rhun because the Dutch had ‘murdered all the people of the island, the most part with exceeding torments, so that there is not one of the naturals left’.175 It would seem Coen’s figure is wrong, but it could also be, however, that immediately after the attack a huge group of refugees gathered on Rhun and from there later escaped to either Ceram or the Kai and Aru Islands. To grasp the extent of the genocide, it is important to know how many Bandanese were living on Banda. The most credible information comes from an unfortunately anonymous estimation dating from around 1635 that, of the 15,000 people on Banda, fewer than 1,000 remained.176 This seems to be the Ibid., p. 158. 170 Ibid. 171 Ibid., p. 161. Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, p. 643. Ibid., pp. 729–30. 174 Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 261. ‘East Indies: December 1623 – January 1624’ in Calendar of State Papers, Volume 4, www .british-history.ac.uk/cal-state-papers/colonial/east-indies-china-japan/vol4/p190. 176 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 161.

169 172 173 175

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source given most credence by historians over the centuries. The source is from a written account by someone who clearly must have been in the Dutch fleet during the capture of Ai in 1616 and that of Lonthor in 1621, and was published by Leupe in 1854.177 Dutch colonial historian H. T. Colenbrander wrote in 1925 that the 15,000 Bandanese were almost all exterminated.178 A Banda population of 15,000 around 1620 is also supported by earlier data. Already, in the early sixteenth century, Tomé Pires had estimated between 2,500 and 3,000 people as inhabitants of Banda.179 It seems likely that Pires underestimated the total number at the time.180 In 100 years, Bandanese society had grown considerably and absorbed a whole group of people who had not been born there. The anonymous but informed contemporary Dutch source estimated, around 1635, that there had been 15,000 people, among them 4,000 armed men.181 In 1897, German botanist Otto Warburg also estimated that there were 15,000 Bandanese in the early seventeenth century, and that about 3–4,000 were killed in the war, 1,000 were shipped out, while about 10,000 must have run away.182 There were probably in total 1,200 Bandanese captured by the end of April 1621.183 Another 600 were captured later by Sonck, after Coen had left.184 Some of these died when being transported away from Banda. As for Dutch losses, Van der Chijs estimated that some 300 men were lost to disease on the expedition, with only about 18 people killed and around 60 wounded, but this was still considered quite a substantial cost in people and expenses.185 The Dutch later brought some of the captured Bandanese back to Banda as slaves but, after a Dutch amnesty granted in 1637 allowed free Bandanese to return, in 1638 only 560 original Bandanese were found on Banda, with only half being free: 103 men (53 enslaved), 291 women (over half enslaved – 158 to be exact), 166 children (69 born into slavery).186 That was all that remained on Banda of the once flourishing Bandanese civilisation. In Banda, not even 20 years after the destruction of their way of life and community, the Bandanese numbered only 560, and half were slaves, the others – at most – strangers in their own land, now repopulated with various groups brought in as workers 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 185 186

Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 384–430. H. T. Colenbrander, Koloniale Geschiedenis, vol. I I (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1925), p. 118. Pires, Suma Oriental, p. 206. Villiers, ‘Trade and society in the Banda Islands in the sixteenth century’, 726. Leupe, ‘Beschrijvinge van de Eijlanden Banda’, 74. Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, p. 107. Tiele, ‘De Europeërs in den Maleischen Archipel; Vol. 9’, 257. 184 Ibid., 260. Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 161. Warburg, Die Muskatnuss, p. 107.

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in Dutch-owned nutmeg plantations. In the Banda Archipelago in 1638, there lived 462 adult Europeans with 77 children, 560 Bandanese and 2,743 categorised as foreigners (the large majority being slaves). Out of a total of 3,842 inhabitants, this leaves 280 free Indigenous Bandanese – and that includes all the islands of Lonthor, Ai, Rhun and Rosengain, and does not include any children under 12 years old.187 On the fate of the Bandanese population, historians seem to have reached a consensus. Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya describe the ‘oft-cited case’ of the Banda Archipelago: ‘In a show of brutal force the Dutch governor-general Jan Pieterszoon Coen forcibly removed or killed most of the indigenous population, estimated at 15,000 people, and thus gained control over the world’s primary source of nutmeg and mace.’188 Barbara Watson Andaya, in the 1993 Cambridge History of Southeast Asia: From Early Times to c.1800, writes: ‘Of 15,000 Bandanese only about 1,000 were left and Banda itself became a colony settled by Dutch and mestizo concessionaries.’189 This is indeed what happened. Only 50 free men with their families had returned to Banda in 1638, but it seems reasonable to estimate that more survived than the 1,000 that historians have repeatedly provided as an estimate. It is likely that about 3,000 to 4,000 died, in the violence and because of hunger, on the Banda Archipelago. Another 1,800 to 2,000 were likely taken prisoner at some point by the Dutch during the military campaign against the Bandanese. Possibly 2,000 to 3,000 made it to Ceram, and perhaps an equal number to the Kai and Aru Islands. That would give a total estimate of 8,800 to 12,000 accounted for, with anywhere from 3,000 to 6,000 people drowned trying to escape, provided the number of 15,000 Bandanese in total is an accurate estimate to begin with. There is one way to make at least some – albeit flawed – comparative estimate on how many could have drowned. The anonymous source mentioned before estimated that in 1616 there were 1,800 people on Ai, and that 400 of those had drowned after the Dutch attack that year.190 That would mean that more than 20 per cent drowned trying to escape from Ai, with the islands of Lonthor and Rhun so close. Therefore, it seems that a number of 3,000 to 6,000 drowning is not unreasonable as an estimate in this case where 187 Valentijn, Naaukeurige verhandeling van Banda, p. 30. 188 Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia, 1400–1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 210. 189 Barbara Watson Andaya, The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. I: From Early Times to c.1800 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 430. 190 Leupe, ‘De Verovering der Banda-Eilanden’, 394–5.

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distances were much greater. Despite the fact that more than 1,000 Bandanese survived, the destruction of their home on Banda and Bandanese civilisation was still nearly absolute. The 4,000 to 6,000 people that may have survived could never rebuild what was lost. After the Bandanese genocide, Banda was completely transformed, and in November 1621 Coen proudly proclaimed: ‘In Banda God has been praised. There remains but to bring in worthy good people who could govern slaves. If this is not neglected then garrisons can be lightened, fruits will benefit [and] the Company will have been done a very big favour.’191 Eighteenth-century Dutch historiography would initially be supportive of Coen, and one account stated that Coen ‘in the year 1621 in March, muzzled the capricious and murderous Bandanese. Banda that had already cost so much Dutch blood, was truly conquered, and everything there, through his feared name and bravery, was brought into so much peace, that it hasn’t dared move again, but on the contrary brought great profits to the noble Society.’192 By the nineteenth century and beyond, Dutch historiography was more critical: ‘The sword of Jan Pieterszoon Coen has left a bloodstain there [in Banda] on the map.’193 Coen was a hero to the Dutch for centuries, but the current generation of Dutch have come to see his exploits in a more critical light. Coen did achieve his goal and did what his VOC masters wanted. The nutmeg became a Dutch monopoly. The destruction of the Bandanese also eliminated the only trading market in the Spice Islands. Now there were only suppliers selling.194 Dutch activities had established a monopoly on the spice trade, but at the cost of the lives of the Banda people. The Dutch had destroyed Banda civilisation. Gone was their vibrant economy. Gone was their culture. Few Bandanese survivors remained. These people would never rise again, and their civilisation and society became only a shadow of what it had once been. The Bandanese seem to have been killed simply because they were a nuisance to the Dutch and there was no easy way to deal with them. Of course, the Dutch wanted what the Bandanese had: exclusive rights to their nutmeg and mace production. The Bandanese had to go. Their elimination was something the heads of the VOC wanted, and Coen wanted. The effects for the Bandanese were terrible. Dutch troops took some as prisoner and killed many others. In response to the Dutch invasion and subsequent 191 Colenbrander, Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië, I, 670. 192 François Valentijn, Beschrijving van Groot Djava ofte Java Major, vol. I V (Dordrecht and Amsterdam: Joannes van Braam – Gerard onder de Linden, 1726), pp. 274–5. 193 De Jonge, De opkomst van het Nederlandsch Gezag, I I, p. 172. 194 Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence, p. 220.

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mass killings, many Bandanese fled to the hills and starved there, while some committed suicide by jumping off the cliffs. Still others fled the island, only to drown while trying to escape. A few succeeded and became what we would now call asylum seekers. These communities continued in some form. Ceram, north of Banda, was such an area, but perhaps the only one left now is the region of the Kai and Aru Islands. Linguistic research there shows that there are about 4,000 Bandanese, still speaking Bandanese, living today on two coastal areas of Kai Besar Island in the southeast of the Moluccas, about 400 kilometres away from the Banda Archipelago.195 The actual civilisation on Banda itself is irreparably destroyed, however. Just before being killed at the mass execution of orang kaya on 8 May 1621, one of them asked in Dutch if there was now no mercy.196 Coen had none in his heart, but the shine of gold in his eye. The fragrance of nutmeg drowned out the smell of blood. And a civilisation had come to an end.

Bibliographic Note The best primary sources addressing violence in the Banda Islands during these years are found in Dutch archival materials. From the nineteenth century on, many of these materials have appeared in printed form. Particularly important are the letters of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, published by Colenbrander and Coolhaas in multiple volumes (Jan Pietersz. Coen: Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië), especially Volume I (1919) by Colenbrander, and Volume VII (1952) by Coolhaas. A crucial piece of evidence is an (anonymous) Dutch contemporary witness account published in 1886 in Van der Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden (1599–1621) (The Establishment of Dutch Authority over the Banda Islands (1599–1621)), complemented by various archival sources consulted by Van der Chijs in his study of these events. There are also valuable Dutch archival materials published by J. K. J. de Jonge in the 1860s in various volumes. Sparse English-language primary sources, in the form of accounts of employees of the English East India Company, complement the Dutchlanguage sources. These English-language archives were first published originally in the nineteenth century in, Calendar of State Papers Colonial, East

195 James T. Collins and Timo Kaartinen’ ‘Preliminary notes on Bandanese: language maintenance and change in Kei’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 154:4 (1998), 525. 196 Chijs, De Vestiging van het Nederlandsche Gezag over de Banda Eilanden, p. 159.

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Indies, China and Japan, ed. W. N. Sainsbury (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office), and are available through British History Online. Secondary sources in Bahasa Indonesia and in other languages remain relatively limited, and largely draw on sections of the very limited primary archival material, mentioned above. A recent addition to the secondary literature on this topic is Marjolein van Pagee, Banda: De genocide van Jan Pieterszoon Coen (Utrecht: Uitgeverij Omniboek, 2021).

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‘Too Furious’

The Genocide of Connecticut’s Pequot Indians, 1636–1640 benjamin madley

The 1636–8 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial-era conflict opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequot people, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent. Few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved debate. Despite centuries of discussion over how to understand these events, no consensus exists on whether or not colonists’ policies and actions constituted genocide.1 This chapter summarises the Pequot genocide debate, narrates the catastrophe, explains why it did constitute genocide, and shows how it set precedents for further mass violence against Native Americans. In the 1960s and early 1970s, several scholars called English violence against the Pequots ‘extermination’ or ‘exterminating’, but in 1975 the jurist Anna Monguia became the first to call it genocide, deeming English colonists’ aggression ‘a genocidal attack’.2 Monguia thus joined a rising chorus of The author thanks Ned Blackhawk, Valerie Gambrell, Karl Jacoby, Paul Kelton, Ben Kiernan, Jacob R. Lahana, Andrew Lipman, James Lundberg, Preston McBride, Mark Meuwese, Nakai Northup, Lori A. Potter, Daniel K. Richter, Connor Smith and Craig Yirush, as well as the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation for their help. This chapter is dedicated to the memory of historian Alfred A. Cave. 1 Historian Gregory D. Smithers called these events ‘One of the most controversial historical case studies of English–Indian violence’: G. D. Smithers, ‘Rethinking genocide in North America’ in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. D. Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 322–44, at 331. 2 A. T. Vaughan, ‘Pequots and Puritans: the causes of the war of 1637’, The William and Mary Quarterly 21 (April 1964), 256–69, at 256; A. T. Vaughan, New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620–1675 (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1965), p. 122; L. Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 90; G. B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 85; A. R. Monguia, ‘The Pequot War reexamined’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 1 (1975), 13–21, at 20.

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activists and scholars who began referring to historical violence against Native Americans as genocide.3 In 1980, historian Richard Drinnon joined Monguia, noting ‘the genocidal intentions of the English’ before declaring: ‘The war established the credibility of the English will to exterminate.’4 Ten years later, historian Frank Chalk and sociologist Kurt Jonassohn insisted: ‘The Puritans’ annihilation of the Pequots is one genocide against the Indians that can be described in depth.’5 That same year, historian Laurence M. Hauptman explained: ‘What befell the Pequots in 1637 and afterward clearly fits the most widely accepted definition of genocide, one set by the United Nations Convention on Genocide in 1948.’6 Others vehemently disagreed. In 1991, Religious Studies scholar Steven Katz drew the battle lines of the Pequot genocide debate. Katz claimed that Englishmen demonstrated no ‘intent to commit physical genocide’, but conceded that they may have committed ‘cultural genocide’.7 Thus began what may be the most prolonged debate over a single instance of genocide in the history of the United States or its colonial antecedents. The following year, historian James Axtell deemed ‘The (unsuccessful) Puritan assault upon the Pequots of Connecticut in 1637’ to be one of several ‘authorized colonial attempts to annihilate . . . single tribes’.8 That same year, American Studies scholar David Stannard called the Pequot War ‘brutish and genocidal’, while scholars Lenore Stiffarm and Phil Lane, Jr labelled it ‘outright extermination’.9 Michael Freeman, a political scientist, directly challenged Katz in 1995, asserting that the Englishmen involved intended to annihilate Pequots culturally and physically. Katz responded 3 For the wider American genocide debate, see B. Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate: meaning, historiography, and new methods’, American Historical Review 120:1 (February 2015), 98–139 (hereafter, ‘Madley, “Reexamining”’). 4 R. Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), pp. 43–4, 48. 5 F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn, ‘Indians of the Americas, 1492 to 1789’ in The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, ed. F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 173–80, at 180. 6 L. M. Hauptman, ‘The Pequot War and its legacies’ in The Pequots in Southern New England: The Fall and Rise of an American Indian Nation, ed. L. M. Hauptman and J. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 69–80, at 76. 7 S. T. Katz, ‘The Pequot War reconsidered’, New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991), 206– 24, at 220 (emphasis in original). 8 J. Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 261. 9 D. E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 112; L. A. Stiffarm with P. Lane, Jr, ‘The demography of Native North America: a question of American Indian survival’ in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. A. Jaimes (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 23–54, at 34.

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that colonists committed only cultural genocide.10 Also in 1995, Hauptman reiterated his position that Pequots suffered genocide according to the Genocide Convention’s definition.11 Historian Ronald Karr joined Katz in 1998, insisting that ‘Laying waste the countryside and slaughtering civilians . . . were accepted means of conducting unconventional war’, though conceding that colonists’ actions ‘raise the question of cultural genocide’.12 The following year, Katz republished his 1991 essay with a new postscript, now claiming: ‘the Pequots survived the 1637 war because the colonists allowed them, indeed helped them, to survive’.13 The debate then continued into the new millennium. In 2000, Katz reasserted that Pequots did not suffer genocide, ‘in the technical sense [of the Genocide Convention]’, while Holocaust survivor and literature scholar Eva Hoffman countered: ‘Surely, the murder of one quarter to one half of a group suggests the intent to destroy that group “in part”, and therefore can legitimately be referred to as genocide.’14 Four years later, historian William Rubinstein added: ‘The Pequots . . . were deliberately exterminated.’15 Also in 2004, political scientist Guenther Lewy countered that there was no ‘premeditated plan to exterminate the Pequots’, while, late in the conflict, ‘colonists spared women, children, and the elderly, further contradicting the idea of genocidal intention’.16 Historian Mark Levene pushed back in 2005. He asserted that Englishmen tried to ‘wipe out the Pequots’ and, in 2007, historian Ben Kiernan described ‘Pequot Indians, devastated in the war and genocide of 1637–1638’.17 Alfred Cave – a leading Pequot War historian – then proclaimed: ‘Puritan writers on the Pequot war leave us no reason to doubt that the Pequots 10 M. Freeman, ‘Puritans and Pequots: the question of genocide’, New England Quarterly 68 (June 1995), 278–93; S. T. Katz, ‘Pequots and the question of genocide: a reply to Michael Freeman’, New England Quarterly 68 (December 1995), 641–9. 11 L. M. Hauptman, Tribes and Tribulations: Misconceptions about American Indians and their Histories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), p. 9. 12 R. D. Karr, ‘“Why should you be so furious?”: the violence of the Pequot War’, The Journal of American History 85 (December 1998), 908. 13 S. T. Katz, ‘The Pequot War reconsidered’ in New England Encounters: Indians and Euroamericans, ca. 1600–1850, ed. A. T. Vaughan (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999), 111–235, at 127. 14 P. Novick, T. Szulc and S. T. Katz, reply by E. Hoffman, ‘“The uses of Hell”: an exchange’, New York Review of Books 47 (15 June 2000), www.nybooks.com/articles/ar chives/2000/jun15/the-uses-of-hell-an-exchange. 15 W. D. Rubinstein, Genocide: A History (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2004), p. 52. 16 G. Lewy, ‘Were American Indians the victims of genocide?’ Commentary 118 (September 2004), 58. 17 M. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, 2 vols. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), I I, p. 64 (emphasis in original); B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 167, 227–35.

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were the victims of genocidal rage.’18 Still, debate continued. Historian Gary Anderson rejected the genocide thesis in 2014, insisting: ‘The nearest indictment possible under the circumstances might be applied to the Connecticut General Court, which did sanction the attack on the Pequot towns, perhaps a war crime.’19 The following year, I published a brief account of genocidal violence against the Pequots, upon which this chapter expands.20 Two factors polarise the Pequot genocide debate. First, participants disagree over what genocide means. Second, they differ on how to interpret the substantive evidence. To resolve the debate, this chapter will address both issues, before narrating the catastrophe and considering the evidence in light of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. The debate hinges, in part, on how participants define genocide.21 Hauptman, Stannard, Lewy, Cave, Kiernan and I all deployed the Genocide Convention definition.22 Others disagreed over who is protected and what crimes constitute genocide. Chalk, Jonassohn and Axtell expanded the scope of protected groups to include any ‘group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator’, while restricting genocide to ‘one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group’.23 Freeman expanded the scope of genocidal acts to include plans and actions ‘to disintegrate political and social institutions, culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups or to destroy the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups’.24 Rubinstein narrowed the scope of genocidal acts – ‘Genocide might . . . be defined as the deliberate killing of most or all members of a collective group’ – while excluding ‘most “acts” which are construed as genocide in international law’, beyond direct killing.25 Katz also expanded the range of protected groups, but insisted: ‘genocide applies only when there is an actualized intent . . . to physically destroy an 18 A. A. Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. D. Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 282. 19 G. C. Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), p. 50. 20 Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 120–6. 21 Historian Jeffrey Ostler argued that ‘the debate about genocide and the Pequot War hinges on definitions’, in his ‘Genocide and American Indian history’ in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, March 2015, http://americanhistory.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acre fore/9780199329175.001.0001/acrefore-9780199329175-e-3?rskey=Mt1uMR&result=4. 22 Hauptman, ‘Pequot War and its legacies’, 76; Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 281; Lewy, ‘Were American Indians the victims of genocide?’ 61; Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’, 275; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 11; Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 103. 23 Chalk and Jonassohn quoted in Axtell, Beyond 1492, p. 261 (emphasis in original). 24 Freeman, ‘Puritans and Pequots’, 290–1. 25 Rubinstein, Genocide, pp. 2, 3 (emphasis in original).

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entire group’.26 Although Katz deemed the Convention to be the ‘technical definition’, he emphasised premeditation as a defining feature of genocide. Finally, Anderson defined genocide as ‘a concerted effort to kill large numbers of people or indeed to annihilate a given people’ that ‘a legitimate government must plan, organize, and implement’.27 A widely accepted international legal treaty, the UN Genocide Convention provides a definition of genocide that is reinforced by an expanding body of case law. On 9 December 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention and its definition ‘unanimously and without abstentions’.28 It remains the only authoritative international definition. Unlike the at least twenty-two alternative definitions proposed since 1959, it has judicial power.29 From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, 152 nations are officially parties to the Convention.30 Moreover, it is supported and further defined by expanding international case law. It thus provides a powerful, though imperfect, definition for investigating any potential case of genocide. The Cambridge World History of Genocide proceeds from that basis. Yet the Pequot genocide debate also hinges on evidence. Fortunately, primary sources and early histories – largely ignored by some participants in this debate – illuminate the events usually remembered as the Pequot War, and its aftermath. To begin, it is important to understand that English statements of intent to annihilate Native Americans, as well as massacres targeting them, began before 1636. In Virginia, colonists had expressed genocidal intent and committed at least one major massacre during the 1620s. In 1622, Virginia Colony leaders responded to an Indigenous attack by planning ‘a sharp revenge . . . even to . . . the rooting them out for being longer a people vppon the face of the Earth’. The following year, colonists massacred 151 to 200 Powhatan people on the Potomac River.31 New England colonists then set new precedents: employing different tactics and, as we shall see, nearly annihilating the Pequot nation in the genocide of 1636–40. 26 S. T. Katz, The Holocaust in Historical Context: The Holocaust and Mass Death before the Modern Age, 2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), I, pp. 20, 127, 128 (emphasis in original). 27 Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian, p. 13. 28 L. J. LeBlanc, The United States and the Genocide Convention (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 1. 29 A. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 23–7. 30 https://treaties.un.org/Pages/ViewDetails.aspx?src=TREATY&mtdsg_no=IV-1&ch apter=4&clang=_en (accessed 29 April 2021). 31 Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 109, 113.

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Colonists’ motives for attacking the Pequots were both geostrategic and local. Pequots dominated wampum bead production along the shores of Long Island Sound. Imbued with powerful social and political meaning for many northeastern Native Americans, these beads – fashioned from whelk and quahog seashells – became a currency vital to colonial trade with Indigenous peoples.32 By controlling wampum production, Pequots wielded economic power and traded advantageously with other Algonquians, Dutchmen and Englishmen. Subduing the Pequots would give English colonists the keys to what was effectively the regional mint, while weakening their Dutch rivals in what was then New Netherland. Vanquishing the Pequots would also eliminate a regional Indigenous power, open Pequot lands to colonisation, give Englishmen control of the strategic mouth of the Connecticut River – a waterway draining much of New England – and ultimately help to establish English regional hegemony. The immediate casus belli was a series of local murders. On 20 July 1636, Native Americans killed the English trader John Oldham in Atlantic waters near Block Island, off the coast of what is now Rhode Island. The Manisses people of Block Island were not allied with the Pequots. Nevertheless, Massachusetts Bay Colony leaders responded to Oldham’s murder by attacking both Block Island Manisses and Connecticut Pequots, whom some colonists accused of having previously ‘slain one Captaine Norton, and Captaine Stone, with seven more of their company’.33 This punitive expedition aimed to kill substantial numbers of both Block Islanders and Pequots. In late August 1636, John Endecott’s expeditionary force of 98–120 men left Boston.34 ‘They had commission’, wrote Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop, ‘to put to death the men of Block Island, but to spare the women and children, and to bring them away [enslave them] and from thence to go to the Pequods to demand the murderers [allegedly Pequots] of Capt. Stone and other English, and one thousand fathom of wampom for 32 L. Ceci, ‘Native wampum as a peripheral resource in the seventeenth-century world system’ in Pequots in Southern New England, ed. Hauptman and Wherry, 48–63. 33 J. K. Hosmer, ed., Winthrop’s Journal, ‘History of New England,’ 1630–1649, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908) (hereafter, ‘Winthrop, Journal’), I, p. 83, n. 1, pp. 183–4; J. Underhill, Newes from America; or a A New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London: J. D., 1638), pp. 2, 9. John Mason wrote that Pequots did not kill these men, in A Brief History of the Pequot War: Especially of the Memorable Taking of Their Fort at Mistick in Connecticut in 1637 (Boston: S. Kneeland and T. Green, 1736), pp. viii–ix. 34 25 August 1636, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 186; Underhill, Newes from America, p. 3; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. ix.

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damages, etc., and some of their children as hostages, which if they should refuse, they were to obtain it by force’.35 Retreating into Block Island’s interior, local Manisses prevented Endecott’s troops from achieving their goals. Still, Endecott’s officer Captain John Underhill reported: ‘the Indians being retired into Swamps, so as wee could not find them, wee burnt and spoyled both houses and corne in great abundance’.36 Winthrop added that Endecott’s troops ‘staved seven canoes’.37 Yet Endecott failed to kill or enslave many Block Islanders. Intent on carrying out the second half of his orders, Endecott now sailed across the water to the Pequots. Underhill recollected ‘the [Pequot] Indians spying of us came running in multitudes along the water side, crying, what cheere Englishmen, what cheere, what doe you come for? They not thinking we intended warre went on cheerefully untill they come to Pequeat [now called the Thames] riuer.’ They ‘cryed, what Englishman, what cheere, what cheere, are you hoggerie, will you cram us? That is, are you angry, will you kill us, and doe you come to fight.’ Endecott replied by demanding the killers’ heads. A Pequot ‘Ambassadour’ explained that Pequots had thought Stone and company had been Dutch, not English. Endecott’s men rejected this explanation. They threatened: deliver the killers’ heads or ‘wee will fight with you’. Pequots continued to negotiate, but Endecott attacked.38 Underhill reported, ‘[W]ee suddenly set upon our march, and gave fire to as many as we could come neere, firing their Wigwams, spoyling their corne, and many other necessaries that they had buried in the ground.’ He explained, ‘Thus we spent the day burning and spoyling the Countrey.’ In sum, the English had only ‘one man wounded in the legge; but certaine numbers of theirs fsaine [slain], and many wounded’.39 Neighbouring Narragansett Indians revealed the toll. Governor Winthrop wrote: ‘The Naragansett men told us after, that thirteen of the Pequods were killed, and forty wounded.’40 According to one

25 August 1636, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 186. Underhill, Newes from America, p. 7 (emphasis in original). 24 August 1636, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 188. 38 Underhill, Newes from America, pp. 9–15. Underhill, Newes from America, pp. 14–15. Lion Gardiner, then commander of Connecticut’s Fort Saybrook, wrote ‘The Bay-man kild not a man save yt one Kichomiquin an Indean Sachem of yt Bay kild a pequit.’ See Gardiner [here Gardener], Relation of the Pequot Warres: Written in 1660 by Lieutenant Lion Gardener and now First Printed from the Original Manuscript With an Historical Introduction, ed. W. N. C. Carlton (Hartford Press, 1901), p. 11. 40 24 August 1636, Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 189–90. Underhill recollected that after killing ‘numbers’ of Pequots and ‘having burnt and spoyled what we could light on, wee imbarqued’: Underhill, Newes from America, p. 15. 35 36 37 39

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contemporary writer, ‘thus began the wars between the Indeans and us in thes prts [parts]’.41 Some Pequots now understood the English potential to inflict an Indigenous apocalypse. On or before 24 August 1636, Pequot envoys appealed to Narragansetts for assistance. The Narragansett sachem, or leader, Miantonomo, explained that these Pequot diplomats, ‘labored to persuade [Narragansetts], that the English were minded to destroy all Indians’.42 Despite this dire warning, Narragansetts, like Mohegans, saw opportunities in allying with Englishmen against the powerful Pequots. In October, Miantonomo met with Governor Winthrop in Boston. There, the two leaders signed a pact allying Massachusetts colonists and Narragansett Indians against the Pequot nation. The treaty required: ‘Neither party to make peace with the Pequods without the other’s consent’, while stipulating that they were ‘Not to harbor, etc., the Pequods’.43 A war against all Pequots was in the making. Endecott, meanwhile, returned to Massachusetts, and Pequots – who had recently been attacked – besieged Connecticut’s Fort Saybrook and ‘slew diverse Men’.44 During the long siege, Pequots – perhaps hoping to end the conflict – asked the fort’s commander, Lion Gardiner, ‘have you fought ynough[?]’. Gardiner recollected, in 1660, that the Pequots then ‘asked if we did vse to kill women & childre¯[n?]’. Gardiner answered with a threat: ‘we said they should see yt heraftr’. Some Pequots reportedly replied, ‘we will goe to conectecott and kill men women & children’.45 Whether or not any Pequots actually said as much, violence followed. On 22 February 1637, Gardiner led ten armed men out of Fort Saybrook, surprising and chasing three Pequots. According to him, ‘a great Company of Indians’ counter-attacked, killing or mortally wounding four of his men in a fierce skirmish. Gardiner failed to report Pequot casualties.46 In early March, Miantonomo sent ‘a Pequod’s hand’ to Massachusetts.47 Then, on 41 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 11. 42 Pequots to Narragansetts, summarised by Miantonomo and written by Mr Williams, 24 August 1636, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 190. 43 ‘THE ARTICLES’ in Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 193. 44 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. ix. 45 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 15. 46 Lion G[a]rdiner to John Winthrop, Jr, 23 March 1637 in No Editor, Winthrop Papers, vol. I I I: 1631–1637, 6 vols. (Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1943), I I I, pp. 381–2. For Winthrop’s account, reporting only nine Englishmen involved, see 22 February 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 208. See also Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, pp. 12–13. 47 9 March 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 212.

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23 April, some 100 to 200 Pequots assaulted Wethersfield, Connecticut, killing nine colonists, including perhaps three women, before taking two ‘maids’ prisoner.48 Further Anglo-Pequot clashes followed. By April’s end, Pequots had killed ‘about Thirty’ English people in all, while suffering an unknown total number of casualties.49 Colonists now dramatically escalated the violence. On 1 May, Connecticut’s General Court declared ‘offensiue warr’ against the Pequots and mustered 80–100 men under Captain John Mason.50 Before they departed, preachers primed them for mass killing. At a Hartford, Connecticut church service, ‘reverend Ministers’ first told Mason’s men: ‘you need not question your authority to execute those whom God, the righteous Judge of all the world, hath condemned . . . every common Souldier among you is now installed a Magistrate’. Having granted the men freedom to kill, the sermon concluded with a thinly veiled exhortation to commit mass murder: a promise that ‘the Lord’ will ‘inclose your enemies in your hands’ and ‘make their multitudes fall under your warlike weapons’.51 The ‘offensiue warr’ now began. Moving down the Connecticut River with 60–80 Mohegans under their leader, Uncas, Mason’s force located its first victims.52 According to Winthrop, ‘Minantunnomoh sent us word, that Capt. Mason, with a company of the English upon the river, had surprised and slain eight Pequods, and taken seven squaws.’53 Colonists would employ both murder and enslavement in their quest to eliminate the Pequots. Mason continued south. ‘[A]bout five hundred Indians’, including Mohegans under Uncas and Narragansetts under Miantonomo, accompanied Mason.54 At Fort Saybrook, the installation’s commander, Lion Gardiner, demanded from Uncas proof of loyalty: ‘send you now 20 men to ye bass riuer, for there 48 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 17; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. ix. Mr Haynes ‘and others’ summarised in 12 May 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 213; P. Vincent, A True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New England, between the English, and the Salvages: With the present state of things there (London: M. P., 1637), p. 7. For date, see H. R. Stiles, The History of Ancient Wethersfield Connecticut, 2 vols., (New York: The Grafton Press, 1904), I, p. 61. 49 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. x (emphasis in original). 50 J. H. Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, Prior to the Union with New Haven Colony, May, 1665 (Hartford: Brown & Parsons, 1850), p. 9; Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 19; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 1; Underhill, Newes from America, p. 23. 51 Ministers in E. Johnson, Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651, ed. J. F. Jameson (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1910 [1654]), pp. 165, 166. 52 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 23. Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 19; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 1. 53 22 May 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 218. 54 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 5 (emphasis in original).

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went yesstrnight 6 Indeans in a Canoe hither, fetch them now dead or aliue’.55 Near the fort, Mohegans killed four to six Pequots.56 At the fort, Gardiner paid ‘15 yards of trading Cloath’ for the victims’ heads.57 This was the first human head bounty offered in colonial New England. Mohegans also brought a Pequot prisoner into the fort. According to Gardiner, he was ‘a traytor’ named Kiswas.58 P. Vincent explained that colonists ‘tied one of his legs to a post, and 20 men with a rope tied to the other, pulled him in pieces, Captain Underhill shooting a pistol through him, to dispatch him’.59 Following Kiswas’ decapitation, Gardiner ‘set all their heads upon the fort’ in a gruesome display.60 The combined Anglo-Indian force, minus some Narragansetts who went home, now sailed northeast towards the Pequots at Mystic, Connecticut, while Underhill marched overland to join them.61 Mason’s plan was clear: ‘We had formerly concluded to destroy them by the Sword and save the Plunder.’62 This statement is evidence of Mason’s prior intent. Following a night march, Mason and Underhill attacked the village of Mystic at dawn on 26 May 1637.63 A barking dog alerted at least one Pequot to their arrival and that person began ‘crying Owanux! Owanux! which is Englishmen! Englishmen!’. Colonists then opened fire, ‘the Indians being in a dead indeed their last Sleep’. Soon after Pequots began vigorously resisting the attack, Mason announced: ‘WE M U S T BU R N T H E M.’64 He torched the ‘West-side’ of Mystic, while Underhill ‘set fire on the South end with a traine of Powder, the fires of both meeting in the center of the Fort’.65 Mason reported that Pequots ‘ran as Men most dreadfully Amazed’. Then, ‘when the Fort was thoroughly Fired, Command was given, that all should fall off and 55 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, pp. 19–20. 56 24 May 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 219; T[homas]: Hooker to John Wyntrop, c. May 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 408; Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 20; Vincent, True Relation, p. 8; Underhill, Newes from America, pp. 24–5; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 1. 57 For cloth, see Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 20. For a discussion of body part exchanges binding people together during the genocide, see A. Lipman, ‘“A meanes to knitt them togeather”: The exchange of body parts in the Pequot War’, The William and Mary Quarterly 65 (January 2008), 3–28. 58 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 20. 59 Vincent, True Relation, p. 9 (emphasis in original). Winthrop agreed that ‘the English . . . torture[d]’ the prisoner in Journal, I, p. 219. 60 Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 219. 61 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 5–6; Underhill, Newes from America, pp. 36–7. 62 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 8. 63 25 May 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 220; Underhill, Newes from America, p. 37. 64 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 7, 8 (emphasis and capitalisation in original). 65 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 39. See also Mason, Brief History, p. 8.

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surround the Fort’.66 Pequots fired back but ‘were scorched and burnt . . . deprived of their armes [because] the fire burnt their very bowstrings’. Indeed, ‘many were burnt in the Fort, both men, women, and children, others forced out, and came in troopes to the Indians, twentie, and thirtie at a time, which our soldiers received and entertained with the point of the sword; downe fell men, women, and children’.67 Colonists could have taken scores of the fleeing Pequots prisoner. Instead, they murdered ‘men, women, and children’, in keeping with Mason’s intent ‘to destroy them by the Sword’. The death toll of that nightmare dawn remains uncertain. Very few Pequots survived. According to Underhill, ‘the Indians, that were in the reere of us [Mohegans and/or Narragansetts] reported . . . about foure hundred soules in this Fort’. Yet, ‘not above five of them escaped out of our hands’.68 Four other contemporary writers, only one of whom might have been an eyewitness, estimated 300 to 400 killed.69 Mason, however, recollected that Mystic’s Pequots were ‘utterly Destroyed, to the Number of six or seven Hundred, as some of themselves comfessed’, while ‘There were only seven taken Captive & about seven escaped.’70 This estimate, reportedly provided by survivors well acquainted with Mystic’s population, may be the most accurate. Indeed, Underhill’s detailed drawing of the fort portrays 98 lodges (see Figure 9.1), suggesting a population above 300–400. Historian Alfred Cave, author of the definitive Pequot War history, considered Mason’s estimate of 600–700 dead ‘probably more accurate’ than Underhill’s estimation of about 400.71 In contrast, the attacking colonists lost ‘two Slain outright, 66 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 8 (emphasis in original). 67 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 39 (emphasis in original). According to Mason, perhaps forty ‘issued forth [and] perished by the Sword’: Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 9. 68 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 39. 69 Gardiner, not an eyewitness, estimated 300 in Relation of the Pequot Warres, pp. 20, 30. Winthrop, also not an eyewitness, reported 302 on 25 May 1637: Winthrop Journal, I, p. 220. Vincent, who may or may not have been an eyewitness, estimated 300–400 in True Relation, p. 12. Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford, also not an eyewitness, estimated ‘about 400’ in W. Bradford and C. Deane, eds., History of Plymouth Plantation (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1856), p. 357. For a detailed study of the event, see K. McBride, D. Currie, D. Naumec, et al., ‘Battle of Mistick Fort: site identification and documentation plan’, GA-2255-09-017 (Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center), http://pequotwar.org/wpcontent/uploads/2011/05/MPMRC_-NPS_ABPP_PublicReportMistickFort.pdf. 70 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 10 (emphasis in original). 71 A. A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), p. 151. Lipman argued: ‘evidence seemingly favors the lower end of the range. All sources written at the time of the war place the number at three or four hundred, and only John Mason’s account, which was written much later and defended the necessity of the attack due to the Pequots’ overwhelming numerical superiority offered the suspicious

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Figure 9.1 John Underhill, ‘The figure of the Indians’ fort or Palizado in NEW ENGLAND and the maner of the destroying It by Captayne Underhill And Captayne Mason’. In Underhill, Newes from America: or a New and Experimentall Discoverie of New England (London, 1638). (Courtesy of the Huntington Library)

and about twenty Wounded’ while accidentally ‘hurt[ing]’ ‘Divers’ or ‘many’ of their Indigenous allies with friendly fire.72 Despite the carnage, Underhill and Mason sought to justify it. Underhill wrote, ‘Great and dolefull was the bloudy sight to the view of young soldiers that never had beene in Warre, to see so many soules lie gasping on the ground so thicke in some places, that you could hardly passe along.’ Mason and Underhill’s Narragansett allies, meanwhile, ‘cried mach it, mach it; that is, it is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slaies too many men’. Considering their protests, Underhill asked, ‘It may bee demanded, Why outlier of “six or seven hundred”’: Lipman, ‘“[M]eanes to knitt them togeather”’, 19, n. 23 (emphasis in original). 72 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 10 (emphasis in original). See also Underhill, Newes from America, p. 39. Vincent suggested that one of the two Englishmen may have been killed by friendly fire, in True Relation, p. 12. For allied Indigenous casualties, see 25 May 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 220, and Roger Williams to John Winthrop, 2 June 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 427.

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should you be so furious (as some have said) [?] should not Christians have more mercy and compassion?’ His answer was an attempt to justify the massacre of innocents by appealing to biblical precedent: ‘sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents’.73 In contrast, Mason was simply triumphant: ‘Thus was God seen in the Mount, Crushing his proud Enemies and the Enemies of his People . . . burning them up in the Fire of his Wrath, and dunging the Ground with their Flesh: It was the LO R D ’ S Doings, and it is marvelous in our Eyes!’74 Mason was not alone in celebrating the atrocity. Some political leaders and colonists also endorsed the mass killing at Mystic. Twenty days after the slaughter, Massachusetts Governor Winthrop wrote: ‘There was a day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for the victory obtained against the Pequods.’75 Plymouth Colony Governor William Bradford later wrote that: It was a fearfull sight to see them thus frying in ye fyer, and ye streams of blood quenching ye same, and horrible was ye stinck & sente ther of; but ye victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prays therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfuly for them, thus to inclose their enimise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud & insulting an enimie.76

Underhill, Mason, Winthrop and Bradford all endorsed the massacre after the fact. To them, it was a righteous act. Had Mystic been an isolated event, it would have constituted a single ‘genocidal massacre’, which sociologist Leo Kuper defined as ‘the annihilation of a section of a group – men, women, and children, as for example in the wiping out of whole villages’.77 However, Mystic was part of a more systematic killing campaign. Immediately following the massacre, some 300 Pequot warriors from nearby, ‘much inraged’ by the slaughter, counter-attacked.78 According to Underhill, in ‘an houre [we] slew and wounded above a hundred Pequeats, all fighting men that charged us’.79 Marching to their boats, colonists and their Indigenous allies repeatedly shot Pequots and ‘fetch[ed] their Heads’, presumably to claim lucrative head bounties.80 Seven Mohegeans, who had been Underhill, Newes from America, pp. 39–40, 43, 40 (emphasis in original). Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 14 (emphasis and capitalisation in original). 15 June 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 222. Bradford and Deane, eds., History of Plymouth Plantation, p. 357. L. Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 10. 78 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 10–11; Underhill, Newes from America, p. 42. 79 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 42 (emphasis in original). 80 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 11–12. See also Vincent, True Relation, p. 12.

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with the Pequots, told the English: ‘about an hundred Pequets were slaine or hurt, in the fight with the English at their returne from the Fort’.81 Additional killings would follow. The Pequot leader Sassacus, ‘with the remainder of this massacre [then] fled the Countrey’ while ‘The greatest Body of [Pequots] went towards MA N H A T A N C E [Manhattan, New York]’, killing ‘three English Men in a Shallop’ en route. For many of these Pequot refugees, there would be no escape. Massachusetts soon mobilised 120 militiamen, under Captain Israel Stoughton, to hunt down Pequot survivors.82 Two groups now began to ‘utterly roote them out’, according to one contemporary writer.83 Massachusetts and Connecticut colonists, along with Mohegans, composed the first group. At the mouth of Connecticut’s Thames River, hundreds of Pequots surrendered to Stoughton’s force ‘without any opposition’.84 Yet this was no ordinary war. On or before 5 July, Stoughton’s men murdered twenty-two to thirty of the surrendered men.85 Mass killing was becoming common. Forty Connecticut colonists under Mason now joined the campaign, even as Mohegans captured ‘Straglers’.86 In early July, a group including Lieutenant Richard Davenport reached a rocky coastal headland northeast of New Haven, Connecticut. There they decapitated two Pequot prisoners, at least one a sachem, renaming the peninsula ‘Sachem’s Head’.87 Reaching the New Haven area, Davenport ‘with 20 men’ slew five or six ‘pecotts’ there.88 The colonial force now moved southeast. On 13 July, at least eighty colonists surrounded a large group of Pequots and local Sasqua Indians in a swamp near Fairfield, Connecticut. In an initial attack, Lieutenant Davenport and others slew ‘but few’, Davenport reporting how he ‘thrust [one man] through with my pike twise’ and wounded or killed 81 82 83 84

85 86 87

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Mohegans summarised in Vincent, True Relation, p. 15. Vincent, True Relation, p. 15; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 14. Vincent, True Relation, p. 15. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 14; W. Hubbard, A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, from the first planting thereof in the year 1607 to this present year 1677 (Boston: John Foster, 1677), p. 128. 5 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 224–5; Vincent, True Relation, p. 16; Hubbard, Narrative, p. 128. Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 14, 15; Vincent wrote of ‘200 English’ in this campaign in True Relation, p. 15. Richard Dauenport to Hugh Peeter, c. 17 July 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 452; 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 226; Jo: Winthrop to [William Bradford], 28 July 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 456. 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 226. For five victims and quotation, see Dauenport to Peeter in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 453.

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four others before a barrage of arrows forced him and his men to retreat with wounds of their own.89 Following a parlay, some 180 to 200 ‘old Men, Women and Children’ surrendered; others remained in the swamp.90 That night, colonists ‘killed fortie or fiftie besides those that they cut off in their retrait’.91 According to Mason, as many as ‘sixty or seventy’ escaped.92 Yet, after a search for bodies, the disinterment of some ‘buried in the mire’ and the discovery of ‘some who died in their flight’, Winthrop concluded: ‘not 20 did escape’.93 The attackers suffered only three men wounded.94 In total, the killings of mid-May to mid-July 1637 took a cataclysmic toll on the Pequots. On 13 July, Winthrop wrote, ‘We had now slain and taken, in all, about seven hundred.’95 This was likely an underestimate. According to Underhill, a military leader directly involved in much of the killing, Pequots were ‘slaine by the sword, to the number of fifteene hundred soules in the space of two moneths and lesse’.96 Still, killing continued. According to Vincent, writing in 1637, ‘Some other small parties of them were since destroyed.’97 Refuge proved elusive. On 28 July, Winthrop observed, ‘the Indeans in all quarters [are] so terrified’ that they ‘are afraid to receive’ Pequot refugees.98 Mohawks, Montauks, Narragansetts and possibly other Native Americans constituted the second group in the anti-Pequot campaign. To compel killing, colonists employed head bounties and, sometimes, genocidal threats. Three days after the Mystic Massacre, Montauk leader Wyandanch crossed Long Island Sound. Reaching Fort Saybrook, he asked Gardiner ‘if we were angrie with all Indeans’. Gardiner replied ‘No.’ Yet, he warned: if ‘you haue pequits 89 Dauenport to Peeter in Winthrop Papers, I I I, pp. 453–4; Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 456; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, pp. 15–17; Vincent, True Relation, p. 16. For ‘but few’, see Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 16. 90 Dauenport to Peeter in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 453; Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 457; 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 227; Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 16; Vincent, True Relation, p. 16. For quotation, see Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 16 (emphasis in original). 91 Vincent, True Relation, p. 16. 92 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 17 (emphasis in original). 93 Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 457; 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 227. Mason wrote: ‘We afterwards searched the Swamp, & found but few Slain.’ See Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 17 (emphasis in original). 94 Dauenport to Peeter in Winthrop Papers, I I I, pp. 453–4; Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 457. 95 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 227. See also Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 457. 96 Underhill, Newes from America, p. 2. Underhill seems to have meant between mid-May and mid-July 1637. 97 Vincent, True Relation, p. 16. 98 Winthrop to [Bradford] in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 457.

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with you . . . they might kill my men, . . . and So we may kill all you for ye pequits but if you will kill all the pequits yt come to you and send me thr heads’ then ‘you shall haue trade with vs.’ Wyandanch later sent Gardiner a dozen Pequot heads. Gardiner ‘paid . . . as I had promised’. Wyandanch then ‘kild . . . many of ye pequits and sent thr heds to’ Gardiner, probably fearing that unless he continued this grisly trade, colonists would ‘come and kill vs all as they did ye pequits’.99 Similar fears and rewards likely motivated other Indigenous people in New England and New Netherland to kill Pequots. Indeed, in 1637, Mason reported, ‘The Pequots now became a Prey to all Indians. Happy were they that could bring in their Heads to the English: Of which there came almost daily to Winsor, or Hartford [Connecticut].’100 In late June or early July, Narragansetts and Nipmucks defeated Pequots and their ‘Wunnashoatuckoog’ Nipmuck allies in northeastern Connecticut, killing perhaps three or more Pequots.101 That summer, Mohawks sent the heads and hands of many Pequots, including their leader Sassacus, to Hartford, for, as Gardiner explained, ‘they all fered vs’.102 Pequot body parts also arrived in Boston. On 5 August, Winthrop reported that Englishmen brought to Boston ‘part of the skin and lock of hair of Sasacus and his brother, and five other Pequod Sachems’, scalps taken during a Mohawk attack that killed twentyseven Pequots.103 The death toll may have been higher. Mohegans later reported ‘Sasacus . . . killd . . . and 40 men with him, and som women’.104 Either way, on 5 August, Winthrop added, ‘They brought news also of divers other Pequods . . . slain by other Indians, and their heads brought to the English.’ Thus, ‘now there had been slain and taken between eight and nine hundred’.105 Still, reports of killing continued to pour into Boston. On 20 August, Rhode Island Governor Roger Williams wrote, based on conversations with Miantonomo, of the undated killings of thirteen Pequots by Narragansetts.106 About three days later, Davenport reported how Mohegans ‘brought the 99 Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, pp. 20, 21, 22; Wyandanch in Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, pp. 20, 24. 100 Mason, Brief History of the Pequot War, p. 17 (emphasis in original). 101 Roger Williams to John Winthrop, 10 and 15 July 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, pp. 445, 451. These letters do not specifically mention Pequot casualties. 102 Vincent, True Relation, pp. 16–17; Gardiner, Relation of the Pequot Warres, p. 21. 103 5 August 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 229–30. 104 Mohegans summarised in Richard Dauenport to the Gouernor of Massachusetts, c.23 August 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 491. 105 5 August 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 229–30. 106 Roger Williams to Mr Governour, 20 August 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 489.

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[hands] of a great Sachem . . . Momonotuck Samm’.107 So many Pequot body parts arrived that Winthrop stopped counting. On 26 August, he wrote: ‘The Indians about sent in still many Pequods’ heads and hands from Long Island and other places’, while, on 31 August, ‘The Naragansetts sent us the hands of three Pequods.’108 In total, body-part bounties and threats encouraged the slaying of substantial numbers of Pequot people. On 12 October 1637, Massachusetts colonists organised another coordinated victory celebration. That day, Winthrop recorded in his journal ‘A day of thanksgiving kept in all the churches for victories against the Pequods’.109 Massachusetts religious leaders and their congregants once again celebrated the mass killing of Pequots after the fact. Some colonial leaders sought total erasure. The 21 September 1638 Treaty of Hartford (created by Connecticut Englishmen but also signed by Miantonomo and Uncas) banished Pequots from their ancestral homeland and gave ‘200 Pequots living that are Men besides Squaws and Papooses’ to Narragansetts and Mohegans. The Treaty also specified that Pequots ‘shall no more be called Pequots but Narragansetts and Mohegans’. Finally, it required the beheading of any surviving Pequot who had killed or attempted to kill any English person.110 In sum, the Treaty of Hartford’s authors sought to eliminate the Pequot nation. Dispersing survivors was central to this erasure strategy. According to chroniclers of the conflict, colonists captured at least 319 Pequots, many of whom they treated as property.111 Colonists also gave many Pequot prisoners to Indigenous allies, condoning, if not requiring, the incorporation of Pequots into those communities. The 1638 Treaty facilitated the largest such transfer. If at least 1 woman and 1 child accompanied each Pequot man placed into Mohegan and Narragansett custody under the Treaty, a minimum of 600 Pequots fell under the control of their Indigenous rivals. Colonists also shipped at least 1 to England, 15 boys and 2 women to bondage on ‘Providence Isle’ off Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, and perhaps 80 or more Pequots to slavery in Bermuda.112 Colonial leaders sought to scatter and destroy the Pequots ‘as Dauenport to [Winthrop], c.23 August 1637 in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 490. 26 and 31 August 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 231. 12 October 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 238. John Haynes, Roger Ludlow, Edward Hopkins, Miantonomo and Uncas, ‘Articles of Agreement Between the English in Connecticutt and the Indian Sachems’, 21 September 1638, 1–2: Connecticut State Library, Hartford. 111 M. L. Fickes, ‘“They could not endure that yoke”: the captivity of Pequot women and children after the war of 1637’, New England Quarterly 73 (March 2000), 55–81, at 61. 112 For England and Providence Isle, see 5 July and 13 July 1637, Winthrop, Journal, I, pp. 225, 227–8. For Bermuda, see F. V. W. Mason, ‘Bermuda’s Pequots’, Harvard Alumni Bulletin 39 (26 February 1937), 616–20, and J. E. Smith, Slavery in Bermuda (New York: Vantage Press, 107 108 109 110

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such’ (in the terms of the UN Genocide Convention). As Kiernan explained, ‘English policy was clear: the Pequot ethnic group had to disappear. The survivors were to be made unable to reproduce themselves as a community.’113 The impact was so devastating that at least one author reported all Pequots either hiding or vanished. In a book published in 1643, the author explained: in that Warre which we made against them . . . a very few of our men in a short time . . . slew and took prisoners about 1400 of them, even all they could find . . . so that the name of the Pequits (as of Amaleck) is blotted out from under heaven, there being not one that is, or, (at least) dare call himselse a Pequit.114

Yet this policy did come to an end. Colonial officials halted the state-sanctioned systematic destruction of the Pequot people in October of 1640. The magistrates of Connecticut, New Haven and Aquidneck ‘declared their dislike of such as would have the Indians rooted out, as being the cursed race of Ham’.115 By this point, colonists had achieved their ends. They had shattered Pequot power, seized Pequot wampum production, taken the strategic mouth of the Connecticut River, and cleared the way for English hegemony in the region. Genocide had served its purposes. Still, the myth of the vanished Pequots echoed into the future. Nearly two centuries later, in 1823, Harvard Professor Edward Everett concluded that the Pequots had been ‘extinguished’.116 Twenty-eight years after that, the narrator of Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby Dick began insisting to generations of readers that the Pequots were ‘extinct’.117 In fact, Pequots were neither ‘extinguished’ nor ‘extinct’. Some had resisted and survived the killing, enslavement and dispersal of the 1630s. Pequots re-established themselves, as an independent nation on their traditional lands, during the 1650s.118 In 1651, colonists and Pequots

113 114

115

116 117 118

1976), pp. 23–5. Fickes challenged the veracity of the claim that the English sent Pequots to Bermuda in ‘“They could not endure that yoke”’, 61, n. 13. Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 233. T. Weld (?), New Englands First Fruits; In Respect, Firft of the Converfion of fome, Conviction of divers, Preparation of fundry of the Indians. 2. Of the progresse of Learning, in the Colledge at Cambridge in Massacufets Bay. With Divers other fpeciall Matters concerning that Countrey (London: R. O. and G. D. for Henry Overton, 1643), pp. 37–8. October 1640 letter in E. R. Potter, Jr, The Early History of Narragansett: With an Appendix of Original Documents, Many of Which are Now for the First Time Published (Providence: Marshall, Brown and Company, 1835), p. 30. E. Everett, ‘On the state of the Indians’, North American Review 16 (January 1823), 30–45, at 37. Ishmael in H. Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1851), p. 76. Jacob R. Lahana kindly brought this quotation to my attention. M. L. Oberg, Uncas: First of the Mohegans (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 139–41; K. McBride, ‘The historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots, 1637–

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agreed to establish a roughly 500-acre Pequot reservation at Noank (Nawayunk).119 Fifteen years later, Connecticut approved the creation of a 2,000–3,000-acre Pequot reserve at Mashantucket.120 Then, in 1683, the colony created an approximately 280-acre reservation near what is now North Stonington.121 Pequots then persisted across succeeding centuries. At least one nineteenth-century Pequot publicised the tribe’s continued existence to the wider world. In 1829, William Apess, a Pequot man and Methodist minister, brought attention to his people when he published the first English-language Native American autobiography, subtitled: Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians.122 Still, Pequot people struggled to retain their lands and sovereignty. Those struggles continued. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan signed the Mashantucket Pequot Indian Claims Settlement Act, formalising federal recognition of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation and settling land claims.123 Nineteen years later, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs formally recognised the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation, only to revoke that recognition in 2005.124 In 2021, 1,095 people were enrolled members of Connecticut’s federally recognised Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, while some 1,255 were citizens of the nearby Eastern Pequot Tribal

119

120

121 122

123

124

1900: a preliminary analysis’ in Pequots of Southern New England, ed. Hauptman and Wherry, 96–116, at 105. ‘Agreement Between Town and Tribe, Pequots Granted Lands at Noank (Nawayunk), 18 November 1651’ in A. T. Vaughan, Early American Indian Documents: Treaties and Laws, 1607–1789 (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1979), 101–2; McBride, ‘Historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots’, 105. For 2,000 acres, see [Mo] Udall, ‘Providing for the settlement of land claims of the Mashantucket Pequot Indian tribe of Connecticut, and for other purposes’, 21 March 1983 in United States House of Representatives, Report No. 98-43, 98th Congress, 1st Session, 2. For 3,000 acres, see McBride, ‘Historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots’, 106. D. H. Hurd, History of New London County, Connecticut, with Biographical Sketches of Many of Its Pioneers and Prominent Men (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis & Co., 1882), p. 32. W. Apes, A Son of the Forest: The Experience of William Apes, A Native of the Forest. Comprising a Notice of the Pequod Tribe of Indians (New-York: Published by the Author, 1829). For all of Apess’ writings, see: W. Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. B. O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992). Mashantucket Pequot Indian Claims Settlement Act, 18 October 1983 in United States, US Statutes at Large (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1985), X C V I I : 851. ‘Final determination to acknowledge the historical Eastern Pequot Tribe’, Federal Register 67:126 (1 July 2002), 44234–40; ‘Reconsidered final determination to decline to acknowledge the Eastern Pequot Indians of Connecticut and the Paucatuck Eastern Pequot Indians of Connecticut’, Federal Register 70:198 (14 October 2005), 60099–101.

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Nation.125 Twenty-first-century Pequots – some of whom generously shared information for this chapter – have not forgotten their ancestors’ seventeenth-century ordeal.126 They are the descendants of tenacious survivors. Between 1636 and 1640, colonial policy-makers and perpetrators expressed genocidal intent as defined by the Genocide Convention – that is, an ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’.127 Before the 1637 Mystic Massacre, Mason wrote: ‘We had formerly concluded to destroy them by the Sword’, while the 1638 Treaty of Hartford articulated plans for eliminating Pequots as a national and ethnic group. Colonists also repeatedly celebrated and sought to justify the mass killings ex post facto. Massacres, mass executions, homicides and human body-part bounties underscored that genocidal intent, while also providing evidence of genocidal acts. Such acts of genocide – as defined by the Genocide Convention – included the many killings (battles, massacres and murders), as well as ‘causing serious bodily or mental harm’ to members of the group on the basis of their group identity. Systematic dispersal through institutionalised kidnapping and slavery constituted ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’.128 Indeed, colonists likely also understood that sending Pequots to English Caribbean bondage – where some 25 per cent of slaves died each year – would kill many of them.129 Colonists almost certainly understood that dispersal through slavery constituted ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’, especially when they shipped Pequots to distant locations while separating women from men. Finally, kidnapping and enslaving Pequot children involved the genocidal act of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’, as when colonists exiled boys to Caribbean bondage.130 125 Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation Public Affairs Director Lori A. Potter provided the nation’s 2021 enrolment numbers in an email to the author on 19 May 2021. Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation council member Valerie Gambrell provided the Eastern Pequot Tribal Nation’s enrolment numbers in a telephone call on 25 May 2021. 126 See www.mashantucket.com/tribalhistory.aspx and www.easternpequottribalnation .com/history.html. 127 The United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, Treaty Series, Vol. 78: No. 1021, 280. Hereafter ‘United Nations, Convention’. 128 United Nations, Convention, 280. 129 B. C. Richardson, The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492–1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 66. 130 United Nations, Convention.

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Interpreting the Pequot ordeal as genocide is complicated by three factors: the death toll, uncertain Pequot population estimates, and Pequot resistance. From all of the evidence cited earlier and in Table 9.1, it is likely that Englishmen and their Indigenous allies killed at least 1,500 Pequots in 1637 alone, and probably closer to 1,600 in 1636 and 1637. As to the pre-war Pequot population, most scholars have estimated that the Pequots numbered some 3,000 to 4,000 people.131 These figures can be traced to a widely quoted 12 July 1633 Winthrop journal entry enumerating ‘three or four thousand warlike Indians’.132 Scholars then tend to estimate that, due to the war, the Pequot population declined to perhaps 1,000 to 2,500 people, a decrease of at least 35 per cent.133 However, Winthrop made his population estimate just as the smallpox epidemic of 1633–4 was beginning. Bradford reported that it erupted that summer and ‘swept away many of ye Indeans from all ye places near and adjoyning’. The variola major virus reached a palisaded village of some 1,000 ‘Indeans’ on the Connecticut River that winter. According to Bradford, ‘It pleased God to visite these Indeans with a great sicknes, and such a mortalitie that of a 1000. above 900. and a halfe of them dyed.’134 By January 1634, three men returned from Connecticut – which contained the Pequot homeland – and told Winthrop: ‘the smallpox was gone as far as any Indian plantation was known to the west, and much people dead of it’.135 That spring, according to Bradford, more ‘Indeans’ on the Connecticut River, ‘fell sick of ye small poxe, and dyed most miserably’.136 Pequots almost certainly suffered substantial losses after Winthrop’s widely cited July 1633 population estimate. Consequently, scholars have likely overestimated the Pequot population in 1637, when the war began. Given the

131 S. F. Cook, ‘The Indian population of New England in the seventeenth century’, University of California Publications in Anthropology 12 (16 January 1976), 51; W. A. Starna, ‘Pequots in the early seventeenth century’ in Pequots in Southern New England, ed. Hauptman and Wherry, 33–47, at 47; McBride, ‘Historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots’, 104. 132 12 July 1633, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 103. 133 Anthropologist Kevin McBride wrote ‘an estimate of 2,000 to 2,500 Pequots remaining at the close of the War is not unreasonable’ in ‘Historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots’, 104. Native American Studies scholar Bruce Elliot Johansen estimated: ‘After the war, Pequot population probably fell below 1,000’ in The Encyclopedia of Native American Economic History (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999), 200–2, at 201. 134 Bradford and Deane, eds., History of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 315, 325. 135 ‘Hall and two others’ summarised, 20 January 1634, Winthrop, Journal, I, p. 118. 136 Bradford and Deane, eds., History of Plymouth Plantation, pp. 325–6.

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Table 9.1 Comparative reported death tolls in the Pequot War, 1636–1637

Location and date Pequot (Thames) River, before 24 August 1636 Fort Saybrook, Autumn and Winter, 1636–7 Near Fort Saybrook, 22 February 1637 Pequot hand sent to Massachusetts, March 1637 Total number of colonists killed by the end of April 1637 Connecticut River, before 22 May 1637 Near Fort Saybrook, before 24 May 1637 Fort Saybrook, May 1637 Mystic, 26 May 1637 Near Mystic, 26 May 1637 At or near Fort Saybrook, on or after 26 May 1637 Near mouth of Pequot (Thames) River, on or before 5 July 1637 Northeastern Connecticut, before 10 July 1637 Sachem’s Head, before 13 July 1637 New Haven area, before 13 July 1637 First Fairfield Swamp attack, 13 July 1637 (victims may have included Sasquas) Second Fairfield Swamp attack, 13–14 July 1637 (victims may have included Sasquas)

Reported number of civilian colonists Reported number of civilkilled by ians and militiamen killed Pequots by Pequots

Reported number of Pequots killed (civilians and warriors) by colonists and their allies

0

0

?

‘diverse men’ (3+?)

‘numbers’ (at least 2) –13+ ?

0

4

?

0

0

1

9

0

~30 (including militiamen 0 listed above, and 9 civilians listed to the left) 0 8

0

0

4–6

0 0 0 3

0 2 ? 3

1 300–700 2–100 0

0

0

22–30

0

0

0–3+

0

0

2

0

0

5–6

0

0

2–5+

0

0

42–52+

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Table 9.1 (cont.)

Location and date [Underhill’s summary of total number of Pequots killed, mid-May to mid-July 1637 Pequot heads sent by Wyandanch after midJuly 1637 Mohawk attack on Pequots, before 23 August 1637 Hands of Momonotuck Samm, delivered by Mohegans on or before 23 August 1637 Pequot heads and hands sent by ‘Indians’ from ‘Long Island and other places’ soon before 26 August 1637 Pequot hands sent by Narragansetts, 31 August 1637 TOTALS

Reported number of civilian colonists Reported number of civilkilled by ians and militiamen killed Pequots by Pequots

Reported number of Pequots killed (civilians and warriors) by colonists and their allies

0

0

1,500]

0

0

12

0

0

27–43+

0

0

1

0

0

6+

0

0

3

12

35 (23 militiamen?)

440+ – 1,579+

likely death toll of 1,500 or more, the percentage of Pequots killed was probably substantially higher than scholarship typically suggests. Pequot resistance poses a larger challenge to an interpretation of genocide, because many scholars define genocide as one-sided mass killing.137 Was this simply a war in which both sides killed civilians but one had overwhelming firepower? Pequot warriors did besiege Fort Saybrook and did kill civilians, notably in early 1637. Yet these killings were unusual. From late May 1637 on, colonists repeatedly massacred Pequot civilians and slew prisoners, while Pequots killed no colonists and few if any of their Indigenous allies. The 137 For 1959–2014 academic definitions of genocide, see Jones, Genocide, pp. 23–7.

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killing and attempted destruction of the Pequot people became essentially one-sided, as Table 9.1 illustrates. Comparing casualties on both sides – a method not previously employed in the Pequot genocide debate – helps to clarify the fact that Pequots suffered genocide. Englishmen and their allies likely killed close to 1,500 or more Pequots in 1636 and 1637, including many women and children. These estimates are built solely upon specific (dated and/or located) reported killings. They omit all non-specific reports of killings of Pequots, such as Vincent’s undated description of how Francis Waine-Wright of New Ipswich killed 2 Pequots and ‘brought . . . their heads to the armie’, and Williams’ description of 13 Pequots killed by Narragansetts at unspecified locations and times.138 Other killings likely went completely unreported. Indeed, the death toll may have been substantially higher than 1,500. Even assuming a 1636 Pequot population of 3,000 people, not counting births between 1636 and 1637, a death toll of 1,500 would have reduced the Pequot population by 50 per cent. These are baseline numbers. If the 1636 population was 2,500 people, the population loss would have been 60 per cent. And if the 1636 population was 2,000, losses would have been 75 per cent. Of course, if the death toll was higher than 1,500, the total population loss could well have exceeded 75 percent. Using before-and-after population estimates, scholars have posited that, in 1636 and 1637, colonists and their allies killed ‘one quarter to two thirds’ of all Pequot people.139 In contrast, primary sources suggest that Pequots killed perhaps 35 colonists, including some 23 militiamen, during a war initiated by Massachusetts – and none after late May 1637. After that, colonists and their allies killed at least another 122–163 Pequots. During the entire war and genocide, for every colonist killed by Pequots, colonists and their allies likely killed more than 40 Pequots. Whatever the exact ratio, the violence was overwhelmingly onesided. Colonists sought to annihilate the Pequot people ‘as such’, and scatter the survivors. This was a case of genocide. And it set important precedents. Beginning in 1641, Dutch authorities in nearby New Amsterdam mimicked English anti-Pequot policies. First, they followed the Pequot head bounty precedent set by their English neighbours. That year, the Director and Council of New Netherland offered ‘Ten fathoms of Wampum for each of the . . . Raritans, and 20 fathoms of Wampum for every head of the Indians who have most barbarously murdered our people 138 Vincent, True Relation, pp. 17-18; Williams to Governour, 20 August 1637, in Winthrop Papers, I I I, p. 489. 139 Freeman, ‘Puritans and Pequots’, 289.

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on Staten Island.’140 Two years later, Dutch officials launched their own killing campaigns. As in the Pequot genocide, the Dutch employed night encirclement, massacres and, ultimately, even John Underhill himself. In February of 1643, 400 to 500 Wiechqaesgeck Munsees sought refuge from Mohawks outside New Amsterdam. Colonists then petitioned Dutch West Indian Company Director Willem Kieft to avenge the killing of Dutch traders by Native Americans now that ‘God hath fully delivered them into our hands.’141 The eyewitness and Kieft critic David Pieterszoon DeVries later wrote that, on 24 February, Kieft and his co-conspirators ‘determined to commit the murder’.142 Beginning at about midnight on 25 February, colonists massacred perhaps 40 Wiechqaesgeck refugees at Corlear’s Hook, on the lower east side of Manhattan Island, and perhaps 80 others at Pavonia, New Jersey, including women and children.143 These massacres triggered additional violence and Kieft recruited Underhill, who spoke Dutch and had married a Dutch woman, as a military leader.144 The following year, Kieft expanded his campaign and Underhill, with others, reportedly killed some 120 Indigenous men at two western Long Island villages. Underhill now repeated his Mystic stratagem. Following 140 Director and Council of New Netherland, ‘Ordinance of the Director and Council of New Netherland, offering a reward for the heads of Raritan Indians, passed 4 July, 1641’ in Laws and Ordinances of New Netherland, 1638–1674, comp. and trans. E. B. O’Callaghan (Albany: Weed, Parsons and Company, 1868), 28–9 (emphasis in original). 141 D. P. De Vries, My Third Voyage . . . in Collections of the New-York Historical Society, 2nd ser. (New-York: D. Appleton and Company, 1857), I I I, pp. 113–14; Maryn Adriaensen, Jan Jansen Dames and Abraham Plank to William Kieft, n.d. in Documents Relative to the Colonial History of the State of New-York . . ., ed. J. R. Broadhead and E. B. O’Callaghan, 15 vols. (Albany: Weed, Parsons, and Company, 1856), I , p. 193. 142 De Vries, My Third Voyage . . ., p. 115. The pro-Kieft Journal of New Netherland explained that Kieft granted approval to twelve men who petitioned for permission to attack Native Americans ‘on the Manhatens and on Pavonia’. See Anonymous, Journal of New Netherland in Narratives of New Netherland, 1609–1664, ed. J. R. Jameson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909), p. 277. 143 J. Fiske, The Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899), I , pp. 184–5; B. in A. V. D. Donck, Vertoogh van Nieu Nederland; and Breeden Raedt aen Vereenichde Nederlandsche provintien. Two Rare Tracts, Printing in 1649–’50 Relating to the Administration of Affairs in New Netherland (New York: Baker, Godwin & Co., 1851), pp. 148–9; De Vries, My Third Voyage . . ., pp. 115–16; A. L. Trelease, Indian Affairs in Colonial New York: The Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1960), p. 76. The Journal of New Netherland, completed in 1647, reported that soldiers at Pavonia and colonists at Corlear’s Hook killed ‘about eighty’ and took 30 prisoners, before soldiers shot ‘a man and a woman’ at Pavonia. See Anonymous, Journal of New Netherland, p. 277. The soldiers returned with ‘many severed heads’ according to Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, I, p. 185. 144 Winthrop, Journal, I I, p. 57.

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a night march from Stamford, Connecticut, his 130 men located a large village near what is now Pound Ridge, New York. Under the light of a full moon, they surrounded it, attacked, and killed some 180 people. He and another officer then ordered the town to be set ablaze. Ultimately, Underhill’s force shot dead, stabbed to death or incinerated more than 500, and possibly as many as 700, people, presumably Siwanoys or Tankitekes, but also perhaps 25 Wappingers. Not more than 8 men escaped. Like English colonists during the Pequot genocide, Dutch colonists celebrated the atrocity. When the troops returned to Fort Amsterdam, ‘A thanksgiving was proclaimed on their arrival.’145 Statements of genocidal intent, massacres, human body-part bounties and homicides were not uncommon themes in the invasion of Native America. A number of military and political leaders threatened to annihilate American Indian peoples. The physical manifestation of these declarations were the hundreds of massacres committed against Indigenous people that stained the continent from east to west. Meanwhile, policy-makers offered bounties for Native American body parts in at least twenty-three US states or their colonial, territorial or Mexican antecedents. Homicides are too numerous to count.146 The Pequot genocide of 1636–40 remains an important, even formative, event in the invasion of Native America and the making of the United States.

Bibliographic Note Participants, bystanders and historians have been writing about the Pequot catastrophe of 1636–40 since it occurred. Major primary sources include memoirs by Gardiner (Relation of the Pequot Warres, 1660), Mason (Brief History of the Pequot War, 1736) and Underhill (Newes from America, 1638), as well as P. Vincent’s 1637 pamphlet True Relation of the Late Battell fought in New England, the 1638 Treaty of Hartford (Haynes et al., ‘Articles of Agreement Between the English in Connecticutt and the Indian Sachems’), and the 145 Anonymous, Journal of New Netherland, pp. 282–3. This author referred to Underhill as ‘Van der Hyl’. The expedition included 150 men, according to Fiske, Dutch and Quaker Colonies in America, p. 188. For Fort Amsterdam, see E. B. O’Callaghan, History of New Netherland; or, New York under the Dutch, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1846), I , p. 302. 146 For fifty-five reported massacres in what are now thirty-one states between 1539 and 1890 as well as human body-part bounties, see Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 112-17. For hundreds of massacres and homicides in California see B. Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 363–480.

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letters and journals of governors William Bradford (Bradford and Deane, eds., History of Plymouth Plantation) and John Winthrop (Journal). In Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence (1654, esp. pp. 161–70), Edward Johnson provided a brief, confused narrative. Finally, the Winthrop Papers include many relevant letters, as does The Correspondence of Roger Williams (vol. I: 1629–1653). The secondary source literature is too voluminous to address exhaustively here. The most comprehensive treatment to date is Alfred Cave’s Pequot War (1996), while the website pequotwar.org provides archaeological, historical and teaching information. Some other important late-20th- and early-21stcentury studies addressing Pequot history between 1636 and 1640 include the previously noted works by Alden Vaughan (especially the 1964 ‘Pequots and Puritans’, and New England Frontier, 1965), Kevin McBride (especially the 1990 ‘Historical archaeology of the Mashantucket Pequots’), Laurence Hauptman (‘Pequot War and its legacies’, 1990, and Tribes and Tribulations, 1995), Michael Freeman (‘Puritans and Pequots’, 1995), Ronald Karr (‘“Why should you be so furious?”’ 1998), Michael Fickes (‘“They could not endure that yoke”’, 2000), Michael Oberg (Uncas, 2003, esp. 34–86), Ben Kiernan (Blood and Soil, 2007, pp. 227–35) and Andrew Lipman (‘“[M]eanes to knitt them together”’, 2008), as well as historian Neal Salisbury’s Manitou and Providence, esp. pp. 166–239.

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The seventeenth century was a time of unprecedented violence and instability across eastern North America. Beforehand, only select European expeditions, maritime explorers and seasonal fishing vessels had seen the American coastline, let alone settled upon it. Aside from Spanish colonies in Florida and portions of the Southeast, Native peoples maintained autonomous control over the continent north of Mexico.1 Scholars have worked for generations now to reconstruct the changing dimensions of that Indigenous dominion and power, abandoning in the process problematic and celebratory paradigms of European discovery and settlement. Indeed, the history of seventeenth-century North America offers little cause for celebration, as European invasions wrought incalculable harms. By century’s end, not only had multiple colonies expanded along the Atlantic seaboard, but, across the interior, Native nations confronted terrifying and recurring cycles of death and disease. Many of them inhabited worlds undergoing catastrophes, which became shattered beyond repair, if not recognition.2 Many, in fact, would not survive the lethal combination of disease and warfare that reverberated across their homelands during this century of horrors, as destructive waves radiated out from zones of European invasion. These waves of warfare and killings came not only from Europeans but also from Indigenous peoples engaged in internecine violence along ‘the violent edges of empire’.3 Such violence preceded the property-based ‘settler 1 B. Bailyn, The Barbarous Years: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600–1675 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012). 2 R. Ethridge, ‘Global capital, violence, and the making of a colonial shatter zone’ in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 49. 3 See R. B. Ferguson and N. L. Whitehead, ‘The violent edge of empire’ in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. Ferguson and Whitehead (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992), 3–4.

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colonialism’ of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and laid the basis for its eventual formation.4 Throughout the 1600s across eastern North America, Indigenous peoples made war upon each other in ways that depopulated regions and shocked Europeans. They did so in response to the forces of European contact. Since their conflicts often occurred outside Europeans’ documentary purview, assessments of their broader impact remain inherently partial and limited. The relations between the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy and those of the Wendat Confederacy illuminate these patterns of violence and destabilisation. They reveal forms of destruction, transformation and diaspora that came to define eastern North America in the mid-century. These encounters remain more consistently documented than those in other regions and stand in contrast to other continental recalibrations occurring across the ‘shatter zone’ of the Southeast, where Native societies began confronting Spanish-introduced pathogens in the 1540s.5 In eastern North America throughout the 1600s, a cadre of Jesuit chroniclers, French officials and Dutch traders recorded dimensions of the Iroquois–Wendat Wars. They also offered preliminary interpretations of their causes. Iroquoian and Wendat ethnohistories, archaeological studies and oral histories offer additional insight into this conflagration. While some French traders and Jesuit missionaries perished alongside their Wendat allies, the Iroquois–Wendat Wars took nearly exclusively Indigenous lives. Iroquois forces raided villages, killed ‘several thousand’ Wendats and took an equal number of captives.6 Such raids ultimately depopulated Wendake – the Ontario homelands of the Wendat Confederacy. This warfare also remade regions outside the theatres of conflict, including New France across the St Lawrence, New Holland along the Hudson, as well as dozens of Algonquian-speaking villages across the Ohio River and by the eastern Great Lakes, amongst whom Wendat refugees sought shelter. Iroquois raids became so unrelenting that they eventually caused surviving Wendats to flee into a southern Ontario ‘diaspora’. 4 See A. Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). 5 R. Ethridge, ‘Introduction: mapping the Mississippian shatter zone’ in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, ed. R. Ethridge and S. Shuck-Hall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1–62. 6 Estimates for the number of Wendat killed by Iroquois attacks vary. For ‘several thousand’ killed, see B. G. Trigger, The Children of Aataentsic: A History of the Huron People to 1660, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1976), I I, p. 840.

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These mid-century campaigns also generated growing attention across the Atlantic. In 1722, for example, after a century of warfare, when Claude Charles Le Roy Bacqueville de la Potherie published his four-volume Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale, he noted that, when ‘one speaks in France of the Iroquois’, a common response was that there was ‘nothing in the world as cruel as an Iroquois war’.7 Iroquois raids displaced Wendat villages and yielded a generation of captives who became incorporated into Iroquoian society and culture. Confronting their own unprecedented demographic collapse initiated by European pathogens, captive incorporation partly motivated the Iroquois raids, and the raiders continued to pursue Wendat refugees after they fled. Raiders also assaulted villages – both Indigenous and European – that offered refuge to the Wendat. They tracked them as they fled into the Great Lakes area and attacked those who harboured them. Among a group of Neutral Indians, for example, Father Paul Ragueneau recounted that, in 1651: Great was the carnage, especially among the old people and children . . . The number of captives was exceedingly large . . . This loss was very great, and entailed the complete ruin and desolation of the Neutral nation; the inhabitants of their other villages, which were more distant from the enemy, took fright; abandoned their houses, their property, and their country; and condemned themselves to voluntary exile . . . Famine pursues these poor fugitives everywhere and compels them to scatter through the woods and over the more remote lakes and rivers, to find some relief from the misery that keeps pace with them.8

Iroquois raiders also attacked French settlements that sheltered Wendats. In May 1656, Mohawk warriors journeyed past Québec City to attack the easternmost Wendat refugee settlement at Isle d’Orléans along the St Lawrence. They returned with seventy captives, travelling downriver past French villages whose leaders were powerless to intercede.9

7 C. C. de Bacqueville de la Potherie, Histoire de L’Amérique septentrionale, 4 vols. (Paris: Jean-Luc Nion and François Didot, 1722) I I I, p. 1; J. Parmenter, The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), p. 41. 8 R. G. Thwaites, ed., The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers Co., 1898), X X X V I, p. 177. 9 B. G. Trigger, Natives and Newcomers: Canada’s ‘Heroic Age’ Reconsidered (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1985), pp. 277–80. The French had previously conducted a ‘bilateral treaty’ with the Iroquois and ‘lapsed into a state of de facto neutrality’ regarding the region’s Indian affairs, essentially breaking a nearly half-century commitment at the time of alliances with Wendat and regional Algonquian powers. Ibid.

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Informed by cultural imperatives activated by the impact of diseases and associated horrors, Iroquois actions in the Iroquois–Wendat War do not easily conform to definitions of genocide that suggest complete extermination. During this war, Iroquois raiders committed all five of the genocidal acts described in the 1948 United Nations Convention definition, including in particular ‘killing members of the group’ and ‘transferring children of the group to another group’. However, it is important to note the key role of the latter and of other forms of captive-taking in the Iroquois’ actions. Although Iroquois leaders may be said to have possessed an ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part’ the Wendats ‘as such’, their total physical annihilation was neither the intent nor the outcome of the Iroquois campaigns against them.10 The Iroquois displaced the Wendat Confederacy of roughly 25,000–30,000 people from southern Ontario, and did so in order to solidify their power as the region’s pre-eminent authority. Iroquois clan mothers subsequently offered approximately 3,000 Wendat villagers incorporation into their communities as kin and clan members, replacing the lives of those lost to European pathogens and warfare. Iroquois warriors thus destroyed Wendat communities in part to achieve such incorporation, and subjected their captives to painful processes of de-naturalisation intended to disassociate them from their previous social identities. In return, surviving captives joined the Iroquois Confederacy. Indeed, they came to inhabit the standing of deceased Iroquois community members, especially young men and women whose clan and village responsibilities were essential to the survival of their respective nation. Far from attempting to exterminate all the Wendat, the Iroquois made war upon them in order to bring captives into the Confederacy’s long-standing visions of peace and power.11 10 See B. Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate: meaning, historiography, and new methods’, American Historical Review 120:1 (February 2015), 98–139. Warfare, disease, depopulation, displacement and diaspora so thoroughly reconfigured seventeenth-century eastern North America that subsequent colonialists believed these processes to be providential or natural: ‘Thus emerged the almost canonical trope of American Indian population decline as a natural disaster created by biological forces, and the expropriation of increasingly “empty” Native American lands as a just response to opportunities created by regrettable, but inevitable, natural devastation’: ibid., 100. 11 On the origins of the Iroquois Confederacy and its ideologies of peace and power, see, e.g., E. Tooker, ‘The League of the Iroquois: its history, politics, and ritual’ in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. X V: The Northeast, ed. B. G. Trigger (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute, 1978), 418–29; F. Jennings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), pp. 25–41; D. K. Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), pp. 14–49; M. Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace: Iroquois–European Encounters in Seventeenth-Century

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While warfare was common in eastern North America before European arrival, the wars of the seventeenth century were of different scope and form. The introduction of new technologies of violence, particularly guns, and the growth of continent-wide extractive resource competition, including the fur trade, brought powerful new dimensions to pre-existing Indigenous rivalries. Indeed, colonialism pulled all Native nations into its turbulent and transformative currents. As Native nations, including the Iroquois, navigated such disruptions, they often prompted administrative attention, the deployment of new resources, and military focus from European leaders. During the last years of the Iroquois–Wendat Wars, the French monarch Louis XIV redirected hundreds of his most experienced troops to New France, where governors had struggled since the days of Samuel de Champlain to contain the violence that they had unknowingly unleashed upon the region.

Technologies of Violence French settlements across the St Lawrence and Dutch colonies along the Hudson River recast the nature of Indigenous warfare in North America. The establishment of Québec in 1608 and New Amsterdam in 1609 initially disadvantaged members of the Five Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. ‘Iroquoia’, a vast territory in central New York, eastern Ontario, and northwestern Pennsylvania, was distant from the earliest French and Dutch trading centres and settlements. The Confederacy comprised the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations, who had been united for centuries. Before European contact, their unity quelled strife between discordant village communities and brought over-arching structures of centralised governance.12 Such America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 76–115; W. N. Fenton, The Great Law and the Longhouse: A Political History of the Iroquois Confederacy (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), pp. 51–85; T. Alfred, Peace, Power, and Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto (Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 89–103; Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, pp. xxvii–xlix; B. Rice, The Rotinonshonni: A Traditional Iroquoian History through the Eyes of Teharonhia: Wako and Sawiskera (Syracuse University Press, 2013), pp. 173–250; T. J. Shannon, ‘Iroquoia’ in The Oxford Handbook of American Indian History, ed. F. E. Hoxie (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 200–3; and S. M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), pp. 15–76. 12 Fenton provides an overview of accounts of the Confederacy’s origins, including nineteenth-century Onondagan accounts of the Epic of the Peacemaker. These accounts were relayed to ethnographers such as J. N. B. Hewitt, to Canadian officials such as Duncan Campbell Scott, and to Iroquoian intellectuals, including Arthur

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structures included a system of clans and chieftainships, representative councils, and governing practices and documents, including sets of beaded wampum belts that recorded Iroquoian epics and philosophies. Using shared cultural values and ceremonies for peace, the Iroquois had developed a confederation that positioned them to withstand the turbulence of contact and harness its advantages.13 Autonomous over their internal domestic politics and centralised in the oldest confederation in North America, the Iroquois included between 25,000 and 30,000 members. Despite their strength, the simultaneous arrival of French settlers on their northern frontiers and Dutch colonists on their southeastern borders threatened Iroquois trade and diplomacy. They remained geographically removed from the formation of new trade routes and watched as French leaders traded with their Algonquin and Montagnais rivals, while Dutch traders allied with their Mahican rivals. Trade had brought French settlers into the St Lawrence River Valley, and, upon arrival, Samuel de Champlain had been encouraged by some resident Native peoples to join them in battles against the Iroquois. In the summers in 1609 and 1610, the governor brought his soldiers into those conflicts, famously beginning a series of campaigns that became immortalised in subsequent engravings. He then invaded Onondagan territory in 1615, laying siege to its palisaded village at Kaneenda. These campaigns claimed hundreds of lives, involved 1,000 French Indian allies and used new weapons of war. The French not only brought guns, ammunition and metals, but also constructed in 1615 an elevated ‘war machine’, a cavalier once common in medieval Europe. This platform reached ‘within a pike’s length’ of the Onondaga’s fortifications and allowed

C. Parker. Their transcriptions sometimes tallied ‘525 pages’, and many went untranslated and unpublished until the late twentieth century. See Fenton, Great Law and the Longhouse, pp. 66, 51–2, 83–103. Within such accounts, as Susan Hill relays, ‘Land becomes a symbol of identity and serves as a basis for relationships between peoples (males to females; family to family; nation to nation; the Confederacy to external nations, etc.). The uniting of the Five Nations’ lands allowed for the establishment of the Great Law and the elimination of internal warfare. Land is also a metaphor for life – the faces of the future generations “are below the ground” and the dead are returned to earth . . . The collective messages of Haudenosaunee cultural history remind us that land is the basis for life as we know it.’ See Hill, Clay We Are Made Of, p. 52. 13 As Parmenter suggests, ‘The history of seventeenth-century Iroquois demography reveals a comparatively striking success story of population recovery and maintenance in the wake of substantial losses sustained during the first “virgin soil” epidemic of 1634.’ See Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 289.

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the French to ‘place four or five of our arquebusiers to fire many volleys over the top of their palisades’.14 Aside from the cavalier, the use of these new military technologies, tactics and resources became increasingly common across northeastern North America. They increased the displacement of colonial violence onto Indigenous communities removed from European settlements. Throughout the early 1600s, the new wave of violence spilled across Indigenous homelands before most Native peoples had ever seen Europeans. Obtaining these new technologies became a principal ambition for all Native nations. Excluded from the French trade, the Mohawk turned east towards the Hudson. Seeking to dominate the Dutch fur trade, they displaced Mahican and other Native traders and drove these smaller Native communities across the Hudson altogether. The easternmost members of the Confederacy, Mohawks quickly monopolised the Dutch fur trade. They did so not only through violence but also by trade, ferrying annual stacks of furs to Dutch posts, such as Fort Orange, founded in 1624. By 1634, Mohawk villages teemed with growing numbers of metals – ‘chains, bolts . . . iron hoops, spikes’, as the Dutch trader Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert detailed after his visit in 1634–5.15 He also noticed that, everywhere he travelled, his party ‘caused much curiosity in the young and old’, and they were ‘repeatedly’ asked to discharge their weapons: the Mohawks ‘wanted us to fire’ the Dutch guns.16 Mohawks asked both to see and to hear evidence of the new technologies. They wanted visual and audible confirmation of the new power that many Europeans commonly carried. Champlain and his ‘arquebusiers’ used the French wheel-lock, often referred to as an arquebuse. Despite its obvious advantages, it was ‘fragile, prone to clogging . . . and expensive to buy and fix’.17 A principal weapon in the Spanish conquest of northern New Spain, these were weapons more for governors than for Indigenous allies. By contrast, Van den Bogaert and the Dutch used the flintlock, or snaphaunce.18 It became the preferred weapon 14 H. P. Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain, 6 vols. (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1925), I I I, p. 67. See also, Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, pp. 26–7. 15 C. T. Gehring and W. A. Starna, eds. and trans., A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country, 1634–1635: The Journal of Harmen Meyndertsz Van Den Bogaert, rev. ed. (Syracuse University Press, 2013), p. 4. 16 Ibid., pp. 11, 8, 6 and 16. See also ibid., p. 43, n. 82. 17 D. J. Silverman, Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 27. 18 Ibid., pp. 25–7.

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throughout the interior. The flintlock was lighter than the arquebuse, more compact and better suited for use in American forests. Throughout the 1630s, Iroquois hunters depleted the fur-rich animal populations of their own homelands, exchanging American furs for Dutch arms. By 1642, Mohawk villages had obtained approximately 300 flintlocks. Most importantly, they had mastered the weapon’s use. They were now armed with the best guns available, and an Indigenous ‘arms race’ began.19

Demography and Disease Though now well-armed, Iroquois communities confronted other challenges. In particular, waves of contagion spread across eastern North America, engulfing Iroquois, Mahican, Wendat and other Native communities. Van den Bogaert, for example, had noticed the impacts of a recent smallpox outbreak reported earlier in 1634, but his records did not convey the extent of the trauma. It was one of three epidemics reported in under six years. Of the eight villages he described, according to one historian, the Mohawk ‘were in the process of abandoning’ half of them; estimated to number 8,000 during the 1620s, the Mohawk population fell to 3,000 after 1634.20 Unlike guns, immunities could not be bought, stolen or procured. Diseases targeted all and took a particular toll among New France’s growing number of allied Native communities.21 The losses carried away young and old, weak and strong. Diseases provide essential context for understanding the violence that followed. The clearest insights into these pandemics came from Jesuit missionaries. The Iroquois refused missionisation throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, yielding few accounts of their daily lives. They had limited encounters with Christianity as either an ideology or a practice. As Onondaga leaders eventually explained, they preferred their interactions with the Dutch and ‘had never heard them mention Paradise or Hell; on the contrary, they were the first to incite them to wrong-doing’.22

19 Ibid., p. 21. 20 D. R. Snow, The Iroquois (New York: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 96–100. See also Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, pp. 45–51, 289–91. 21 K. M. Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed: A History of the Seventeenth-Century Wendat People (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2013), pp. 14–15. 22 Quoted in Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, p. 106.

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In the earliest years of New France, by contrast, Indian villages began accepting ‘envoys’ and missionaries as representatives of their new allies. In 1611, for example, Champlain and several Native nations began exchanging young men from within their respective communities in order to facilitate mutual language acquisition, cultural fluency and related forms of cultural transmission.23 By 1637, missionaries began establishing réductions (reserves) for Native converts outside Québec City at the village of Sillery, on Isle d’Orléans.24 Reporting from across New France, missionaries chronicled Jesuit proselytising efforts, particularly among New France’s largest allied confederacy, the Wendat. Also referred to as the Huron, the Wendat maintained similar social, economic and political structures to the Iroquois.25 They comprised four principal nations with eight clans, and used an Iroquoian dialect known as ‘Nadowekian’. Their confederacy held ‘roughly twenty to thirty palisaded longhouse villages’ and totalled approximately 25,000–30,000 people.26 These two confederacies held long-standing antagonisms, especially between the westernmost Iroquois community, the Seneca nation and Wendat villages in southern Ontario. Throughout the 1620s and into the 1630s, disease linked them most. In Wendake, Jesuit missionaries recorded the effects of these contagions. They did so in often sentimentalised ways intended to deepen support for their efforts. According to Father Paul Le Jeune, for example, a young Wendat boy, Arakhie, held great promise. ‘Eleven or twelve years old’, his name translated as ‘closing day’, and he was much ‘like a little sun which 23 Champlain describes them as ‘gens de nostre habitation, de ceux que i’auois enuoyé dans les terres avec les sauuages’, which Biggar translates as ‘some of those people from our settlement whom I had sent with the natives into their interior’. See Biggar, ed., Works of Samuel de Champlain, I I, p. 217. See also C. Heidenreich, ‘Early French exploration in the North American interior’ in North American Exploration, 3 vols., vol. I I: A Continent Defined, ed. J. A. Logan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 82–3. 24 For an overview of competing French missionisation efforts and various efforts to ‘franciser’ (to ‘Frenchify’) Native peoples, see R. M. Morrissey, ‘The terms of encounter: language and contested visions of French colonization in the Illinois country, 1673– 1702’ in French and Indians in the Heart of North America, 1630–1815, ed. R. Englebert and G. Teasdale (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 43–75. 25 For general overviews of Wendat (Huron) social structures, see Trigger, Children of Aataentsic. 26 Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, p. 2. See also B. C. Trigger, ‘The French presence in Huronia: the structure of Franco-Huron relations in the first half of the seventeenth century’, Canadian Historical Review 49 (June 1968), 107–41; and G. Warrick, A Population History of the Huron-Petun, A.D. 500–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 152–3.

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arose before the eyes’. Strong, intelligent, responsive to Jesuit teachings and to ‘the Commandments of God’, Le Jeune described him as ‘an equal to adults of his community’. So moved by him, Le Jeune delayed reporting his fate. The Jesuit father waited until he ‘was ready to write about it’, when he could describe the young boy’s death without ‘tears from falling from my eyes’.27 Like Arakhie, many prominent Wendat leaders also died during smallpox epidemics, including the chiefs Taretande and Aenon. Each represented various anti- and pro-French factions, respectively. Both died in 1637. Aenon was buried far away from Wendake at the Catholic cemetery at TroisRivières, a clear sign of his dedication to alliance with the French. Aenon died after developing proposals to help counteract the impacts of disease. In response to their diminishing numbers, he had proposed assembling Wendat villages into a great central location – a ‘Centre Lieu’ – that could be fortified and provisioned through French alliance and trade. He also tempered many of Taretande’s anti-Jesuit rebukes, some of which had been delivered during Jesuit sermons. He did so with military and political pragmatism. The ‘Wendat need for firearms’, he informed his people, complemented ‘the French need for able-bodied men’, and he envisioned Wendat leaders like himself and French missionaries like Le Jeune working towards such an alliance.28 Consensual decision-making had always been difficult among the Wendat Confederacy, even before the decision to accept French missionaries. According to Le Jeune, Aenon spoke with passion on Wendat concerns. His ambitions, however, perished during these disease years: ‘the epidemic prevailed in every direction . . . As he felt that he was nearing death, he summoned the interpreters, offered a present to Monsieur the Governor, and begged him to favor the Hurons.’29 An estimated 500 Wendat died during the 1636 epidemic, including 20 per cent of the village of Ossossane. The Wendat’s ‘country’, expressed one leader, ‘is going to ruin . . . Every day it is worse than before; this cruel malady has now overrun all the cabins of our village.’30 Indeed, within

27 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X I I I, pp. 117–19. See also Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, pp. 15–16. 28 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X I I I, pp. 217–23. See also Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, pp. 18–25; and p. 21, for ‘Wendat need’. Labelle uses Anglicised versions of the French spellings of the names of these leaders – Tarentandé and Aenons. 29 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X I I, pp. 197–9. 30 Ibid., X V, p. 43.

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a decade, Wendake’s dispersal would become complete, but for reasons that had yet to become fully evident. The impact of diseases highlights not only the broader forces of colonialism, but also its individual effects. Disease became a collective disaster made up of deeply personal tragedies. This context provides essential understandings for the subsequent generations of violence that followed. Informed by such communal and individual devastation, the Wendat Confederacy initiated violent responses that drew them further into the continent’s growing cycles of destruction. Like the violent new technologies, diseases, too, sparked outcomes that accelerated the use of force. Both Wendat and Iroquois villages endured waves of pathogens in the 1630s. The region’s cascading violence accelerated in both scale and form throughout the 1640s.

Iroquoian Expansion and Captive-Raiding As the easternmost Confederacy member, the Mohawk had the longeststanding interactions with both the French and Dutch. After the first decade of French settlement (1608–18), Mohawks came to monopolise the Hudson River trading posts, acquiring guns, metals and other wares through the fur trade. They had not only pushed Mahicans east of the Hudson but also continued raids upon them into the Connecticut River Valley, where, in a reversal of fortunes, Mohawks exacted forms of tribute that the Mahican had required of them earlier in the century.31 Eventually, such expeditions ranged even into Maine, where Iroquois raiders attacked Abenaki communities allied with Mahicans.32 Before the 1630s, Mohawks had driven Mahicans away from the Hudson in order to gain access to Dutch trading. Economic, military and political motivations largely shaped this Iroquois diplomacy and warfare. Once armed with Dutch guns, however, it became far easier to steal rather than to trap for furs, and throughout the 1630s Iroquois raiders increasingly redirected stolen furs south to the Dutch, continuing their trade for the 31 Dennis, Cultivating a Landscape of Peace, pp. 129–30. 32 C. G. Calloway, The Western Abenakis of Vermont, 1600–1800: War, Migration, and the Survival of an Indian People (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), p. 67. See also A. N. Nash, ‘The abiding frontier: family, gender and religion in Wabanaki history, 1600–1763’ (PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), 211–12; and J. A. Maurault, Histoire des Abenakis: depuis 1605 jusqu’à nos jours (Québec: Gazette de Sorel, 1866), pp. 125–7, who chronicles Jesuit relations among the Abenaki in 1646–7 and notes the survival of those who did not ‘fall into the hands of the Iroquois’. For subsequent Mohawk–Abenaki conflicts, see also Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 116.

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guns, ammunition, metals, wares and repairs essential to seventeenthcentury firearms usage. By 1656, for example, Iroquois traders brought nearly 50,000 skins a year to Fort Orange, a nine-fold increase from the 1630s.33 They now raided, rather than hunted, furs. Primarily harvested by Native trappers hundreds of miles away across the Great Lakes, the skins were then processed by Native American women in interior Algonquian-speaking villages before their transport to French markets. Throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, theft and stolen labour fuelled Iroquois and Dutch fortunes. Following the smallpox epidemics of the 1630s, captive-taking also became an increasingly essential institution across Iroquoia as a way to replace lost community members. Through elaborate rituals and ceremonies, foreign captives became adopted into Iroquois society, assuming familial, village and clan responsibilities. Most notably, starting in the late 1630s and for fifteen years thereafter, the Five Nations targeted Wendats for captivity. By 1650, the vast majority of Wendat villages across southern Ontario had been overrun by Iroquois warriors, who now used the Wendake region to stage continued raids farther into the interior. This zone was now only ‘seasonally occupied’.34 In August 1637, the French began witnessing the initial cycles of this growing conflict. They failed to comprehend fully both its logics or ultimate outcomes. That summer, Aenon had departed his village and travelled east towards the St Lawrence. He left Wendake from Georgian Bay and then headed down the Ottawa River, arriving at Trois-Rivières in early August. His canoeing party was powered by warriors who enabled the travel and trade between French settlements and the Great Lakes. After two canoes departed for their return journey west, however, disaster struck. One of them returned promptly and reported, ‘They have encountered the Iroquois.’ The others ‘had been captured’.35 Initially, French leaders ‘gave no credit’ to these concerns. As Le Jeune blithely reported, Native peoples ‘are often alarmed without cause’. 33 ‘Between 1625 and 1640 about 5,000 to 6,000 skins were traded each year at Fort Orange . . . By 1656 the number had risen to 46,000 a year’: Trigger, ‘Early Iroquoian contacts with Europeans’, 354. Similar dynamics of increased production also occurred in French–Indian trade: ‘It thus appears that after 1635 the number of skins obtained by the French arose as the Indian population declined’: Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, I I, pp. 603–4. 34 C. E. Heidenreich, ‘Re-establishment of trade, 1654–1666’ in Historical Atlas of Canada, ed. R. C. Harris, vol. I (University of Toronto Press, 1987), pl. 37; see also pls. 38–39. 35 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X I I, p. 197.

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However, with the appearance the next day of Iroquois warriors paddling upriver and reports of ‘about five hundred well armed men’, desperation spread through the settlement.36 Only a few seasons old, the Trois-Rivières community prepared its defences. Much of the colony’s leadership had arrived from Québec City to receive the Wendat guests. A small but well-armed French vessel docked, armed with cannons and men. Hurried calls for reinforcements were sent to Québec. None, however, controlled the river’s open waters where Iroquois warriors continued their attacks on arriving guests. They destroyed an entire flotilla of ten additional Wendat canoes, causing the governor, on 6 August, 36 Ibid., X I I, pp. 201–3.

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to worry that ‘he could not drive these rovers away from us as we had so few men’.37 Over 100 Indian allies from Wendake had arrived to trade, communicate and strengthen their bonds of alliance with the French leaders. They had made the journey safely up the river. They did not, however, make the return, as additional Wendats lost their lives or were captured. It was also 6 August when the French leaders first heard the sounds of Mohawk gunfire.38 Mohawks captured thirty Wendats in this attack, with untold numbers drowned, killed and wounded. Upon the arrival of reinforcements, the governor attempted to counter-attack against the Iroquois. Ominously, they found an Iroquois message upon their trails heading back to Iroquoia, a wooden ‘plank’ upon which Mohawk leaders had drawn the figures of ‘thirty Hurons, whom they had captured . . . The different lines indicated the quality and age of the prisoners . . . [including] two head much larger than the others, to represent two Captains’. The rendering held not only images but also colours. ‘All these heads were scrawled in red, except one, which was painted black.’39 Red identified those intended for adoption, or ‘requickening’. As historian Jon Parmenter suggests, ‘Seeking to recover from substantial population losses, the Five Nations embarked on innovative efforts to “requicken” the league.’ One way, ‘was to adopt Wendats’.40 Mohawks similarly painted the faces of captives in subsequent requickening ceremonies. For example, a French teenager from Trois-Rivières, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, had his face painted ‘the red colour’, according to one biographer, which ‘meant that he had already been chosen as a candidate for adoption’.41 Like Radisson, the thirty captured Wendats were taken as part of the escalation in captive-raiding across the region. Such adoptions occurred to replace lost family members, whose responsibilities were too essential to abandon. They also continued the affective ties between family members, as well as the duties within clan systems that structured Iroquois society. Captive-taking enabled such ties to continue.42 Complex ceremonies accompany the seven primary life stages within Iroquois society. Beginning at birth, children in Mohawk society are given 37 Ibid., X I I, p. 209. 38 Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 80. 39 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X I I, p. 215. 40 Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 81. 41 M. Fournier, Pierre-Esprit Radisson: Merchant Adventurer, 1636–1710 (Sillery: Les Éditions du Septentrion, 2002), pp. 20–4. 42 For detailed examination of Iroquois captive-raiding, see Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, esp. pp. 32–5, 60–74.

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an identity, with a place in their society already established. Clan mothers guide mothers, children and adolescents through life stages via established rites.43 Such guidance was also given to captives, who were told the names, clans and family positions of those who had perished. They were expected to assume not only such positions, but also the names themselves. Radisson recalled, for example, after his forced march into the village community: ‘Among the tumult I perceived my father and mother, with their two daughters. The mother pushes in . . . directly to me . . . calling me often by my (Mohawk) name.’ In this matrilineal culture, Radisson’s new Mohawk mother identified him among the incoming captives and did so by the name of her lost son. She then removed him from the rest, ‘drawing me out of my rank’. She next placed ‘me into the hands of her husband, who then bid me have courage’.44 She had both selected and sanctioned her new son’s position within her family. The incorporation of captives also required continued suffering. As Iroquois villages began incorporating new members, they accelerated processes intended to de-naturalise them of their previous identities. To become a naturalised member of the Confederacy, one had to disavow one’s previous tribe and, like Radisson, to accept a new identity. Expanded through the maelstrom of colonialism, this process required additional violence. Captives knew that pain was a mechanism for their anticipated transformation. Tormented in ways that included days-long deprivation, gauntlets of abuse, fire brandings and routine assaults, captives experienced harms intended to eliminate their previous identities and prepare them to assume the positions of deceased family members.45 To a surprising degree, such ‘ceremonial requickening’ worked. Scholars estimate that potentially as many as 10,000 people were naturalised into Iroquois villages in the halfcentury following the epidemic of the 1630s.46 The largest numbers, approximately 3,000, came from Wendake.47

43 See J. Rodriguez with I. Wakerahkats:teh, A Clan Mother’s Call: Reconstructing Haudenosaunee Cultural Memory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017), pp. 52–4. 44 A. T. Adams. , ed., The Explorations of Pierre Esprit Radisson (Minneapolis: Ross & Haines, Inc., 1961), p. 18. See also Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, pp. 83–4. 45 See, e.g., Fournier, Pierre-Esprit Radisson, p. 41. 46 For captive demography among the Iroquois, see J. A. Brandão, Your Fire Shall Burn No More: Iroquois Policy toward New France and Its Native Allies to 1701 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 73–4. 47 Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 80.

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The Iroquois Assaults on Wendake Iroquois raiders struck far across eastern North America. With periodic assaults on French settlements, their raids radiated east, west and south of Iroquoia and reshaped the demography of Iroquoia, Wendake and, eventually, eastern North America. Growing annually throughout the 1640s, warfare recast much of the middle of the continent, covering a geographic expanse of over 1,000 miles. From Maine to the western shores of Lake Michigan, Iroquois raids shadowed everyday life for countless Native peoples, particularly the Wendat. Dramatic changes in Iroquois military practice and technologies had occurred since their first battles with Champlain. He had fought Mohawks wearing armour made of woven reeds, and when he invaded Iroquoia in 1615, he confronted archers using stone-tipped arrows. By contrast, on 3 July 1648, 1,000 Iroquois warriors now carried the most advanced weaponry in North America as they invaded Wendake. They encountered little resistance at the palisaded village of Teanaostaiaé, where missionaries were leading Sunday services.48 During the previous generation, Wendat villagers had developed alliances with French leaders, becoming close allies and devout converts. Approximately 2,000 Wendat lived at Teanaostaiaé. The morning attack inflicted over 700 deaths and captivities, including the death of a priest who began the day in service before dying while baptising the wounded. After the assault, over 1,000 fled. The destruction involved more than captive raids or punishing retribution. It represented the beginnings of a campaign to displace the Wendat altogether. ‘The aim of the Iroquois was not to replace the Huron as middleman’, as Bruce Trigger has suggested, ‘but to intensify warfare . . . to the point of dispersing them’ entirely.49 Nearly 10 per cent of the Wendats’ total population was killed, captured or exiled in one morning, an attack that was but one of over seventy identified from this period.50 Grieving families fled west to other villages, as the cycles of Iroquois attacks now unleashed upon the Wendat created a ‘diaspora’ across the Great Lakes.51 The dispersed fled across Wendake and into neighbouring communities. Their crisis, however, quickly enveloped others. Villages of ‘Neutral Indians’ 48 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, I I, p. 752. 49 Ibid., I I, p. 729. 50 Brandão, Your Fire Shall Burn No More, p. 77. 51 For the use of ‘diaspora’ to describe Wendat dispersal, see Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, I I, pp. 767–70.

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in southern Ontario were the first to accept displaced Wendats. Where the refugees fled, however, Iroquois raiders followed. Some suggest that the Iroquois continued to raid for additional captives in order to ensure that the thousands whom they had captured had no remaining communities to rejoin. Accordingly, ‘the danger of a Huron revival’ motivated Iroquois raiders who targeted Wendat refugees across the Great Lakes and into French settlements and missions, as noted above in May 1656, at Québec City.52 Extreme violence characterised these years and became a key tactical element of Iroquois strategy. They projected ‘overwhelming violence’ throughout the decade and created, in the process, ‘a profound and shared sense of vulnerability and terror’ among survivors.53 Descriptions of the deaths of children, the elderly and the defeated fill the pages of Jesuit reports. Paralleling the experiences of their Wendat allies, numerous Algonquianspeaking villagers nearby similarly ‘took fright; abandoned their homes, their property, and their country; and condemned themselves to voluntary exile’.54 Iroquois raids fanned out with such an intensity that, by 1650, an Indigenous remapping of the continent was under way. The Iroquois displaced numerous additional communities across their expanding western borders: Petun, Wenro, Neutral, Erie and neighbouring Algonquianspeaking nations.55 As these many nations retreated from Iroquoia, they often entered into conflict with resident Indigenous peoples across the Great Lakes: Dakotas and Ho-Chunks of the upper Mississippi; Menominees in Wisconsin; and Ojibwes throughout Michigan. The dispersed often retreated into defensive locations, onto peninsulas and up rivers. They feared Iroquois raids from their east and now also confronted new antagonists around them.56 Famine, in addition to warfare and captivity, stalked Wendat refugee resettlements. Hunger, as one priest wrote, ‘pursues these poor fugitives everywhere and compels them to scatter through the woods and over the more remote lakes and rivers, to find some relief’.57 Within these 52 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, 273, 279. 53 Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘The shapes of power: Indians, Europeans, and North American worlds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century’ in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. J. Barr and E. Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 45, 56. 54 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X X X V I, p. 177. 55 See, e.g., M. E. White, ‘Neutral and Wenro’ and ‘Erie’ in Northeast, ed. Trigger, 418–29. 56 R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 1–49. 57 Thwaites, ed., Jesuit Relations, X X X V I, p. 177.

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communities, ‘Moss, bark, and fungus were eaten, but these were totally inadequate to support the large numbers of people.’58 Untold numbers died in the growing cold that descended each fall, while winter became a time of incalculable deprivation. Misery particularly befell those displaced before they had harvested their summer gardens. Comparable only to the pandemics of the 1630s, cold and hunger accompanied Wendat refugee communities throughout much of the year. Iroquois raiders initiated so many waves of such transformation that it is easy to miss the colonial disruptions and political economies that underlay them. And, in turn, the internecine Indigenous violence influenced the processes of imperial historical development, as the violent edges of empire often most clearly registered the traumatic effects of colonialism. In addition to targeting the Wendat for incorporation, for example, the Iroquois were also attempting to dislodge Wendake altogether from the influence of the French. They aimed ‘to redirect the flow of furs, goods, knowledge, and power southward to their own villages’.59 They had incorporated their historic enemies by the thousands into the Confederacy and, by 1652, had severed Wendake from New France. Starting in 1647, Wendat traders no longer travelled to French settlements. For four consecutive years, no western traders travelled to any French settlements, as the Iroquois had ‘shattered the trading network on which New France depended for its economic prosperity, creating despair throughout the colony’.60 The 1650s became a time of crisis, scarcity and uncertainty across New France. For the Iroquois, the destruction of Wendake was an effort aimed at their own stabilisation. They worked to reconsolidate their hegemony within an expanding, dangerous and multi-polar world. Wendat destruction remained at the core of their efforts to rebuild ‘what might be called kinetic regimes, which were networks of power and support that revolved around mobile activities – long-distance raids, wide-ranging diplomatic missions, shifting trade fairs, seasonal political meetings, itinerant villages’.61 Additionally, the Wendat had developed growing trading networks with Indigenous allies across the northern Great Lakes. These potential networks threatened the advantages the Iroquois held vis-à-vis the Dutch fur trade. In addition to the French, Wendake had attracted a growing number of traders from across their western and northern worlds, which stretched north of 58 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, I I, pp. 770–9. 59 Hämäläinen, ‘Shapes of power’, 45. 60 Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, p. 273. 61 Hämäläinen, ‘Shapes of power’, 49.

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Georgian Bay towards Hudson’s Bay and west into the Great Lakes. The Wendat maintained ample fields of corn, beans and squash across Ontario’s rich southern soils, and they combined their horticultural productivity with hunting and fishing in the rivers, lakes and streams of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.62 The colder watersheds of ‘the Northern Interior’ provided better furs and pelts than southern geographies, including Iroquoia.63 The Wendats’ bountiful production of corn thus complemented the hunting and fishing economies of their neighbours, many of whom lived in regions ill suited for agriculture. Northern villagers had become pre-eminent trappers and traded their peltries both at Wendat villages where French priests and occasional leaders ventured, and in New France itself. Wendake provided, in short, a breadbasket for its many allied neighbours, including the French. It provided staging grounds for eastbound traders bringing harvested furs, and its warriors provided protection for flotillas heading to New France. With its principal villages near the headwaters of the Ottawa River, Wendat villagers steered traders down this nautical highway to its confluence with the St Lawrence at Montréal, which the French founded in 1642. This third major French settlement became the most important in the fur trade, and flourished for two centuries thereafter under a number of different empires.64 Repeated Iroquois attacks destroyed the basis of Wendat horticultural surpluses. In a reversal of the flow of power, Wendake now provided the staging ground for westbound Iroquois raiders. Their continued assaults into fur-rich environments brought furs, captives, and additional resources, and also diverted the previous flow of traders, furs and resources away from New France. Iroquois raids had eliminated and reversed the flow of Wendat power. Scholars debate the intentionality of such designs. A horticultural society themselves, the Iroquois’ gendered domestic economies provided sufficient harvests throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not until the American Revolution would Iroquois villages suffer forms of destruction,

62 Trigger, Children of Aataentsic, I, pp. 165–8. 63 For impacts of northern Iroquoian raids ‘all the way to James Bay’, see A. J. Ray, ‘The Northern Interior: 1600 to modern times’ in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol. I: North America, ed. B. G. Trigger and W. E. Washburn (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I I, 274. See also Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, pp. 259–73. 64 See Roland Viau, ‘An archipelago of trade: 1650–1701’ in Montreal: The History of a North American City, ed. D. Fougères and R. MacLeod, 2 vols. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017), I, 90–150.

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crop elimination and invasion comparable to those Wendake experienced in the 1640s.65 Nonetheless, it does appear that Iroquois raiders dispersed Wendat villages for captives and, in part, to deprive New France of its largest and most consistent allies. For more than a generation, Wendat bushels of corn, packs of furs and streams of allies had tied them to the French. Through extreme violence, Iroquois warriors severed this alliance and established an expanded realm of power that precluded anyone from inhabiting Wendat villages. In the process, ‘by the 1670s’, the Iroquois Confederacy had become, according to one scholar, ‘the dominant territorial power in the eastern woodlands, its mobile villages covering a realm that dwarfed the French and English possessions around it’.66 By contrast, across Wendake’s former farmlands, ‘A closed forest extended over the entire area previously cultivated by the Huron.’67 The economy as well as the polity of Wendake had been destroyed. The Iroquois intent was clearly to destroy Wendat culture too.

Aftermath: Iroquois, Wendake and New France after 1652 By 1652, and in less than five years, the Wendat Confederacy had been dismantled. Thousands of its members had died, and thousands more had been captured by Iroquois raiders. Survivors fled into the heart of the Great Lakes region where they joined other Algonquian-speaking peoples as refugees, in a world that had been brutally reordered by internecine Indigenous warfare. The violence of this era was as unprecedented as it was destructive. ‘Never again in North America’, as Richard White has suggested, ‘would Indians fight each other on this scale or with this ferocity’.68 Over the past two generations, scholars have assessed the extent of the ferocity and worked to determine its legacies. For the Iroquois, the Wendat and the French, the 65 See, for example, R. Koehler, ‘Hostile nations: quantifying the destruction of the Sullivan–Clinton Genocide of 1779’, The American Indian Quarterly 42:4 (Fall 2018), 427–53. 66 Hämäläinen, ‘Shapes of power’, 45. 67 C. Heidenreich, Huronia: A History and Geography of the Huron Indians, 1600–1650 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), p. 187: ‘There can be no doubt that the early explorers were referring to abandoned corn fields that have been recolonised by grasses and weeds.’ 68 White, Middle Ground, p. 1.

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violent Iroquois–Wendat conflict engendered transformations that reshaped the structures of their everyday lives. Flush with their successes in the west, Iroquois Confederacy members nonetheless struggled to maintain political stability following the forced Wendat dispersal. Western Confederacy members, particularly the Seneca, prioritised the Confederacy’s ongoing advances and envisioned extended hunting and trading advantages farther across the Ohio River Valley. They held long-standing animosities with the Wendat and other western nations, many of whom had inflicted attacks upon them.69 The Mohawk, in contrast, continued to maintain their Hudson-based trading partnerships, which at times required heeding Dutch calls to arms. As they knew, Dutch fortunes grew imperilled by other Europeans, and England’s expansion along Long Island Sound had accelerated throughout the 1630s following its victory in the Pequot War of 1636–7. New England, and soon New Sweden (founded in 1638), vied with the Dutch for fur and other resources of the interior. Such inter-imperial rivalries dragged Mohawks into battle and required constant engagement and vigilance.70 Wendat survivors not only migrated west into the Great Lakes area. They also headed east as captives of the Iroquois, and also as servants, neophytes and labourers for the French.71 Beginning in 1647, the Wendat diaspora ranged from mission settlements at Isle d’Orléans outside Québec, to French settlements at Montréal and Great Lakes villages. In these diverse locales, Wendats became active participants in communal defence. Like the Mohawk allies of the Dutch, displaced Wendats also joined subsequent French campaigns throughout the century, the vast majority of which targeted the Iroquois. Less is known about the Wendat captives who became incorporated into Iroquois society. Historians have assessed how the Iroquois struggled to naturalise so many into their village worlds. Within some villages, according to Daniel Richter, ‘adoptees became a majority . . . Huron captives in particular maintained a separate identity within Iroquois communities for decades.’72 Including many children as well as teenagers, Wendat adoptees

69 See, e.g., Trigger, Natives and Newcomers, p. 271. 70 Silverman, Thundersticks, pp. 39–55. 71 For an overview of the Wendat diaspora across New France, see Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, pp. 143–68, 185–9. 72 Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, p. 73. See also Labelle, Dispersed but Not Destroyed, pp. 169–75.

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integrated themselves into existing familial, clan and village systems. They became valued family members and naturalised community members. Religious differences reveal additional dimensions of the Wendat diaspora. When Jesuit priests eventually began arriving in Iroquoia in the 1650s and 1660s, they were often welcomed by ‘throngs of Hurons who had preserved themselves as distinct groups in their new homes’.73 Just as they had attempted the incorporation of Catholicism in the 1630s, Wendat refugees in Iroquoia now lobbied for ties with the missionaries. In fact, following attempted diplomatic accords between New France and Iroquois leaders in 1665–7, new ‘franchophile’ factions emerged within Iroquoia that favoured missionisation and, at times, even réductions (reserves). Notwithstanding a half-century of hostilities, several Iroquois villages with numerous Wendat captives accepted both missionisation and baptism. Many Iroquois even migrated to French-allied villages along the St Lawrence. Within the growing ranks of these factions, ‘networks of adopted captives’ generated increased pro-French sentiments as well as new social and community formations.74 Violence against the Wendat generated far-reaching, surprising outcomes. Shattered Wendat communities remade interior Great Lakes social geographies, as well as those of Iroquois villages decimated by diseases. They aided in the expansion of Catholicism and missionisation among the Iroquois. Wendat ‘agency’ and ‘survival’, however, must not mask the horrors that had been unleashed across Wendake during mid-century. While creative in their influences, the impacts of Iroquoian violence were nonetheless destructive. French leaders on both sides of the Atlantic thought as much. After a series of ineffectual peace initiatives, including a short-lived treaty with the Confederacy in 1653, New France remained destabilised by Iroquois raids. The loss of Wendake furthered the isolation of New France, and its settlements became even more dependent on supply ships from France, which could only arrive in the late spring following the thawing of the St Lawrence. New France remained unable to ‘afford aid to its beleaguered’ Wendat allies.75 With a civilian population of under 3,000, French leaders were able neither to assist the Wendat nor to marshal effective campaigns against the Iroquois.76 In fact, the short-lived treaty (1653–7) held provisions for French 73 Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, p. 73. 74 Ibid., p. 116. 75 R. A. Goldstein, French–Iroquois Diplomatic and Military Relations, 1608–1701 (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1969), p. 80. 76 W. J. Eccles, Essays on New France (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111.

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neutrality in inter-Indigenous conflicts; French leaders’ attempted neutrality with the Iroquois effectively abandoned France’s interior allies. Accordingly, the Mohawks who attacked Isle d’Orléans in May 1656 not only captured seventy Wendats but returned downriver to Iroquoia within metres of French settlements, including the governor’s home in Québec City. French authority appeared so weak that Seneca leaders in 1664 proposed naturalisation for French settlers, whom they invited to leave the St Lawrence altogether to live in Iroquoia. ‘They ask this’, reported one missionary, ‘hoping that the French will surround their Villages’ with defensive palisaded settlements.77 Leaders from New France annually crossed the Atlantic to request reinforcements and supplies in their ongoing struggles against the Confederacy, as Pierre Boucher from Trois Rivières had unsuccessfully attempted in 1661.78 Eventually, to stabilise its empire, the French monarchy intervened. To stem the growing power of the Iroquois, Louis XIV sent more troops to Canada, including over 1,000 of France’s most elite soldiers – the Carignan– Salières Regiment. The military soon totalled more than a third of the colony’s European population. The Wendat dispersal now spurred the demographic regrowth of New France, as it had among the Iroquois. The Crown appointed its second-ranking officer, the Marquis de Tracy, to command these troops. His mission: ‘to destroy [the Iroquois] completely’.79 Monarchical leaders now understood the disruptions caused by Iroquois warfare. In the aftermath of the Wendat dispersal, French leaders implemented reforms that restructured French North America. They understood that greater royal authority was needed to build the forms of prosperity they desired from France’s overseas colonies, and in 1663, Louis XIV revoked the charter of the Compagnie des Cent-Associés, a conglomerate that had maintained the colony’s fur-based economy. He appointed the Marquis de Tracy as head of the Carignan-Salières Regiment and made him lieutenant-general of France’s overseas colonies, as Iroquois warfare and the destruction of Wendake increasingly reshaped French imperialism. Iroquois warriors had once dominated seventeenth-century warfare. After 1665, that dominance was ending. New forms of colonial violence had come to rule a vast geography, an expansive region stretching from the Great Lakes, across the upper Ohio River Valley, and to Québec, with Iroquoia near 77 As quoted in Richter, Ordeal of the Longhouse, p. 102. 78 J. Verney, The Good Regiment: The Carignan–Salières Regiment in Canada, 1665–1668 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1991), p. 4. 79 Quoted in ibid., p. 3.

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its centre. 1,200 French soldiers now moved to limit Iroquois strength in the east, but they held little power to compel the Confederacy’s submission, particularly in the west. According to Parmenter, the French ‘were [still] powerless to deter the Iroquois from continuing offensives into the upper Great Lakes’.80 Throughout the late 1600s, the centrifugal forces of the Confederacy continued to radiate widely, and they soon generated commensurate reprisals. Seneca and Cayuga raids, for instance, reached as far as St Louis in 1684. Such attacks influenced Louis XIV to command colonial governors to invade Iroquoia once more. In 1687 and 1693, they did so, targeting and burning Iroquois villages. These campaigns were led by colonial leaders, authorised by the French monarchy, and drew strength from allied Indian villages across the Great Lakes. They included Wendat survivors whose loyalties to New France had endured long after the Iroquois destruction of Wendake.81

80 Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, p. 167. See also M. A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), pp. 38–40, for alternative perspectives on Iroquois influence. 81 Parmenter, Edge of the Woods, pp. 172–3, 182. For campaigns of 1687 and 1693, see pp. 189–226.

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In a letter dated 11 May 1791, Joseph Bowman reported that ‘the Indians are spreading fire and the tomahawk through the frontier’.1 The recipient of Bowman’s letter was Jonathan Clark, a Continental Army veteran and a trained attorney. Like scores of other Virginians, the Bowman and Clark families had turned their attention westward since the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) and held substantial economic and political investments in the young republic’s expanding frontiers in Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio and Illinois. Bowman came from a prominent family in Frederick County in northeastern Virginia. By the 1790s, though, the Bowmans presented themselves as Kentucky pioneers. The Clark family also had roots in Virginia. They hailed from Albemarle County and enjoyed access to prominent politicians such as Thomas Jefferson. Connections like these proved important, as the Clarks had eyes on the vast tracts of western lands that Indigenous people such as the Cherokees, Shawnees, Eries and Illinois called home.2 General Jonathan Clark always welcomed news from the frontier. The Revolutionary War taught Clark, like other colonisers with economic interests in ‘the west’, that maintaining a regular correspondence with family and friends was vital to safeguarding the security of Euroamerican settlements. Regular correspondence also reinforced business alliances and bonds forged 1 Joseph Bowman to Jonathan Clark, 11 May 1791, George Rogers Clark Letters, 1752–1818, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia. Hereafter ‘LVA’. 2 Clarence Walworth Alvord, ed. George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1781, 19 vols. (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Library, 1912–26), I I I, p. cxii; John W. Wayland, A History of Shenandoah County, Virginia (Strasburg, VA: Shenandoah Publishing House, 1927), p. 449; Robert P. Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1968), p. 103; Landon Y. Jones, William Clark and the Shaping of the West (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004), chs. 2 and 3; Jay H. Buckley, William Clark: Indian Diplomat (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), pp. 29–38.

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in the heat of military battle. The Bowman and Clark families shared such connections. Joseph Bowman had served under one of Clark’s younger brothers, George Rogers Clark, in a series of military campaigns in the Illinois Country: at Kaskaskia in 1778, and Vincennes in 1779.3 For people like Joseph Bowman and George Rogers Clark, defeating British troops in the Illinois, gaining the allegiance of French settlers, and inducing ‘indian savages’ to ‘cast the tomahawk into the river where it could never be found again’, were all deemed critical to the safety of Anglo-American settlements and the expansion of the frontier.4 The Bowman–Clark correspondence revealed a series of underlying assumptions about colonial interests and Anglo-American perceptions about Native people. They highlighted a desire not only to acquire, but to secure, territorial investments. No one – at least not Joseph Bowman and George Rogers Clark – wanted ‘the Indians’ to spread ‘fire and the tomahawk through the frontier’. Long-held anxieties about ‘unprovoked’ Indian attacks on Anglo-Americans and their economic investments had become embedded in the Anglo-American psyche by the latter half of the eighteenth century.5 Bowman’s and Clark’s anxieties were not new; they punctuate the written archives of the early colonial Americas. Beginning with Columbus in 1492, the European invasion of the Caribbean and mainland Americas altered the course of Native American history. In some parts of North America, precontact kin-based societies fractured and eventually coalesced into multiethnic and multi-lingual communities such as the Catawba and Seminole. In other instances, smaller communities shattered beyond repair.6 For Native people, European invasion was the ‘spreading fire’ – a destructive inferno routinely ignited by accusations of Indian ‘savagery’ and calls for their ‘extermination’ or ‘extirpation’.7 3 Carl J. Ekberg, French Roots in the Illinois Country: The Mississippi Frontier in Colonial Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Lowell H. Harrison, George Rogers Clark and the War in the West (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2001). 4 Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780, in George Rogers Clark Papers, V I I I, p. 485. 5 George Rogers Clark, The Conquest of the Illinois, ed. Milo M. Quaife, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), p. 76; Colin G. Calloway, The Victory with No Name: The Native American Defeat of the First American Army (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 56. 6 Robbie Ethridge, ‘Introduction: Mapping the Mississippian shatter zone’ in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South, ed. Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 1–62. 7 Examples of the language of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ of ‘savages’ and ‘infidels’ in North America are commonplace in the written records of early colonial America. In the interests of space, I provide two emblematic examples of this discourse here. See

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Europeans, of course, saw things differently. From the English founding of Virginia in 1607 to Anglo-American expansion into the Old West during the initial decades of the American republic in the 1780s and 1790s, no North American frontier seemed safe, no fort or settlement entirely secure. Faced with unfamiliar landscapes and ‘savages’, colonisers routinely expressed their anxieties and vulnerabilities, prompting the widespread – if not universal – conviction that physical and psychological violence against Native people was entirely justified. This chapter focuses on these emotions and how they help us to understand genocide in early colonial North America. After briefly surveying some of the key historiographical contributions to the genocide debate, the chapter turns to two ‘genocidal moments’: the 1610 Kikotan (or Kecoughtan) Massacre and removal, and Metacom’s War of 1675–6, also known as King Philip’s War.8 The chapter will address the eighteenth century to reveal the implications of French massacres of Native communities from the pays d’en haut to the Lower Mississippi River between the 1710s and 1730s, the exterminatory rhetoric and actions of British Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst during the Seven Years’ War of 1756–63, and the anti-Indian paranoia of Anglo-Americans during the American Revolutionary War (1775–83) and founding of the United States in the 1780s and early 1790s. One short chapter cannot cover all of the massacres, genocidal rhetoric and exterminatory actions of Europeans in North America prior to the Revolutionary War. Suffice it to say that colonialism’s written archives (and the visual and oral records of Native Americans) are full of historical events that meet the definition of genocide laid out by the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. In addition to the case studies outlined in this chapter, some of these other genocides include Vasco Núñez de Balboa’s use of dogs to exterminate Indian ‘sodomites’ in 1510; the 1540 Mabila Massacre in which Spanish conquistadors under Hernando de Soto massacred between 2,500 and 5,000 Indians in a paramount chiefdom ruled by Chief Tuskaloosa; the Mystic Massacre of 600–700 Pequot Indians in 1637; and the Dutch-inspired attack against Thomas Hutchinson, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay, 2nd edn (London: M. Richardson, 1760), p. 170; Peter Williams, French and Indian Cruelty, 2 vols. (York: J. Jackson, 1758), I I, p. 67. For more statements of genocidal intent by military and political leaders between 1622 and 1886, see Benjamin Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate: meaning, historiography, and new methods’, American Historical Review 120:1 (February 2015), 109–10. 8 On the concept of ‘genocidal moments’, see Anthony Dirk Moses, ‘An Antipodean genocide? The origin of the genocidal moment in the colonization of Australia’, Journal of Genocide Research 1:1 (2000), 89–105.

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Tankitekes (or Siwanoy) and Wappinger people at Pound Ridge in New York in 1644 that saw between 500 and 700 Indians killed (the latter two events are analysed by Benjamin Madley in Chapter 9 of this volume). The history of early colonial North America is littered with genocidal moments like these. An appreciation of the scale and scope of such genocidal histories reveals the deceptiveness of Bowman’s 1791 claim about Indians ‘spreading fire’ among settlers. The inverse was true. Colonisers such as Bowman worked to divide Native people and induce Indigenous warriors into alliances with colonial militias that would terrorise Native communities.9

Debating Genocide When the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ in 1943, he had in mind, among other horrific events, colonialism and its impact on Indigenous Americans.10 Lemkin’s early arguments about genocide in the Americas, and the subsequent signing of the UN Genocide Convention in 1948, sparked a lively historical debate about European colonisers and their ‘intent to destroy’ Native peoples and cultures.11 Those debates are ongoing.12 Framing many of these historiographical arguments has been the question of whether the UN Genocide Convention is too blunt an 9 Patricia Galloway, Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 129; Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 81; Alan Gallay, Colonial Wars of North America, 1512–1763 (New York: Routledge, 2015), p. 331; Gregory D. Smithers, Native Southerners: Indigenous History from Origins to Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2019), ‘Introduction’. 10 See, e.g., Raphael Lemkin, Lemkin on Genocide, ed. Steven L. Jacobs (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), p. 16. 11 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), pp. xi–xii, ch. 9; United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, United Nations – Treaty Series, vol. 78: No. 1021, 280; Raphael Lemkin, ‘Genocide’ in Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), ch. 1. 12 Recent state-of-the- field syntheses of this debate include Alfred A. Cave, ‘Genocide in the Americas’ in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 273–95, at 276, 279–88; David B. MacDonald, Identity Politics in the Age of Genocide: The Holocaust and Historical Representation (London: Routledge, 2008), ch. 3; Smithers, ‘Rethinking genocide in North America’ in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, ed. Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (Oxford University Press, 2010), 322–41; Brenden Rensink, ‘Genocide of Native Americans: historical facts and historiographic debates’ in Genocide of Indigenous Peoples: A Critical Bibliographic Review, ed. Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2011), 15–36; Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’,

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instrument to interpret the decline in Indigenous populations – from approximately 6 million prior to 1492 to 240,000 in the United States and Canada by 1900.13 But does this data point to genocide? According to religion scholar Steven Katz, it does not. Katz shrugs off Indigenous population loss as an ‘unintended tragedy’ of disease transfer.14 Others, such as historian James Axtell, have worried that ‘genocide inaccurately describes the vast majority of encounters between Europeans and Indians’.15 More recently, historian Gary Clayton Anderson posited a false equivalency between claims of North American genocides and other genocides. Clayton argued that genocide fails to describe accurately the impact of colonialism on Native Americans because ‘large numbers of Indians survived and because policies of mass murder on a scale similar to events in central Europe, Cambodia, or Rwanda were never implemented’.16 Of course, the fact that genocide does not explain all or most Indian deaths does not mean that genocide was absent, or irrelevant. Moreover, disease and genocide are not necessarily mutually exclusive factors. Indeed, the reservations in which colonists confined Native people in Virginia as early as 1658 became well-known breeding grounds for disease transmission. In other cases, whites deliberately encouraged the spread of diseases to Native populations – something that

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98–139. Notable scholarship that analyses the place of violence and genocide in North American history includes David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Brendan C. Lindsay, Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012); Gary Clayton Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime that Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014); Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016); Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016); Robert A. McNally, The Modoc War: A Story of Genocide at the Dawn of America’s Gilded Age (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017); Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). A point recently synthesised by Janne Lahti, The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 105–9. On demographic estimates, see Russell Thornton, ‘Tribal membership requirements and the demography of “old” and “new” Native Americans’, Population Research and Policy Review 16 (1997), 33–42; Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 98. Katz quoted in Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 106. Axtell quoted in Madley, ‘Reexamining the American genocide debate’, 106. Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing, p. 4. Joseph P. Gone, an interdisciplinary anthropologist and citizen of the Gros Ventre tribal nation of Montana, offers a slightly different take, contending that genocide is overused in American history. See his ‘Colonial genocide and historical trauma in Native North America: complicating contemporary attributions’ in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Andrew Woolford, Jeff Benvenuto and Alexander Laban Hinton (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 273–91.

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Indigenous people throughout eastern North America acknowledged in the centuries before the American Revolution.17 Understanding genocides in early colonial North America requires historical specificity. Building on the work of historians Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley and Jeffrey Ostler, it becomes possible to see how war, politics and genocide often converged.18 Recognising these important convergences requires methodological and conceptual agility. It encourages historians to ask new questions of well-worn archival paths, and to expand our source base beyond the written evidence of wars, massacres and atrocities to include Native oral, visual and written perspective as well – examples of which exist in Cherokee written documents, Lakota Winter Counts and other Native sources.19

Frontiers of Anxiety Who perpetrated genocide in early colonial North America? What logic informed their actions? There is no single answer to these questions. Yet we can identify patterns of thought and behaviour by examining historic cases of violence. The largely forgotten English massacre and dispersal of

17 Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People: The Powhatan Indians of Virginia through Four Centuries (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), pp. 110–15. On Europeans spreading disease, see Arthur Grenke, God, Greed, and Genocide: The Holocaust through the Centuries (Washington, DC: New Arcadia, 2005), p. 137; Marion Strange, Vital Negotiations: Protecting Settlers’ Health in Colonial Louisiana and South Carolina, 1720– 1763 (Berlin: V&R Unipress, 2012), p. 10; Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2012), p. 119. Native people continued to allege that settlers deliberately spread disease among them well into the nineteenth century. See Barbara Alice Mann, The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier Expansion (Santa Barbara, CA: ABCCLIO, 2009), pp. 79–80. Two historians who dismiss the idea that Europeans deliberately spread disease in early colonial America are Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in British North America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 15. 18 Kiernan, Blood and Soil; Benjamin Madley, ‘California and Oregon’s Modoc Indians: how Indigenous resistance camouflages genocide in colonial histories’ in Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, ed. Woolford, Benvenuto and Hinton, 119; Ostler, Surviving Genocide. See also Russell Thornton, ‘Native American demographic and tribal survival into the twenty-first century’, American Studies 46:3/4 (Fall/Winter 2005), 23–38; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (December 2006), 387–409. 19 John R. Alden, ‘The eighteenth century Cherokee Archives’, The American Archivist 5:4 (October 1942), 240–4; James H. Howard, ‘Two Dakota Winter Count texts’, Plains Anthropologist 5 (December 1955), 13–30; Colin G. Calloway, One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003).

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approximately 100–200 Kikotan Indians and their Indigenous neighbours – notably the Nansemond – in Virginia in 1610 is one such case.20 The 1610 Kikotan Massacre was the culmination of an extended period of violence and political change in tidewater Virginia. The carnage at the mouth of the James River occurred in the midst of a prolonged drought, a natural event that magnified the tenuousness of English settlement and sparked the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609.21 Understanding this complex history first requires recognising that massacres, like wars, can slide all too easily into episodes of genocide. The political scientist Jacques Semelin has urged scholars to examine carefully the ideas that drive the intent behind different forms of violence. As Semelin argued, ‘massacres are mainly born out of a mental process, a way of seeing some “Other” being, of stigmatising him, debasing him, and obliterating him before actually killing him’.22 Semelin outlined a framework that moves us towards a textbook definition of genocide in early colonial North America. Building on Semelin’s insights, we can also complicate simplistic binaries of European–Indigenous violence. In the case of the Kikotan, Powhatan warriors and English colonisers perpetrated genocidal violence against them. This recognition highlights the importance of pre-Columbian political calculations across Indian Country and, as other case studies in this chapter reveal, the alliances that Natives sometimes formed with colonisers.23 When Europeans engaged in genocidal violence, perpetrators cut across social lines. They included soldiers and priests, politicians and backcountry farmers. The perpetrators of genocide against Indigenous communities were young and old, rich and poor. They held a variety of political and religious beliefs. The various threads of Christianity, European legal precedents about both land use practices and ‘just warre’, the European desire to extract natural resources from the American landscape, and cultural assumptions 20 James Mooney, ‘The Powhatan Confederacy, past and present’, American Anthropologist 9:1 (1907), 129–52; Lyon G. Tyler, The Cradle of the Republic (Richmond: The Hermitage Press, 1906), p. 245. 21 J. Frederick Fausz, ‘Fighting “fire” with firearms: the Anglo-Powhatan arms race in early Virginia’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 3:4 (1979), 33–50; J. Frederick Fausz, ‘An “abundance of blood shed on both sides”: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614’, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 98:1 (January 1990), 3–56. 22 Jacques Semelin, Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 9. 23 As the following analysis will make clear, Powhatan motives for moving against the Kikotan prior to English invasion were quite different from the exterminatory intent of the English in 1610.

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about American Indian inferiority all intersected on the Kikotan homelands in the early seventeenth century.24 Arrogance, a sizeable investment of resources, and enormous risk characterised the early modern European invasion and colonisation of North America.25 Those factors, combined with pre-existing beliefs, meant that it did not take much for European leaders in early colonial North America to descend into feelings of anxiety and suspicion about Native Americans. In unknown landscapes, surrounded by ‘savages’, Europeans could, and did, manifest their anxieties in genocidal violence. In the colonised spaces of North America and the Caribbean, the logics of Christian and natural rights had the potential (and tendency) to justify European invasion, Native American dispossession, anti-Indian jurisprudence and exterminatory violence. Jurists and political philosophers – from Thomas Aquinas and his ideal of the common good for separate societies to the land rights/ownership theories of Vitoria, Pufendorf and Locke – were all present in the ad hoc logics that Europeans used to justify colonialism in North America and violence against Native polities.26 The theory of just war, as the eighteenth-century jurist Emer de Vattel defined it, became a particularly important concept in rationalising war and genocidal violence against Native North Americans.27 As Vattel observed, just war resulted from ‘injury either committed or threatened’. This gave rise to the notion of pre-emptive, or anticipatory, self-defence, which had the potential to slide easily into aggression and genocide in early colonial North America. 24 Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971); Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976). 25 Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001); Alan Gallay, Walter Ralegh: Architect of Empire (New York: Basic Books, 2019). 26 Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 301–2; Henrik Syse and Gregory M. Reichberg, Ethics, Nationalism, and Just War: Medieval and Contemporary Perspectives (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007); Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Tyler Rauert, ‘Early modern perspectives on western just war thought’ in The Prism of Just War: Asian and Western Perspectives on the Legitimate Use of Military Force, ed. Howard M. Hensel (London: Routledge, 2016), 87–114, esp. 97–8; Jérémie Gilbert, Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights under International Law: From Victims to Actors, rev. edn (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 27 Victoria Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation in Ancient China and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 151; Howard L. Malchow, History and International Relations: From the Ancient World to the 21st Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2020), pp. 29, 204–7.

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Consider the initial years of English invasion in Virginia. Even before the English stepped ashore, invasion and pre-emptory violence were part of a colonising psychology with roots in the sixteenth-century English invasion of Ireland and violence against the ‘wild Irish’. The English then extended this mentality across the Atlantic.28 By the 1580s, the English justified invasion and pre-emptory violence in North America on the grounds that ‘there are fertile and pleasant provinces in the main land, populated only by savages, fit to be civilly and christianly inhabited’.29 When the English arrived on Virginia’s coast in the spring of 1607, they faced uncertainty. Natives defended their lands by meeting initial English forays with violence, especially in the vicinity of modern-day Virginia Beach. Invasion would not be easy. By late May, the English had learned of a powerful and ambitious chief named Wahunsenacawh. He was someone with whom they might be able to negotiate. The English also decided to establish a fortified settlement on Jamestown Island.30 Uneasy diplomacy between the Powhatan and the English characterised early encounters. English and Powhatan diplomats were both curious about each other and mistrustful. Unsurprisingly, violence was always possible. On 27 May 1607, the tottering English fort at Jamestown reported being ‘assaulted by above 200 savages’ after Captain Christopher Newport and his men were about to retire ‘having ended their discovery’.31 Such seemingly unprovoked attacks heightened English anxieties and confirmed preconceptions about American ‘savages’ being inclined to engage in surprise assaults on settlers. As such, Englishmen viewed pre-emptory violence as an acceptable colonising strategy. The English cleric Samuel Purchas provided a succinct justification for pre-emptory violence when he referred to Native Americans as a ‘nomadic people’ who ‘range rather than inhabite’ the land. Purchas added that Englishmen should feel justified in their efforts to ‘root out [the Indians] from being [any] longer a people’.32 By 28 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, ch. 5. 29 Calendar of State Papers: Colonial, America and West Indies, vol. I, 1574–1660, 35 vols., ed. W. Noel Sainsbury (London, 1860), pp. 3–4 (hereafter cited as ‘CSP’). See also ‘20 November 1606, instructions for government’ in The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609, ed. Philip L. Barbour (London: Hakluyt Society, 1968), 43. 30 Frank E. Grizzard, Jr and D. Boyd Smith, Jamestown Colony: A Political, Social, and Cultural History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2007), p. 99; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, The Jamestown Project (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 212–16. 31 CSP, I, p. 7; Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing off in Early America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 20, 23, 77–8. 32 James A. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 170; G. B. Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (Englewood Cliffs:

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rhetorically framing Native Virginians as wild, un-Christian and ‘brutish and unmanly’, English colonisers understood their own violence against Native communities in Virginia as moral and in accord with prevailing European concepts of international law.33 Recognising the legal and cultural background of the English invasion is critical to understanding the logic behind the genocidal violence. Kiernan explained that early seventeenth-century Englishmen viewed Native Virginians as ‘wastrels’, whose social, economic and agricultural practices did not conform to English understandings of land ownership and productive use. More broadly, Europeans misrepresented Native Americans as a ‘wandering’ people, or as clusters of individuals practising ‘communal’ rather than ‘individual’ land use practices.34 Englishmen such as Captain John Smith internalised these stereotypes and viewed Native people as un-Christian, and thus ‘savages’ who might attack English colonists at any time.35 When Smith famously encountered the Powhatan and members of other Indian polities around the Chesapeake, Virginia’s Indigenous population stood at approximately 50,000, with the Algonquian-speakers of the coastal plain numbering about 21,000.36 By the early twentieth century, diplomacy, war, confinement to reservations and blood quantum laws had reduced Virginia Indians to a little more than 2,000 survivors.37 Those figures are stunning. They reveal how close the English – and the white inheritors of the colony begun in 1607 – came to annihilating Virginia’s

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Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 63; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 222; David Day, Conquest: How Societies Overwhelm Others (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 77. Robert D. Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 133. Tin-bor Hui, War and State Formation, p. 47; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 217. John Smith, The Adventures of Captain John Smith, The Founder of the Colony of Virginia (New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1842), p. 51. Rountree, Pocahontas’s People; Keith Egloff and Deborah Woodward, First People: The Early Indians of Virginia, 2nd edn (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Laurelyn Whitt and Alan W. Clarke, North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2019), pp. 118–19; Ethan A. Schmidt, The Divided Dominion: Social Conflict and Indian Hatred in Early Virginia (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2015); Kristalyn Marie Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). Peter H. Wood, ‘The changing population of the colonial South: an overview by race and region, 1685–1790’ in Powhatan’s Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, 1685–1790, ed. Gregory A. Waselkov, Peter Wood and Tom Hatley, rev. edn (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 57–132; Russell Thornton, ‘Demographic history’ in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. X I V: Southeast, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2004), pp. 48–52.

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Indigenous peoples completely. Although the English barely survived their own starving times in the colony’s early years and struggled to find a sustainable economic foundation for the colony, efforts to secure their

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‘forts’ and ‘plantations’ ultimately rested on violence against local Native American communities.38 The Kikotan experience is revealing in this respect. They inhabited lands that became infamous in 1619 when the White Lion anchored at the mouth of the Chesapeake with a cargo that included the first enslaved Africans in English North America. The Kikotan homelands – what the English called Fort Comfort (later renamed Point Comfort) – was home to as many as 1,000 Kikotan kinspeople. They lived near, and traded with, the neighbouring Accomac, Nansemond, Warraskoyaak and, to their north, the Pamunkey – the political and military heart of the Powhatan chiefdom.39 The Powhatan – or Tsenacommacah – chiefdom was still fairly new when the English arrived in 1607. Wahunsenacawh, whom the English called Chief Powhatan and described as ‘subtle’ and ‘mischievous’, was still solidifying his power over the tidewater region.40 Unlike the much more powerful and prosperous Monacans of Virginia’s mountain and piedmont regions, the Powhatan lacked the monumental mound complexes that characterised some wealthy, mature Native polities.41 Powhatans were active both on the warpath and as traders and diplomats. For the Kikotan, this meant pressure to accede to Powhatan rule. Powhatan political and territorial growth followed a pattern seen throughout the Eastern Woodland region of North America. Over the course of the fifteenth to early seventeenth centuries, the solidification of larger multi-ethnic and multilingual Native polities, combined with pre-existing rivalries and ambitious chiefs, created a political environment conducive to warfare between different Indigenous kinship groups.42 As older chiefdoms declined and smaller communities coalesced, people migrated, engaged in warfare or diplomacy, and formed new confederacies and kinship ties.43 The sudden incursion of 38 Historians of slavery have generally glossed over this critical point. For example, Philip Morgan’s jejune Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998) offers only superficial analysis of Native history in Virginia and the Carolinas. 39 William Strachey, The Histories of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia Freund (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 42, 69–70; Michael Guasco, Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), pp. 1, 202. 40 CSP, I, pp. 11–12. 41 On this point, see Jeffrey L. Hantman, Monacan Millennium: A Collaborative Archaeology and History of a Virginia Indian People (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018). 42 Smithers, Native Southerners, ch. 2. 43 Patricia Galloway, ‘Confederacy as a solution to chiefdom dissolution: historical evidence in the Choctaw case’ in The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the

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Europeans added to an already fluid situation. For small communities like the Kikotan, the consequences of these sudden changes proved profound. Just prior to the English invasion and settlement at Jamestown, Wahunsenacawh instructed Powhatan warriors to attack the Kikotan. As in similar military actions throughout eastern North America, such violence aimed to enslave the vanquished or induce them to join a larger and more powerful chiefdom.44 Wahunsenacawh wanted to secure power over a strategically important part of the tidewater region. While precise numbers are difficult to calculate, archaeological and historical evidence suggests that Powhatan warriors reduced the Kikotan population from a little over 1,000 to as few as 100 or 200 – and approximately 20–30 fighting men.45 Survivors were likely encouraged to adopt new kinship ties within the Powhatan chiefdom.46 Insufficient surviving evidence makes it impossible to conclude unequivocally that Powhatan warriors intended to commit genocide against the Kikotan. However, the Powhatan violence did have exterminatory consequences for Kikotan culture, politics and kinship systems. For surviving Kikotan, choices were few and stark. Those who evaded capture and adoption into the Powhatan chiefdom tried to rebuild their lives. Most, however, came under the leadership of a werowance, a local leader whose allegiance was to the Powhatan. One of those werowances was Pochin, Wahunsenacawh’s son, who oversaw the repopulation of Kikotan lands. As Pochin directed rebuilding efforts, a new threat emerged. That the English posed any challenge to the Powhatan chiefdom would have surprised Pochin and his father. In 1608, the English were a pathetic rabble. They struggled to feed themselves, relying on Indigenous charity to American South, 1521–1704, ed. Charles Hudson and Carmen C. Tesser (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 393–420; Stephen Kowalewski, ‘Coalescent societies’ in Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians, ed. Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 94–122. 44 On Indian slavery, see Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). 45 Strachey, Histories, pp. 60–1, 68; Maurice A. Mook, ‘The Aboriginal population of tidewater Virginia’, American Anthropologist 46:2 (April–June 1944), 193–208, esp. 194; Helen C. Rountree, Pocahontas, Powhatan, Opechancanough: Three Indian Lives Changed by Jamestown (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), pp. 19, 44. 46 ‘Old Kecoughtan’, The William and Mary Quarterly 9:2 (October 1900), 83–4; F. L. Gleach, Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 43.

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Figure 11.1 Map of Virginia, ‘discovered and described’, by Captain John Smith, c.1606. (Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Washington, DC)

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eat. On the verge of starvation, Englishmen like John Smith recognised the need to trade with local Indians. But, just as trade talks began, English cultural chauvinism inspired a violent outburst. In the spring of 1608, Smith approached the Kikotan to initiate trade. The Kikotan reportedly had 3,000 acres of corn, a potential lifeline for the invaders, who struggled to grow crops amid a lengthy drought.47 To Smith’s surprise, the Kikotan elders ‘scorned’ his overtures. Smith became enraged. He let ‘fly his muskets’, prompting the Kikotan to flee ‘into the woods.’48 Smith’s 1608 encounter marked a sharp decline in English relations with the Kikotan that ultimately sparked the First Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609, a war that involved genocide. As mutual suspicions grew, large-scale violence became more likely. By early 1610, the English made no secret of their desire to acquire land at the mouth of the James River – the ‘eastern door’ – to secure river access for their boats and supplies for the Jamestown settlement.49 Moreover, English land use practices began severing Kikotan people from their crops, sacred spaces and homes. By early summer, the English became alarmed at news of Kikotan alliances with neighbouring Indigenous polities – alliances the English wanted to prevent. The English responded quickly, expediting fort construction on Kikotan lands. English rhetoric also became more incendiary. For example, Virginia Governor Sir Thomas Gates, expressed how he was ‘desyreous for to be Revenged upon the Indyans att Kekowhatan’ for their resistance to English expansion. Gates pointed to Kikotan warriors capturing and killing Humphrey Blunt, an Englishman, on the banks of the James River, as further evidence of the need to intensify military activity and eliminate these dangerous ‘savages’ from a strategically important part of Virginia.50 47 Hu Maxwell, ‘The use and abuse of forests by the Virginia Indians’, The William and Mary Quarterly 19:2 (October 1910), 73–103, esp. 80. In pre-Columbian America, a huntergatherer society of 100 people needed approximately 100 acres of land to sustain them. Agriculture reduced that figure to 10 acres per 100 people. Given the Kikotan reportedly cultivated many thousands of acres, it is likely that their population was larger than colonial estimates suggest. The Kikotans likely traded corn surpluses with other communities, and used corn to pay tribute to the Powhatan chiefdom. For an overview of high-yielding grain crops in pre-Columbian eastern North America, see Jane Mt Pleasant, ‘A new paradigm for pre-Columbian agriculture in North America’, Early American Studies 13:2 (Spring 2015), 374–412. 48 John Smith, The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, & The Summer Isles (1629; rpr. Bedford: Applewood Books, 2006), p. 93. 49 Fausz, ‘An “abundance of blood shed on both sides”’, 11. 50 ‘Old Kecoughton’, 83; Mark Nicholls, ‘George Percey’s “Trewe relacyon”: a primary source for the Jamestown settlement’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 113:3 (2005), 212–75, quote is at 252; James Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America (New York: Basic Books, 2008), pp. 62, 119.

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Gates’ rhetoric highlighted the goal of colonial officials: to ‘drive’ the ‘savages’ from their homelands. Territorial dispossession and dispersal manifested itself in the 1610 Kikotan Massacre. Using Blunt’s murder as a justification, Gates led a force of armed English militiamen to the outskirts of Kikotan in July 1610. Having reached the outskirts of the Kikotan village, Gates ordered one Englishman to play music while the rest of Gates’ men danced. The Kikotan were unaware that this impromptu merriment was a ruse; as villagers emerged to investigate, Gates ordered an attack. George Percy, an Englishman who accompanied the expedition to Kikotan, recalled that Gates ‘fell in upon them put five to the sword wounded many others . . . the rest of the savages he put to flight’.51 Percy’s account of the Kikotan Massacre is a rare piece of eyewitness testimony from this bloody encounter. Historians have not uncovered written documents to clarify what happened to the fifty or sixty Kikotan who encountered Gates’ wrath. If the outcome of the English attack is any indication, a genocide occurred. Within days of the violence, no Kikotan remained at their village. Those who were not killed or mortally wounded likely fled to find refuge among neighbouring Indigenous communities. Herein lies the distinction between Powhatan and English attacks on Kikotan villages: the latter came with the intent to exterminate and disperse the Kikotan, while the former sought to incorporate them into the Powhatan chiefdom.52 The English had come to stay. Initially led by the Virginia Company, the English invasion of Virginia was a high-stakes business venture, as well as an experiment in settler colonialism. Indigenous people stood in the way of these risky enterprises. All trace of Kikotan people had to go. In 1611, not content with physically destroying and dispersing the Kikotan, Virginia’s General Assembly agreed to ‘change the savage name of Kicowtan’ to Elizabeth City. By 1619, English families lobbied colonial officials to erase the Kikotan from memory by establishing the Corporation of Elizabeth City – thereby providing articles of incorporation that embedded Elizabeth City in the legal architecture of colonial Virginia.53 By renaming the landscape and its rivers, English colonists asserted ownership of Virginia. The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as more than ‘killing members of the group’. It can also involve ‘causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, or ‘deliberately inflicting on the group 51 Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, pp. 53–4. 52 Fausz, ‘An “abundance of blood shed on both sides”’, 6. 53 CSP, I, p. 22; Grizzard, Jr and Smith, Jamestown Colony, p. 106.

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conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. The latter two ‘acts of genocide’ are precisely what the English initiated when they began building forts, stealing Native land for their plantations, and burning crops, which led to starvation among Powhatan communities.54 The spiritual connection to place that Native people had nurtured over millennia was under attack by English colonisers. In the decades after the First Anglo-Powhatan War (1609–14) and the genocide of the Kikotan people, the English accelerated a scorched earth approach to expansion. The Powhatan responded to this destruction of property and razing of crops with counter-attacks. In March 1622, Opechancanough led a series of operations against English settlements along the James River, killing roughly 347 colonisers out of some 1,200.55 These mass killings of men, women and children amounted to a genocidal massacre of colonisers and sparked the Second Anglo-Powhatan War (1622– 32). In that time, the Virginia Company had its charter revoked and a Crown colony was established over Virginia. The years between 1622 and 1632 saw massive loss of Indigenous life and destruction to property as English policy towards Native Americans shifted to a focus on their total defeat. The English engaged in an ‘expiable war unto the dead’ with the Powhatans. Additionally, English soldiers dutifully ‘cut down their corn, burnt their houses, and slaughtered many’.56 In May 1623, Captain William Tucker used the cover of peace negotiations to poison some 200 Indians. In what became known as the Potomac River Massacre, a further 50 Indigenous warriors were slaughtered in hand-to-hand combat.57 By the end of the Second Anglo-Powhatan War, the Powhatan population had declined precipitously. From a high of approximately 21,000 in 1607, the Powhatan numbered less than 5,000 by 1632. The change in English policy seemed to be working.58 However, using the cover of war to commit genocide proved expensive. In a 1624 petition, Virginia’s Council and General Assembly requested compensation from the Crown for expenses incurred while ‘extirpating the savages’.59 Other wars followed the Second Anglo-Powhatan War: most notably, the Third Anglo-Powhatan War of 1644–6 that culminated in colonial officials confining surviving Native people – numbering fewer than 3,000 – to 54 United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide; Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, pp. 71–2. 55 Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, pp. 75–6. 56 CSP, I, pp. 56–7; Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, pp. 77–8. 57 Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, p. 81. 58 Gleach, Powhatan’s World, p. 169. 59 CSP, I, pp. 63–9.

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reservations.60 In comparison, a population of over 30,000 English colonisers resided in Virginia by mid-century. These settlers benefitted from a genocidal framework for settler colonial expansion: justify exterminatory violence by invoking the ‘savagery’ of Indigenous people while citing their unprovoked attacks; use the cover of war to commit mass killings, destroy food sources and disperse Native people; and crush community and kinship by confining survivors to reservations.61 By the opening of the eighteenth century, the English added to their exterminatory arsenal. The founding of the Brafferton School at William and Mary College in 1723 was an attempt to impose a western education and Christian beliefs on Native children. Brafferton was not the first ‘Indian school’ in North America, but it highlighted Virginia colonists’ deep commitment to erasing Native culture, language and religion.62

Metacom’s Resistance In New England, Englishmen replicated patterns of genocidal violence seen in Virginia. The Pilgrim and Puritan colonisers who invaded what became Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island during the 1620s and 1630s encountered Indigenous communities with flexible kinship systems that inclined elders to extend hospitality and engage in peaceful diplomacy with English people.63 These groups included the Montauketts on eastern Long Island, members of the Wôpanâak (or Wampanoag) Confederacy, the Narragansett, Pequot, Mohegan, Nipmuck and numerous other kinship communities. Early efforts to negotiate with Englishmen quickly devolved into violence as a growing list of bloody encounters soured relations. These included an English sailor who shot and murdered Wampanoags ‘without

60 Rountree, Pocahontas’s People, p. 96; Gleach, Powhatan’s World, p. 169; Schmidt, The Divided Dominion, pp. 126–30; Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia, pp. 17–19. 61 Agitation for access to land continued into the late seventeenth century. In 1676, Nathaniel Bacon led a rebellion that targeted Doeg, Susquehannock, Pamunkey, Occanechi and other Native communities after Bacon’s followers accused Governor Berkeley of turning a deaf ear to reports of Indian attacks. See James D. Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 62 Margaret Connell Szasz, Indian Education in the American Colonies, 1607–1783 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 74–6; Rebecca A. Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 144. 63 James Axtell, ‘The Scholastic philosophy of the wilderness’, The William and Mary Quarterly 29:3 (July 1972), 338–9.

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provocation’, and colonisers who aggressively displaced Native people from their homelands and access to fisheries.64 Violent clashes between Native people and colonisers over land, the construction of English forts and access to resources all had the potential to spiral into mass murder. Growing mistrust between Native people and colonisers fuelled these confrontations. So too did competing Indigenous polities. The result was a combustible mix of relations in which the smallest spark could ignite a region-wide war and expose Indigenous communities to mass extermination.65 As Benjamin Madley reveals in Chapter 9 of this volume, that potential became reality for the Pequots in 1637. Yet another New England conflict – King Philip’s War – was also genocidal. By the 1670s, the relentlessly aggressive English push for Native lands strained relations to the breaking point. Metacom (or Metacomet), the second son of the sachem Massasoit, became the Wampanoag sachem in 1662. Under Metacom’s leadership, Wampanoags grew tired of English aggressiveness and duplicity – in particular, the English tendency to ply sachems with liquor to induce them to sign over vast tracts of land. Known to the English as King Philip, Metacom had had enough. In 1675, war broke out.66 King Philip’s War killed an estimated 3,000 Native people – a death rate of 15 per cent – and 800 colonists, or a death rate of 1.5 per cent.67 The war began in June 1675 when Wampanoag warriors reportedly ‘pilfered’ English homes in Swansea, Massachusetts, killing a number of English people. It remains unclear whether Metacom sanctioned the attack. Irrespective, Metacom responded quickly to the outbreak of war. He relocated people under his leadership from Montaup (the Mount Hope Peninsula) to the Pocasset swamps.68

64 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 225–7. 65 Neal Salisbury, Manitou and Providence: Indians, Europeans, and the Making of New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 11; A. A. Cave, The Pequot War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 49, 61, 164. 66 Daniel R. Mandell, King Philip’s War: Colonial Expansion, Native Resistance, and the End of Indian Sovereignty (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 68–73; Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), pp. 12, 109, 132, 136–8. 67 Eric B. Schultz and Michael J. Tougias, King Philip’s War: The History and Legacy of America’s Forgotten Conflict (New York: The Countryman Press, 1999), p. 5; Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 240; Christine M. Delucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 68 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 87; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, pp. 155, 167.

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Figure 11.2 Phillip [sic], alias Metacomet of Pokanoket. Engraved from an original by Thomas Church in 1772. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC)

In September 1675, Nipmuck warriors responded to colonisers encroaching on their land and attacked wagon trains. In what became known as the Battle of Bloody Brook, the Nipmuck ambushed the colonisers, killing almost sixty. Bloody Brook had a significant impact on the settler psyche. Captain Benjamin Church, of Plymouth Colony, had long observed the ‘skulking’ tactics of Native warriors and insisted that colonial militias should adopt Indigenous tactics to shorten the war and secure victory.69 In December 1675, the English put Church’s tactics to the test. At the Great Swamp, a marsh surrounded by thick brush, Narragansett and Wampanoag people gathered for protection. On several acres of firm ground in the middle of the swamp, a palisaded fort protected several hundred ‘wigwams’, a breastwork and a blockhouse. Narragansetts and Wampanoags at the 69 John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 30, 35.

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Great Swamp simply wanted to see out the war in safety. Some Englishmen saw things differently. Colonial militias viewed these civilians as rebellious ‘savages’.70 On 8 December, Plymouth and Massachusetts troops met with their Connecticut, Mohegan and Pequot allies to prepare an attack on the Great Swamp. The goal was simple: annihilate the people sheltering behind the Great Swamp’s unfinished palisade. On 19 December, militias and their Indigenous allies attacked, killing approximately 100 warriors. Next, militia leaders directed their forces to a breach in the palisade. A genocidal massacre ensued. The attackers slaughtered Native women, children and old men. Estimates of those killed by English soldiers vary wildly, ranging from a death toll of as low as 97 to as high as 1,000.71 Just as they did during the Pequot War and Anglo-Powhatan Wars, English scorched earth tactics destroyed Native food stores and burned houses – over 500, some with people still inside. The events at the Great Swamp in December 1675 were no ‘fight’ – this was a genocide marked by extraordinary levels of cruelty.72 Following Great Swamp, colonial militias moved through Plymouth and Connecticut colonies determined to ‘utterly extirpate’ Native people.73 Indigenous warriors now enjoyed little military success, the Narragansett enduring particularly heavy losses. For example, in 1676, colonists massacred 126 of them in the infamous Spruce Swamp Massacre.74 Indeed, Native people throughout New England suffered into the spring and summer as colonial militias cut off access to fishing grounds and destroyed crops. Sometimes they suffered major atrocities. In 1676, colonists slew 100–200 Nipmucks at the Peskeompskut or Turner’s Falls Massacre.75 By the time Metacom was shot and killed by the militia’s Native allies, King Philip’s War was all but over. Feeling morally justified in exterminating Native people in the region, Colonel Benjamin Church ordered English soldiers to sever Metacom’s head from his body. The English subsequently took Metacom’s head to Plymouth to serve as a warning to any Indigenous person who dared 70 James D. Drake, King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 120; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, pp. 242–3. 71 Jennings, The Invasion of America, p. 312, n. 43. 72 Drake, King Philip’s War, pp. 76, 120; Lepore, The Name of War, p. 87; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, pp. 244–5. 73 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 239. 74 John Tallcot to Honrd Gent, 4 July 1676 in J. Hammond Trumbull, ed., The Public Records of the Colony of Connecticut, from 1665 to 1678, 15 vols. (Hartford: Brown and Parsons, 1852), I I, pp.458–9. 75 Mandell, King Philip’s War, p. 142; Brooks, Our Beloved Kin, pp. 252, 307; Delucia, Memory Lands, pp. 206, 216, 248.

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to resist colonial power. Furthermore, colonial militias continued sweeping through the swamps killing women and children. As in the Pequot genocide, colonists sold survivors into Caribbean slavery.76

American Inferno By the eighteenth century, genocidal violence and a scorched earth approach to colonial expansion accelerated. Over a century of encounters with Europeans – Spanish, French, Dutch, English and others – intensified preexisting rivalries among Native polities. In the Southeast, historian Pekka Hämäläinen observed a region wracked by almost constant political and economic instability, and outbursts of violence that often involved massacres.77 As colonists extended their geopolitical footprint, the Native South became a killing field in which Apalachee, Yamaesees, Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws and scores of other communities faced physical annihilation or dispersal. For example, the Tuscaroras numbered about 5,000 when British militias from the Carolinas and Virginia enslaved over 1,000, slaughtered close to 1,300, and drove most of the survivors north, where they found refuge among the Haudenosaunee.78 The British were not alone in exploiting pre-existing Native rivalries to prevent pan-Indian alliances, advance colonial interests and rationalise massacres.79 During the 1710s and 1720s, the French massacred Native communities from the pays d’en haut to the Lower Mississippi River. Near the headwaters of the Detroit River, the Frenchman Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac established Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit – Fort Detroit. Cadillac hoped the fort would become the ‘Paris of America’. If Detroit’s founding in 1701 did anything, it intensified rivalries among Native polities in the region.80 Looking to solidify Pontchartrain, Frenchmen grew concerned that ongoing warfare between Native polities might undermine their colonial 76 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 241. 77 Pekka Hämäläinen, ‘The shapes of power: Indians, Europeans, and North American worlds from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century’ in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Countryman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 31–68. 78 David La Vere, The Tuscarora War: Indians, Settlers, and the Fight for the Carolina Colonies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), pp. 12, 45; Smithers, Native Southerners, pp. 70–7. 79 On pan-Indianism, see Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 80 Charles Garrad, Petun to Wyandot: The Ontario Petun from the Sixteenth Century (University of Ottawa Press, 2014), pp. 509–10.

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ambitions. With Native leaders at loggerheads over the establishment of Pontchartrain, and Fox warriors asserting themselves, French officials and traders became anxious. French leaders also worried growing British interests in the region threatened New France, which numbered around 50,000 colonists by 1710.81 As Cadillac departed Pontchartrain to become governor of Louisiana in 1710, the migrating Fox (or Mesquaki), along with their Kickapoo and Mascouten allies, arrived in Detroit.82 Relations among Native polities further deteriorated, while the French complained about Fox ‘piracy’ causing violent conflagrations around Pontchartrain. For example, both French settlers and Native elders accused White-Robe, a Fox chief, of ‘continually slaying people’.83 White-Robe earned few friends. He embodied the threat posed by Fox migrations in the region. As a result, when the Fox laid siege to Fort Pontchartrain, the French and their Huron and Ottawa allies brought maximum force to five days of combat, slaughtering over 1,000 Fox people.84 The Mesquaki continued to suffer at the hands of the French and their Indigenous allies. By the summer of 1730, about 900 Mesquaki decided that their survival lay to the east and with the Iroquois. As they began migrating out of what is today Wisconsin and travelled through Illinois, the French and their Indian allies intercepted the Mesquaki. The Mesquaki knew they were in trouble and tried to protect themselves by building a fort – to no avail. What followed became known as the Fort Fox Massacre, in which the French and their Native allies killed over 500 Mesquaki people.85 Over the coming decades, additional attacks on Native communities – from the Illinois and Ohio Countries to the Native South – soaked the land in blood and the paths leading west in the tears of the dispossessed.86 81 R. David Edmunds and Joseph L. Peyser, The Fox Wars: The Mesquakie Challenge to New France (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), pp. 66–70; Andrew K. Sturtevant, ‘Jealous neighbors: rivalry and alliance among the Native communities of Detroit, 1701–1766’ (PhD dissertation, College of William and Mary, 2011), 16–18; Allan Greer, The People of New France (University of Toronto Press, 1997), p. 12. 82 R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, rev. ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 70. 83 William Jones, Fox Texts, ed. Franz Boas (Leiden: Late E. J. Brill Publishers and Printers, 1907), p. 9. 84 ‘1712: siege of Detroit by Wisconsin Indians’ in Wisconsin Historical Collections, 20 vols. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1855–1915), X V I, 269; William Jones, Ethnography of the Fox Indians (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), pp. 4–6. 85 Edmunds and Peyser, The Fox Wars, pp. 154–6. 86 Roger M. Carpenter, ‘Times are Altered with Us’: American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), p. 163; Taylor, American Colonies, pp. 389–90.

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Along the Lower Mississippi River, European colonisers saw Indian ‘plots’ at every turn. French officials referred to a ‘Natchez plot’ to justify what historian Alan Taylor referred to as French ‘bullying’. French paranoia, and Natchez resistance, resulted in colonists launching a series of military strikes against Natchez communities. As early as 1715, the French and their Native allies began attacking the Natchez. For example, the French targeted Old Hair, the Sun (or leader) of Apple Village during the latter half of the 1710s. Apple Village warriors resisted French colonialism by maiming cattle and killing settlers. In response, French military leaders encouraged Indian allies – notably the Choctaws – to target Suns like Old Hair and attack villages that exhibited hostility towards the French. These tactics continued through the 1720s and into the 1730s. In February 1730, for instance, the French and their Choctaw allies launched an attack that killed some 200 Natchez people, while an unknown number of survivors fled and took refuge among the Chickasaws. Over two decades of trade disputes, massacres, and Natchez women and children being sold into slavery had taken a toll. As the 1740s began, a nation that once included 60 villages was reduced to only 6.87

Conclusion By the mid eighteenth century, clear historical patterns had emerged that help us to understand outbursts of genocidal violence in North America. When trade and diplomatic forays soured, mutual distrust ensued and often descended into war. Europeans then justified massacres, the targeting of Indigenous leaders, the confinement of Native communities on reservations, and the destruction of crops by invoking stereotypes about Native people as un-Christian and ‘savage’. Such logic attempted to justify not only warfare but the ‘extirpation’ of Native people. During the Seven Years’ War, British Field Marshal Jeffery Amherst put such logic into practice. Amherst ordered that hostile Indians be ‘immediately put to death, their extirpation being the only security for our safety’. And Benjamin Franklin, a founding father of the US republic, saw Native Americans as a treacherous race who deserved to be thrown to the dogs.88

87 G. E. Milne, Natchez Country: Indians, Colonists, and the Landscapes of Race in French Louisiana (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015), pp. 57, 84, 91–6; James F. Barnett, Jr, The Natchez Indians: A History to 1735 (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007), pp. 105, 126–7. 88 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 244.

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Understanding such patterns reveals the deep history behind Joseph Bowman’s 1791 letter to Jonathan Clark. Bowman genuinely worried about Native warriors ‘spreading fire’ among colonists. In truth, though, colonists had ignited that fire centuries earlier. Recognising this, and analysing genocidal histories in early colonial North America, does not flatten our understanding of the past – it adds layers of insight and historical specificity. More importantly, understanding genocidal histories allows us to do justice to the lives lost in the ‘spreading fire’ of settler colonialism and to honour the resilience of those who survived.

Bibliographic Note The events covered in this chapter are addressed in archival documents, printed primary sources, oral histories and a voluminous historiography. Key printed primary sources related to the case studies in this chapter include: Alvord, ed., George Rogers Clark Papers, 1771–1781; Barbour, ed., The Jamestown Voyages under the First Charter, 1606–1609; Hutchinson, The History of the Colony of Massachusetts-Bay; Smith, The Adventures of Captain John Smith, The Founder of the Colony of Virginia, and The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, & The Summer Isles; Strachey, The Histories of Travell into Virginia Britania (1612), ed. Wright and Freund; and Williams, French and Indian Cruelty. Consult also the Calendar of State Papers (1860–1936) and Wisconsin Historical Collections. The secondary literature is too voluminous to address exhaustively here. Among the most important pieces of secondary literature related to Virginia are Egloff and Woodward, First People: The Early Indians of Virginia; Fausz, ‘Fighting “fire” with firearms: the Anglo-Powhatan arms race in early Virginia’, and ‘An “abundance of blood shed on both sides”: England’s First Indian War, 1609–1614’; Horn, A Land as God Made It: Jamestown and the Birth of America; Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing off in Early America, and The Jamestown Project; Rice, Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America; Rountree, Pocahontas’s People; Schmidt, The Divided Dominion; Shefveland, Anglo-Native Virginia. For New England, see Brooks, Our Beloved Kin; Delucia, Memory Lands; Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity; Mandell, King Philip’s War; Salisbury, Manitou and Providence; Schultz and Tougias, King Philip’s War. Also see Kiernan, Blood and Soil, and Ostler, Surviving Genocide, for two of the best examples of how to incorporate genocide into sweeping historical analyses.

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The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars An Early Modern Genocide? david brophy

The Zünghars were a confederation of Buddhist, Western Mongol (Oirat) peoples centred on what is now the northern half of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of western China (see Map 12.1). Throughout the first half of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), they were regarded as the empire’s most dangerous rival. When an internecine succession struggle eroded the loose unity of the Zünghar polity in the 1750s, the Qianlong emperor took advantage of the opportunity to invade and neutralise his dynasty’s last remaining competitor for rule on the Mongolian steppe. In the wake of the military victory, which the emperor considered the finest achievement of his six-decade reign (1736–95), a combination of deliberate killing, disease and flight came close to wiping out the original Oirat inhabitants of Jungharia. We lack reliable population figures, but in the nineteenth century, Qing historian Wei Yuan estimated that, from some 600,000 Oirat Mongols, only a fortunate 20 per cent who escaped into Kazakh and Russian territory survived.1 Soviet historian Il’ia Iakovlevich Zlatkin took an even grimmer view, concluding that only 30–40,000 (i.e. less than 10 per cent) had found refuge in Russia.2 In the 1960s, British Mongolist Charles Bawden was the first to describe these events as a ‘genocide’, and, since then, the term has come into wide use as a description of the Qing destruction of Zünghar society. In English-language scholarship, the most authoritative account is that of Peter Perdue, who implicitly draws an analogy with the Nazi holocaust by referring to Qing policy as a ‘final solution’ to the dynasty’s frontier anxieties.3 Research for this chapter was carried out with the support of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (project number DE170100330), funded by the Australian Government. 1 Cited in Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 285. 2 I. Ia. Zlatkin, Istoriia Dzhungarskogo khanstva (1635–1758) (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), p. 462. 3 Charles R. Bawden, The Modern History of Mongolia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 31; Perdue, China Marches West, pp. 155, 308.

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The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars Tobolsk Tobolsk Lake Baikal Irkutsk K iakkhta ia Kiakhta

N Lake Balkhash

AL IIlili

JUNGHA

Ba Bar rköl Barköl S H A N Ürümchi N A I T A qsu Aqsu K ashgar Kashgar

TA

YM O

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U N TA

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GOBI DESERT Beijing B eijing

Hami

TARIM BASIN Y arkand Yarkand Suzhou

Q I N G H A I P L AT E AU T I B E T Lhasa

0 0

300 mi 500 km

Map 12.1 Eastern Eurasia in the mid eighteenth century. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

By the time of their historic showdown, the long-running rivalry between the Qing and the Zünghars had already been the cause of multiple wars, and had given rise to much violent rhetoric on the part of the Qianlong emperor’s predecessors. Scholars examining the 1750s as a case study of genocide have seen in this martial discourse evidence of a long-standing dynastic desire to wipe out their Zünghar enemies.4 At the same time, with the growing availability of Manchu-language sources for the Qing frontier wars, historians have come up with increasingly fine-grained studies of these campaigns, studies that complicate a straightforward narrative of genocidal intent. On the basis of these studies, we are now in a much better position to specify when and why the Qing court switched from a policy of incorporating the 4 David M. Crowe, War Crimes, Genocide, and Justice: A Global History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 31–2.

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Zünghars into the empire, to one of mass killing. From roughly late 1756 to late 1759, it was Qing practice to exterminate those they identified as rebels (often referred to in the sources by the distinctive name of mahachin), before the focus of Qing policy again reverted to resettling the surviving Zünghars and organising them within the new frontier administration. This chapter begins with an account of the rise of the Zünghars and the Qing–Zünghar conflict. It then turns to an analysis of the violence of the late 1750s, assessing available evidence for the intentions and decision-making behind the policy of mass killing, and the more detailed picture of its implementation provided by memorials (reports to the court) from the field. Attention will be given to discursive issues, e.g. the language applied to the community of victims and distinctions made within it, as well as to more concrete questions of demographics, and the wider political context of eighteenth-century Inner Asia. Some discussion will be provided of the subsequent depiction of these events in Qing and Inner Asian sources, and the fate of Oirat survivors within the Qing empire down to the present day. The conclusion will explicate the significance of this case study for contemporary theoretical discussions of genocide and kindred categories.

Background: The Qing–Zünghar Rivalry The Zünghar state emerged in the seventeenth century within the evolving political structures of Western Mongolian, or Oirat, society. An identifiable collective from the thirteenth century onwards, the Oirats participated in the construction of the Mongol world empire but remained outsiders by virtue of their lack of royal Chinggisid bloodline. In the post-imperial period, one notional division of Mongolian society held there to be six Eastern Mongol tümen (units of 10,000) and four Western Mongol, or Oirat, tümen. This gave rise to the designation ‘Four Oirat’, although the precise number and identity of the leading groups among the Oirat would vary across time. In imperial Chinese history, the Oirat emerged as independent political actors during the Ming dynasty, when they engaged in raids on the imperial capital of Beijing. Never a centralised polity, one tümen of the Oirat – the Khoshud – dominated the Qinghai Plateau for much of the seventeenth century, and eventually came to occupy Lhasa early in the eighteenth. A second division migrated west into Russia where they became known as Kalmyks. As a tribal designation, the term ‘Zünghar’ first emerges among a third group of Oirat, who occupied the steppe region between the Tianshan and Altay mountain ranges in the early seventeenth century. The ethnonym survives today in the name 294

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of this territory, Jungharia, in what is now the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.5 The man credited with organising, if not founding, the Zünghar state is Galdan (r. 1678–97). Son of an aristocrat of the ruling Choros lineage of the Zünghar tribe, Galdan was trained as a monk in Lhasa, before being dispatched to Jungharia by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Having inherited the title khung-taiji, or ‘crown-prince’, he received from the Dalai Lama the title šaǰin bariqcˇi bošoqtu khan, ‘ordained khan who upholds the religion’, identifying him as the defender of the Buddhist faith. As he united the Oirat of Jungharia behind him, the designation ‘Zünghar’ came to extend across various Oirat groups living in that region, including the Dörböd and Khoid tribes (Atwood calls them ‘ethnies’ or ‘sub-polities’). In the course of expanding his domains, Galdan also brought much of the Muslim Tarim Basin (home to today’s Uyghurs) into a loose subordination and came into conflict with the Khalkha Mongols to the east. Galdan’s efforts to exercise hegemony across the Mongolian steppe drove many of these Khalkha princes into the waiting arms of the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) of the Qing. The Kangxi emperor then personally led a campaign into Mongolia, routing Galdan’s army on the outskirts of what is now Ulaanbaatar, capital of independent Mongolia. Galdan’s successor Tsewang Rabtan maintained friendly diplomatic relations with the Qing dynasty, while consolidating Zünghar influence across Muslim territories to the south and west. He and his heir, Galdan Tsering, engaged in frequent raids against their Kazakh neighbours. At its height in the 1740s, Zünghar rule in the Islamic world not only extended across what is now Xinjiang, but also took in the Tashkent region, parts of the Ferghana Valley, and cast its shadow as far south as Badakhshan and the Pamirs. In 1717, Tsewang Rabtan’s invasion of Tibet to dislodge his Khoshud rivals became the catalyst for a new round of conflict with the Qing, who took advantage of the unpopular Zünghar occupation to send troops to Lhasa, where they were received as liberators. After Tsewang Rabtan’s death in 1727, war again broke out with the Qing along the Mongolian frontier, and the Yongzheng emperor engaged in diplomatic negotiations with both Russia and the Volga Kalmyks, in the hope of isolating and finishing off the 5 Some dispute exists as to the origins of the name, but it almost certainly derives from the Mongolian word ‘left-wing’ (ǰegüng·ar), and possibly stands in relation to the Qinghai Plateau as the ‘right-wing’ of the Oirat. In scholarly works, the term is spelt variously Junghar, Jungar, Zunghar, Zünghar, etc. My spelling of Mongolian terminology here follows Christopher Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire (New York: Facts on File, 2004).

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Zünghars. These efforts ended in failure, however, and one of the Qianlong emperor’s first acts on taking the throne in 1735 was to negotiate a peace treaty with the Zünghars. An exchange of envoys led to the signing of a pact similar to that recently concluded with the Russians in Kiakhta (1727). Although it did not delineate a firm borderline, the treaty recognised the existing distribution of pasture lands along the Altay Mountains, and left the Zünghars in control of most of the Tarim Basin. During Galdan Tsering’s reign, the Zünghar population increased to an estimated 200,000 families. According to a description from the 1750s, these were divided into 2 sections. One, comprising 24 otogs (pasture-camps) administered by zaisangs, was directly subordinate to the ruling Choros lineage. The rest of the Zünghar confederation consisted of 21 appanage units (anggi), belonging to individual aristocrats.6

The Zünghar Civil War and the Qing Invasion The Qianlong emperor’s invasion and pacification of Jungharia in the 1750s has been depicted by many historians as the product of a long-held plan. The emperor himself liked to think of his achievement in these terms, as the fulfilment of a design conceived by his predecessors. In 1755, with news that his armies had arrived in the Zünghar stronghold of Ili, the emperor penned a celebratory verse, including the lines: ‘One might say this carries on the work of the two preceding reigns / It brings to mind thoughts of everlasting peace’.7 With different motives in mind, modern historians have tended to concur with this interpretation. Chinese historians, working within the ‘national unity’ paradigm, have described the incorporation of Jungharia into the Qing empire as restoring a natural, pre-existing unity (with the Zünghars therefore defined as ‘rebels’, or even ‘secessionists’). Soviet historians, by contrast, took the Zünghar side in what became a Sino-Soviet history war, and described these events as the outcome of the Qing empire’s longstanding aggressive, indeed imperialist, designs on Zünghar territory. The Qing court’s desire for frontier security, and the persistent dynamics of conflict that this gave rise to, help to explain its increasingly interventionist 6 Atwood, Encyclopedia of Mongolia and the Mongol Empire, p. 622. For further discussion of Zünghar social structure, see his ‘Titles, appanages, marriages, and officials: a comparison of political forms in the Zünghar and thirteenth-century Mongol empires’ in Imperial Statecraft: Political Forms and Techniques of Governance in Inner Asia, Sixth–Twentieth Centuries, ed. David Sneath (Bellingham, WA: Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, 2006), 207–43. 7 Gaozong, Yuzhi shiwen shiquan ji (Beijing: Zhonguo zangxue chubanshe, 1993), p. 28.

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policy towards the Zünghars in the middle of the eighteenth century. But the destruction of the Zünghars, both as a political entity and as a physical people, was not the outcome of a pre-determined policy. In his 1755 verse, the Qianlong emperor was celebrating what he believed was the conclusive incorporation of the Zünghars into the imperial fold – not their massacre, which was yet to come. It was the failure of these initial Qing policies, and the ongoing resistance that ensued, that led to this deadly outcome. It is therefore necessary to set a discussion of this cataclysm within a close analysis of the evolution of Qing policy. Although peacetime conditions permitted the flow of ‘tribute’ missions from the Zünghars to the Qing, in its rhetorical framing of steppe politics, the Qing maintained a distinction between the status of the Zünghars as ‘barbararian’ outsiders (yi) and the Khalkha, who were referred to as ‘Mongols’ (Menggu).8 It was only with the demise of Galdan Tsering in 1747 that the Qing evinced a growing interest in supervising Zünghar affairs. Instead of allowing the free passage of Zünghar ‘tea-brewing’ missions to Tibet (to pay their respects to the Dalai Lama), for example, now the Qing court offered to train Oirat lamas in Beijing. When Galdan Tsering’s heir, Tsewang Dorji Namjal, was assassinated in 1749, the succession struggle among the Choros nobility intensified, with first his brother Lamadarja, and then his cousin Dawachi, seizing the throne in quick succession. This evident instability ended the illusion of Zünghar unity, and the Qing now formalised policies for engaging with members of the Oirat aristocracy on an individual basis. As early as the Kangxi reign of the seventeenth century, defecting Oirat who sought refuge in Qing domains had been resettled in parts of Inner Mongolia. With civil war now looming, increasingly large parties made their way into Qing territory. Most notable among these was the 1753 exodus of the Dörböd ethnie (and affiliated groups), who were eventually resettled in Western Mongolia, modern-day Uws Province, where they still reside today. By the middle of 1754, discussion at the Qing court had shifted to the possibility of military intervention into Jungharia. Basing themselves on the traditional conception of the ‘Four Oirat’ tümen (a not entirely accurate description of the actual political situation in Jungharia), the Qing envisaged subsuming the Zünghars into four newly established khanates, along the lines of the administration of Outer Mongolia. Along with the ruling Choros 8 See Matthew W. Mosca, ‘Neither Chinese nor outsiders: yi and non-yi in the Qing imperial worldview’, Asia Major 33:1 (2020), 103–46.

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lineage of the Zünghars, khans would be appointed from among the Dörböd, Khoid and Khoshud tribes, respectively. This policy bore fruit almost immediately, enticing the defection of Amursana of the Khoid, a close ally of the reigning Zünghar khan Dawachi, in September 1754. His Khoid (and Kirghiz) following was relocated to Manchuria, while Amursana himself remained in Beijing to participate in Qing planning for a campaign into Jungharia. In February 1755, Amursana was made deputy to the Qing commander-in-chief Bandi, and the two men were assigned one wing of an army 50,000 strong, which would assail the fragile Zünghar state from two directions. The 1755 invasion of Jungharia was the first of a total of four military expeditions that would be dispatched from 1755 to 1759. For my purposes, the most important of these were the final two, but the events of the early campaigns should be briefly reviewed. The first campaign saw few serious engagements. The Zünghar khan Dawachi fled and was taken prisoner by Muslims in the Tarim Basin. Steps were then taken to implement the Qing’s ‘four khanate’ vision of Oirat society. In the course of 1755, the policy was modified, with the establishment of ‘leagues’ (cˇig·ulg·an) that were to appoint the khans (and act as something of a check on their authority). Rounding out the administrative structure, a chief lama was appointed to the Oirat Buddhist clergy in Ili. The Qianlong emperor issued his ‘victory proclamation’ that November, and a large contingent of Oirat aristocrats was invited to the capital to receive Qing titles. With Jungharia seemingly pacified, the bulk of Qing troops were withdrawn.9 Yet the Qianlong emperor’s eagerness to declare ‘mission accomplished’ would prove premature. Having put forward his own proposals for a more unified Oirat polity, the Khoid Amursana now conspired with Mongols in the Qing army to rebel and declare himself khan of all the Oirat. The plot was discovered and Amursana recalled to Beijing, but he escaped along the way to launch his rebellion. Meanwhile, disaffected Khalkha Mongols rose up across Western Mongolia, in a series of events known as the rebellion of Chinggünjab.10 Drawing on the support of some Oirat aristocrats and lamas, Amursana annihilated the small Qing garrison in Ili. Yet, whether out of lingering loyalty to the deposed khan Dawachi, or else new loyalty to the Qing, other Oirat aristocrats distanced themselves from Amursana’s actions. When the Qianlong emperor 9 For a discussion of the shifts in Qing policy, see Keith Scott, ‘The evolution of the forward policy in Central Asia under Ch’ien-Lung’ in Papers of the XIX International Congress of Chinese Studies (Ostasien-Institut der Ruhr-Universität Bochum, 1968), 88–94. 10 Charles R. Bawden, ‘The Mongol rebellion of 1756–1757’, Journal of Asian History 2 (1968), 1–31.

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Figure 12.1 ‘Receiving surrender from the Eli’ (Pingding Yili shouxiang), depicting the Qing occupation of Ili in 1755. Copperplate print from a drawing by Ignatius Sichelbarth (Ai Qimeng). (Cleveland Museum of Art)

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mobilised a second invasion force to quell the rebellion, he was able to draw on these Oirat for support. Amursana was eventually driven to seek refuge in Russian territory, while his anti-Qing associates were put down. The turn of events occasioned a new policy towards the remaining loyal Oirat. Ditching the plan for a fourfold division according to tümen, officials outlined a more finegrained approach, basing itself on the smaller social units of otog and anggi. This too would soon be rendered obsolete by the course of events. By now, the Jungharian steppe had been the scene of two military campaigns in quick succession, all of which was taking its toll on the nomadic Oirat population. Qing officials had levied human and animal resources to support their two invasions, and did so again to maintain the network of postal stations that now extended as far as Ili. Raiding between different Oirat groups exacerbated the social crisis. By late 1756, disaffection was growing among the Oirat aristocrats who had recently submitted, and a new revolt broke out. Although previously considered an extension of Amursana’s uprising, scholars such as Onuma Takahiro have clarified that this Oirat uprising was a distinct event, one not motivated by ties to Amursana.11 In confessions extracted in the wake of the revolt, those who led it claimed they had been driven to rebel by the dire state of Oirat society. Their people were starving, one said, but Qing officers were taking no measures to ease their suffering, and they had no way to inform the emperor directly of their plight. They also cited the brutal military discipline meted out to some of their fellow Oirat during the pursuit of Amursana into the Kazakh Steppe. In these confessions, they said their intention had been to reconstitute a Zünghar state under the Qing-appointed Choros khan Galsang Dorji, a member of the anti-Amursana faction.12 For the Qing court, this new rebellion – the second since the initial invasion of Jungharia in 1755 – was the last straw. A more substantial military intervention and occupation of Jungharia would be required. In the spring of 1757 a new, third expedition, involving some 60,000 troops, was dispatched. It was this third expedition that would inflict the most massive destruction on Oirat society. Employing the rhetoric of righteous outrage, the Qianlong emperor determined that all Oirat deemed unreliable were to be killed, for spurning his imperial grace. Talk of ruling the Oirat through established figures of authority was set aside: ‘we must not retain the old names of the otogs as before’, the emperor decreed, ‘or 11 Onuma Takahiro, Shin to chu¯¯o Ajia so¯gen: yu¯bokumin no sekai kara teikoku no henkyo¯ e (To¯kyo¯ daigaku shuppankai, 2014), pp. 106–8. 12 Wu Amuguleng, ‘Zhunga’er fuwang shiqi ruogan shishi kaozheng’ (MA dissertation, Minzu University of China, 2015), 19–26.

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appoint people as zaisang, šülengge etc.’.13 Instead, Qing officials made temporary appointments of low-ranking ‘supervisors-in-chief’ (zongguan), pending a future decision on frontier governance structures. Many of the remaining Oirat who had not yet submitted fled into the steppe or the mountainous regions surrounding Ili, where they were pursued by punitive expeditions. By this time, instability in Jungharia had also disrupted Qing plans to rule the Tarim Basin through local Muslim intermediaries, necessitating a campaign in that direction too. To complete the pacification of Jungharia and consolidate Qing rule in the Tarim Basin, therefore, a fourth campaign was mobilised in 1758–9.

The Massacre of the Mahachin The third and fourth Qing campaigns, during which an explicit policy of mass killing was articulated and implemented, were not the only cause of loss of life in this period. As is evident from testimonies taken in the wake of the Oirat rebellion, famine was already claiming many lives. We still lack anything that could be described as a political economy of pre-Qing Jungharia (and the paucity of sources may prevent such a thing), but it is telling that interviews with Zünghar defectors from the period preceding the Qing invasion often describe a shortage of livestock in Jungharia, hinting that a drawn-out economic crisis may have precipitated the civil war of the 1750s.14 A smallpox epidemic that struck Mongolia in 1756–7 also claimed its victims: the escapee Amursana was among them, dying of the disease in the Siberian town of Tobolsk in 1757.15 Furthermore, as Benjamin Levey has highlighted, Kazakhs to the west also had an important role to play in the anti-Oirat violence, killing and enslaving many in revenge for the previous history of Oirat raiding.16 Finally, some Oirat also fell victim to the sedentary 13 Qingshilu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), X V, p. 809 (QL22/5/bingwu [1 July 1757]). The šülengge was a minor functionary responsible for tax collection. 14 See, for example, the accounts given in Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan and Zhongguo bianjiang shidi yanjiu zhongxin, eds., Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang’an huibian (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2012), V I I I, pp. 59–64, 64–8, 75–8, 78–82, which date to the period 1748–9. These state that most Oirat were dependent on agriculture for their livelihood, and that a series of poor winters had reduced the amount of pasturage available in Jungharia. 15 On Amursana’s flight, as reflected in imperial Russian sources, see I. Ia. Zlatkin, ‘Russkie arkhivnye materialy ob Amursane’ in Filologiia i istoriia mongol’skikh narodov: pamiati akademika Borisa Iakovlevicha Vladimirtsova, ed. G. D. Sanzheev (Moscow: Vostochnaia literature, 1958), 289–313. 16 Benjamin Samuel Levey, ‘Jungar refugees and the making of empire on Qing China’s Kazakh frontier, 1759–1773’ (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2013), 37–44.

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Muslim population of the Tarim Basin, where local Sufi shaykhs took advantage of the chaos to make a bid for political independence. A Muslim source from Kashgar, the Taẕ kira-i Azizan, describes the massacre in mid-1755 of a party of 300 Oirat belonging to the Sharas otog, who had come to Kashgar on a trading mission.17 These various economic, environmental and political factors all interacted to heighten the crisis experienced by Zünghar society at this time. But to explore the question of genocide, my focus here will remain on the deliberate killing that took place in the course of the suppression of the Oirat uprisings and the Qing occupation of Jungharia. It had long been standard practice among Qing officialdom to refer to political enemies by the belittling designation of ‘bandit’ (Chinese zei; Manchu hu¯lha). Onuma Takahiro observes that it was only on the third Qing campaign that the term came into common use in reference to the Zünghars.18 Alongside this, a new and more specific term emerged for the Oirat ‘bandits’ at the same time: the word mahachin (Chinese mahaqin; Manchu mahacin). An Oirat term deriving from the word for ‘meat’, mahachin has been interpreted in two different ways. One reading is that it signifies ‘carnivore’, and by extension ‘cannibal’ (‘ogre’ is one translation in a religious text).19 A second is that it means ‘butcher’, and therefore ‘murderer’.20 Alongside these connotations of violence and cannibalism – which was almost certainly practised – in its wartime context the term specifically referred to those Oirat who had lost their traditional otog affiliations and been cast adrift in small bands. Writing sometime after the events of the 1750s, the exiled Qing literatus Ji Xiaolan offered the following definition: ‘The mahachin are Oirat refugees, without chieftain or tribe, who form groups of a few tens, or just a few individuals, and roam through the mountains. When they have fowl to hand they eat fowl, when they run into livestock they eat livestock, and when they come across people they eat people.’21 According to a detailed study by Wu Amuguleng, the term ‘mahachin’ occurs in Qing reports from Jungharia as early as July 1756, in instructions to 17 Muhammad Sadiq Kashghari, In Remembrance of the Saints: The Rise and Fall of an Inner ˙ ˙ Sufi Dynasty, Asian trans. David Brophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), p. 121. 18 Onuma, Shin to chu¯¯o Ajia so¯gen, p. 114. 19 Levey, ‘Jungar refugees’, 31; John R. Krueger, Materials for an Oirat–Mongolian to English Citation Dictionary (Bloomington, IN: The Mongolia Society, 1978), p. 589. 20 Paul Pelliot, Notes critiques d’histoire kalmouke (Paris: Librairie d’Amérique et d’Orient, 1960), p. 87, n. 243. 21 Ji Yun, Yuewei caotang biji (Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998), p. 194. Elsewhere in his writings, Ji defines mahachin as an Oirat term for ‘bandit’: ibid., p. 97. See also Wang Qiming, ‘Qing Qianlong nianjian xiyu de “Mahaqin”’, Xiyu yanjiu 3 (2012), 33–5.

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‘exterminate the mahachin to keep the waystations running’.22 Similar wording occurs in a decree from November of that year, in the wake of the uprising of the Oirat aristocrats.23 The articulation of a deliberate policy of extermination towards the mahachin can be found in imperial decrees from throughout 1757, often linked to the perceived threat of attacks on Qing communications. In October 1757, for example, the emperor reiterated that ‘We must thoroughly exterminate the runaway mahachin so as to keep the highways open.’24 But the punitive expeditions went well beyond the defence of the newly established waystations, often involving the pursuit of mahachin deep into the mountains where they were hiding out, relying on captives as guides. At the height of the violence, surrendering to Qing troops was in and of itself not enough to avoid execution. According to a memorial submitted in June 1757, officials were instructed to transport Oirat who had submitted to military camps in Barköl and Suzhou, where they were to ‘massacre those who are slated for massacre; divide up the remaining women and children and bestow them as slaves upon the military and civil officials as appropriate’.25 In the emperor’s eyes, voluntary submission was insufficient evidence of sincerity, and there was no guarantee that such Oirat would not rebel again in the future. As he outlined in September 1757: There are now many Oirat who have been captured by the two wings of the army. While outwardly they have submitted, they have primarily done so out of fear, and cannot be entirely trusted. If we turn a blind eye to this, future incidents will be unavoidable. Inform my generals and high officials that they should scrutinise their demeanour closely: those who arouse no suspicions can be sent to Erin Qabirgha [in the Ili region – DB] and assigned pasturage, so as to supply the garrison in coming years. Anyone about whom there is the slightest doubt should be sent to Barköl, and then onward to Suzhou for execution. I originally had no intention of handling affairs in this way, but their unpredictable inclination to rebellion leaves me no choice but to root out this evil once and for all.26

22 23 24 25 26

Wu, ‘Zhunga’er fuwang shiqi ruogan shishi kaozheng’, 41. Qingshilu, XV, p. 594 (QL21/run9/jiwei [16 November 1756]). Qingshilu, XV, p. 594 (QL21/run9/jiwei [8 October 1757]). Levey, ‘Jungar refugees’, 32. Qingshilu, XV, p. 922 (QL22/8/guiyou [26 September 1757]).

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Similar instructions were issued again in early 1758: ‘calm them by telling them you are sending them to Suzhou, then kill all the men, and give all the women and children to the military and civil officials’.27 There are, unfortunately, no surviving sources from the Oirat perspective that describe these atrocities in any detail. Manchu memorials from the field, which constitute the primary source for this campaign, are replete with accounts of the killing of small groups of not only men, but also women and children, as well as interrogations under torture that often resulted in death. Beyond this archive, which is still yet to be fully explored, we can be confident that there were other practices that were left out of official reports to the Qing court. Refugees into Russia, for example, told officials there that Qing soldiers had on occasion acquired horses from Kazakhs in exchange for Oirat captives.28 The Qing officials chiefly responsible for implementing these policies were the commanding officers of the third and fourth Qing invasions. Some of these were high-ranking Manchu bannermen such as Jaohu¯i (Zhao-hui) and Šuhede (Shu-he-de). The command structure also included Mongols such as the brothers Chinggünjab and Šebdenjab.29 During the campaign, the Qianlong emperor occasionally recalled his officials for consultations. In early 1760, for example, he summoned Šuhede to the capital, where he admonished him to be diligent in hunting down the mahachin.30 The main fighting force of the Qing army in Xinjiang was made up of Manchu members of the Eight Banners. Alongside these were Khalkha Mongols, Solon from Manchuria, and Chahar Mongols from Inner Mongolia, as well as Chinese troops who belonged to the Green Standard Army. One Russian source claims that, on the third invasion of Jungharia in 1757, the Mongolian contingents were held back, suggesting that they were considered less reliable than Manchus or Chinese in an anti-Oirat expedition.31 However, I have not encountered any evidence in Qing sources that ethnicity was a factor in deciding which troops to commit to the field. Not surprisingly, the effect of the terror on Oirat runaways was to deter people from voluntarily submitting. ‘We all deliberated’, one Oirat told his 27 Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang’an, X X V I, p. 45. 28 B. P. Gurevich, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v Tsentral’noi Azii v XVII-pervoi polovine XIX v. (Moscow: Nauka, 1983), p. 119. 29 For biographies of Jaohu¯i and Šuhede, see Arthur W. Hummel, ed. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1912) (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1943), I, pp. 72–5; I I, pp. 659–61. 30 Qingshilu, X V, p. 922 (QL22/8/guiyou [23 February 1760]). 31 Gurevich, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, p. 116.

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captors early in 1758, ‘and decided that if we submitted, instead of sparing us they would kill us all, so instead of being killed for nothing, it would be better to defend our hideout and die fighting.’32 Some mahachin retained working muskets, and were able to conduct raids on waystations to obtain food and supplies. According to one anecdote recorded by the scholar Ji Xiaolan (possibly apocryphal), the mahachin employed an ingenious technique to manufacture gunpowder out of the dried shells of dung beetles mixed with deer’s blood.33 Occasionally, these mahachin were able to strike significant blows against the Qing forces hunting them down. In 1759, for example, the Qing official De-shu was killed by a party of more than 100 Oirat in the Tianshan Mountains between Aqsu and Sayram, an act that enraged the emperor. While officials preferred to wait until the following spring to track down De-shu’s killers, the emperor insisted that they be caught immediately. Still, the mahachin were by definition small and atomised bands, and incapable of staving off punitive expeditions for long. Following the flight of Amursana and the aristocratic rebellion, organised resistance among the Zünghars on any large scale was minimal. One instance of note was the ‘rebellion’ of two otogs, the Sharas and Makhus, who had settled in the Tarim Basin and briefly allied with local Muslims. Sheltered from the initial impact of the invasion of Jungharia, these otogs had retained their structure intact, and carried out raids on Qing postal stations to the south of the Tianshan before they were exterminated. In the early twentieth century, the Mongolist Gustav Ramstedt recorded local traditions among the Xinjiang Mongols surrounding the disappearance of these two groups, according to which the ‘Sharas–Makhas’ had settled among a friendly, far-off people and lost contact with their brethren in Jungharia.34 As already mentioned, many Oirat also fell victim to Kazakh raids, and some were also enslaved by the Muslims in the Tarim Basin. For many, Russia presented the most attractive escape route, but even there conditions were difficult. As early as 1755, parties of Oirat zaisangs petitioned the tsar for refuge. Zlatkin estimates that, in the end, a total of around 40–50,000 Oirat fled into Russian territory, most of them entering via the Cossack forts of Semipalatinsk and Ust-Kamenogorsk. Initially, provision was made to feed 32 Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang’an, X X V I I, p. 273, cited in Wu, ‘Zhunga’er fuwang shiqi ruogan shishi kaozheng’, p. 48. 33 Ji, Yuewei caotang biji, p. 538. 34 See Gustav John Ramstedt, Seven Journeys Eastward 1898–1912, trans. John R. Krueger (Bloomington, IN: The Mongolia Society, 1978), p. 182.

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and accommodate the refugees, but in 1758 Vice-Governor Karl von Frauendorf in Irkutsk instructed forts along the Siberian line that Oirat refugees should not be admitted unless they were willing to convert to Christianity.35 Soviet historians paint a mostly positive picture of Russian relief efforts, but the fact is that many Oirat refugees ended up enslaved, either directly at the hands of Russians, or brought by Kazakhs for sale in Siberia’s slave bazaars. There were also instances of Russian collaboration with the Qing punitive expeditions. In 1761, for example, a party of fleeing mahachin implicated in the death of the Qing official De-shu (described above) arrived at a Russian guard post in the Altay. There they were detained, and, at Beijing’s request, returned to Qing officials, with the accused ringleader sent to Beijing for execution.36

The Aftermath Benjamin Levey’s review of Qing historiography of Qianlong’s campaigns shows how, in his words, these authors ‘wrote the Jungars out of history’. In his account of the Qing massacre, the Manchu author Qi-shi-yi writes that the victims ‘exceeded one million people . . . the soldiers went out in every direction and searched for and killed [those who escaped or fled]’. Elsewhere Qi-shi-yi describes Jungharia as entirely depopulated: ‘The Zünghar people were completely wiped out. The [steppe] was empty for one-thousand li, and there was no sign of human habitation.’ Zhao-lian, in his Miscellaneous Notes from the Xiao Pavilion (Xiaoting zalu, 1815), expressed the same view – that the Oirat had been entirely wiped out – differing with Wei Yuan’s more widely cited estimate: ‘Thirty percent died of illness, twenty percent fled to the Russians and Kazakhs, and fifty percent were killed by our troops.’37 Inner Asian sources paint a similar picture. Writing c. 1800, for example, the Tibetan author Thuken Losang Chökyi Nyima depicted the once-flourishing Oirat territories as now ‘barren like fields in autumn’.38 35 S. S. Shashkov, Istoricheskie etiudy (Saint Petersburg: Tip. A. Morigerovskago, 1872), p. 132. For the fate of some elite refugees, see L. Chetyrova, ‘Russian policy towards Kalmyks and Jungars during the decline of the Jungar khanate’, Senri Ethnological Studies 86 (2014), 81–7. 36 Lo-shu Fu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations, 1644–1820 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1966), pp. 228, 230. 37 For these citations, see Levey, ‘Jungar refugees’, 8–9. 38 Thuken Losang Chökyi Nyima, The Crystal Mirror of Philosophical Systems: A Tibetan Study of Asian Religious Thought, trans. Geshé Lhundub Sopa (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009), p. 377.

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The destruction of the Oirat was indeed massive in scale, but there were survivors. As the massacre policy was moderated in 1759, officials directed those Oirat who were considered trustworthy to pasture lands surrounding Ili. As increasing numbers of refugees made their way in from Kazakh and Kirghiz captivity, officials faced requests to return them to their enslavers. In December 1760, the emperor decreed that these Oirat were now to be considered his imperial subjects and therefore not to be returned: ‘They have all become the slaves of the lord (ejen i albatu).’39 Thus, in a sharp aboutface, the Qing now shifted rhetorically to position themselves as protectors of the Zünghars against hostile neighbours such as the Kazakhs. Eventually, the more lenient policy was extended to the remaining mahachin themselves: ‘Now that winter has arrived and the snow has set in, the mahachin will have no refuge and will have to flee in all directions. Naturally we should send frequent patrols to track them down, but we need not go to extremes’, the emperor explained to his officials in January 1761. ‘We should offer a wide amnesty so they come and submit, and we can spare the effort of sending soldiers to catch them . . . If the mahachin now repent and turn themselves in, they should be received. But if they remain in their lairs, they should be executed without mercy.’40 Anyone who displayed signs of recalcitrance was still to be killed, therefore, but those who came in of their own accord were to be sent to Ili, where the resettled Oirat were provided with stipends and livestock. To advertise this change in policy, wooden signs in Mongolian were erected throughout Jungharia. To administer the growing population of poverty-stricken Oirat refugees in Ili, Qing General Agui drew on elements of the Qing banner system and enrolled them in newly established military companies (niru). At first, two such Oirat companies were set up, but they were increased throughout the 1760s, until by 1770 there were sixteen such companies in existence. A standard company consisted of 100 men of fighting age, but the size of the Ili companies tended to exceed this, ranging between 100 and 200 individuals (along with any family members). During the 1760s, these companies were combined into a banner with two wings (termed anggi, in a nod to the now defunct Zünghar appanage system), which came to form part of the ‘resident’ Eight Banners of Ili, the mainstay of the Qing garrison in Xinjiang. Showing the extent to which the Qing court had dispensed with the idea of ruling through the Zünghar elite, some of the company captains 39 Onuma, Shin to chu¯¯o Ajia so¯gen, p. 126. 40 Qingshilu, X V I, p. 1046 (QL25/12/bingshen [31 January 1761]).

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were selected from among Oirat who had submitted in earlier Qing campaigns, and were residing as far away as Inner Mongolia or Beijing.41 This company structure allows us to estimate the surviving Oirat population at approximately 2–3,000 men of fighting age, though it is worth noting that some Oirat were also enrolled in Chahar companies. Because of the preponderance of men among the refugees, the Qing tried to ransom Oirat slaves back from Muslims in the Tarim Basin, and from Chinese troops in the Green Standard Army. They were particularly anxious to obtain more Oirat women of marriageable age, to make up for an evident shortfall in the surviving refugee population. When these sources proved insufficient, more were recruited from a marriage draft among the Chahars of Inner Mongolia. Oirats continued to find their way back to Xinjiang from slavery among the Kazakhs until the early nineteenth century. In the 1770s, the ethnically Oirat population of Xinjiang was greatly increased by the flight into Qing territory of Torghud and Khoshud Mongols from the Volga region (where they were known as Kalmyks). Nowadays, the majority of the Mongols of Xinjiang descend from these Kalmyk returnees, and not from the original Zünghar population. With the old political structure of the Zünghars completely abolished, the term ‘Zünghar’ itself fell out of use in Qing Xinjiang, retaining only historic and geographic connotations. In place of the ethnonym ‘Oirat’, the Qing referred to these people as ‘Ööld’ (Chinese: Elute), a tribal name of one section of the Oirat that now came to refer to the whole community. Under this name, today’s descendants of the Zünghar survivors account for around 20 per cent of Xinjiang’s approximately 140,000 Mongols.

Conclusion In a short space of time, Qing thinking towards Jungharia shifted from a hands-off effort to ‘use barbarians to rule barbarians’ to a determination to do away with the Zünghars as a political entity. Arguably, the preceding period of disunity among the Zünghars laid the foundations for this outcome, fostering deep rivalries that hindered the formation of new, and stable, conduits of indirect rule from Beijing. Concluding his survey of Qing policy, Keith Scott writes that the Qing empire tried as far as possible to use the Junghars themselves to carry through the campaign that resulted in the annexation of their territory. In practice, 41 Onuma, Shin to chu¯¯o Ajia so¯gen, pp. 127–8.

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however, this policy nearly proved disastrous, since it was directly responsible for Amursana’s attempted seizure of power. What was intended as a brief, conclusive campaign thus lasted over four years; not only was it accomplished at a heavy cost in fighting manpower and military expenditure, but the original benevolent aims were gradually lost as increasingly ruthless tactics had to be employed to suppress the hydra-headed resistance encountered.42

We now know that it was not just Amursana’s well-known rebellion, but a second flare-up of resistance in its wake, that strengthened the Qianlong emperor’s resolve to physically annihilate his perceived enemies. As Perdue puts it, ‘The emperor’s edicts from this period expose the tension within the mid-Qing between the ideal of benevolence and the reality of repression.’43 Imperial security was the primary motivation for the invasion and occupation of Jungharia. Since ancient times, dynasties ruling China had considered the steppe the most likely source of a military challenge. (Even in the nineteenth century, retaining control of Xinjiang continued to outweigh coastal defence as a strategic priority.) Although the now vacant lands of Jungharia came to be occupied by new garrisons and settlers from the interior, colonisation was not among the court’s initial objectives. Acknowledging the limitations of a perspective that relies primarily on official sources, it is hard to discern any high degree of racial or religious prejudice preceding this descent into violence. The Zünghars were familiar neighbours to the Qing, particularly to the Inner Asian elite who directed the Qianlong emperor’s campaign. If anything, it was cultural proximity, not cultural distance, that heightened this rivalry. Both sides were competing for the role of patron of the prestigious Yellow Hat sect of Tibetan Buddhism, and both, from time to time, would accuse the other of violating their duties to defend the church. As a political entity, the original Zünghar confederation was already in a state of disintegration by the time the Qing armies arrived, and the largescale defections make it difficult to estimate their remaining population by the late 1750s. We must also take into account the still poorly studied, but clearly influential, environmental and economic factors that were eroding the foundations of life in the Jungharian steppe. Given that social structures and military structures tended to coincide in nomadic societies, the mass killing in Jungharia originated as a form of collective punishment for the 42 Scott, ‘The evolution of the forward policy’, 94. 43 Perdue, China Marches West, p. 286.

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political stance taken by individual aristocrats. As these existing Zünghar structures (i.e., otog and anggi divisions) broke down, the new social category of mahachin became the focus of the punitive expeditions. As we have seen, a set of putative political criteria were applied to the victims of the massacre policy, even if these were set aside in practice. Efforts were often, if not always, made to filter out women and children, who were more likely to be enslaved than killed. Still, taking into account the multi-dimensional nature of the social crisis, it seems plausible that the Qing invasion was, directly or indirectly, responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives. Given that many definitions of genocide highlight not the complete physical destruction of a people, but the eradication of any basis for a group to maintain its sense of communal identity and cultural traditions, there seems to be no obstacle to describing these events as a case of genocide. For the few survivors, the ideological climate of the Qing left almost no scope to keep alive a memory of these events, be it in oral or written form, and the same can be said for those Oirat dispersed elsewhere across Eurasia. In the People’s Republic of China today, the imperatives of national unity continue to constrain any consideration of the victim’s perspective on the downfall of the Zünghars. In the sensitive political climate of Xinjiang, the narrative of this period remains a triumphalist one of national unification. All but eradicated as a people, the voice of the Zünghars has likewise been lost to history.

Bibliographic Note No surviving texts describe the Zünghar genocide from the Oirat perspective. The closest thing we have to this are brief testimonies provided by Zünghar refugees who were interviewed upon arrival in Qing and Russian territory. The Qingshilu (Veritable Records of the Qing Dynasty) and the Qing imperial archive (at the First Historical Archive in Beijing, and National Palace Museum in Taibei) serve as the chief primary sources for these events. In the wake of the conquest, a selection of field memorials and imperial edicts were edited and published in Fu-heng (comp.), Pingding Zhunga’er fanglüe (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 1983). Copies of the original memorials (lufu zouzhe), containing many details not reflected in the official campaign history, have since been published as Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’anguan and Zhongguo bianjiang shidi yanjiu zhongxin, eds., Qingdai Xinjiang Manwen dang’an. Hardly any of these documents, be they in Manchu or in Chinese, have been translated into English, although Lo-shu, A Documentary Chronicle of Sino-Western Relations, 1644–1820, contains a handful of relevant 310

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items. Russian archival documents relating to the Qing invasion can be found in a variety of archives, including the Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts (RGADA), and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire (AVPRI). Some items can be found in publications such as B. P. Gurevich and G. F. Kim, eds., Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v Tsentral’noi Azii XVII-XVIII vv. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), and V. A. Moiseev, ed., RusskoDzhungarskie otnosheniia (konets XVII – 60-e gg. XVIII vv.): dokumenty i izvlicheniia (Barnaul: Azbuka, 2006). Important secondary works on political and military history include those cited by Zlatkin in Istoriia Dzhungarskogo khanstva (1635–1758), and ‘Russkie arkhivnye materialy ob Amursane’; Gurevich, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia v Tsentral’noi Azii v XVII-pervoi polovine XIX v.; Perdue, China Marches West; and Takahiro, Shin to chu¯o¯ Ajia so¯gen. On the specific details of the mass killing of Zünghars from 1756 onwards, Wu Amuguleng’s MA dissertation, ‘Zhunga’er fuwang shiqi ruogan shishi kaozheng’, and Levey’s PhD thesis, ‘Jungar refugees and the making of empire on Qing China’s Kazakh frontier, 1759’, both unpublished, serve as valuable reference points.

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A Vicious Civil War in the French Revolution ‘The Vendée’, 1793–1795 peter mcphee

In March 1793, the French Republic was not yet six months old. War which had broken out with Austria and Prussia in 1792 had resulted in a series of defeats for French armies, deepening the suspicion of Louis XVI’s loyalties. This was a key reason for the overthrow of the monarch on 10 August. But the execution of Louis XVI for treason on 21 January 1793 only expanded the theatres of war. Within ten days, France was at war with England and the Netherlands; then, on 7 March, war was declared on Spain. The National Convention responded to this desperate military situation on 24 February by imposing a levy of 300,000 conscripts to be chosen by ballot. In most regions, the ballot was seen as a necessary sacrifice. In the western region south of the Loire, however, it triggered massive armed rebellion and civil war, known, like the administrative department at its heart, as ‘the Vendée’ (see Map 13.1). The region erupted on 11 March, the day before the ballot.1 As news reached the Convention of the scale of the insurrection in the west, it passed a sweeping law on 19 March decreeing rebels who took up arms to be ‘hors la loi’ (outlaws). The ‘stab in the back’ from the west as foreign armies invaded the northeast and southwest of the new republic provoked rage in Paris and elsewhere. From Paris alone, while more than 80,000 volunteers and conscripts left for the northeastern front, another 30,000 had to be despatched to the Vendée.2 They were in no mood to placate the insurgents, and the repression they unleashed has been seen as integral to ‘the terror’ of 1793–4. The insurrection resulted in terrible loss of life before it was finally crushed in 1794 and, after an abortive insurrection with British support, again in 1795. 1 For the general context of the Revolution at this point, see P. McPhee, Liberty or Death: The French Revolution (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), ch. 9. 2 R. M. Andrews, ‘Paris of the Great Revolution: 1789–1796’ in People and Communities in the Western World, vol. I I, ed. G. Brucker (Homewood, IL: Dorsey Press, 1979), 56–112.

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Map 13.1 The ‘Vendée militaire’. (Cartography by Gavin Leys, University of Melbourne)

Estimates have ranged from unsubstantiated claims of 500,000 rebel deaths to more accepted recent estimates of up to 170,000 insurgents and local noncombatants, and 30,000 republican troops. The destruction of life and property during the repression of the insurrection left permanent scars on society and politics in the west. For republicans, it was a fratricidal betrayal at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis; for the rebels, it was seen as a slaughter of those faithful to throne and altar.3 The level of violence was extreme. Jean-Claude Bénaben, a government commissioner in the region, reported on a massacre of civilians that took place at Le Mans after the town was retaken by republican forces in December 1793: I was witness to all the horror a town taken by storm can present. Soldiers spread out into the houses and having taken the wives and girls of the 3 An accessible overview of the course of the insurrection is C. Tilly, The Vendée (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), ch. 13; more detailed is J.-C. Martin and F. Lebrun, La Guerre de Vendée, 1793–1800 (Paris: Points, 2014).

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brigands who had not had time to flee, took them into the squares or the streets where they were crowded together and butchered on the spot; shot, bayoneted or slashed with swords.. . . The entire road to Le Mans, up to five or six leagues from Laval, was covered with the bodies of the brigands . . . Four or five leagues from Le Mans I saw on the side of the road about one hundred bodies, completely naked, piled one on top of the other, more or less like pigs ready to be salted.4

Violent opposition to the Revolution in the Vendée could not have been predicted in 1789. The cahiers de doléances – ‘lists of grievances’ compiled by all parishes in March–April 1789 as part of the process of preparing for the Estates-General to advise Louis XVI – showed that rural communities in the west shared many of the grievances of those elsewhere. But there were two main differences. First, they were less likely to criticise the Church. Most of the rural population lived on scattered farms and in hamlets outside the central village or bourg, but it was there on Sundays that the rural community – indeed a communion of souls – gathered to worship and decide local matters, under the tutelage of the parish clergy, typically esteemed local men.5 Second, the opinion-makers around the clergy tended to be substantial renters of land on long-term tenancies, often frustrated by their subordination to the urban bourgeois who acted as the middlemen between farmers and the religious orders and nobles who owned much of the land. The direct causes of the insurrection must be sought in the particular changes and disappointments occasioned by the Revolution. The Revolution brought the peasants of the Vendée no obvious benefits. Heavier state taxes were collected more rigorously by local ‘patriot’ bourgeois, who also monopolised new offices and municipal councils. In the west, where priests and their vestries had governed their communities, the local government law also created a puzzling separation of municipality and vestry, and excluded many men and all women used to discussing parish matters after mass. It was local bourgeois who bought up church property when it was nationalised and sold off at auction in 1791. In the district of Cholet, for example, nobles bought 23.5 per cent of such land, and peasants only 9.3 per cent, but bourgeois acquired 56.3 per cent.6 Local bourgeois were the direct and resented beneficiaries of revolutionary change. 4 C. Petitfrère, La Vendée et les Vendéens (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), pp. 58–60, translated in P. Dwyer and P. McPhee, eds., The French Revolution and Napoleon: A Sourcebook (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 100. 5 Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 150–6; T. Tackett, ‘The west in France in 1789: the religious factor in the origins of the counterrevolution’, Journal of Modern History 54 (1982), 715–45. 6 C. Petitfrère, ‘The origins of the civil war in the Vendée’, French History 2 (1988), 201.

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Successive revolutionary Assemblies failed to reform the distinctive longterm tenancies of the west, accentuating frustration at the Assembly’s protection of property-owners. For example, on 1 December 1790, it decreed that the value of the abolished tithe formerly paid to the church could now be added to rents by landowners.7 The National Assembly had alienated the crucial group of substantial tenant-farmers, the core of the rural community. The feudal regime was comparatively light in the region, and tenant-farmers were in any case exempt from most seigneurial exactions. The abolition of feudalism, which wedded the mass of landowning peasants to the Revolution in most regions of France, was simply not so important here.8 It was, above all, the Revolution’s secular reforms to the Church that antagonised the devout of the west. This was a region characterised by strong clerical recruitment of boys from local families, well integrated into their communities and well remunerated. The overall decline in clerical recruitment in France in the decades before 1789 was particularly marked: more than 40 per cent in, for example, Paris, Provence and the regions south of Paris (Nivernais, Berry, Bourbonnais, Burgundy). In contrast, in parts of the west where the Vendéen revolt erupted (the provinces of Maine, Anjou, Lower Poitou), overall recruitment had actually increased by almost half, especially from rural areas.9 The theology to which the faithful were exposed was marked by a ‘Tridentine’ mistrust of worldly pleasures, by emphasis on priestly authority, and by a powerful imagery of the punishments awaiting the lax when they passed beyond the grave. Yves-Michel Marchais, the curé of a devout western parish, preached that ‘everything that might be called an act of impurity or an illicit action of the flesh, when done of one’s own free will, is intrinsically evil and almost always a mortal sin, and consequently grounds for exclusion from the Kingdom of God’.10 People across France assumed that, like the monarchy before it, the revolutionary government had the right to reform the Church’s temporal organisation, detailed in the Civil Constitution of the Clergy voted on 7 S. Aberdam, ‘La Révolution et la lutte des métayers’, Études rurales 59 (1975), 73–91; D. M. G. Sutherland, ‘Peasants, lords, and leviathan: winners and losers from the abolition of French feudalism, 1780–1820’, Journal of Economic History 62 (2002), 1–24. 8 Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 177–86. 9 T. Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton University Press, 1986), ch. 11. 10 R. Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism 1789–1914 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 24, 27. See too F. Lebrun, ed., Parole de Dieu et Révolution. Les sermons d’un curé angevin avant et pendant la guerre de Vendée (Paris: Éditions Imago, 1988).

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12 July 1790. There was no question of separating church and state: the public functions of the Church were assumed to be integral to daily life. The Assembly accepted that public revenues would financially support the Church after the abolition of the tithe. Most priests were materially advantaged by the new salary scale, and only the upper clergy would have regretted that bishops’ stipends were dramatically reduced. However, the Assembly reallocated diocesan and parish boundaries, eliciting a chorus of complaints from the faithful in small rural communities and urban parishes now required to worship in a larger neighbouring church. In the west, many priests were in fact paid less under the new salary scales and, in this region of scattered hamlets and small churches, many now found themselves without a parish to lead. Moreover, this was one of the few regions where the tithe had been paid directly to the local clergy rather than the diocese, hence facilitating the capacity of priests to minister to all the needs of the parish. In the words of some angry men from Saint-Aubin-deBaubigné to officials in January 1791, ‘If you don’t pay our priest, you fucking beggars, and you take everything from our lords, with what will they give us work, with what will we live?’11 Most contentious, however, was the issue of how the clergy were to be appointed in future. To the trenchant objections of clerical deputies in the Assembly that the priestly hierarchy of the Church was based on the principle of divine authority and inspired appointment by superiors, the Assembly applied the principle of popular sovereignty to the choice of priests and bishops. The Assembly had crossed the narrow line separating temporal and spiritual life, and its decision was compounded by requiring those elected at New Year 1791 to take an oath to the law, the nation and the king. Only about half the parish clergy of France would do so, and many of the ‘jurors’ retracted their oaths when the pope threatened them with excommunication in April. In most of the districts of the west, more than 70 per cent refused the oath, and in many, more than 90 per cent did so.12 While the constitutional clergy in other regions saw themselves as servants of the people, as ‘citizen priests’, the refractory or non-juring clergy of the west saw themselves as servants of God. To them, the Civil Constitution was anathema to the corporate, hierarchical structure of the Church and the leadership of the pope. The idea of those local bourgeois who had bought up

11 Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 233–42; Tackett, ‘The west in France in 1789’. 12 Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 233–5; Tackett, ‘The west in France in 1789’.

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Church property also voting in elections for priests and bishops was outrageous. The Vendée region itself was also marked by a deep cleavage between ‘enlightened’ townspeople and the countryside and its priests. In Angers, for example, the new bourgeois administrators had long been characterised by their hostility to clerical power and wealth (the Church owned three-quarters of the property in the town).13 In the district of La Roche-sur-Yon, too, administrators had few hesitations about closing nineteen parish churches (out of a total of fifty-two) deemed to be surplus according to the provisions of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy.14 The most striking characteristic of the religious grievances in the cahiers of 1789 was the apparent paradox that these were sharpest in the towns of the west around which would erupt the violent rural rejection of the Revolution’s demands for conscripts in March 1793. Patterns of clerical recruitment before 1789 – where there were strong increases in total recruitment in many western dioceses even though urban recruitment fell sharply – suggest a divergence in attitudes between town and country which would be articulated in the cahiers, then reflected in the widespread outrage at the reforms of the Civil Constitution, and finally expressed in violent civil war in 1793. Urban cahiers in the west had demanded an end to clerical privileges and had called for religious toleration and measures to restrict church ownership of property. In other provinces, local authorities sought to mitigate the local impact of church reform, or even manoeuvre around it; in the west, however, urban authorities implemented reforms implacably, even with alacrity. There, the authorities found ‘all priests tiresome’ and welcomed the chance of ‘relegating priests to their proper place’. The Paris government even had to intervene after the flight of the king to secure the release of non-juring clergy from illegal detention in towns such as Angers and Nantes. This hostility was mirrored in much of the countryside, where ‘intruder’ priests faced public rejection, aggression and assault. Their lives were a misery.15 In most rural communities of the west, ‘patriots’ were a small and identifiable group, usually local bourgeois. Their frustration with the ‘malevolence’ of the local priests and nobles and the ‘fanaticism’ of the peasants 13 J. McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester University Press, 1960). 14 M. Faucheux, L’insurrection vendéenne de 1793: aspects économiques et sociaux (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1964), p. 298. 15 R. Crossuard, La Révolution dans le district de Vitré, 1789–1795 (Rennes: Rue des Scribes, 1989), pp. 215–19; Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture, pp. 257–83; Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 242–52.

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shines through the surviving village council registers, expressed in the French language that their rural fellows scarcely knew, if at all. Revolutionary administration was firmly in the hands of men with secular notions of authority and few qualms about imposing the new tax regime or ecclesiastical reforms. The Revolution was resented for having attacked a religious culture inseparable from life itself without having done anything for those who rented farms, while elected bourgeois enforced revolutionary laws and taxes. The last straw was that the conscription levy of February 1793 exempted men serving on local councils, those seen to be the face of the new regime. The fury of rural communities was focused on men it knew only too well, distinguished by their wealth, clothing and loyalties. By early 1793, the coincidence of seething resentments and external invasion had created the Vendée powder-keg, ignited by the conscription ballot of March 1793. Accordingly, the first targets were local officials. On 11 March, a band of about 1,500 insurgents overran the small town of Machecoul and, across the next six weeks, killed at least 160 locals: local officials in particular, but also a range of artisans, shopkeepers and labourers seen as the enemy. The killings later became exaggerated (they were often reported as 800) and embellished in terms of cruelty. On 14 March, 10,000 insurgents led by a former professional soldier – now a gamekeeper for a noble – named JeanNicolas Stofflet, overran the 400 revolutionary soldiers and national guards in Cholet, and proceeded to search out and kill about 300 ‘patriots’.16 To the north, up to 6,000 peasants hostile to conscription swept into the little town of La Roche-Bernard near Vannes on 15 March, shouting ‘Vive le Roi! Vive la bonne religion!’ before killing a score of the 200 republican troops there. The next day, they turned on the district administrator, Joseph Sauveur, and his deputy. According to a fellow Breton among the soldiers, Sauveur was shot in the mouth but managed to stay erect and took out his medal of office. While then shot in an eye and with fingers hacked off, he still refused to let go of the medal. He was then burned alive on a pyre made of the liberty tree. Three months later, the Convention renamed the town La Roche-Sauveur.17

16 E. J. Woell, Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers: Religious Revolution and Counterrevolution in Western France, 1774–1914 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2006), esp. ch. 4; Tilly, The Vendée, ch. 13. 17 Archives départementales du Morbihan, Lz831; É. Souvestre, Mémoires d’un sans-culotte bas-breton (Brussels and Wouters: Raspoet, 1843).

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The National Convention in Paris, and many historians since, were convinced that an insurrection on such a scale must have been the result of clandestine planning by the royalist nobles and priests who assumed the leadership. However, while there had certainly been previous ‘conspiracies’ against the Revolution, this was an insurrection which was co-ordinated instead by the fixed date of the conscription ballot and by the intricate social and commercial networks among the rural population. It did not need to be ‘organised’. The Vendéen insurrection was a visceral rural rejection of a revolution which had brought nothing but trouble, particularly to parish life, and which was seen as the work of unsympathetic, wealthy townspeople. The leadership of nobles and refractory clergy made it openly counter-revolutionary, but for most peasants it was anti-revolutionary rather than a longing for the ancien régime. The most common slogan of the rebels was ‘Long live the king and our good priests!’, but this was a password for the like-minded rather than a clear motive. It points to the fatal weakness of the insurrection: the lack of a coherent, unifying purpose between nobles and priests intent on destroying the Revolution, on the one hand, and, on the other, masses of rural people who were intent on killing or expelling those locals they felt were attacking their way of life, but who were without any plan to march on Paris. The nobles who assumed leadership of the rebellion were constantly frustrated by the refusal of the rank-and-file to follow orders, and their habit of joining and leaving the armies at will.18 The violence and initial success of the rebellion confirmed its resolution to show no mercy. The ‘Catholic and Royal Army’ established headquarters at Châtillon-sur-Sèvre (today Mauléon), and on 5 July 1793 inflicted a heavy defeat on republican troops under the command of François Westermann, killing 2,000 and taking others prisoner. Only 300 of his 7,000 troops survived. Westermann demanded revenge. But military fortunes were mixed. In late June, republican forces won a major victory over the Vendéens at Nantes, a crucial turning point in the civil war. There were important consequences: the death of the rebel leader Jacques Cathelineau from a sniper’s shot led to rancorous division about his succession, and the defeat was a blow to those who had looked to England’s navy to turn Nantes into the capital of the revolt.19 General Kléber’s troops also won a victory near Cholet in July, but in September his 6,000 troops 18 Tilly, The Vendée, pp. 331–6. 19 Y. Guin, La Bataille de Nantes, 29 juin 1793. Un Valmy dans l’ouest (Laval: Siloë, 1993).

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suffered terrible losses at the hands of the 30,000 troops of the Catholic and Royal Army. Atrocities continued on both sides: at Montaigu, captured republican soldiers were thrown into a well.20 A key turning point was the battle at Cholet in mid-October, which put the Vendéen army of up to 80,000 in disarray. Then the repression commenced. On 21 October, four deputies ‘on mission’ from the National Convention reported that it ‘wanted the war to be finished before the end of October and we can today announce to it that [in words they underlined] the Vendée no longer exists’. A general reported the Vendée ‘steaming with blood, strewn with corpses, burning for the most part’. The diary of a soldier noted, on 13 December, ‘a massacre of women and children’.21 By November, Nantes had been under siege from the rebels for months; provisions were almost exhausted. As well as the 83,000 inhabitants, there were 7,000 refugees, thousands of wounded soldiers in ten military hospitals, scores of thousands of soldiers in garrisons, and up to 10,000 prisoners. Sacrificial victims were at hand in the person of non-juring clergy who had supported the rebels. On 16 November, self-styled sans-culottes ‘cleansed’ the church of Ste-Croix of ‘fanaticism and the priesthood, whose imbecile ministers or imposters, spread out across the globe for the misfortune of the human race, mark their steps by ruination and pious assassinations’. The anticlerical rage of local Nantais encouraged Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a Jacobin deputy-on-mission sent to ‘pacify’ the Vendée, to order that 94 priests held on the ship La Gloire were to be drowned in the Loire. There were vengeful Nantais prepared to encourage Carrier in successive mass drownings and shootings, in all of about 1,800 people, but his dictatorial style and penchant for excess and vulgarity would finally alienate even them. He was recalled from Nantes in February.22 By late December, the Catholic and Royal Army had been reduced to about 12,000 members, of whom only half were in a position to fight. They retreated to Savenay on the banks of the Loire, from where the terrified townspeople had fled: in March 1793, the constitutional priest and other officials had been murdered by the rebels. The republican troops under Westermann who attacked Savenay pursued the remnants of the counter-revolutionary army 20 M. Péronnet and Y. Guin, La Révolution dans la Loire-Inférieure (Le Coteau: Horvath, 1989). 21 C. Petitfrère, ‘La Vendée en l’an II: défaite et répression’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 300 (1995), 178–9. 22 Péronnet and Guin, Révolution dans la Loire-Inférieure, pp. 127–31; A. Lallié, Les sociétés populaires à Nantes pendant la Révolution, 2nd ed. (Nantes: L. Durance, 1914), pp. 133–66.

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relentlessly in and around the town, and finally through the forest of Gavre, where the remainder had fled. In all, about 6,000 would die, including prisoners judged and executed on the spot by a military commission. This was the greatest atrocity committed during the civil war. In a notorious report, Westermann exulted that ‘the Vendée is no more’: It died under our swords, with its women and children. I’ve just buried it in the swamps and woods of Savenay.. . . I don’t have any prisoners to reproach myself for. I exterminated the lot.. . . The broadsides continue ceaselessly at Savenay, because brigands are arriving all the time presuming that they will be made prisoners.. . . We’re not taking prisoners, as it would be necessary to give them the bread of liberty and pity is not revolutionary.23

Between December 1793 and May 1794, after the insurrection had been crushed, General Turreau’s ‘infernal columns’ conducted a ‘scorched-earth’ revenge on communes declared outside the law. (See Figure 13.1.) To the Minister of War, he reported on 19 January that all rebels of all ages and both sexes would be ‘exterminated’: My purpose is to burn everything, to leave nothing but what is essential to establish the necessary quarters for exterminating the rebels.. . . All brigands caught bearing arms, or convicted of having taken up arms to revolt against their country, will be bayoneted. The same will apply to girls, women and children in the same circumstances.. . . [A]ll villages, farms, woods, heathlands, generally anything that will burn, will be set on fire.

Even the little town of Bressuire, a republican bastion against the insurgents, was emptied and burnt.24 As Westermann, Turreau and others conducted punitive purges through the countryside, the Vendéen leader Charette retaliated as best he could – for example, ordering 700 republicans to be executed when he retook the little town of Legé in February. In turn, the republican troops were in no mood for sympathy. One of them was Corporal François-Xavier Joliclerc, from a small village in the eastern Jura mountains and, by 1793, a hardened veteran of the revolutionary wars. On 25 January, he wrote to his mother from Cholet that: ‘We will use steel and flames, a rifle in one hand, a burning torch in the other. Men and women, all will feel the end of our swords. All have to die, except 23 R. Secher, A French Genocide: The Vendée, trans. G. Holoch (University of Notre Dame Press, 2003). 24 Dwyer and McPhee, eds., The French Revolution, pp. 101–2. See A. Rolland-Boulestreau, Les colonnes infernales (Paris: Fayard, 2015); C. Merle, La Révolution française à Bressuire, 1789–1799 (Poitiers: Projets Éditions, 1988).

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Figure 13.1 ‘The brigands are crushed!’ Proclamation after the Battle of Savenay, 23 December 1793. (ullstein bild Dtl. / Getty Images)

small children. These departments must be an example to others which want to revolt. We’ve already burnt through about seven leagues.’ On 4 March, however, he was wounded during an insurrection at nearby Vezins on the day of Carnival, which left fifty-two of his fellows dead, ‘all with heads smashed in or with bodies run through with bayonets’. He admitted to his mother that, ‘if I recounted to you the cruelties committed in the Vendée by both sides, your hair would stand on end, but I think this war will soon be finished’.25

25 É. Jolicler, Joliclerc, volontaire aux armées de la Révolution. Ses lettres (1793–1796), 4th ed. (Paris: Perrin, 1905), pp. 154–63.

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The Vendéen insurrection had a last, tragic gasp. The Peace of Mabilais on 21 April 1795 had offered freedom of religion and a full amnesty for deserters and rebels in the west if they surrendered. On 28 June, however, the British navy landed 6,000 troops on the peninsula of Quiberon, west of Vannes in Brittany, in an attempt to bring together émigré troops and the remnants of the Vendéen rebels under François de Charette’s leadership. The troops were repelled near Vannes.26 After a summary trial by a military commission made up of townsmen, about 750 insurgents were shot, many on what became known as ‘Martyrs’ Field’ near Auray. Among those executed were the majority of the noble officers – in all, 366 of those executed.27 Enraged, Charette ordered 300 republican prisoners to be killed while he celebrated mass. Charette himself was later captured while fighting in the Vendée, and executed by firing squad in Nantes on 29 March 1796.28 Ultimately, the civil war in the Vendée was to claim perhaps as many as 200,000 lives, including 30,000 government soldiers. Recent estimates have ranged higher, up to Jean-Clément Martin’s estimate of up to 250,000 insurgents and 200,000 republicans.29 The estimate by the historian who has done most to turn the Vendéen insurrection into a holy war for freedom against republican tyranny, Reynald Secher, is surprisingly lower, if still massive: he calculates that the 773 communes involved militarily in the war lost at a minimum nearly 15 per cent of their total population (more than 117,000 of 815,000 people), and nearly 20 per cent of their housing.30 Who exactly were the insurgents and ‘patriots’? While to patriotic Parisians the people of the Vendée were often imagined as an amorphous mass of ‘fanatical’ peasants, they formed, in fact, a complex and stratified society. The Vendée was a region of subsistence polyculture and some cattleraising, but was overlaid by a textile industry centred in its small towns and large villages, such as Cholet, Beaupréau and Chemillé. Charles Tilly’s classic 1964 sociological analysis of the two ‘occupational complexes’ of the region – an agricultural and a commercial or industrial one – revealed the social bases of the civil war, both reflective of involvement in particular types of 26 R. Dupuy, La noblesse entre l’exil et la mort (Rennes: Éditions Ouest-France, 1989), pp. 102–9. 27 Archives départementales du Morbihan, L1476. In 1829, the bones were exhumed and deposited in the vault of a memorial chapel at the Auray monastery, on what is now called the Champ des Martyrs. A plaque on a wall in the park of La Garenne in Vannes commemorates those shot there, including Hercé. 28 Péronnet and Guin, Révolution dans la Loire-Inférieure, pp. 144–6. 29 J.-C. Martin, La Vendée et la France (Paris: Seuil, 1987). 30 See F. Lebrun, ‘Reynald Sécher et les morts de la guerre de Vendée’, Annales de Bretagne et des pays de l’Ouest 93 (1986), 355–60.

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production and reflected in social relations such as marriage. The endogamous culture of the agricultural community – small and large farmers, millers, agricultural service artisans (such as blacksmiths and coopers) – highlighted the ties between types of production and the narrow range of social relationships, evident for example in the choice of marriage partner. In contrast, the ‘industrial’ complex of commercial and administrative bourgeois, artisans and winegrowers were likely to inter-marry, to have external contacts and to be ‘patriots’.31 While Tilly warned against a simple correlation of occupation and politics, he was able to conclude that ‘patriots’ or ‘blues’ were mostly bourgeois of various kinds (officials, professionals, landowners, merchants), while the insurgents or ‘whites’ were overwhelmingly peasants and artisans, a cross-section of rural society, with a surprising number of bourgeois supporters. The republican cause was often supported by the winegrowers of the Loire Valley, and the skilled workers of the towns on the edges of the Vendée (Angers, Nantes, Saumur). His analysis of 1,721 insurgents classified 1.8% as nobles, 2.9% as priests, 46.1% as peasants, 11.8% as bourgeois, and 37.5% as artisans. The ‘patriot’ side is more elusive, but his analysis of 268 volunteers for the revolutionary armies in 1792 identified 29% as bourgeois, 58.4% artisans, 8.1% ‘other’, and only 4.5% peasants.32 Claude Petitfrère broadly agreed in his larger analysis of 4,715 ‘whites’ and 3,254 ‘blues’: those from bourgeois occupations were 1.63% of the insurgents but 12.38% of the ‘patriots’; artisans and shopkeepers were 19.0% and 50.25%, respectively; textile workers 15.44% and 14.41%. In contrast, those from agricultural occupations were 62.82% of the ‘whites’ and 20.38% of the ‘blues’.33 Far more difficult to explain is the intensity of violence. The single most unsatisfactory dimension of accounts of the Vendée, as of other mass killings, is the simplest to pose: why did some people want to kill so many others? Too often the explanations of atrocity are based on imputed characteristics of the perpetrators: for Reynald Secher, it was enough to allege of the republican troops that ‘the recruits were undisciplined, drunk with blood and pillage’.34

31 Tilly, The Vendée, fig. 4 and ch. 7. Tilly’s study was in fact based on southern Anjou, the northern half of the insurrectionary region. 32 Tilly, The Vendée, tables 19 and 30. 33 Petitfrère, ‘The origins of the civil war’, 197. 34 Tilly, The Vendée, p. 1; Secher, A French Genocide, p. 107.

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Analysis of the language of soldiers on both sides reveals stereotypes of hatefulness. The slogans of the insurgents expressed support for the ‘good priests’ as the essence of a threatened way of life, and hatred for bourgeois: You’ll perish in your towns Cursed patauds [bourgeois patriots] Just like caterpillars Your feet in the air.35

Republican troops were unsettled by the insurgents’ supposed fervour. According to one local, ‘these men only need a hunk of black bread and some water for their provision . . . Led by religious fury, hoping only for a martyr’s glory, they fling themselves on our cannon and weapons.’36 To republicans, the rebels were superstitious and cruel, manipulated in their ignorance by malevolent, ‘fanatical’ priests and nobles. In the words of the Jacobin newspaper the Révolutions de Paris, they were ‘vindictive lordlings, wild priests, gamekeepers without pity, valets, clerks, and a quantity of fanatic peasants, for whom crime has become an act of virtue. Jesus Christ and the virgin, Louis XVII and his mother, are their war-cries.’37 The republican thirst for revenge was typified by Jacques Garnier, known as Garnier de Saintes, a particularly hot-headed Jacobin deputy sent to the army defending La Rochelle in April 1793: The great measures that we are taking resemble wind-gusts which make the rotten fruit fall and leave the good fruit on the trees; afterwards you will be able to harvest what’s left; it will be ripe and full of flavor, it will give life to the Republic. What use is it to have a lot of branches if they are rotten? It’s better that fewer are left, provided they are green and vigorous.38

In turn, Vendéens saw the republicans as ‘fanatics for so-called liberty . . . making waves of blood flow through our homeland’, hacking to pieces and slitting the throats of unarmed ‘whites’.39 35 C. Tilly, ‘Local conflicts in the Vendée before the rebellion of 1793’, French Historical Studies 2 (1961), 231. 36 É. Gabory, ‘La Guerre de Vendée – soldats paysans’, Mémoires de la Société d’histoire et d’archéologie de Bretagne 6 (1925), 312. 37 J. Gilchrist and W. J. Murray, eds., The Press in the French Revolution: A Selection of Documents Taken from the Press of the Revolution for the Years 1789–1794 (Melbourne: Cheshire; London: Ginn, 1971), pp. 276–7; P.-R. Choudieu, Mémoires et notes (Paris: Plon, 1897), p. 360. 38 Quoted by D. M. G. Sutherland in H-France Forum 5 (2010), http://www.h-france.net /forum/forumvol5/sutherland5.pdf. 39 E. Martin, ‘“La race rebelle” or “la prétendue République”. Representations of a civil war: the Vendée, 1793–1794’ (unpub. Honours dissertation, University of Melbourne, 1995), 35–6.

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Tilly’s concern was to use sociological analysis to explain why particular occupational groups predominated on either side, but his observation of two ‘complexes’ also enables us to explain the level of hatred and violence. While the farmers of the Vendée were typically engaged in market-oriented livestock trading, as well as subsistence polyculture, this was a type of activity in which they typically encountered the town through the unsympathetic face of the merchant keen to buy cattle at the lowest possible price, or through the bourgeois property-owner keen to collect his rents. For the townsfolk, in contrast, the farmers of the Vendée were well fed, pious and backward. Deep urban–rural mistrust made both sides only too ready to add epithets such as fanatics, blood-suckers and worse.40 This was a classic case of communities which had lived side-by-side but in mutual mistrust and hostility. It has that in common with many other episodes of mass killing in history, where apparent civility has proven to be a fragile shield against profound contempt for ‘others’ in the community.41 The topography of the region both enabled guerrilla-type fighting and accentuated the desire for reprisals. The region was characterised by a distinctive bocage landscape, where high hedgerows across the undulating landscape kept cattle enclosed and bordered a maze of narrow tracks. There were few roads (see Map 13.2). This terrain suited ambushes and retreat, and exacerbated a vicious cycle of killing and reprisals by both sides convinced of the malevolent brutality and fanaticism of the other. In particular, republican troops, harried and ambushed by rebels who readily disappeared into the hedgerows and thickets, carried out sweeping reprisals when possible. General Turreau, best known for his colonnes infernales, described in 1794 the fury of the rebels: ‘you have as much difficulty in operating a retreat as they have the facility to flee when defeated. Victorious, they encircle you, cut you to bits; they pursue you with a fury, a bloodthirsty ferocity, an inconceivable rapidity.’42 Memories of the insurrection were so engrained in households and regions that they would be a critical determinant in later political choice – for example, during the upheavals of the 40 Although he does not explicitly refer to the Vendée, see R. Cobb ’s discussion of urban– rural mistrust in The Police and the People: French Popular Protest 1789–1820 (Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 290–302. 41 On the harrowing and epic history of Hersch Lauterpacht, Raphael Lemkin and the town of Lviv, see P. Sands, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016). 42 Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la guerre de la Vendée par le général Turreau (Paris: Baudouin Frères, 1824), pp. 26–8.

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Map 13.2 The Vendée in 1793, showing major roads. (From Thomas George Johnson, François-Séverin Marceau (1769–1796) (London, 1896), p. 123)

democratic Second Republic of 1848–51.43 In the elections of 1849, the anti-republican Party of Order won 144 of the 148 seats in the west and Brittany, in part by consistently feeding fears that a vote for republicans threatened a return to the terror of 1793. This would mark political choice in western France until at least the 1980s.44 Both at the time and, especially, in highly questionable nineteenth-century memoirs, abundant testimony was recorded about atrocities committed by republican troops. So it was believed that, in Clisson, people who were still alive were thrown into the well of a castle; 150 women were allegedly burned to make fat. In Angers, the skin of the victims was supposedly tanned to make 43 P. McPhee, The Politics of Rural Life: Political Mobilization in the French Countryside 1846– 1852 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1992), ch. 5; M. Ozouf, ‘Fédérations, fédéralisme et stéréotypes régionaux’ in Ozouf, L’École de la France: essais sur la Révolution, l’utopie et l’enseignement (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), pp. 39–45. 44 McPhee, Politics of Rural Life, chs. 4–5.

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riding breeches for superior officers.45 Such memories were reinforced, for example, by the discovery of masses of bones in Les Lucs by the parish priest in 1860. This was to result in a myth, still potent today, of the ‘Bethlehem of the Vendée’, according to which 564 women, 107 children and many men were massacred on a single day, on 28 February 1794. No evidence for such an event has been found.46 Such had been the extent of killing in the Vendée that apologists for the ancien régime have ever since been able to present the Revolution as the war of the Enlightenment and freemasonry on Christianity, monarchy and feudal traditions supposedly beloved of peasants.47 In the Vendéen village of Chanzeaux, for example, the church built in the nineteenth century on the ruins of the old one burned in 1794 features stained-glass windows added in 1955 listing the names of the dead, and visual images which teach villagers that the rising was one of devout peasants defending beloved priests and nobles.48 The many local ‘patriots’ in the region are dismissed as collaborators in cultural and religious destruction. More than 200 years later, the insurrection remains a central element in the collective identity of the people of the west of France.49 The constructed memory of the insurrection sustains regional pride, conservative politics and commemorative commerce (in the same way that ‘the Vendée’ still symbolises for outsiders an archaic, rural, reactionary and Catholic France profonde). Over the past thirty-five years, however, the repression has also been represented as something far more sinister. While there have long been attempts to associate the terror ideologically with twentieth-century totalitarianism – one thinks of the work of Jacob Talmon – in 1983 a rather different link was posited by Pierre Chaunu: ‘The Jacobin period can only appear today as the first act, the foundation stone of a long and bloody series stretching from 1792 to our own times, from Franco-French genocide in the Catholic west to the 45 Secher, A French Genocide, p. 134. 46 A more recent estimate is that between 300 and 500 of Les Lucs’ 2,320 people were killed in all the fighting during the Vendéen insurrection: J.-C. Martin and X. Lardière, Le Massacre des Lucs: Vendée 1794 (Vouillé: Geste Éditions, 1992). See too P. Tallonneau, Les Lucs et le génocide vendéen. Comment on a manipulé les textes (Luçon: Éditions Hécate, 1993). 47 See, for example, R. de Sagazan, ‘L’Association bretonne face à la célébration du bicentenaire de la Révolution française’, Bulletin de l’Association Bretonne et Union régionaliste bretonne (1990), 41–8. 48 L. Wylie, Chanzeaux: A Village in Anjou (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966). 49 R. Sedillot, Le coût de la Révolution française (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1987), pp. 24–5, makes the preposterous claim that the repression of the Vendée was a more intense genocide than the Holocaust.

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Figure 13.2 Atrocity against civilians in the Vendée, December 1793. (ullstein bild Dtl. / Getty Images)

Soviet gulag, to the destruction caused by the Chinese cultural revolution to the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia.’50 Chaunu’s allegation that the link with totalitarianism was one of revolutionary practice, the genocidal repression in the Vendée, was based on the claims of one of his doctoral students, Reynald Secher, on whose thesis jury he sat in 1985. The claim of genocide gained Secher notoriety and certainly contributed to the popularity of his book and his interests in historical commemoration. The claim was based on a series of statements by revolutionary officials and military commanders, most famously Betrand Barère’s plea to the National Convention on 1 August 1793: ‘Détruisez la Vendée!’ On 1 October, the Convention solemnly proclaimed to the army it sent to the west: ‘Soldiers of liberty, the brigands of the Vendée must be exterminated; the soldier of the 50 Cited by H. Gough, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary: the French Revolution and the revenge of the Vendée’, Historical Journal 30 (1987), 978. J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Martin Secker & Warburg, 1952), famously found the origins of Stalinist communism in an unbroken tradition dating from Rousseau and Robespierre. The context and meaning of ‘terror’ are expertly analysed by M. Biard and M. Linton, Terror! The French Revolution and Its Demons (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).

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nation demands it, the impatience of the French people commands it, its courage must accomplish it.’ A series of army officers were blunter, such as General Beaufort in January 1794, who wished to ‘entirely purge the soil of freedom of that cursed race’.51 In Secher’s words: The reprisals were thus not frightful but inevitable acts that occur in the heat of battle in a long and atrocious war, but indeed premeditated, organized, planned massacres, which were committed in cold blood, and were massive and systematic, with the conscious and explicit intention of destroying a well-defined religion and exterminating an entire people, women and children first, in order to eradicate a ‘cursed race’ considered ideologically beyond redemption.52

Secher returned to the theme of genocide in a cruder polemic, Juifs et vendéens: d’un genocide à l’autre, in 1991. While insisting, disingenuously, that he did not wish to relativise the Holocaust (thereby enraging Holocaust deniers), he pursued his theme that these were both modern genocides.53 In 1993, he was the driving force behind a major exhibition in Paris where terms such as ‘extermination’, ‘genocide’ and ‘holocaust’ were used interchangeably, and other historians were accused of ‘mémoricide’. The exhibition was supported in person or in print by President Chirac, the Ministers of Culture, Foreign Affairs and Justice, the Cardinal of Paris, and prominent historians such as Jean Meyer (the supervisor of Secher’s thesis), Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Pierre Chaunu and Jean Tulard. The exhibits avoided any recognition of civilian killings by Vendéen rebel troops, and displayed uncritically documents ranging from contemporary artefacts to fantastic later fictions.54 The intensely political nature of attitudes to the insurrection in the Vendée has made the ascription of labels highly charged on both sides. In republican historiography, the scale of repression of the rebellion has been seen as 51 Secher, A French Genocide, p. 250. The claim of genocide is contested by Gough, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary’, 977–88; F. Lebrun, ‘La guerre de Vendée: massacre ou génocide?’ Histoire 78 (1985), 93–9; and J.-C. Martin, ‘Dénombrer les victimes de la Terreur. La Vendée et au-delà’ in Visages de la Terreur. L’Exception politique de l’an II, ed. M. Biard and H. Leuwers (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), 155–65. 52 Secher, A French Genocide, p. 251. 53 Juifs et vendéens: d’un genocide à l’autre. La manipulation de la mémoire (Paris: Olivier Orban, 1991). An attack on Secher from the political right is by A. Martin, ‘Le faux pas de Reynald Secher’, Revue d’histoire révisionniste 4 (1991), 152–64. An unusual conference collection bringing together radically opposing perspectives is La Vendée dans l’histoire. Actes du colloque (Paris: Librairie académique Perrin, 1994). 54 Vendée. Chouanneries. L’Ouest dans la Révolution, 1789–1832 (Mont Dol: Histoire et mémoire de l’Ouest, 1993).

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a regrettable but necessary response to a murderous ‘stab in the back’ at the moment of the Revolution’s greatest crisis. In contrast, in February 2007 a group of right-wing politicians from the west of France attempted to introduce legislation into the National Assembly which would have applied the label of ‘genocide’ to the repression, and therefore to one of the foundation acts of the first French Republic, just six months after its creation. In 2013 and 2017, the Front National and other right-wing deputies again asked the National Assembly to recognise the repression of the Vendée uprising as ‘genocide’. In 2017, a former senior advisor to President Sarkozy, Patrick Buisson, published a book likening the repression in the Vendée to genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. The preface was written by far-right politician Philippe de Villiers, a ‘eurosceptic’ member of the European Council and President of the Conseil Général of the department of Vendée.55 While the debate that has continued for more than thirty-five years has pitted most professional historians of the period and a majority of politicians against right-wing activists and a minority of historians, it was complicated in 2017 by the intervention of Jacques Villemain, a French representative at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Court of Justice. Villemain has argued that the logical consequence of the Court’s findings on Rwanda and Srebrenica is that there were crimes against humanity in the Vendée from April to July 1793, and genocide from August 1793 to mid-1794.56 Of course, the wording of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was – and remains – profoundly contentious for both its apparent looseness (the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’) and its exclusions, particularly of political groups. In the case of the Vendée, this has meant that the need to produce evidence-based claims of atrocity has been thwarted by verbal volleys over nomenclature. Since Lemkin’s time, a plethora of further definitions has been developed, among them that by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn: ‘A form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.’ They have asserted that the Vendée fits this

55 P. Buisson, La Grande histoire des guerres de Vendée (Paris, Perrin, 2017). See the comments by Loris Chavanette on https://www.lepoint.fr/histoire/revolutionfrancaise-un-historien-repond-a-patrick-buisson-23-11-2017-2174598_1615.php. 56 J. Villemain, Vendée, 1793–1794. Crime de guerre? Crime contre l’humanité? Génocide? Une étude juridique (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2017).

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definition, even though it plainly cannot be described as ‘one-sided mass killing’.57 How applicable is the term ‘genocide’ to the killings of 1793–4 in the Vendée? Neither the people of the west of France nor the historical profession have been well served by Secher’s crude methodology and unconvincing polemic. His claim that the insurgency was ‘above all a crusade for individual liberty’ crushed by a genocidal regime tells us more about his view of contemporary European history than about the French Revolution.58 His allegation of genocide is based on a radical misuse of the term and on dubious historical methodology. Not only did Secher solemnly reproduce the most florid nineteenth-century myths about republican horrors as if they were contemporary, neutral documentation, his description of the civil war was highly selective. He refers to the ‘massacre’ of Les Lucs as if it was fact, and evidently has felt no need to revisit his claim in the light of later historical research disproving it.59 The first mass killings of the conflict – those of republicans by insurgents at Machecoul, Cholet and La Roche-Bernard – are simply ignored by him. Secher has consistently claimed that the objective of the National Convention, like the Nazi regime, was total extermination: ‘If, despite intentions, the genocide was not carried to its conclusion, this was solely because of insufficiency of resources.’60 A difficulty for Secher is, therefore, that, by April 1794, the Convention had declared itself ‘reassured’: ‘the hideous hydra’ of the Vendée ‘can no longer speak counterrevolution, since it is all it can do to survive’. Just when the region was at its mercy, the Convention did not proceed to ‘extermination’ but withdrew the troops so they could be sent to the front against invading foreign armies. Huge numbers of people were killed, but not because they were a distinctive Vendéen people, nor because they were devout Catholics. The Vendéens were not a distinct ethnic, cultural or religious entity. The Convention considered – but did not enact – proposals which envisaged 57 F. Chalk and K. Jonassohn, eds., The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 23; K. Jonassohn and K. S. Bjeornson, Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations in Comparative Perspective (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Transaction Publishers, 1998), p. 208. Others who have used brief and selective reading to argue the case include M. Levene, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, 2 vols. (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005), I I, p. 118; A. Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), pp. 6–7. 58 Secher, A French Genocide, p. 249. 59 Ibid., p. 200. Cf. Martin and Lardière, Le Massacre des Lucs. 60 Secher, A French Genocide, p. 253.

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a punitive redistribution of property from rebel families to those of local patriots. From the outset, moreover, the Convention and its military commanders counted on the support of local republicans: it was not ‘Vendéens’ who were the enemy. Nor, despite the rhetoric, is the evidence compelling that the Convention intended to exterminate the inhabitants of the Vendée per se – but they did intend to exterminate the military opposition. Republican armies – like the Vendéen rebels – committed war crimes when they slaughtered indiscriminately anyone found with weapons or suspected of aiding the enemy.61 So the insurrection in the Vendée and its repression are best understood as a particularly bloody civil war, with much in common in that regard with the American Civil War of the 1860s. However, it was studded with examples of atrocity which would later be known as ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘war crimes’ as the National Convention and its military commanders sought to ‘exterminate’ the military opposition. The rebels did likewise. It would be a travesty, however, if the debate about the Vendée was semantic.62 It is not as if contesting that the repression amounted to genocide should mean that the repression itself was therefore considered or appropriate. Horrific things were done, and mostly left unpunished. Westermann was guillotined in April 1794, but only because he had backed the wrong side during a deadly political divide in Paris. Turreau was imprisoned for his excesses in September 1794 but argued successfully that he had only been obeying orders: he ended his career as Ambassador to the United States under Napoleon. Only Carrier was found guilty of the war crimes he had committed in Nantes, and went to the guillotine on 16 December 1794.

Bibliographic Note The most significant development in English-language studies of the Vendée was Tilly’s 1964 book The Vendée, which used historical sociology to examine the distinct socio-economic networks across southern Anjou and their solidifying into two exclusive and fatally polarised communities. A major shortcoming of Tilly’s analysis was regarding the religious culture of the region; 61 Note A. Gérard, La Vendée. Les Archives de l’extermination (La Roche-sur-Yon: Centre Vendéen de Recherches Historiques, 2013). 62 Sands, East West Street, esp. pp. 377–81, on the way that the understandable desire of survivor groups to claim to be victims of genocide has established an unfortunate hierarchy of horror within mass killings. Note the useful discussion of terminology by B. Kiernan, ‘Is “genocide” an anachronistic concept for the study of early modern mass killing?’ History 99:336 (2014), 530–48.

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here, Timothy Tackett later revealed the distinctive characteristics of the Catholic Church and its relationships with local communities by examining the social origins, cultural presence and religiosity of the priestly fraternity, in ‘The west in France in 1789’ and Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture. Impressive local studies by Wylie (Chanzeaux: A Village in Anjou), McManners (French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime) and Woell (Small-Town Martyrs and Murderers) demonstrated how divided urban and rural communities had become in their cultural practices and values by 1789, and how subsequent revolutionary legislation exacerbated mistrust to the point of hatred and violence. Recent controversy has centred on the claims of Secher and others (e.g., Secher, A French Genocide) that the repression in 1793–4 amounted to genocide, despite an effective early rebuttal by Gough, ‘Genocide and the bicentenary’, 977–88.

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The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c.1810 to the Present michael r. mahoney This chapter argues that, according to widely accepted definitions of genocide under international law, the Zulu kings Shaka (r. 1810s–1828) and Dingane (r. 1828– 40) perpetrated genocide against some of the peoples they conquered. However, this argument comes with two caveats. First, for centuries, white writers have used the image of the violent African to justify racism, slavery and colonialism. Moreover, from the time of Shaka until perhaps the Rwandan genocide of 1994, no Africans have served as icons of African violence in western culture more often than have the Zulus.1 One scholar has referred to the association of Zulus with violence as ‘character assassination’,2 and to a large extent it was. Nevertheless, it is possible to argue that racist stereotypes of the violent African serve not only to justify racism but also to blind us to white violence in Africa and elsewhere. At the same time, some Africans have perpetrated genocide and other injustices against other Africans. In this respect, Africa is no different from any other region of the world, including Europe. The second caveat, and the second major argument of this chapter, is that Zulu society is a model post-genocidal society. The deep wounds created by the early-nineteenth-century genocides have long since healed, even if other bitter conflicts have plagued the Zulu people in more recent times.3 1 S. J. R. Martin, ‘British images of the Zulu c.1820–1879’ (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1982); S. M. Leech, ‘Twentieth century images of the Zulu: selected representations in historical and political discourse’ (PhD dissertation, University of South Africa, 1997); S. M. Leech, ‘“Aggressive by nature, depraved and like Nazis”: images of Zulu violence’, African Historical Review 30:1 (1998), 89–108; Neil Sobania, ‘But where are the cattle? Popular images of Maasai and Zulu across the twentieth century’, Visual Anthropology 15:3–4 (2002), 313–46. 2 Dan Wylie, Savage Delight: White Myths of Shaka (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2000). See also the critique of white representations of Shaka and other aspects of South African history in M. Cornevin, Apartheid: Power and Historical Falsification (Paris: UNESCO, 1980). 3 For a more extensive history of unity and conflict within Zulu society, see M. Mahoney, The Other Zulus: The Spread of Zulu Ethnicity in Colonial South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

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SOUTH AFRICA

Map Area

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Map 14.1 Zululand and neighbouring regions, including chiefdoms mentioned in this chapter. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

Subject to Debate: The Facts of Zulu History and the Sources for Them Despite much lively debate over Zulu history, especially since the 1980s, the basic outline of that history is rather uncontroversial. Virtually all of the Zulus in the world today live in South Africa, where they number some

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12 million out of a total population of 60 million and form the country’s largest ethnic group. Within South Africa, the vast majority of Zulus live in KwaZulu-Natal province, some 30,000 square miles along South Africa’s east coast. KwaZulu-Natal is the only South African province with a name reflecting the ethnic composition of its inhabitants, a fact resulting from the numerical preponderance and strong ethnic consciousness of the Zulus living there. Yet, up until the 1810s at least, the Zulu chiefdom was only one among dozens of others in KwaZulu-Natal, controlling only a tiny fraction of the territory and population that would later become Zulu. Zulu history may be periodised according to the reigns of the kings, five of which I will focus on here, extending from the 1810s to the 1910s: 1. Shaka, who ruled from the 1810s until 1828, is often considered the first Zulu king, because he was the first to extend Zulu rule over most of the other chiefdoms in KwaZulu-Natal. His reign also saw the first settlement of Europeans in the area, when British traders established Port Natal at the site of present-day Durban in 1824. 2. Dingane, who ruled from 1828 until 1840, was Shaka’s step-brother and a co-conspirator in Shaka’s assassination. Boer trekkers invaded the Zulu kingdom in 1838 and, with the help of various groups of Africans, routed the previously formidable Zulu army, an event that both resulted from and exacerbated civil war within the kingdom. 3. Mpande, who ruled from about 1840 to 1872, was another step-brother of Shaka and Dingane. He struck a deal with the Voortrekker Boers: they would help Mpande take the Zulu throne from Dingane, and in exchange Mpande would cede to the Boers all Zulu territory south of the Thukela River – or about half of the Zulu kingdom. Boers thus founded the Natalia Republic in 1839, but their rule was short-lived. The British annexed the territory in 1843. The Boers then trekked into the interior again and the white population of Natal became overwhelmingly British, though by far the majority of the total population was African. Across the Thukela River, in what became known as Zululand, Mpande ruled in relatively peaceful independence for more than twenty years. 4. Mpande’s son Cetshwayo ruled from 1872 to 1884. He was the last independent Zulu king. The British invaded and defeated the Zulu kingdom in 1879, reducing Cetshwayo to one chief among many in Zululand. 5. Cetshwayo’s son, Dinuzulu, ruled from 1884 to 1913. After a long and complicated transition process, Natal colony finally annexed Zululand in 1897. Although neither Natal colony nor South Africa recognized

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Dinuzulu and his successors as kings of all the Zulus until 1951, Natal Africans almost universally regarded them as such. While white authors have often been quite critical of all the Zulu kings, they have tended to portray Shaka and Dingane as unusually violent. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, the violence associated with Shaka’s and Dingane’s reigns, and with the refugees who fled the Zulu kingdom under their rule, became known as the ‘Mfecane’, a term of uncertain and controversial origin.4 It was only in the late 1970s that white writers began to question seriously whether Shaka and Dingane actually did the things they were alleged to have done. This questioning came about through a thorough reappraisal of the existing sources of Zulu history. Until this time, the historiography addressing Shaka and Dingane had been characterised by what one scholar has called ‘textual incest’. Even the most academic authors regularly and uncritically borrowed from each other’s accounts, and virtually all of the existing scholarship was ultimately derived from just three published primary sources: the first-hand accounts of the British traders Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Fynn, who resided in the Zulu kingdom during the last years of Shaka’s reign and the beginning of Dingane’s, and the works of the British missionary A. T. Bryant, who collected Zulu oral traditions from the 1880s to the 1920s. All this work was published after the fact. Isaacs’ book first appeared in 1836, the first excerpts from Fynn’s book came out only in the 1880s, and Bryant did not begin publishing until after 1900. Worse, Isaacs admitted to sensationalising his own account and urging Fynn to do the same, while Bryant’s stated goal was to ‘clothe the dry bones’ of the raw evidence he had gathered. Without any source citations, it is impossible to determine what assertions were derived from oral traditions and which were the products of Bryant’s own imagination.5 4 J. Cobbing, ‘The case against the Mfecane’ (paper presented to the University of the Witwatersrand African Studies Institute African Studies Seminar, 1984). For a more thorough treatment of the problematic concept of the ‘Mfecane’, see C. Hamilton, ed., The Mfecane Aftermath: Reconstructive Debates in Southern African History (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1995; Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1995). 5 N. Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, 2 vols. (London: Edward Churton, 1836); H. F. Fynn, The Diary of Henry Francis Fynn, ed. J. Stuart and D. M. Malcolm (Pietermaritzburg: Shuter and Shooter, 1950); A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1929). For critiques of these authors, see Shula Marks, ‘The traditions of the Natal “Nguni”’ in African Societies in Southern Africa, ed. L. Thompson (New York: Praeger, 1969); R. K. Rasmussen, Migrant Kingdom: Mzilikazi’s Ndebele in South Africa (London: Rex Collings; Cape Town: David Philip, 1978); W. Worger, ‘Clothing dry bones: the myth of Shaka’, Journal of African Studies 6:3 (1979), 144–58; J. Wright, ‘A. T. Bryant and “The Wars of Shaka”’, History in Africa 18

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The same criticisms levelled at white writers’ works have also been directed against African testimony collected by whites. The richest source of such African testimony is the James Stuart Archive, a collection housed in the Killie Campbell Africana Library in Durban and published in a series totalling six volumes so far.6 Stuart, a contemporary of Bryant’s, was a British colonial official who, having been raised in Natal, spoke fluent Zulu. Between the 1890s and 1920s, he conducted dozens of interviews with Africans on Zulu history. Unlike Bryant, Stuart created transcripts of his interviews that included their date and location as well as background information on each interviewee. However, as rich as the James Stuart Archive might seem, in the late 1980s one historian argued that it was totally unreliable. James Stuart was a racist, and we have no way of knowing how much of the archive was invented by him to justify white supremacy.7 Still, the evidence collected by Stuart has stood up very well in the face of such criticism. Stuart was a racist insofar as he believed in segregation and considered Africans inferior to Europeans. Yet Stuart also vigorously protested against laws that aimed to push Africans off their lands and into the wage labour force. He also favoured the preservation of chiefship and customary law, in the face of stiff opposition from his fellow colonists. Indeed, on numerous occasions, Stuart’s interviewees candidly criticised white rule in Natal. It is unclear why Stuart would have faked the interview notes if he had never intended to publish them. Indeed, his published works never cited them directly. Far from a forgery, Stuart’s interview notes are a record of popular debates among Natal Africans over the meaning of their own history. One of the main issues that Natal Africans have debated among themselves, in both Stuart’s time and in our own, is how to evaluate Shaka and Dingane. Africans have never been unanimous on this point, so it is no wonder that that lack of unanimity is reflected in the words of Stuart’s interviewees.8 Their words form the evidentiary basis of the analysis that follows. (1991), 409–25; J. Pridmore, ‘The production of H. F. Fynn c.1830–1930’ in The Debate on Zulu Origins, ed. D. R. Edgecombe et al. (Pietermaritzburg: Department of Historical Studies, University of Natal, 1992); D. Golan, Inventing Shaka: Using History in the Construction of Zulu Nationalism (Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1994); Wylie, Savage Delight. 6 C. Webb and J. Wright, eds., The James Stuart Archive of Recorded Oral Evidence Relating to the History of the Zulu and Neighbouring Peoples, 6 vols. (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press; Durban: Killie Campbell Africana Library, 1976–2014) (hereafter ‘JSA’). 7 J. Cobbing, ‘A tainted well: the objectives, historical fantasies, and working methods of James Stuart, with counter-argument’, Journal of Natal and Zulu History 11 (1988), 115–54. 8 The argument here is derived from that of C. Hamilton, Terrific Majesty: The Powers of Shaka Zulu and the Limits of Historical Invention (Cambridge, M A, and London: Harvard

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State Violence under Shaka and Dingane and the Reasons for It The chiefs who ruled Zululand before Shaka were generally remembered with great fondness by Stuart’s informants, in contrast to the enormous ambivalence and even outright hatred they expressed towards Shaka himself. Indeed, even the British traders Fynn and Isaacs painted a much more flattering picture of the Mthethwa chief Dingiswayo, the most prominent chief in the region prior to Shaka’s accession to power, than they did of Shaka himself.9 This is so despite the fact that Dingiswayo had died during the 1810s and Fynn and Isaacs only came to Zululand in 1824. Their view of Dingiswayo must therefore reflect, at least to a certain degree, the opinion of the Zulus with whom they interacted. So it is unsurprising that Stuart’s informants painted a rather rosy picture of pre-Shakan Zululand. This is particularly apparent in discussions of preShakan warfare, which Stuart’s informant Lugubu described in this way: In the fights that took place in former days, the men would hurl assegais [spears] at one another. They did not approach closely. If one side was defeated and a man was left exhausted, he would say, ‘Mo! I am defenceless!’ He would be taken captive, but never killed. When the fighting was over his family would come and ransom him with a beast. That was the custom in former times. Chiefs had not yet begun putting people to death, even if they had done wrong. Women were not killed in war, nor was a man who was running away, for he was like a woman. Only a man who was engaged in fighting was stabbed.. . . Small boys, children, used not to be killed.10

Other informants painted a similar picture: war was limited in every sense. It was a last resort, an option taken up only when peaceful means of conflict mediation had been exhausted. The causes were always specific and limited. Even combatants rarely died, and property – especially the cattle so highly prized by Zulus, as by so many other African peoples11 – was hardly ever University Press, 1998), esp. chs. 2 and 4. Many African writers, too, have criticised Shaka for his excessive use of violence. See, for example, T. Mofolo, Chaka (London: Oxford University Press, 1931); and M. Malaba, ‘Super Shaka: Mazisi Kunene’s Emperor Shaka the Great’, Research in African Literatures 19:4 (1988), 477–88. My own interviews among Zulu speakers in the late 1990s confirm that memories of Shaka’s atrocities are alive and well in contemporary Zulu oral traditions. See, for example, my interviews with Jethros Gumede (18 August 1996), Mboneni Gumede (27 July 1997) and Tom Ntuli (27 July 1997), all conducted in Mapumulo district, KwaZulu-Natal province, South Africa, with Thuthukani Cele serving as translator and interpreter. 9 See, for example, Fynn, Diary, p. 10. 10 JSA: Lugubu, I, p. 290. 11 Melville J. Herskoviuts, ‘The cattle complex in East Africa’, American Anthropologist 28:1 (1926), 230–72.

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seized or destroyed. Indeed, pre-Shakan warfare in southeast Africa was more like contemporary sports than anything else. Non-combatants attended battles as spectators, cheering a favourite side or the virtuosity of individual soldiers. Soldiers showed off and competed for the adulation of the women in the audience, and battle scars were prized as badges of courage. Stuart’s informants uniformly attributed later changes in the conduct of warfare to Shaka. The goal of the Zulu army was not merely the defeat of its enemies, but their total destruction. Those exterminated included not only whole armies, but also prisoners of war, women, children and even dogs. The means of executing so many people were often gruesome: impaling was particularly common.12 During most of Shaka’s youth, he and his mother lived in exile from the Zulu chiefdom, owing mainly to a dispute between her and Shaka’s father, the Zulu chief. This had an enormous impact on Shaka’s subsequent career. He first rose to prominence as a soldier for chief Dingiswayo, just one of the three or so chiefs under whom Shaka and his mother lived at various points in their exile. According to Stuart’s informant Madikane, Shaka’s extreme methods were already apparent at this early stage: Dingiswayo sent Tshaka [Shaka] out with a body of troops to attack the amaMbata people whilst he went to war against the amaNtshali. Tshaka not only defeated the amaMbata but pursued them, killed them off and returned with their cattle etc. Dingiswayo, who had expected T. [Shaka] to return sooner and had been waiting for him, reproved him for his drastic measures, it being against Dingiswayo’s policy to exterminate any tribe.13

Dingiswayo later helped Shaka to gain the Zulu chiefship. When Dingiswayo died, Shaka began to invade his neighbours, including Dingiswayo’s own Mthethwa and the Langa, or Langeni, another chiefdom that had served as a home for Shaka and his mother during their years of exile. Even though the Langa ultimately surrendered to Shaka, he exterminated them. Revenge was his main motive for doing so: One day Tshaka called all the Langeni people together to a certain euphorbia tree at some hill. Finding that they were not all assembled, he sent and directed that even the very old men should come. They came, believing that he had it in mind to make them presents of cattle, as his mother was a member of their tribe. When as many as possible had congregated, he 12 JSA: Mbovu, I I I, p. 44; Mini, I I I, pp. 129–30; Mkebeni, I I I, p. 196; Mqayikana, I V, p. 20; Ngidi, V, p. 60. 13 JSA: Madikane, I I, p. 61.

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proceeded to call to mind the way they had brought him up when a boy; how they had given him a small black beast with horns . . . saying he was to eat that; how they used to send him out herding cattle and, during his absence, dig a hole, and on his getting back say, ‘There’s a bird in that hole over there, my child; go and take it out’, (and how) he then put his hand in to find nothing but faeces buried there; how they would ask, ‘Do you know what a porcupine’s egg looks like?’, and on his saying, ‘No’, they would say, ‘There it is; take it out’, and when he attempted to do so he would find nothing but excrement there; how they would pour curds in such quantities into his hands for him to eat that it would run down both arms to the elbows and become quite hot as he ate. In fact they had treated him just like a dog. He then said that on account of all this, of their ill-treatment of him, he would have them put to death, and forthwith, on (his) giving the order, all were massacred on the spot. He was afterwards very sorry for what he had done, and directed all the orphans to be carried off to the Mtetwa district (for that was where he himself had grown up), where, he said, the country was a pleasant one to live in and where they would get nice curds for their children. They were accordingly accommodated with land.14

Shaka acted in a similar way against the Mthethwa, because some of them had treated him badly.15 As we shall see below, at various points in his reign, Shaka would call for the extermination of the subjects of many other chiefdoms. Shaka relied on such genocidal policies to maintain his authority because he lacked legitimacy in the eyes of many of his subjects. Although such an argument might seem uncontroversial, it challenges certain widely held beliefs. For example, some might be very reluctant to see genocide as rational or politically functional in any way. Conversely, the thrust of Zulu historiography on the subject for several decades now has been to emphasise the popular legitimacy of the Zulu state. As early as 1969, sociologist Eugene Walter used the early Zulu kingdom as a central example in his argument that coercion and legitimacy are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Walter maintained that Shaka chose to pursue violently coercive policies even though his subjects considered him legitimate.16 Similarly, historian Carolyn Hamilton has shown how the Zulu ruling class promoted its own legitimacy by manipulating oral traditions in such a way that they could be used to 14 JSA: Mahashahasha, I I, pp. 107–8. For other accounts of Shaka’s actions against the Langa, see JSA: Baleka, I, pp. 7, 11; Baleni, I, p. 19; Jantshi, I, p. 191; Mkando, I I I, p. 151; Ngidi, V, pp. 30, 62–3, 73. 15 JSA: Baleni, I, p. 19; Mhlekele, V, p. 130. 16 E. Walter, Terror and Resistance: A Study of Political Violence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. pp. 53–5, 257.

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justify Zulu rule. The new oral traditions portrayed the Zulus as the original inhabitants of the area, while other Africans were supposedly latecomers. The oral traditions argued for deep historical ties between the Zulu ruling class and other local elites with whom they sought to ally, all the while portraying subordinate groups as inherently inferior.17 Zulu kings did pursue hegemonic aims, and those projects were successful at certain times with certain people. Walter and Hamilton marshalled substantial evidence to prove that the Zulu kings did in fact enjoy some legitimacy. The trick, however, is to locate that legitimacy in time and social space, and to determine precisely where and when legitimacy ends and coercion begins. Tellingly, to demonstrate the legitimacy that Zulu kings have enjoyed among their subjects, Walter cited a passage from the work of the anthropologist Max Gluckman referring not to the early nineteenth century, but to the twentieth: During the time of the kings, the State bulked large in the people’s lives. In council and on the battlefield only could high ambitions be satisfied.. . . Today old men talking of the kings get excited and joyful, chanting the king’s songs and dances, and all Zulu tend, in conversation, to slip into tales of the king’s wars and affairs at his court.. . . The old Zulu generally shake their heads over the harsh rule of the past; and then speak of the glories under it.18

There is no doubt that the Zulu king has enjoyed substantial, but by no means universal, legitimacy from at least 1906 to the present; my own work, and that of many other scholars before me, shows as much. Yet Walter has missed another one of Gluckman’s main points – namely that the Zulu kings are popular today because they no longer have any power left to abuse. As we shall see, the present state of affairs only emerged about a century ago, in response to historical transformations that left late colonial Natal – and the position of the Zulu kings in it – very different from what it had been only decades earlier. The subjects of Shaka or any other Zulu king were not (and are not) an undifferentiated mass. Consider, for example, Walter’s characterisation of the subjects of a ‘terroristic despot’ such as Shaka: [T]he methods of the terroristic despot, despite their destructive consequences, are often considered natural by the people he dominates. Although they may hate the experience of oppression, they seldom dispute his right to rule or his right to the methods he employs. Individuals ordinarily 17 C. Hamilton, ‘Ideology, oral traditions, and the struggle for power in the early Zulu kingdom’ (MA thesis, University of the Witwatersrand, 1985); C. Hamilton and J. Wright, ‘The making of the AmaLala: ethnicity, ideology, and relations of subordination in a precolonial context’, South African Historical Journal 22 (1990), 3–23. 18 Quoted in Walter, Terror and Resistance, p. 244 (emphasis added).

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object or try to escape when they are singled out as victims of his cruelty, but not always. A number of victims accept their fate with passive resignation or even with the show of enthusiasm, in some cases praising the destructive power of the despot while being led to places of execution. In terroristic despotism, we shall observe, violence is culturally syntonic.19

Surely this varies according to people’s positions in the social order and the privileges they derive from, or are denied because of, that position. Some of Walter’s own evidence suggests that Shaka’s power was far more constrained. At one point, for example, he conceded that ‘[e]ven within the principal royal kraal [homestead] the illusions of despotic omnipotence and popular submission were contradicted by physical limitations’, and that ‘the degree of control’ which Shaka enjoyed over his subjects ‘remained inversely proportional to the distance from the center’.20 The amount of legitimacy which Shaka and his successors enjoyed in any given community varied from individual to individual, as well as over time. An excellent example of this variation is the Qwabe chiefdom. The Qwabe chiefdom was one of the largest in the region, and one of Shaka’s first conquests. Examining the Qwabe case in depth, Hamilton argued that the Zulu ruling class, at this point too weak to dominate the Qwabe outright, instead incorporated them on a position of parity. Unlike later conquests, the Qwabe as a whole enjoyed equality to members of the original Zulu chiefdom. The integration of and equality between the two peoples – Qwabe and Zulu – were reinforced, Hamilton maintained, by manipulating oral tradition. For example, new traditions described the two chiefdoms’ eponymous and legendary progenitors as brothers.21 The Qwabe chiefdom had been another one of the homes for Shaka and his mother during their exile, but upon conquering the Qwabe Shaka did not set out to exterminate them as he had done with the Langa or Mthethwa. After Shaka defeated and killed their chief, the Qwabe stopped fighting and chose to khonza (pledge allegiance to) Shaka, saying ‘We are now Tshaka’s people.’22 This peaceful state of Qwabe/Zulu affairs lasted until about 1824, when somebody attempted to assassinate Shaka. While many people, Shaka included, believed that Qwabes had been behind the attempt, many of Stuart’s informants – and Qwabes in particular – denied any involvement. They maintained that they had been framed, possibly by members of the Zulu royal house who felt threatened by the Qwabe’s popularity with 19 Ibid., pp. 54–5 (emphasis in original). 20 Ibid., p. 258. 21 Hamilton, ‘Ideology’, ch. 3. 22 JSA: Makuza, I I, p. 169. See also JSA: Jantshi, I, p. 194; and Mandlakazi, I I, p. 178.

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Shaka.23 In any event, Shaka decided that the Qwabe were guilty. He then collectively punished the whole chiefdom by indiscriminately killing Qwabe subjects. However, Shaka apparently changed his position shortly thereafter, for by the time he actually was assassinated, in 1828, the Qwabes – and in particular their chief, Nqetho – were once more favourites of his. This time, though, being Shaka’s favourites proved to be their death warrant. In 1829, Nqetho concluded that he would soon be purged by Shaka’s successor, Dingane, and fled southward into Natal and towards Pondoland, taking a large number of cattle and followers with him. Dingane sent his army after them, and also determined to exterminate any Qwabe who had stayed behind. Between their initial war with the Zulus and the later punitive actions by Shaka and Dingane, many of the Qwabe had been killed and the survivors had been scattered throughout the region, living as refugees: It was in respect to the great massacre of the Qwabe people that Tshaka is said to have caused dongas [ditches] to be filled with corpses. So vast was the massacre that the whole people left Zululand to settle in Natal, Pondoland, and elsewhere. There is nowadays no section of the Qwabe tribe in Zululand. On seeing a member of the Qwabe tribe in Zululand, some old woman of the amaCunu tribe is said to have expressed the greatest surprise, believing, as the slaughter was so thorough, that everyone must have been killed.24

The Zulu ruling class hegemonic projects most likely worked on those Qwabes who were lucky enough to be favourites of Shaka’s – such as Nqetho, or the famous soldier Zulu ka Nogandaya, alias Komfiya – but not on those who were victimised. Similarly, the Zulu state might have enjoyed some hegemony among the Qwabe as long as relations between the two were peaceful, but it is hard to believe that these strategies worked while the massacres were happening. Like any government, Shaka’s rewarded those who submitted to him and punished those who did not. If the Zulu state was more draconian than most states in its style of punishment, this reflected the character of the ruler, but also the weakness and insecurity of this newborn political order. So, on the one hand, it is not difficult to find positive reasons why people may have been attracted to Shaka’s rule. In the beginning, for example, Shaka benefitted from the death of the popular Dingiswayo, and from the fact that Shaka’s and 23 For accounts linking Qwabes with the attempt, see JSA: Jantshi, I, p. 194; Kambi, I, p. 209; Melaphi, I I I, p. 80. For accounts denying Qwabe involvement, see JSA: Meseni, I I I, p. 100; Ngidi, V, pp. 39–40; Sivivi, V, p. 374. Meseni was Qwabe chief from 1892 to 1906. 24 JSA: Mbovu, I I I, p. 43.

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Dingiswayo’s main antagonist – the Ndwandwe chief, Zwide – was himself particularly violent. In fact, according to one of Stuart’s Ndwandwe informants, ‘Zwide was a great fighter, so much so that he was always fighting, and caused many to join Tshaka.’25 While many of Stuart’s informants spoke of Shaka’s inclination towards total warfare and the extermination of his opponents, others discussed how he would kill the leadership of opposing chiefdoms but take in their subjects. In fact, subjects of conquered chiefdoms could, on occasion, become high-ranking officials in the Zulu state, and there were at least two instances in which opposing chiefs were themselves spared and rewarded this way.26 Once conquered peoples had pledged their allegiance to Shaka, they found that he could be very generous in bestowing gifts of foodstuffs – some of it pillaged from the kingdom’s enemies.27 Shaka could also be tolerant of a certain degree of insubordinate behaviour from members of his inner circle, including high-ranking members of conquered chiefdoms, such as Ngomane of the Mthethwa, or Nqetho of the Qwabe.28 Perhaps all these positive inducements help to explain why Stuart’s informant Mayinga said of Shaka, ‘The old regime was good, even though they killed off frequently’, or why Stuart’s informant Ndukwana said, ‘Tshaka did not scatter the nations; he unified them.. . . People will forget their old customs and find Tshaka’s government good.’29 Still, however much Shaka rewarded and indulged those who obeyed him, he became increasingly severe against those he perceived as threats. When members of the Thembu chiefdom defied him, he targeted not only Thembu men, but women and children as well: ‘The Zulu went off along the Tukela. They discovered where the cattle and women of the Tembu had been hidden; there were very many of them. They seized the cattle and killed all the women and children.’30 As a result, in 1905 one of Stuart’s informants said, ‘There are no more Tembus left; they were killed by the Zulus in Tshaka’s day.’31 Yet these were cases of more or less violent resistance. Shaka also exterminated whole chiefdoms for more subtle defiance by their leaders, often involving ceremonies at Shaka’s homestead. He attacked the Ngidi because their chief refused to attend one such ceremony.32 At another, the Mthethwa chief performed a song he had composed. Though JSA: Luzipho, I, p. 354. 26 JSA: Jantshi, I, pp. 186–7; Ndukwana, I V, p. 364. JSA: Baleni, I, p. 19; Ngidi, V, p. 69. JSA: Colenso, I, p. 83; Jantshi, I, p. 189; Kambi, I, pp. 210–11; Mbovu, I I I, p. 31. JSA: Mayinga, I I, p. 248; Ndukwana, I V, pp. 326, 364. 30 JSA: Lugubu, I, p. 285. JSA: Maziyana, I I, p. 277. See also the discussion of the Qwabe above, and the discussion of the Ndwandwe in JSA: Mbokodo, I I I, p. 12. 32 JSA: Ngidi, V, p. 117.

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the song did not refer to Shaka directly, Shaka felt it alluded to his rule and was a subtle attempt at very public criticism of him. Both the Mthethwa chief and his subjects were killed off as a result.33 The Bomvu chief, Zombane, and several prominent Langa men were targeted by Shaka because of their ‘good looks’, perhaps a reference to their charisma or popularity, which Shaka perceived as threatening: ‘Tshaka killed Zombane because he was so handsome that it seemed as if he should become the chief of the Zulu country.’34 It is indicative of the widespread resentment aroused by Shaka’s violence that his successor, Dingane, was fairly popular at first, even though he had been involved in the plot to assassinate Shaka. Indeed, early on, the most effective means by which Dingane acquired legitimacy in the eyes of his subjects was by saying that he had saved the Zulu kingdom from Shaka’s depredations. However, Dingane himself soon felt obliged to renege on his earlier promises to end the violence, even though this was widely seen as hypocritical and his popularity plunged as a result.35 Dingane soon became as arbitrary as Shaka. For example, he waged total war against the Amabaso because they had complained to Dingane about the chief that he had appointed to rule over them.36 However, most of Dingane’s violence was directed against those closely associated with Shaka. As noted earlier, Dingane moved against the Qwabe because their chief Nqetho had been a favourite of Shaka’s. Similarly, Dingane attacked the Mbo because their chief publicly lamented Shaka’s death.37 All it took for Dingane to attack Dube’s people was a rumour that the latter was considering fleeing Zululand just as Nqetho had, while Magaye and his people paid a similar price merely for allowing Nqetho and the rest of the Qwabe safe passage through their territory.38 People of the Tshangala and Gasa kingdoms were killed off because their doctors, while having succeeded in bringing rain to the kingdom, also brought lightning. Gasa doctors had also been among Shaka’s favourites.39 33 JSA: Nhlekele, V, p. 130. 34 JSA: Singcofela, V, p. 339. See also JSA: Ngidi, V, p. 73. 35 JSA: Mtshapi, I V, p. 94. Contemporary European sources also say Dingane was very popular at the beginning of his reign because of his suspension of state violence. See Walter, Terror and Resistance, pp. 178–80. 36 JSA: Mgodini, I I I, p. 114. 37 JSA: Mbokodo, I I I, p. 7. 38 JSA: Dinya, I, p. 106; Mtshapi, I V, pp. 66–7. 39 JSA: Magidigidi, I I, p. 84; Mayinga, I I, p. 250. Shaka also viewed doctors as threats to his rule and killed off many of them. Unlike Dingane, however, Shaka does not seem to have killed off ordinary people merely because they belonged to the same chiefdoms as did the doctors who had been slated for execution. For Shaka’s actions against doctors, see JSA: Baleka, I, p. 9; Jantshi, I, p. 195; Lunguza, I, pp. 330–1; Ndabambi, I V, p. 177; Ndukwana, I V, pp. 267, 342; Ngidi, V, pp. 40–1.

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Did Shaka’s and Dingane’s Actions Amount to Genocide? The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide as specific acts ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group as such’. Stuart’s informants frequently mentioned cases in which Shaka or Dingane explicitly called for the destruction of an entire kingdom or chiefdom, and their soldiers then carried out their orders. Shaka ordered many mass killings during his reign. Besides the examples of the Mbata and Langeni discussed above, Shaka’s victims included: the Qwabe chiefdom: ‘Tshaka said that the Qwabe people should be picked out and all put to death.’40 the amaMbata chiefdom: ‘Dingiswayo sent Tshaka out with a body of troops to attack the amaMbata people whilst he went to war against the amaNtshali. Tshaka not only defeated the amaMbata but pursued them, killed them off and returned with their cattle etc. Dingiswayo, who had expected T. [i.e., Tshaka] to return sooner and had been waiting for him, reproved him for his drastic measures, it being against Dingiswayo’s policy to exterminate any tribe’41 the Nwandwe chiefdom: ‘“Kill off every soul”, said Tshaka, “women and child.” He wanted nothing of [Ndwandwe king] Sikunyana’s to survive. The impi went in and finished them all off.’42 Then there are cases of genocide under Dingane’s reign: the Tshangala chiefdom: ‘The Tshangala people of Sibata lived at the base of the Itala mountain. They caused rain to come, and were killed off by Dingana for having done so.’43 the Gasa chiefdom: ‘He (Dingane) said everyone of the (Gasa) tribe was to come up and go to a large plain at Inhlazatshe where the numerous cattle which he wanted to give them could stand and be seen. Cattle were collected. The people gathered.. . . When all had collected they were put to death.. . . Very many of us were killed there. When I arrived at years of discretion I found only my father living; i.e. of our tribe all the others were dead.’44 40 JSA: Baleka, I, p. 8. The Qwabe and their relations with the Zulu figure prominently in Mahoney, The Other Zulus, passim. 41 JSA: Madikane, I I, p. 61. 42 JSA: Mobokodo, I I I, p. 12. 43 JSA: Magidigidi, I I, p. 84. 44 JSA: Mayinga, I I, p. 25.

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If genocide is defined as a state-mandated killing intended to annihilate whole peoples, then Shaka’s and Dingane’s actions in this regard certainly qualify. A sceptic might counter that these events occurred in a time and cultural milieu in which the genocide concept did not exist. However, as Ben Kiernan has argued, the concept of genocide may still be applicable if the reactions of contemporaries revealed that the actions in question violated widely held norms, and if we can find analogous terms for what we today call genocide.45 In the case of the first point, we find numerous examples of Shaka’s contemporaries criticising him for his excesses. As noted above, Dingiswayo ‘reproved’ him for killing entire chiefdoms. Another chief, Dibandlela, said Shaka ‘adopted terrible tactics in war, viz. he killed off not only the males but the females among his enemies and impaled them on posts, including children’.46 As already mentioned, many of Stuart’s informants criticised Shaka for introducing a new style of total war. One of them, Ngidi, said: In these old days, prior to Tshaka’s day, the tribes did not know how to fight as fighting was afterwards done. For instance, their cause of quarrel might be an area of uncultivated land (ifusi). An apology for a fight would occur between the two parties, assegais being thrown from a distance, and these hostilities would cease on one side or the other being injured. The stock would not be seized. The next day the victorious party would form a procession (udwendwe) and go to apologise for what they had done, and endeavour to pozisa or reestablish peace and friendly feeling. What is known as the umradu style of fighting began with Tshaka, which went to such extremes that children were impaled on posts and even the dogs of a kraal were killed.47

As for Kiernan’s second point, the Zulus did in fact have a term for the wholesale extermination of large groups of people: izwekufa, from Zulu izwe (nation, people, polity) and ukufa (death, dying, to die).48 Izwekufa is identical to ‘genocide’ in both meaning and etymology.

Changing Memories of the Violence Perpetrated by Shaka and Dingane As we have seen, seventy years after Shaka’s death, some of Stuart’s informants saw Shaka as ‘good’ – including some of the very same informants who 45 B. Kiernan, ‘Is “genocide” an anachronistic concept for the study of early modern mass killing?’ History 99:336 (2014), 530–48. 46 JSA: Mageza, I I, p. 72. 47 JSA: Ngidi, V, p. 60. 48 JSA: Mabonso, I I, p. 19; Mahaya, I I, pp. 134 and 139, n. 90; Maziyana, I I, pp. 293, 297; Melaphi, I I I, pp. 79, 81; Mqayikana, I V, p. 5.

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had also discussed some of Shaka’s most notorious acts of violence. Others were very critical of Shaka. Baleka, for example, called him a ‘madman’, while Dlozi said, ‘We do not care for the Tshaka regime. We were all killed off there.’ Lunguza said that, under Shaka and Dingane, an oft-heard prayer was, ‘Would that some other king might reign!’ Some people paid with their lives when Shaka and Dingane heard that they had said such a thing.49 Many southern Africans at the time did more than merely wish that they had another king. No matter how despotic Shaka and Dingane might have been, there were checks on their powers. Violence was one. Opponents assassinated both kings. Migration was another. Many people simply left the chiefdom. Though Zululand was one of the lushest parts of southern Africa, it was still a dry and drought-prone place. People therefore could not farm or graze the same lands endlessly, and periodically moved to new lands. These and other factors meant that Zululand was less densely populated than, say, western Europe or south and east Asia during the same period. Thus, there were almost always new lands that people could move to if they wanted to renounce the authority of their chief and pledge allegiance to another chief, or set themselves up on their own.50 So, Zwide’s violence caused many people to seek Shaka’s protection. Many of those who had survived under the patronage and protection of Shaka’s mother left the kingdom after her death. Secession was a third resistance strategy. Numerous people, some of them high-ranking officials in the Zulu kingdom, defected from both Shaka and Dingane, the future Ndebele king, Mzilikazi, and his followers being perhaps the most notable case. Many Zulus switched their allegiance from Dingane to Mpande because of the heavy losses that they suffered in fighting the Boers in 1838.51 Thus, it is not only the violence of the Zulu kings, but also the precedent of resistance by secession, that helps to explain the behaviour of Natal Africans during the first forty years of European rule there (1838–79). Some of this testimony is mute. During the forty years that Natal and the Zulu kingdom existed side by side, more Africans left the Zulu kingdom to come to Natal, much to the consternation of Europeans there.52 Similarly, during the 1879 49 JSA: Baleka, I, p. 6; Dlozi, I, p. 103; Lunguza, I, p. 314. 50 M. Gluckman, ‘The kingdom of the Zulu of South Africa’ in African Political Systems, ed. M. Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940), 25, 36–46. 51 JSA: Luzipho, I, p. 354; Mabonsa, I I, pp. 14, 22; Ndukwana, I V, p. 347. 52 For a discussion of this migration, see K. Atkins, The Moon Is Dead! Give Us Our Money! The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1993), ch. 1.

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Anglo-Zulu War, Natal’s Europeans feared that Natal’s Africans would join the Zulus to sweep the Europeans into the sea. In fact, hardly any Natal Africans sided with the Zulus in 1879. Instead, most Natal Africans proved quite willing to fight on the British side. After the war, colonial legislators in Natal passed a resolution expressing ‘their high appreciation of the loyalty shewn and services rendered by the Natives of this Colony during the recent war in Zululand’.53 Stuart’s work helps to explain why Natal Africans rejected the Zulu monarch and supported Queen Victoria instead. As Qalizwe said, ‘Living under British rule is more preferable than living under the Zulu regime when people were killed for the slightest offence.’54 Stuart’s informants suggested that the turn to the British had more to do with the shortcomings of the Zulu kings than with the supposed blessings of British civilisation. Dlozi said that ‘At first Europeans were regarded as saviours from the oppressions of the Zulus, but now they are looked on as more tyrannical and oppressive than Tshaka’s wildest schemes.’ If Natal Africans still seemed contented with European rule, this was because ‘to Europeans’ faces they pretend to be satisfied, whereas amongst themselves they speak discontentedly’.55 Similarly, Stuart’s informant Sijewana was of two minds. On the one hand, he said, ‘Natives appreciate English rule because of the security of life and property under it. They are not killed off indiscriminately as under Tshaka without any trial being held.’ Yet Sijewana also complained that Africans ‘are not allowed a voice in the making of laws which concern their own welfare’, and that ‘The system of taxation and collection of taxes [under the British] is a real hardship on the people, and there is much severe suffering in consequence.’56 Lunguza felt the same way. At one point he said, ‘We are better off now that the whites have come. People are permitted to die natural deaths, a far more preferable system of government.’ Yet Lunguza felt that peace came at a cost, for people were inclined to crime as a result: ‘The misbehaviour of nowadays is due to its being impossible to kill off people as formerly. For people are confident that nothing, or very little, can happen, for there is a great chief [i.e., the colonial government] who will stand up for them even though they have done wrong.’57 Even one of Stuart’s European 53 Resolution dated 2 December 1879, from a placard hanging in the hall of the Pietermaritzburg Archives Repository, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. For further information on the participation of Natal Africans on the British side in the AngloZulu War, see Mahoney, The Other Zulus, ch. 2. 54 JSA: Qalizwe, V, p. 228. 55 JSA: Dlozi, I, p. 93. 56 JSA: Sijewana, V, p. 331. 57 JSA: Lunguza, I, p. 331.

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informants argued that Natal Europeans had generally misinterpreted African quiescence: ‘If Natives were wanting protection or anything, they appreciated our protection. They wanted protection whilst the Zulu menace lasted. They never asked for or desired our rule.’58 African participation in the Anglo-Zulu War was not a vindication of British colonial rule, but rather a chance for Natal Africans such as the Qwabe to exact revenge upon Shaka’s and Dingane’s successors. According to one of Stuart’s informants, Cetshwayo met some Qwabe soldiers after his capture on 28 August 1879: During the [1879] Zulu war Qwabe people were recruited and took part. After his capture Cetshwayo saw them and said, ‘And you too, Qwabe, do you take part against us? Are you still harbouring feelings of revenge against us?’ The Qwabes in question were actually present when the capture was effected. The ancient quarrel was therefore being kept still alive by the Qwabes.59

The events of Shaka’s reign were clearly still highly relevant to the politics of the region more than fifty years after his death. Between 1898 and 1906, more inclusive conceptions of Zulu group identity emerged, coupled with a growing sense – among both Africans and Europeans in Natal – of impending anti-colonial rebellion. The impetus was the 1898 return from exile of Cetshwayo’s son and successor, Dinuzulu. Although colonial officials reduced him to the status of one chief among many in Natal and Zululand, they could not prevent ordinary Natal Africans from viewing him as their king. From 1898 onwards, rumours spread that Dinuzulu was organising an uprising against the colonial government in Natal. The rumours became more urgent in 1905, when the government introduced a £1 annual poll tax on each unmarried adult male in Natal. Finally, in 1906, Africans in Natal rose up in arms against the colonial state in what is known as the Bhambatha Rebellion – named after the Zulu leader Bhambatha kaMancinza – only to be brutally crushed by the colonial army. The irony was that Dinuzulu had little if anything to do with it. In 1908, a colonial court found him innocent of fomenting or leading the uprising.60 Natal Africans’ rejection of the colonial state and turn towards Dinuzulu was particularly clear in the context of two categories of ceremony that immediately preceded the 1906 uprising. First were the colonial state’s poll tax collection ceremonies. The colonial state in Natal had long appropriated the 58 JSA: J. Shepstone, V, p. 307. 59 JSA: Mayinga, I I, p. 255. 60 The standard account of the Poll Tax, or Bhambatha, Rebellion is S. Marks, Reluctant Rebellion: The 1906–8 Disturbances in Natal (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

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trappings of local African kingship. Even minor colonial officials insisted on being greeted with the royal salute ‘Bayede!’, and punished those who failed to comply, engendering widespread resentment among Africans.61 Such salutes were particularly important in tax collection ceremonies, which were modelled on the umkhosi, or Festival of First Fruits, in which Africans presented the fruits of their harvest and pledged their loyalty to the kings. In 1906, when officials tried to hold such ceremonies for the collection of the new poll tax, many Africans used the opportunity to show where their loyalties really lay. On several occasions, rather than pay the tax, the assembled young men danced the giya war dance – intended to challenge and threaten one’s opponent – and shouted not ‘Bayede!’ but ‘Usuthu!’, which was Dinuzulu’s salute.62 The young men also often wore the war badges known as ubushokobezi, also associated with Dinuzulu.63 In the end, they often left the ceremony without paying the tax, sometimes physically threatening colonial officials in the process. The second category of ceremony preceding the 1906 uprising was the war-doctoring ceremonies held at chiefly homesteads. Again, Dinuzulu’s war badges and ‘Usuthu!’ salute cropped up frequently at these ceremonies.64 In addition, some of the medicine (intelezi) used for the war doctoring supposedly came from Dinuzulu’s homestead, while other medicines were made from the bodies of Europeans killed by rebels.65 Taken together, the actions of Natal Africans during these ceremonies demonstrated that they now thought of themselves as Zulus. Perhaps the most important aspect of the ceremonies was the evidence they provided showing that dramatic changes in Natal Africans’ attitudes 61 J. Lambert, Betrayed Trust: Africans and the State in Colonial Natal (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996), pp. 185–6. 62 Secretary for Native Affairs, South African National Archives (hereafter SNA) 1/4/15 C48/1906 Sgt E. W. L’Estrange NP to Sub-Insp. Clifton NP, 22 January 1906; 1/MPO 5/ 4 Statement, Nkomonopondo, 5 March 1906; SNA 1/1/335 400/1906 Report, RM Mapumulo, 5 February 1906; SNA 1/1/341 1426/1906 Statement, Swayimana, 19 March 1906; SNA 1/1/341 1426/1906 Statement, Sgt Mhlazana NP, 19 March 1906; SNA 1/4/15 C67/1906 H. Carter to USNA, 31 January 1906; 1/MPO 5/4 Statement, Swayimana, 8 March 1906; 1/MPO Statement, Swayimana, 1 March 1906. 63 GH 1465 Synopsis of wires received from 6PM 14 May 1906 to 6PM 15 May 1906, p. 147; SNA 1/1/343 1897/1906 Statement, Mabeza, 23 June 1906; GH 1550 7220/1907 RM Mapumulo to Col. Sec., 6 November 1907. 1/MPO Add. 1/1/1 Natal Mounted Rifles Intelligence Book, Report Tshabalala, 21 June 1906; Report, Matingwana, 21 June 1906; Report, Tom Khuzwayo, 26 June 1906. 64 Ibid. 65 1/MPO 5/4 Statement, Sifo, 21 July 1906; Statement, Henry Hosking, Trooper NMR, 29 July 190; Statement, Bixa, 2 August 1906; Statement, Thomas d.Oglesby, Sr, [n.d.]. 1/ MPO Add. 1/1/1 Natal Mounted Rifles Intelligence Book, Report, John Hlonono, 25 June 1906; Report, Tom Khuzwayo, 26 June 1906. GH 1471 112/1906 Gov. to Col. Sec., 19 June 1906.

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towards the Zulu kings and towards each other had occurred. First, participants included men – or the sons and grandsons of men – who had fought for the British against the Zulu king. In fact, one centre for war doctoring was the homestead of the Qwabe chief, Meseni. Second, whereas between 1880 and 1906 young men usually gathered to be doctored for feuds against young men from neighbouring chiefdoms, during the 1906 rebellion young men from formerly feuding chiefdoms gathered together to be doctored for war against the colonial state. In dramatic fashion, young men who had been killing each other only months – even weeks – before were now uniting. Rebels exchanged their chiefs’ spears and war badges. Black goats and bulls were slaughtered, and the contents of their bladders were sprinkled around the rebels. All this was intended to end old feuds and cement the new union of the rebels.66 Such symbols have continued to be used by popular Zulu political movements ever since.67

KwaZulu-Natal Province as a Post-genocidal Society The grudges that members of once-victimised Zulu chiefdoms held towards the Zulu kings are no longer apparent, and a sense of common Zulu ethnicity is strong among the descendants of both the perpetrators and victims. Yet it would be wrong to think that the Zulu people have lacked internal conflict in the century since the 1906 uprising. Political struggles between, for example, supporters of the ANC and supporters of the Zulu nationalist Inkatha Freedom Party were very apparent, even among Zulu speakers, during the 1980s and 1990s, leading to tens of thousands of deaths. There have even been struggles within Inkatha, such as those between supporters of King Goodwill Zwelethini and supporters of the Inkatha party head Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi. In addition, feuding between neighbouring chiefdoms, which first 66 SNA 1/1/352 3440/1906 Depositions, Sambana ka Gunjini, Zwelabo ka Fingwana, et al., 16 October 1906; SNA 1/1/353 3482/1906 Report, RM Lower Tugela, 8 November 1906; SNA 1/1/399 1476/1908 Report, RM Lower Tugela, 12 April 1908; SNA 1/1/399 1476/ 1908 Statement, Meseni, 20 March 1907; SNA 1/1/414 3263/1908 Report, RM Lower Tugela, 30 November 1906. 67 See, for example, P. la Hausse, ‘The message of the warriors: the ICU, the labouring poor, and the making of popular political culture in Durban, 1925–1930’ in Holding Their Ground: Class, Locality, and Culture in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century South Africa, ed. Philip Bonner (Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press; Braamfontein: Ravan Press, 1989), esp. 30, 37; and Sandra Klopper, ‘“He is my king, but he is also my child”: Inkatha, the African National Congress, and the struggle for control over Zulu cultural symbols’, Oxford Art Journal 19:1 (1996), 53–66.

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became a real problem in the 1880s, has continued to the present. These different categories of conflict and violence have often overlapped with one another.68 For the most part, these struggles do not reflect the conflicts between the Zulu kings and the peoples they conquered in the 1810s, 1820s and 1830s. However, exceptions do exist. During the 1980s and 1990s, the ANC was more popular south of the Thukela River, in areas conquered by the Zulu kings, while Inkatha was more popular north of the river, in the Zulu heartland. Similarly, in the early 2000s, twelve chiefs in KwaZulu-Natal petitioned the South African government to end their legal subordination to the Zulu king, citing their chiefdoms’ independence before the reign of Shaka. The government convened the Nhlapo Commission to address the matter from 2003 to 2008 and ultimately concluded that the chiefdoms were subject to the Zulu king, but the whole affair demonstrated that resistance to Zulu conquest was not entirely dead, even 200 years later.69 Still, neither memories of Shaka’s and Dingane’s depredations nor a sense of victimisation and injustice are widespread among the genocide survivors’ descendants. Quite the contrary: the degree of ethnic unity among the Zulu people is striking. The Zulu collective thus provides one example of a society in which the descendants of perpetrators and the descendants of victims can see themselves as one people. Of course, this does not mean that other causes 68 Little has been written on the conflict among Zulu nationalists in Inkatha’s heyday during the 1980s and early 1990s, an early and isolated exception being A. Sitas, ‘Class, nation, and ethnicity in Natal’s black working class’ in The Societies of Southern Africa in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Institute for Commonwealth Studies, 1990), 257–78. For accounts of violent feuding between members of different Zulu chiefdoms, see J. Clegg, ‘Ukubuyisa isidumbu – “Bringing back the body”: an examination into the ideology of vengeance in the Msinga and Mpofana rural locations, 1882– 1944’ in Working Papers in Southern African Studies, vol. I I , ed. P. Bonner (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1981), 164–98; R. Malan, My Traitor’s Heart (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 336ff.; W. Beinart, ‘Political and collective violence in southern African historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies 18 (1992), 455–86; A. Jeffrey, The Natal Story: Sixteen Years of Conflict (Johannesburg: South African Institute of Race Relations, 1997); Mahoney, The Other Zulus, ch. 3; S. van Baalen and K. Höglund, ‘“So, the killings continued”: wartime mobilization and post-war violence in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa’, Terrorism and Political Violence 31:6 (2019), 1168–86. 69 Nhlapo Commisssion on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims, ‘Determination on AmaZulu paramountcy’, Media statement by the Minister for Provincial and Local Government, Sydney Mufamadi, on the Findings of the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims, 30 April 2008, www.thedplg.gov.za/index.php?option= com_docman&task=cat_view&gid=93&Itemid=27. See also C. Mdletshe, ‘AmaHlubi reject Zulu links’, The Sowetan, 3 August 2007; B. Madlala, ‘Court to decide on amaHlubi monarchy’, www.iol.co.za, 11 August 2005; A. Hlongwane, ‘Twelve kings saga sparks KZN war talk’, Tribune, 8 July 2007; J. Hennop, ‘Nhlapo quits Commission’, Dispatch Online, http://blogs.dispatchnow/2007/11/28/nhlapo-quits-commission, 28 November 2007.

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of conflict and even violence have not emerged to take the place of these memories.

Bibliographic Note on Sources in English Available English-language primary sources on the history of Shaka and Dingane are relatively plentiful, but are also all problematic in their own way. For example, two English traders, Nathaniel Isaacs and Henry Francis Fynn, who arrived among the first English explorers of what is today KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa in 1824, each published their own accounts of their experiences – in Isaacs, Travels and Adventures in Eastern Africa, and Fynn, Diary, ed. Stuart and Malcolm, respectively. Both men’s works are certainly characterised by a fair amount of ethnocentrism, and even racism, though both also express a certain amount of admiration for Shaka, Dingane and the Zulu people more generally. The missionary A. T. Bryant’s works from the late 1800s and early 1900s examining earlier Zulu history – of which the most comprehensive and widely cited is A. T. Bryant, Olden Times in Zululand and Natal (Capetown: C. Struik, 1965) – are voluminous and detailed, but not particularly transparent when it comes to sourcing. As I discussed in my chapter, far and away the best primary source for the early history of KwaZulu-Natal is the James Stuart Archive (ed. Wright and Webb) currently up to six volumes and containing hundreds of testimonies from KwaZulu-Natal Africans from the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was collected by the British colonial official James Stuart, who was raised in Natal and spoke fluent Zulu. Though collected by a white person (and edited for publication by white people), the archive has no shortage of testimony that praises the Zulu kings and criticises British colonialism. For a discussion of the archive and the debates surrounding it, see C. Hamilton, ‘Backstory, biography, and the life of the James Stuart Archive’, History in Africa (January 2011), 319–41. Secondary sources on Shaka and Dingane are also plentiful, and inevitably controversial. Dan Wylie’s Myth of Iron: Shaka in History (Ohio University Press, 2008) is probably the best and most up-to-date biography of Shaka, though Elizabeth A. Eldredge’s The Creation of the Zulu Kingdom (Cambridge University Press, 2014) is another notable recent, academic monograph covering much of the same history. Sifiso Ndlovu’s African Perspectives of King Dingane kaSenzangakhona (Spring, 2017) is the most thorough academic discussion of Dingane, and it lays bare the racial dimensions of the debates 356

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about Dingane, in particular, and Zulu history more generally. John Wright and Carolyn Hamilton, separately and together, have published some of the deepest and best-informed research on early Zulu history, but it is scattered in numerous monographs, journal articles, book chapters and unpublished theses. A short and recent introduction to their work can be found in C. Hamilton and J. Wright, ‘Moving beyond ethnic framing: political differentiation in the chiefdoms of the KwaZulu-Natal region before 1830’, Journal of Southern African Studies 43:4 (2017), 663–79. They have long been rumoured to be writing a book-length synthesis of their work, but it has not yet appeared. Finally, some mention should be made of Norman Etherington’s The Great Treks: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1854 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), which integrates the history of KwaZulu-Natal in the late 1700s and early 1800s into the wider history of conflict and migration throughout the southern African subcontinent during that era; and of John Laband’s The Eight Zulu Kings: From Shaka to Goodwill Zwelithini (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2018), which examines Shaka, Dingane and their successors in a narrative of over 200 years of Zulu royal history.

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRONTIER GENOCIDES

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The Genocidal French Conquest of Algeria, 1830–1847 william gallois

Introduction The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been viewed with suspicion by western scholars. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, expressed both in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide have varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are ‘popular’ rather than ‘academic’, lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies, whereas academic works in the Anglophone and Francophone traditions have tended to operate from remarkably unscholarly and emotive starting points (generally so as to claim that the term ‘genocide’ should not be applied to the Algerian case). Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies (such as Australia, Canada and America), as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria’s north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin’s diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in nineteenth-century Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to ‘recalcitrant’ groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the ‘slow violence’ of the destruction of particular indigenous groups, communities and identities, alongside limited attempts to transfer indigenous children forcibly and to convert them in missions. The relative absence of Algeria from this domain of scholarly scrutiny seems surprising for two reasons. First, because the scale of French violence

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directed towards the groups they collectively described as ‘Indigènes’, and their subsequent demographic decline, were considerable and certainly comparable with other instances of colonial genocide. Second, because Algeria was central to twentieth-century studies of colonial violence. This was chiefly a result of Frantz Fanon’s experiences and his theorisation of the innate violence of relations between the coloniser and the colonised, founded on his work in Algeria, but also because of the manner in which debates on torture, atrocities and war in Algeria were central to French culture at a moment when Francophone moral and intellectual debates were seen as having global significance in both the First and the Third Worlds. To afford readers the opportunity of comparing the Algerian case with other historical accounts of genocide, this chapter follows the general pattern of this series. It begins with a consideration of definitional problems, before moving on to look at the major historical sources available to scholars, existing historiographical debates, the identities of the perpetrators of organised violence, their victims, archival and published evidence of resistance to genocidal violence, and the underlying roots and praxis of cultures of mass violence in north Africa.

Definitional Problems and the Field of Genocide Studies If historical accounts of the conquest of Algeria have tended to reject any association with the idea of genocide or the field of Genocide Studies, this has tended to be based much more on a set of unexamined assumptions than on any detailed knowledge of that latter field. Many French scholars, in particular, have chosen to view this period through the eyes of their forebears and the records which they left behind, working on the commonsensical assumption that wars, empire-building and conquests inevitably generate considerable bloodshed, with most of the human losses inflicted on the defeated parties. The asymmetrical qualities of the effects of violence, and the degree to which these effects were felt solely by soldiers on one side and largely by civilians on the other, have not generally been thought to have been of any great import. Indeed, such outcomes have tended to be viewed as evidence of the substitution of one (inferior) culture by another (superior) society, in what might be seen to be one of many moral forms of reinscription of the mindset of early-nineteenth-century French colonists. If, on the other hand, the colonial wars of the 1830s and 1840s are seen to be exercises in which a huge European army (up to 100,000 men) struggled to 362

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assert absolute forms of dominance over a diverse series of territories which were then corralled into the idea of an Algerian nation-state, the normal definitions of genocide and extermination which are found in specialist literatures would seem to come into play. Taking, for instance, the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the Algerian case would certainly seem to meet its bar in terms of the availability of evidence that the French committed acts ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. The clause ‘in part’ matters a great deal with regard to Algeria, for, beyond the visions of exterminatory ideologues who envisioned an Algeria without Algerians, there is no real claim that the French sought to eliminate complete populations. What also matters are the particularities of the ‘groups’ whom the French encountered in the Maghreb, for while Europeans may have read these entities in national, ethnic, racial or religious ways, these categories do not map particularly well onto the mosaics of north African culture which preceded the arrival of the French forces in 1830. Religious and place-based forms of identity did matter a great deal to indigenous peoples, but their own understandings of these ideas came to be subsumed within the genealogies of knowledge of the imperial state. Of the diagnostic ‘acts’ of genocide described in the 1948 Convention, the Algerian case certainly included ‘Killing members of the group’, ‘Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group’, ‘Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ (to a limited degree) and, most especially, ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. In other words: the preponderance of distinct forms of behaviour identified by the UN definition may be seen in the historic Algerian case. The same is also true of the congruence with the more recent 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and its legal definition of the crime of ‘extermination’. Its specific focus on actions which ‘constituted, or took place as part of, a mass killing of members of a civilian population’ maps incredibly well on to the historical record in the period 1830–47. That this particular crime against humanity needed to have been ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’ also aptly describes the particularities of the Algerian case, where almost no French soldiers died in combat (far more lives were lost to malnutrition, suicide and alcoholism), yet colossal casualty figures were sustained by Indigenous civilian populations. 363

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In the same way that the UN Convention specifically contended that genocide might be determined by the state’s destruction of traditional ecologies and modes of life, the 1998 Statute highlighted the importance not only of massacres, but also of ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’. As we will see, not only do these definitions serve as useful descriptors of the conditions of life in Algeria, but this language and these concepts bear remarkable similarities to the policies and pronouncements of French soldiers and politicians in the mid nineteenth century. Relatedly, the place of this chapter alongside those discussing other socalled ‘frontier genocides’ of the nineteenth century brings to mind comparisons with the work of scholars such as Leo Kuper, and their accounts of ‘genocidal massacres’ at the edge of empire, though in Algeria – as compared with, say, Queensland or other Australian sites – ‘systemic’ forms of elimination were openly discussed and promoted by political elites in the metropole as well as in the colony. Violence was understood not only as a political tool and a mode of communication, but also as a means of more rapidly securing European domination in the case of a colonial adventure which had become remarkably costly and unpopular ‘back home’. We shall now examine more empirically how these concepts fit the Algerian case.

Historical Context Algeria would have been an unusual settler colony had it experienced no genocidal moment. As Herman Merivale, Professor of Political Economy at Oxford from 1837 until 1842, remarked: ‘The history of the European settlements in America, Africa, and Australia presents everywhere the same general features – a wide and sweeping destruction of native races by controlled violence of individuals, if not of colonial authorities, followed by tardy attempts on the part of governments to repair the acknowledged crime.’1 Indeed, it has been more generally argued that, since the colonial encounter pitted industrial and commercial agriculture against pre-modern forms of farming, there was an inevitability to the manner in which the advanced sought to displace the regressive, just as pastoral societies had displaced 1 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and settler society in Australian history’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 29.

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‘nomadic ones on the Eurasian continent’.2 As Donald Denoon remarked, ‘The coexistence of commercial farming and nomadism was impossible everywhere in the long run’, while Patrick Wolfe suggested that settler colonialism was inherently eliminatory given colonists’ overriding interest in seizing land rather than labour.3 Algeria was different in the sense that it was originally not just a settler colony but a military settler colony, populated by at least 100,000 soldiers at its peak. It played a key role in establishing a new form of colonial template for France, and, arguably, the ‘new’ European imperialism of the later nineteenth century.4 Yet it had also begun life as what has sometimes been seen to have been an almost accidental acquisition in 1830, with the initially precarious rationales for its conquest needing to be rethought still further when the Bourbon royal house which had invaded the Maghreb in June 1830 was deposed just months later. (See Map 15.1.) Unsurprisingly, therefore, the first decade of the colony’s life was complicated by debates between politicians, soldiers, ideologues and settlers who argued whether Algeria ought to be retained and, if so, for whose benefit. It was the military, in the shape of the occupying Armée d’Afrique, which was to triumph in such struggles. It successfully argued that its sacrifices on the ground should accord it a dominant role in shaping the culture and rationale of the new colonial state. In the key period of the first two decades following the conquest, the army therefore managed to establish a quasi-independent dominion in Algeria, though it is also becoming increasingly clear that political authorities in the metropole tacitly backed such a project, even if they often wished to be able to complain of the overmighty and brutal army to critics of the occupation in the French press and the Chamber of Deputies.5 2 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Empire, colony, genocide: keywords and the philosophy of history’ in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 24. 3 Donald Denoon, Settler Capitalism: The Dynamics of Dependent Development in the Southern Hemisphere (Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 26; Patrick Wolfe, ‘Structure and event: settler colonialism, time, and the question of genocide’ in Empire, colony, genocide, ed. Moses, 102–32. 4 I am extremely grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the aptness of comparing the case of New Caledonia (annexed by France in 1853) with that of Algeria, given the similarity of instances of ‘large-scale deaths, land despoliation, [and] refoulement’ in both cases, detailed further in Jean Guiart, La terre et le sang des morts: la confrontation entre blancs et noirs dans le Pacifique sud français (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1983). 5 Alexis de Tocqueville, Writings on Empire and Slavery, ed. and with an introduction by Jennifer Pitts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). See also: Cheryl B. Welch, ‘Colonial violence and the rhetoric of invasion: Tocqueville on Algeria’, Political Theory 31:2 (April 2003), 235–64; Tzvetan Todorov, ‘Introduction: Tocqueville et

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MEDITERRANEAN SEA Bône Algiers

N

Bougie

Constantine

Blida Mostaganem

Sidi-bel-Abbès H I G H Tlemcen

Sétif U E A A T P L

Khenchela Téhessa Biskra

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TUNISIA

Oran

Philippeville

El Oued Touggourt

Ghardaïa Figuig

Ouargla

0 0

100 100

200 mi 200

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El Goléa

Map 15.1 The French conquest of Algeria, 1830–75. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

In spite of the reluctance of later generations of historians, French writers of the 1830s and 1840s certainly compared the nascent Algerian colony with the experiences of other settler colonies. As the French Deputy Amédée Desjobert noted in 1838, it was commonly believed that ‘the first step towards colonisation was the extermination of indigenous peoples’.6 In the case of Algeria, if ‘the complete extermination of the Algerian population’ was not possible, then at the very least the British example in America should be followed, ‘with partial extermination and the complete dispersal [refoulement]’ of local populations. Desjobert called for honesty in admitting that France wanted to exterminate Algerians, observing that this was a predictable outcome in colonial situations and that it needed to be acknowledged that an exterminatory ‘système’ had already been established in Algeria.7 This was partly founded on a racialised view of Algeria in which the presence of other peoples la doctrine coloniale’ in Alexis de Tocqueville, De la colonie en Algérie (Paris: Complexe, 1988), 9–34; Melvin Richter, ‘Tocqueville on Algeria’, Review of Politics 25 (1963), 362–98. 6 A. Desjobert, L’Algérie en 1838 (Paris: P. Dufart, 1838), p. 51. 7 Ibid., pp. 85–6.

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militated against the potential success of the French: as he put it, the ‘Arabs would never change their ways’, the Kabyles ‘were still more intractable’ and the Moors and Jews were incapable of working the land.8 Desjobert admitted, nonetheless, that the significance of these categorisations was predicated on the French desire to take land, to exploit it, and to export settlers from the metropole. None of these things had been countenanced by the Regency of Algeria’s previous imperial masters, the Ottomans, who had not therefore needed to follow the French path of ‘l’extermination des indigènes’.9 The predominant vehicle for this ‘extermination’ was the ‘razzia’, based on the Arabic term ghaziya, which quickly migrated into French (along with the neologic verbs razzier and se razzier) in the 1830s, becoming the most popular loan word in an environment which was generally deeply resistant to any form of borrowing from local culture.10 The razzia, or raid, was understood by the French to be a form of attack that had formed the mainstay of relations between rival tribes before 1830. Such raids were alleged to have been characterised by both great violence and their confiscatory character, as livestock, booty and, occasionally, villagers were seized by one tribe from the other. The razzia was generally disdained as a military tactic in the legalist atmosphere of the very early colony. General Théophile Voirol, who served as military commander at this moment, and others alleged that Algerians would only recognise the moral superiority of French rule if Europeans were to reject the primitivism of local cultures of violence. However, by the late 1830s, it had become entrenched as the default form of assault on ‘recalcitrant’ tribes. This arose in part because of the growing ascendancy of military theories which alleged that the French needed to mirror the violence of local practices in order to entrench their rule in the Maghreb, and partly because an under-resourced army came to rely on the grain, sheep, cattle and gold which they seized on such raids. The razzia was therefore a rapidly evolving form of warfare and, as the colony moved into its second decade, generals such as Bugeaud and Baraguey d’Hilliers began to theorise and practise razzias in new ways, which often had the destruction of whole tribes as their explicit rationale. The extent to which this vindictive system operated at a local level was made plain in the accounts of French razzias, while the extent to which it was conceived of as being systematic can often be found in routine asides of reports from the front. To 8 Desjobert, La question d’Alger, pp. 84–6. 9 Ibid., p. 51. 10 What the French did not acknowledge were the antecedents for the razzia in their own earlier campaigning in Andalucía and the Vendée.

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take one example, on 10 August 1847, the Minister was sent a report on the Cercles of Algiers which generally focused on the state of calm which existed across most of the region, excepting the Cercle d’Aumale, where it was reported that a state of ‘anarchy reigned amongst the Kabyles’: All have come to us, all have given proofs of their submission, either by paying a part of the achour or in returning stolen goods, yet we have still not been able to bring in all of the Djemma. Fractions of this chaotic tribe never cease to seize opportunities to ransack each other. So as to bring an end to this deplorable state of affairs, the tribe, on whom the security of the route to the Oued Sahel depends, are to be reduced. The superior officer in the Cercle has established a squadron upon their territory, whilst all the neighbouring tribes protected by these troops are seizing the grain of the Beni Sala. It seems probable that in persevering with this system, we will finish by completely reducing this tribe.11

This unexceptional reporting of the eradication (‘reduction’) of the Beni Sala is interesting on a series of levels, for it reveals the detailed fabric of genocidal massacres in Algeria, and the manner in which such onslaughts were understood to cohere together as part of an approach which was deployed systematically across the country.

Archival Knowledge and the Elite Direction of Systematic Forms of Violence One of the curiosities of the history of colonial violence in north Africa is that radically different moral norms pertained at different moments, especially with regard to the degree of openness and frankness with which political elites were willing to discuss the systematic extermination or collective punishment of civilian populations. In the case of Algeria, which was largely formative of the cultures of later conquests, the letters and reports found at the French military archives in Vincennes are extraordinarily rich in terms of their documentation of programmatic assaults on portions of the Algerian population in the 1830s and 1840s. Such violence is invariably regretted, but it is nonetheless described in real detail. By way of contrast, the French invasion of Tunisia in the 1880s is much less well documented, though by the early twentieth century, the advent of photography and the widespread circulation of postcards and other forms of visual ephemera generated a quite new openness to the presentation of atrocities in the cases of Morocco and Libya. 11 Service Historique de la Défense 1 H 121, 10 August 1847.

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Each of these cases was, nonetheless, grounded in a single coherent idea, akin to that described by Marlow in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to.12

The idea is ‘unselfish’ because its futurity imposes a set of moral obligations on the Self in the present, but also because this is the shared selfhood of the Self and the ward-Other. In political terms, this idea of ‘wardship’ of the Other generated the eventual (unique) incorporation of the Algerian colony into the borders of the French metropole. Its existence can be divined from letters – technologies of the self and of power as Foucault rightly observed – and the genre of the colonial letter above all. Such writing brought together reportage, directives and meditations of a kind which were deeply personal, yet also conversational as they were directed towards an interlocutor. In fact, even private colonial correspondence was often written with a series of audiences in mind, for the writer understood that others might have access to the correspondence, that extracts might be incorporated into propaganda, newspapers or journals, whilst the presumed readers of times to come were invoked in notions of posterity and futurity. The writer of the letter also, of course, wrote for and to himself, engaging in a form of synthetic dialogue as positions of surety and confidence were reached from starting points of doubt, and this itself may have been grounded in an idea of shared responsibility or selfhood with the letter’s recipient. Critically, in such letters, the materiality – the embodiment – of the Algerian disappeared, for the Other became a kind of fiction. Just as the notion of the Self was assumed and not seen, the same could be true of the interiorised Other. In such correspondence, we very rarely find physical descriptions of Algerians, which might destroy the illusory effect. The shift which is inaugurated in the documents of the early 1840s is one in which French power moves beyond its advocacy of mimetic violence – in which the barbarism of savage Others is necessarily mirrored – to new notions of symbolic, ideological violence, in which the annihilation of Others is construed as a form of anticipatory benevolence. In other words, 12 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, 4th ed. (New York: Norton, 2006), pp. 6–7.

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all will eventually benefit from such decisiveness, and all share in the responsibility of taking such a path and heading into a new future. Now the Other engages in an imagined dialogue in the mind of the Self so that the outcomes of such policies are construed as dialogic rather than simply the responsibility of the Self. The second thoughts of the textual remnants of such thinking reveal the care which was taken – psychologically, as well as politically – in constructing this new logic of morality and the self. Jean-de-Dieu Soult, Nicolas Soult, Duc de Dalmatie, Maréchal Soult (1769– 1851) was a man of many names and titles, yet one whose career tends to be forgotten amidst the political and military drama of the French nineteenth century. If Soult is remembered, it tends to be as a soldier in the Napoleonic period, particularly in the Prussian campaign of 1806 and the Spanish Peninsular War of 1808–14. His political career was seemingly characterised by a willingness to adapt to changing circumstances and to recast his views to suit shifting political moods: as a Napoleonic general, then a royalist Minister of War from December 1814 to March 1815, followed by a renewed loyalty to Napoleon I until Waterloo, an interlude in exile, and then a period of more substantial engagement when he served as both Louis Philippe’s Minister of War (1830–4 and 1840–4) and the Président de la Conseil (1832–4 and 1839–47). Reputedly dominated and overshadowed by Guizot as a politician, Soult rediscovered a republican identity in 1848, dying soon after, with his Mémoires (1854) confirming the view many held that his career should be viewed as exemplifying ambition over conviction. Newly discovered documents from the Service Historique de la Défense, the archives of the French army at Vincennes, however, reveal that Soult was a much more substantial historical and political figure than has been believed. His stage, though, was not the metropole, but the new Algerian colony, whose character and purpose he defined over the critical decades which followed the French invasion of June 1830. Soult’s role in forging the Algerian colony has tended to be ignored both by his biographers and by historians of the period, who instead tend to focus on the career of Maréchal Bugeaud (Governor General, 1840–6) as the originator of the brutal and definitive conquest of the 1840s. This tendency is strange on a number of levels, primarily because Soult was ultimately responsible for French policy in Algeria through its first decades for a much longer period than any other soldier or politician, with the key focus of his dual roles as Minister of War and Président de la Conseil (equivalent to prime minister) being the establishment of a permanent French colony in North Africa. Correspondence between Soult and Bugeaud, much of it secret, reveals 370

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that the two men worked together as architects of French policy in Algeria, and that it is wrong to view Bugeaud as the brutal subjugator in contrast to Soult’s advocacy of the so-called ‘restrained occupation’. In fact, both men were enthusiastic supporters and innovators of razzias – punitive raids and massacres – and a culture of complete domination as a means of definitively securing Algeria as a French possession. That Soult is generally associated with a so-called ‘legalist’ stance – which contended that the norms of European warfare should also apply in Africa – is a consequence of his consistent public advocacy of such positions. Grounded in the notion of the essential beneficence of the French colonial project, Soult and others argued that the success of the occupation would only be achieved if Algerians were able to see that the French were driven by a higher moral purpose and that this was reflected in the manner in which they treated a subjugated people. The alternative was the so-called ‘unrestrained occupation’ in which Europeans would descend to the forms of cruelty which allegedly characterised inhabitants of the ‘Barbary Coast’, where pragmatism and incivility trumped European morals. The correspondence of Soult and Bugeaud, however, reveals the degree to which the prime minister was a private advocate of precisely the kind of brutalities which he found impossible to defend in public (to the French political classes and the metropolitan population, as well as to other Europeans who took a keen interest in the morality of their peer’s empires – and, presumably, to Algerian audiences themselves). Indeed, it was in the hesitant rewritings of these letters that Soult came to construct the moral logic which underpinned a complete about-turn in French ethical thinking about violence in empire. While the legalist position had essentially been grounded in both ethics of justice (stressing the fair and equal treatment of Europeans and Indigenous peoples) and beneficence (the ‘civilising mission’), the later Soult began to view extreme forms of violence as forms of communication appropriate to the kinds of conversations Europeans had with Arabs and Berbers in Algeria. In ethical terms, this depended upon a concept of futurity in which the immediate horrors of massacres and burnings could be justified by the hastening of a forthcoming moment of communal prosperity. This anticipatory beneficence constituted a quite new form of moral thinking in empire.13 13 See Pierre Guiral and Raoul Brunon, eds., Aspects de la vie politique et militaire en France au milieu du Xxe siècle à travers la correspondance reçue par le Maréchal Pélissier (1828–1864) (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1968), p. 32, and Christian Schefer, ‘La “conquête totale”

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In April 1842, Soult wrote to Bugeaud: You have operated amongst the territories of the Beni Menasser, where many [plusieurs? – ‘several’?] villages were sacked or burned. These were more than just reprisals designed to punish them for their incessant warring against us. I applaud the humanitarian sentiments which led to your generous treatment of the women, the old and the children who were not able to flee, and your having given them sustenance, and even clothing. In acting thus, the horrors of war are diminished and we profit from the impressions which emerge in the feelings of the people.14

These words were exemplary in the way that they conveyed a philosophy of violence held by both metropolitan French political power and the army in Africa. Violence (villages ‘sacked or burned’) was understood to be a powerful form of communication, as well as a tool of punishment, for the razzia’s theatres of flames and destruction were believed to be understood by audiences who could decipher such language. There existed a conviction that effective forms of dialogue had taken place, in spite of the fact that we cannot hear the voices of France’s interlocutors. The ‘impressions which emerge[d] in the feelings of the people’ were figments of the colonial imagination, but in some ways they were more powerful for their being interior dramatisations of interchanges which took place in the mind rather than between peoples. After all, such personal fantasies could not be contradicted and possessed the capacity to enrich the moral imagination. In the genre of the letter, Soult was able to imagine ‘the people’, not only Bugeaud, as a co-producer – on the page and in life – of this new colonial Self. However brutal this might seem, such attacks were emphatically perceived to have been driven by an ethic of beneficence. Recognising the rightful qualities of a village in flames required access to a moral sensibility which could look beyond the ‘horrors’ of the immediate moment, both to a past where such tribes had persistently wronged the French and to a better future which was hastened through the most savage forms of communicative assault – by ‘just reprisals’. This time to come was evidently represented by the adjoining ‘humanitarian sentiments’ made manifest in the protection which the army afforded the weakest members of the tribe. This coupling of violence with such ‘sentiments d’humanité’, with the latter morally underwriting the former, was arguably as important as the broader and de l’Algérie (1839–1843): Valée, Bugeaud et Soult’, Revue d’Histoire des colonies françaises 4 (1916), 19–76. 14 SHD 1 H 82, Soult to Bugeaud, April 1842.

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better-known stress on a so-called ‘mission civilisatrice’ in the French empire. Each reveals something of the other, in that they were formed around a moral kernel of beneficence, in which sentiments of goodness excused any manifestations of the idea which might have appeared less virtuous, be they the Algerian children taken from their families to live in model Christian schools or the charred remains of villagers massacred in razzias. Here, horrors were ‘diminished’ or dissolved by horrors in a moral economy in which ‘profit’ was the ultimate goal. Just as Europeans acted communally – in that French soldiers stood as representatives of a civilisation – here the Indigenous peoples of Algeria were massed together as a collective mind. The notion of ‘l’esprit des populations’ somehow brought together both a Hegelian sense of a spirit alive amongst a people and Khaldunian notions of asabiya, or group loyalty, such that the French were able to see an Algerian body, primed for operation, which drew on both local and European understandings of the world. Looked at more closely, we might also learn a great deal from the language, evasions and absences of such a text, which begins ‘vous avez opéré dans la tribu des Beni Menasser, où plusieurs villages ont été saccagés ou incendiés’. Here our attention is instantly drawn to the verb ‘opérer’ and the manner in which Bugeaud is said to have ‘operated’ ‘in/amongst the tribes of the Beni Menasser’, with the technical language of the verb form expressing a surgical cleanliness to a business which both men knew to be far messier in reality – enhanced by the notion that the French acted ‘in’ rather than ‘against’ their adversaries. The identities of their antagonists are anyhow left productively indistinct in the sense that they were abstract, inanimate ‘villages’ rather than peoples. Moreover, by means of employment of the passive voice, no subject is assigned the responsibility for the assailing of these places. Instead, as though it were an act of God witnessed by all parties, we simply learn that ‘numerous villages were sacked or burned’, with the accountability of the French left fruitfully unclear.15 Such forms of linguistic evasion are commonly found in French writing on violence from this moment. Texts rarely deployed simple forms of description in which a European subject acted upon an Algerian object, for the blunt realities of ‘punishment’ could be more allusively communicated through the passive voice, pathetic fallacy or other forms of elision which introduced the idea of violence itself as an actor – a force for which the French did not have 15 Marie-Cécile Thoral, From Valmy to Waterloo: France at War, 1789–1815 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 78–9.

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to assume full responsibility. Thus, in the last days of 1842, Ducuing reported that ‘Our bayonets and our shells produced their customary effect’,16 whilst, months later, Saint-Arnaud wrote to the governor general, ‘I have the honour of informing you that the Beni Ferrah tribe, one of the first who declared against us, have been severely punished by our arms.’17 Writing to Soult that same month, Bugeaud described the campaigning of Le Bar, in which ‘The punishment of the Beni Ziveni had been severe, but well merited.’18 Typically, such assaults had been framed around burnings, recounted in the most oblique of fashions, as the governor general wrote that ‘On the following day, the 20th, at the moment of departure, . . . fires broke out in every direction’,19 recalling the mass of justificatory literature associated with the infamous massacre of the Ouled Riah at Dahra, where almost every form of nature – flames, smoke, wind, the caverns – was alleged to have played a critical role in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.20 As General Loyré d’Arbouville approvingly wrote to the architect of the assault, Colonel Pélissier (who would himself later be appointed governor general), this was an attack ordered ‘against the caves of the Ouled Riah’, rather than the tribespeople sheltering within.21 In any case, and quite typically, the Other shared responsibility with the Self for the outcomes of such assaults. As Bugeaud wrote afterwards to Pélissier: It was a cruel extreme to which these senseless ones reduced you, but they cannot claim any sense of ignorance of the situation. You did all that was humanly possibly to get them to reach terms with you, without resorting to rigorous means. I support your magnanimity, whilst I also support everything which you did after exhausting the path of gentleness.22

Morality was therefore dialogic in that it expressed conversations between Selves and Others, in which the Other’s recalcitrance might be seen to force the Self into actions which it might not otherwise have considered. The notion that ‘villages’ were attacked also served as tacit recognition of the fact that the French saw themselves as operating in a theatre in which distinctions did not need to be made between combatants and civilians: a form of prototypical guerrilla war (or, more accurately, a counter-insurgency 16 F. Ducuing, La Guerre de montagne (Navarre 1834–35 et Kabylie 1841–47) (Paris: Hachette, 1868), p. 150. 17 1 H 88–1–246 – letter from Saint-Arnaud to Governor General, 2 February 1843. 18 1 H 88–1–415 – letter from Minister to Governor General, 25 February 1843. 19 Ibid. 20 William Gallois , ‘Dahra and the history of colonial violence in Algeria’ in The French Colonial Mind, ed.Martin Thomas, 2 vols (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012), I I, 3–25. 21 Guiral and Brunon, eds., Aspects de la vie, p. 53. 22 Ibid., p. 41.

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without guerrilla warfare). The overstated praise for protection of the weak served to complement, and therefore purportedly excuse, what we may presume to have been the elimination of the men of the villages (leaving aside the fact that, in many such razzias, women, children and the old were as much the targets of the army as men). Indeed, there is in this text a curious absence of the men of war from both camps. The two recognised actors are the military high command who directed such incursions, and a symbolic, spared subset of the local population. In part as a means of exploring the moral hesitancy which surrounded attacks entailing the systematic massacring of men, women and children, in which distinctions between combatants and civilians were intentionally abandoned, French soldiers often left behind detailed accounts of such razzias. Great stocks of moral arguments were accumulated to explain such European savagery, most commonly in the claim that it was only through the decisive immediacy of such brutally expressive violence that a longer-term reconciliation of races might be possible. As the ‘embedded’ British journalist Dawson Borrer put it in 1847, having experienced a particularly punishing campaigning season in the Kabylie: ‘In other cases, policy and even humanity have required energetic and repulsive proceedings, – cruel, barbarous, and apparently unnecessary to the observant mind, – but proceedings which tended to prevent a more protracted struggle, and a consequently greater sacrifice of victims.’23 Such counterintuitive humanitarian intentions were meshed to psychological explanations of the behaviour of individual soldiers, for whom massacring became a form of release in an environment where European suffering was assuaged through its being redirected back towards Africans: The only sort of excuse, for the horrors committed by the soldiery in Algeria, is their untamed passions, and the fire added to their natural ferocity, by the atrocious cruelties so often committed by the Arabs upon their comrades in arms, who have been so unhappy as to fall into their power. A thirst for revenge is a passion natural to the human breast, and one of the most difficult to assuage. As the French-African soldier rushes in to overwhelm a tribe, he thinks of the many of his comrades who have been roasted alive before blazing Arab fires, – of others who have been mutilated and tortured in the most horrible manner, and their mangled bodies defiled with insults even after death; he thinks about his own sufferings, during the 23 Dawson Borrer, Narrative of a campaign against the Kabailes of Algeria, with the mission of M. Suchet to the Emir Abd-el-Kader for an exchange of prisoners (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848), p. 130.

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expedition, – of his own fate if the chances of war are against him; and every drop of Arab blood is a salve to his feelings. As he bayonets an infant, he regards it as the mere crushing of a devil’s brood.24

Borrer’s warped and contradictory logic in these two instances seems unimportant given the prevalence of such forms of explanation in the 1830s and 1840s. In fact, the notion that massacres might contain within them kernels of benevolence was mocked in much of the French press at the time, whilst French soldiers were peculiarly unlikely to suffer the tortuous fates they often imagined.25 Yet the true importance of such contentions were the case that they built in support of increasingly programmatic systems of annihilation. These ‘systèmes’, as they began to be called even by French generals in the 1840s, reimagined the razzia as a form of onslaught that would definitively subdue tribes both in the present (through massacres) and the future (through the destruction of their habitats and villages, as well as the confiscation of their goods and food). This may legitimately be considered genocide.

Indigenous Accounts of Colonial Violence It might be argued that the historical underestimation of the scale of the loss of life in Algeria came about precisely because the French programme of destruction was not as completely annihilatory as, say, the settler colonial experience in America or Australia. In contrast to those cases, Algerians remained a numeric majority in their own land throughout the colonial period, and from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards they were able to reconstitute Indigenous societies from subaltern positions. Nonetheless, our key indigenous sources from the 1830s and 1840s – Hamdan Khodja and Ahmed, Bey of Constantine – were not to know that their people would ultimately live more like the black majority of apartheid South Africa than the Cheyenne Native Americans or the Aboriginal Australians of Tasmania. Indigenous actors well understood that a project of destruction for replacement was being enjoined, and that destruction itself was a form of replacement. Having written a seminal text on what he saw as the true character of 24 Ibid., pp. 130–1. 25 See William Gallois, A History of Violence in the Early Algerian Colony (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Michael Taussig, ‘Culture of terror, space of death: Roger Casement’s Putumayo Report and the explanation of torture’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 26:3 (1984), 467–97.

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militarised governance in Algeria – entitled The Mirror26 so as to suggest the forms of self-deception which underwrote a project of annihilation grounded in the idea of goodness – Hamdan Khodja, a leading landowner, merchant and functionary, felt bound to respond to French critics who continued to claim that the Conquest was a model of liberal imperialism. Writing in July 1834, just four years after the arrival of French troops, Khodja maintained that, after a single month of exploring the idea of working with local elites under Governor General Bourmont, the arrival of Clauzel in August 1830 marked the end of any concept of shared forms of governance. Instead, Clauzel’s tenure inaugurated the making of ‘a new Peru’, with Khodja predicting a future for Algeria in which a lust for booty would combine with the Columbian destruction of local ecologies and the introduction of new diseases, resulting in demographic decline and the economic capture of Indigenous peoples.27 ‘Everyone sought quickly to enrich themselves’, he wrote, in a ‘system of extermination and ruination’ (‘une système d’extermination et de spoliation’).28 This early recognition of a systematic quality of extermination and economic destruction was critical because it countered the notion that massacres (such as that of the El Ouffia in 1832) and other observable instances of atrocities were aberrant, arguing instead that they were formative of a culture of governance. The trope of the ‘isolated incident’ would often be used by the French in debates at home and amongst Europeans – as in the Dahra massacre of 1845 – but Khodja described a radically new form of life emerging in Algeria, which was built not upon accidents, but upon systems and strategy. These were Patrick Wolfe’s ‘processes’, not simply ‘events’. This stress on the revolutionary qualities of processive violence was also emphasised by Ahmed, Bey of Constantine, whose appeals to the French, the British and the Ottomans revealed a determination to describe the ‘replacement’ effects of the intertwining of immediate and structural forms of destruction. As he and 2,246 co-signatories, representing the ‘notables of Constantine, the heads of the great families, thinkers, teachers and professors, the ‘Ulema and the Bedouin chiefs and their notables’, all wrote to the British

26 Hamdan Khodja, Le Miroir: aperçu historique et statistique sur la Régence d’Alger (Paris: Sindbad, 1985 [1833]). 27 Khodja, in Abdeljelil Temmimi, Le Beylik de Constantine et Hadj ‘Ahmed Bey (1830–1837) (Tunis: Publications de la Revue d’Histoire Maghrébine, 1978), p. 274. 28 Ibid.

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parliament in 1834, contrasting the British role in the global anti-slavery movement with the French enslavement of Algerians: We write to inform your honourable Parliament that the French entered Algiers after signing, aided by your consul’s work as an intermediary, a welldefined treaty. However, the French have not respected the terms of this treaty. On the contrary, they have followed a quite different path in choosing to expel people from this land without cause, in separating husbands from their wives and families whilst seizing their possessions, in subverting religion, in taking control of the habous [waqf 29] that Muslims established for the poor, in taking over mosques in order to live in them or to rent them to traders. Furthermore, they have unjustly destroyed houses, killed and massacred without cause, unfairly imprisoned others, desecrated graves, and impoverished all the inhabitants of Algiers. As for the Bedouins who inhabit neighbouring areas, they were massacred in spite of their having made peace with the French and their women and children were killed pitilessly. In the history of oppression, we have never come across such extreme examples of injustice.30

This catalogue of forms of destruction described the varieties of immediate and slow, processual or structural violence which characterised the French occupation from its inception. As the Bey went on to write, ‘it is quite clear that their intention is to destroy Islamic law, to spill blood, to change the religion of the place, and to avenge themselves against the living as much as the dead [‘de se venger des vivants comme des morts’]’.31 Thus, as Khodja had also underscored, while individual massacres mattered, it was critical to see that the progressive project of destruction was grounded in forms of slow and structural violence which sought to annihilate the culture of the living as much as that of the dead.

Assessing the toll of Colonial Violence The demographic consequences of the forms of war centred on exterminatory razzias were evidently considerable. The most recent estimate of the toll is that of Brower, who has reckoned that: around 825,000 Algerian lives were ended because of the violence in the first forty-five years of the French occupation, and an equal number died in the famines and epidemics triggered, in large part by the colonial-induced economic mutations suffered by Algerian society. When the emigration of 29 Endowed income tithed by Muslims for public and charitable social goods. 30 Temmimi, Le Beylik, p. 228. 31 Ibid., p. 229 (emphasis added).

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Figure 15.1 French colonial school map of Algeria, c.1950.

people who fled colonial rule is counted, Algeria lost a total of nearly half its precolonial population, from about four million people in 1830 to the roughly two million Algerians (indigènes) counted in 1872.32

In all, approximately 1.65 million dead and 350,000 refugees. Other estimations of population decline vary – Xavier Yacono believed the population to have declined by 650,000, or 20 per cent, in the period 1830–56,33 while Kateb contended that 700,000 perished in the 1860s alone.34 What is generally accepted is that the French empire induced an Algerian demographic catastrophe. Returning to the language of the 1948 Genocide Convention and the 1998 Rome Statute, this ‘die-out’ was clearly induced not only by ‘Killing members 32 As quoted in Benjamin Brower, A Desert Named Peace: The Violence of France’s Empire in the Algerian Sahara, 1844–1902 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), p. 4. 33 Jacques Frémeaux, La France et l’Algérie en guerre: 1830–1870, 1954–1962 (Paris: Economica, 2002), p. 260. 34 Kamel Kateb, Européens, ‘indigènes’ et juifs en Algérie (1830–1962): représentations et réalités des populations (Paris: PUF, 2001), p. 47; for further estimates, see Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 364–74.

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of the group’, but also through ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ and ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter alia the deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’. From the late 1830s onwards, the chief aim of the French state and its army was an assault on nature and markets in Algeria, motivated by a need to diminish the capacity of Indigenous peoples to continue to live as autonomous agents. The colonist’s frustration with such independent life is replayed over and over again, with the commonplace description of tribes as being ‘recalcitrant’ across the mass of archival records from the period. To take one example, Soult wrote to Bugeaud in February 1843 of the ‘very severe punishment’ meted out in the Kabylie, which had included the ‘cruel extreme’ of ‘burning great numbers of villages’, as well as ‘destroying at least 20,000 fruit trees’.35 He hoped, nonetheless, ‘that we will profit from such actions, even with those who have been recalcitrant till now’.36 The temporal character of this instrumental assault on Indigenous peoples and their livelihood was made plain in his concluding remarks that ‘Since such terrible work preserves our own future, let us hope that similar forms of devastation will not always need to be inflicted upon those who make our following such paths inevitable!’ The victims were blamed for their own destruction and suffering.

Bibliographic Note The history of nineteenth-century Algeria is still strikingly under-researched, while the generic conventions of military and colonial history have tended to exclude the idea of genocide as an analytic tool. This would certainly seem to be the case in classic works on the colony by writers such as Charles-Robert Ageron (for example, in Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine, 8th ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); De l’Algérie ‘française’ à l’Algérie algérienne (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2005)); Genèse de l’Algérie algérienne (Paris: Éditions Bouchène, 2005); Le gouvernement du général Berthezène à Alger en 1831 (Paris: Éditions Bouchene, 2005); Charles-André Julien, Histoire de l’Algérie contemporaine: la conquête et les débuts de la colonisation (1827–1871) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1964); and Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, Le royaume arabe: la politique algérienne de Napoléon III, 1861–1870 (Algiers: SNED, 35 SHD 1 H 88, Soult to Bugeaud, 21 February 1843.

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36 Ibid.

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1977). These are brilliant pieces of scholarship, unafraid to criticise the behaviour of French colonists, yet also bound by the conventions of thinking and writing of their moments and the genres in which they operated. Discussions of colonial violence have tended to focus much more on the twentieth century – such as those on the use of torture in the War of Independence – and have inevitably fed into a broader cultural debate on the character of the French empire. As Brower notes, this debate has become remarkably polarised between a ‘légende rose’ and a ‘légende noire’, and has been played out in a series of public spheres, including the press, parliament and schools, as well as in academic literatures. See Robert Aldrich, ‘Conclusion: the colonial past and the postcolonial present’ in The French Colonial Mind, ed.Thomas, I, 334–6. Few attempts have been made to compare Algeria with other settler colonies, and no connections have been made with the new histories of genocide. This much is made plain in even the best recent histories of the colony which have taken violence as a specific theme worthy of consideration, as seen in Brower’s claim that: While the actions of the French colonial state indisputably contributed to the extreme violence witnessed in the twentieth century . . . there is no direct path leading from Algeria to Auschwitz as some have suggested. France never embraced a policy designed to exterminate Algerians, nor was there a systematic attempt to push Algerians entirely out of the country and take their land.37

Whether one agrees or disagrees with Brower, what is plain here is that the rigid functionalism which underpins such views is dependent on notions of causation and intention which have been powerfully critiqued in new studies of colonial genocide. What Brower takes as evidence of a definitive rejection of the possibility of there having been a genocide – the lack of a national policy and the unsystematic character of the violence – would, of course, be viewed as precisely the kind of areas which ought to be probed by structuralist historians of colonial genocide. Brower’s claims on the lack of contiguity between colonial violence and the Holocaust also run counter to much scholarship in the field. While there has been a considerable focus on the confiscation of land by colonists, especially after 1847 – for example, in Benjamin Stora, Histoire de l’Algérie coloniale (1830–1954) (Paris: La Découverte, 1991), 5–26 – less is known 37 Brower, A Desert Named Peace, p. 24.

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about the destruction of the productive and subsistence capacity of Indigenous peoples, which served as a prelude to such land seizures. Equally, the army’s determination to destroy the economic autonomy of local peoples – through strategies of surveillance and market control – looks to have been understated. See Thomas Rid, ‘Razzia: a turning point in modern strategy’, Terrorism and Political Violence 21:4 (2009), 617–35, 625–7, and Albert de Broglie, ‘Une réforme administrative en Afrique, II’, Revue des Deux Mondes 25:1 (1 January 1860), 295–335, 300. Much work remains to be done in detailing the history of massacres, extermination, degradation of life and genocide in colonial Algeria, building on work such as Mahfoud Bennoune’s The Making of Contemporary Algeria, 1830–1987 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 3; Yves Gallisot / René Gallisot, L’économie de l’Afrique du Nord (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969); Samir Amin, L’impérialisme et développement inégal (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1976); and Abdellatif Benachenhou, Formation du sousdéveloppement en Algérie: 1830–1962 (Algiers: OPU, 1976). See also André Nouschi, Enquête sur le niveau de vie des populations rurales constantinoises de la conquête à 1919. Essai d’histoire économique et sociale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961); and the substantial body of work by Hildebert Isnard, such as ‘Les exploitations agricoles européennes en Algérie (essai de représentation cartographique)’, Méditerranée 1(1961), 23–32. Also relevant are Sylvie Thénault et al., eds., Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); John Ruedy, Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).

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‘The Bloody Ground’ Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides in the United States karl jacoby

Are there moments when the United States’ violence towards Indigenous peoples merits the term genocide? The question remains controversial within and beyond the academy, with some non-Native authors declaring as recently as only a few years ago that ‘[g]enocide did not occur in America’1 and that ‘the federal government never contemplated genocide’.2 Native Americans, in contrast, have grappled with this query for longer than the US has existed as a nation. Although the historical record remains uneven, with far more documents from settler than from Native perspectives, a sustained body of evidence demonstrates that American Indians thought that whites – and the new nation that they established after 1776 – desired their land and, if necessary, were willing to kill large numbers of Indigenous people, including women, children and elders, in order to obtain it. This belief constitutes what the historian Jeffrey Ostler has aptly termed ‘an Indigenous consciousness of genocide’. Its existence serves as an important reminder: even though it was only in the late twentieth century that nonNative scholars began to assign the label of genocide to the foundational violence that created the US, Native people have long possessed a discourse that labelled and critiqued the brutality of US conquest.3 The author would like to thank Ned Blackhawk, Bathsheba Demuth, Benjamin Madley, Preston McBride, Justine Meberg, Jeffrey Ostler and Joshua Reid for their help with this chapter. 1 G. C. Anderson, Ethnic Cleansing and the Indian: The Crime That Should Haunt America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), p. 13. 2 P. Cozzens, The Earth is Weeping: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), p. 8. 3 J. Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 147. For a brief historiography of scholarship employing the genocide label to describe events in Native American history under US rule, see B. Madley, ‘Reexamining the American

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Unearthing these Native ‘narratives of horror’ can require close attention to questions of language and interpretation.4 There is a need for more research into the specific Indigenous-language terms – such as Navajos’ Naahondzood (‘The Fearing Time’), the Chinook Jargon expression Polakly Illahee (‘Land of Darkness’) or the Creek word Ecunnaunuxulgee (‘People Greedily Grasping after the Lands of the Red People’) – that American Indians used to discuss colonial violence among themselves.5 Yet much of the Indigenous consciousness of genocide has long been hiding in plain sight, unrecognised by previous generations of scholars. During the negotiations leading up to the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe offered a particularly evocative description of settler aggression. Dragging Canoe opposed the proposed treaty, which would transfer much of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee to white control: ‘Dragging Canoe told them it was the bloody Ground, and would be dark, and difficult to settle.’6 Later white historians – among them, Teddy Roosevelt in his multi-volume Winning of the West – corrupted Dragging Canoe’s words into the ‘dark and bloody ground’ and assumed his phrase to be the Cherokee meaning of Kentucky (a word actually derived from the Iroquoian term for a plain or meadowland).7 This chapter resurrects Dragging Canoe’s original expression to foreground Native understandings of genocide in the nineteenth-century United States. The notion of ‘the bloody ground’ offers a novel remapping of North American history. Not only does it speak back to other terrestrial metaphors historians have used to understand early North America

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genocide debate: meaning, historiography, and new methods’, American Historical Review 120:1 (February 2015), 104–6. J. C. Jastrzembski, ‘Treacherous towns in Mexico: Chiricahua Apache personal narratives of horrors’, Western Folklore 54 (July 1995), 169–96. For Naahondzood, see D. M. Brugge, Navajos in the Catholic Church Records of New Mexico, 1694–1875 (Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College Press, 1985), p. 160. For Polakly Illahee, see B. F. Shaw to Isaac Stevens, 10 February 1856 in ‘Supplemental estimates – Indian Service’, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 37, 111–12. For Ecunnaunuxulgee, see J. Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier, 1607–1814 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 183. One of the few works to foreground Indigenous language in understanding nineteenth-century state-sponsored violence against Native Americans is The Diné of the Eastern Region of the Navajo Nation, collected and recorded by P. Chee, M. Yazzie, J. Benally, M. Etsitty and B. C. Henderson, eds., Oral History Stories of the Long Walk: Hwéeldi Baa Hané (Crownpoint, NM: Lake Valley Navajo School, 1990). Deposition of Samuel Wilson, 15 April 1777 in W. P. Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1781 (New York: Kraus, 1968 [1875]), I, p. 283. T. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West: From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769–1776 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1889) I, pp. 249–50; W. Bright, Native American Placenames of the United States (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), p. 213.

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(‘The Middle Ground’, ‘The Native Ground’), by highlighting how violence (‘bloody’) over land (‘ground’) formed the primary co-ordinates of the new cartography created by the birth of the United States.8 Dragging Canoe’s prediction that Kentucky would be ‘dark, and difficult to settle’ serves as a reminder that, from the Indigenous perspective, colonialism was not inevitable, but rather the result of conscious policies, which often unfolded in the face of considerable Native resistance. In fact, Dragging Canoe’s words proved eerily prophetic: in 1853, Lakota leaders complained that US soldiers were the first ‘to make the ground bloody’.9 ‘The bloody ground’ is a more accurate way to describe the violent clashes between whites and Indigenous peoples in North America than the term ‘Indian Wars’. War connotes a contest between equals, in which each views the other as a sovereign and each faces an equivalent threat. The US, however, never considered Indigenous societies to be full-fledged nations. Rather, they were ‘fierce savages’ with only a ‘right of occupancy’ to their ancestral territories.10 The confrontations between the US and Native Americans resembled the asymmetrical violence that characterised colonial peripheries around the globe during the long nineteenth century. The unequal sizes of the polities involved, as well as the vast distances between the zone of conflict and the colonial power’s centres of population, production and governance, ensured that violence remained confined to Indigenous territories.11 The US ‘Indian Wars’ in the nineteenth century were, in short, colonial invasions. Indigenous peoples would shape events in important ways, and would even defeat US forces in some encounters. But Native Americans could not reach major centres of US population or destroy the economic foundations of the invaders’ way of life. The US could threaten the very existence of Native peoples; the reverse was never the case. ‘White people talk about “Indian War”’, noted the Yavapai elders Mike Harrison and John 8 R. White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); K. DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); see also C. Calloway, Our Hearts Fell to the Ground: Plains Indian Views of How the West Was Lost (New York: Bedford Books, 1996). 9 Lakotas quoted in L. Fowler, ‘Arapaho and Cheyenne perspectives: from the 1851 Treaty to the Sand Creek Massacre’, The American Indian Quarterly 39:4 (Fall 2015), 36490, at 369. 10 The specific terms ‘fierce savages’ and ‘right of occupancy’ come from Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision in Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823). 11 D. Walter, Colonial Violence: European Empires and the Use of Force, trans. Peter Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

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Williams in 1974, reflecting upon the violence their people suffered in the nineteenth century. ‘They come and kill all of us and call it “Indian War”.. . . Men, women, they kill them all.’12 Excavating Indigenous conceptualisations of genocide requires not only re-reading the historical record but also confronting the interpretive challenges inherent to the concept of genocide itself. The 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prioritises the question of intent, defining genocide as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’.13 From a juridical perspective, such a definition is logical: in many legal traditions, intent serves as a key element in determining an individual’s degree of guilt. Yet, as historians have sought to use the UN definition to understand more fully past violence against Indigenous people, the question of intent has proven problematic. Not only can an internal state of mind like intent be difficult to retrieve from a fragmentary archive – the very notion of intent can limit one’s focus to individual behaviour, rather than to the sociopolitical structures that created the conditions that facilitated genocide.14 Even more important, because the notion of intent emphasises the beliefs of the perpetrators of violence, it risks directing attention away from Indigenous peoples and back towards the whites who have long been the primary focus of American history.15 This chapter offers a different point of departure. Rather than beginning with the intentions of individual settlers or federal policy-makers, it asks what Indigenous peoples believed these intentions and policies to be. It could be argued that an effort to plumb the Indigenous consciousness of genocide privileges rumours sweeping through Native communities over detailed tallies of Indigenous casualties. Yet the fear that the US sought to destroy American Indians and seize their lands was in itself a powerful reality shaping Native behaviour throughout the nineteenth century. Even when Indians avoided falling prey to genocide – an outcome which speaks to the import of analysing the Native capacity for resistance, rather than merely focusing on white intent – the 12 C. C. Butler, ed., Oral History of the Yavapai (Gilbert, AZ: Acacia Publishing, 2012) p. 116. 13 The United Nations, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, Treaty Series, Vol. 78: No. 1021, 280. 14 W. A. Schabas, ‘State policy as an element of international crimes’, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 98:3 (Spring 2008), 953–82, at 970. 15 I explored some of these issues in Karl Jacoby, ‘“The broad platform of extermination”: nature and violence in the nineteenth-century North American borderlands’, Journal of Genocide Research 10:2 (June 2008), 249–67.

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actions of Indigenous peoples unfolded within a context of Native awareness of the potential to become the targets of genocidal violence. The documentary record contains repeated instances of Indians voicing fears of their annihilation at white hands. In 1796, the Chickasaw leader Ugulayacabé observed that Americans possessed ‘the cunning of the rattlesnake that caresses the squirrel in order to devour it’.16 After the War of 1812, Dakota refugees fled into Canada, seeking to avoid what they termed their ‘final extinction’ by US forces.17 In a parlay with troops in Washington Territory in the 1850s, members of the Spokane Nation ‘said they heard the troops had come to wipe them out’.18 Western Apaches in the 1860s evinced a similar suspicion of US forces, which they believed were ‘only doing it [negotiating] to kill them’.19 In 1863, Dakotas in Minnesota Territory insisted ‘the white people wanted to kill all of us’.20 The Lakota leader Spotted Tail explained in 1876 that ‘[i]t has been our wish to live here in our country peaceably, and do such things as may be for the welfare and good of our people, but the Great Father has filled it with soldiers who think only of our death’.21 Following their capture by the US Army in 1886, many Chiricahua Apaches feared that ‘we were going to be taken to the ocean and thrown in. Some thought we were going to be killed in some other way.’22 White observers were quick to dismiss such Native testimony, but these accounts rested upon a firmer factual foundation than most settlers cared to acknowledge. In the 1850s, Indians in Washington Territory began to warn one another that ‘if they sold their land . . . they also sold themselves for slaves – that Gov. Stevens had sent for five large ships to transport all the Indians to an island in the ocean where the sun never shined’. Any Native revealing the origin of this awful tale ‘would be killed’ by local settlers.23 Whites at the time 16 C. A. Weeks, ‘Of rattlesnakes, wolves, and tigers: a harangue at the Chickasaw Bluffs, 1796’, The William and Mary Quarterly 67:3 (July 2010), 487–518, at 488, 511. 17 Dakotas quoted in P. Hämäläinen, Lakota America: A New History of Indigenous Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 155. 18 R. Glisan, Journal of Army Life (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1874), p. 403. 19 Apaches quoted in K. Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 176. 20 Four Lightning (David Fairbault, Jr) to H. H. Sibley, 18 May 1863 in The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, ed. C. Canku and M. Simon (St Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), p. 9. 21 ‘Message from the President of the United States, Communicating the Report and Journal of Proceedings of the Commission Appointed to Obtain Certain Concessions from the Sioux Indians’, 1876, 44th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Exec. Doc. 9, 39. 22 S. E. Kenoi and M. E. Opler, ‘A Chiricahua Apache’s account of the Geronimo Campaign of 1886’, The Journal of Arizona History 27:1 (Spring 1986), 71–90, at 84. 23 B. F. Shaw to Isaac Stevens, 10 February 1856 in ‘Supplemental estimates – Indian Service’, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 37, 111–12.

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labelled this narrative of Polakly Illahee (‘Land of Darkness’ in Chinook Jargon, the trade language of the Pacific Northwest) a bizarre Indigenous superstition.24 But the fact that the tale ‘spread among all the Indians with the rapidity of wild-fire, exciting horror at the terrible future in store for them’, demonstrates that Natives grasped the truths embedded within it.25 Ship-borne Russian fur traders had, since the late 1700s, held Natives in bondage on the Pribilof Islands to the northwest, making the fear of being enslaved on a sunless island a concern based on actual atrocities against Indigenous peoples.26 Similarly, the recent treaty process – referenced by the Natives with the phrase ‘if they sold their lands’ – had revealed itself to be a cruel deception, with Indians receiving none of their promised benefits (the US Senate would not ratify the treaties for another four years) even as whites seized many of the area’s best farmlands and fishing spots in the treaties’ aftermath.27 The Indians’ prediction that they ‘would be killed’ by settlers was not unrealistic either. Stories of the genocidal massacres of Natives in northern California during the Gold Rush, and in Oregon during the so-called ‘Rogue River War’ of 1855–6 – the latter featuring white militia units that had titled themselves ‘Exterminators’ and ‘Squaw Hunters’ – had filtered north, passed via word of mouth from one Indigenous community to the next.28 Within months, similar violence would erupt in Washington Territory. Army officers warned those Yakama opposed to the treaty process that they ‘had a force sufficient to sweep them [the Indians] from the face of the earth’, and threatened the Yakama that if they resisted ‘their warriors [would] all [be] killed or 24 G. H. Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), p. 214. 25 W. B. Gosnell to Isaac Stevens, 31 December 1856 in W. B. Gosnell, ‘Indian War in Washington Territory’, The Washington Historical Quarterly 17:4 (October 1926), 289–99, at 294–5. 26 D. W. Veltre and A. P. McCartney, ‘Russian exploitation of Aleuts and fur seals: the archaeology of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century settlements in the Pribilof Islands, Alaska’, Historical Archaeology 36:3 (September 2002), 8–17; A. V. Grinëv, Russian Colonization of Alaska: Preconditions, Discovery, and Initial Development, 1741–1799, trans. R. L. Bland (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), p. 129. That tales spread from Alaska to the Pacific Northwest is suggestive of the vast distances that Native ‘narratives of horror’ could travel. For a discussion of the Russian presence in the future Washington Territory, see J. L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 37–40, 134. 27 C. Friday, ‘Performing treaties’ in The Power of Promises: Rethinking Indian Treaties in the Pacific Northwest, ed. Alexandra Harmon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 164–5. 28 Whaley, Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee, pp. 194–207. For more on genocide in California before, during and after the Gold Rush, see Benjamin Madley’s Chapter 17 in this volume.

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driven from the country, never to return; their women and children [left] starving to death far to the north where the snow never melts’.29 When several Nisqually families, seeking to avoid the conflict, hid in the dense woods near the confluence of the Mashel and Nisqually Rivers, a detachment of white militiamen killed them ‘without regard to age or sex’, according to survivors.30 The first Native authors to write in English did so in large part to make the Indigenous consciousness of genocide legible to white audiences. William Apess, the first American Indian to publish a memoir in English (A Son of the Forest in 1829) and a descendent of the Native nation to suffer one of the earliest colonial genocides in North America (the ‘Pequot War’ of 1636–8), put pen to paper so that his words could serve as a ‘looking-glass for the white man’. ‘[H]istory declares’, stated Apess: when this continent was first discovered, that its inhabitants were a harmless, inoffensive, obliging people.. . . [T]hey saw not the aim and design of the white man, and the chains of a cruel bondage were firmly entwined around them before the illusion was dispelled; and when their eyes were opened, they beheld naught as the portion of their cup but servitude and sorrow. Hundreds of thousands perished before the face of the white man.31

Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), the first Native American woman to publish an autobiography, highlighted the central role of violence towards women in the Indigenous experience of genocide. When she was a child in the 1850s, Winnemucca recalled, ‘[t]here was great excitement among my people on account of fearful news coming from different tribes, that the people whom they called their white brothers were killing everybody that came in their way. . . . So we were all afraid of them.’32 Once whites settled among them, 29 G. Wright to D. R. Jones, 11 June 1856 in ‘Report of the Secretary of War, 1856’, 34th Cong., 3rd Sess., H. Ex. Doc. 1, 161. 30 A. V. Kautz in E. S. Meany, ed., Mount Rainer: A Record of Exploration (New York: MacMillan, 1917), p. 77; Puget Sound Herald (Steilacoom, WA), 22 April 1859, 2. This event, which took place in March 1856, and in which more than thirty Natives died, is now known as the Mashel, or Maxon, Massacre: C. Wilkinson, Messages from Frank’s Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), p. 17. 31 William Apess, On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), pp. 114–15, 155. For more on William Apess, see Robert Warrior, ‘Eulogy on William Apess: speculations on his New York death’, Studies in American Indian Literatures 16:2 (Summer 2004), 1–13; and Lisa Brooks, ‘Envisioning New England as Native space: William Apess’s eulogy on King Philip’ in The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 198–218. For more on the ‘Pequot War’, see Benjamin Madley’s Chapter 9 in this volume. 32 S. Winnemucca Hopkins, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 1994 [1883]), p. 11.

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Figure 16.1 Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute), whose writings and lectures underscored the centrality of sexual violence against Native women to the Indigenous experience of genocide. (Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

Native women found themselves targeted for sexual abuse. ‘One of the Indians had a sister out digging some roots, and these white men went to the women who were digging, and caught this poor girl, and used her shamefully.’33 Such depictions laid bare the dilemma confronting Native nations in the nineteenth century. If Indian peoples refused to cede their lands, the US was 33 Ibid., p. 139.

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likely to respond with brutal campaigns targeting entire Indigenous communities, intended to force Natives onto reservations that represented only a fragment of their original territory – or, worse, to accept removal to more distant lands. Yet if Natives agreed to give up their homelands, they exposed themselves to malnutrition and economic scarcity, which left them more vulnerable to disease and undermined their culture and ability to reproduce. Relocating elsewhere also risked violent conflict with other Indigenous peoples already inhabiting the zones of resettlement. In sum, either option – resistance or acquiescence – opened Natives to the possible loss of population foundational to definitions of genocide. In the first case, demographic decline occurred through what the UN Genocide Convention terms ‘killing members of the group’ and what other scholars have labelled genocidal massacres.34 In the second case, population loss took place through a slow violence that, if less apparent to most onlookers, nonetheless possessed the potential to damage Indigenous demographics through illness, decreased reproduction and heightened clashes between Indian nations, who now found themselves competing with one another for scarce resources.35 Although US officials often argued that they were not the cause for the decline of Native population in these latter instances, the ensuing loss of life would not have occurred in the absence of removal or reservation policies, meaning that this latter example also meets the criteria outlined in the Genocide Convention: ‘Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’ and ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Relocation also exposed Indian children to greater risk of forced transfer to non-tribal members, also a genocidal crime according to the Convention.36 In an effort to mitigate their responsibility for Native losses, US policymakers often blamed disease rather than violence for Indian population decline. In the years after 1492, European colonialism brought to the 34 The notion of ‘genocidal massacres’ was coined by Leo Kuper in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982). See also the discussion in B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 13–16. Given the small size and fluid membership of some Native nations, the distinction between a genocide and a genocidal massacre is not always obvious. 35 I borrow the notion of ‘slow violence’ from Rob Nixon. He defines slow violence as ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all’: R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), p. 2. 36 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

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Americas a panoply of bacteria and viruses – among them smallpox, measles, mumps, malaria, yellow fever, typhus and diphtheria – to which the Indigenous populations had no previous exposure and thus no pre-existing immunity, generating what some scholars have termed ‘virgin soil’ epidemics: disease outbreaks with horrifyingly high rates of mortality.37 Rodney Glisan, a surgeon in the US army, observed in the 1850s that ‘Whooping cough, scarlet fever, typhoid and typhus fevers, epidemic dysentery, and measles, sometimes produce fearful havoc with this doomed race. . .. [O]f all causes, pestilence has been, by all odds, the most destructive among them.’38 Yet focusing on disease as a cause for Native population decline – with the implication that infection was beyond anyone’s control and Indigenous loss of life was therefore accidental – is too simple an interpretive model. Death rates are not simply a function of exposure, as the concept of ‘virgin soil’ epidemics might seem to suggest. Stresses such as inadequate food or shelter, forced relocation, demands for labour, or assaults on Indigenous culture can all exacerbate the effect of diseases, rendering bacteria or viruses far more lethal. When Native communities experienced high rates of sickness under Euro-American colonialism, it can be difficult to disentangle how much of the mortality is attributable to new diseases and how much the process of dispossession exacerbated the illness. In some cases, there was no ambiguity at all: the vectors for transmitting infection flowed directly out of colonial oppression. Many Native populations experienced heightened levels of venereal diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea, which diminished Indians’ ability to reproduce, because of sexual exploitation by whites.39 It also bears remembering that the immunological advantages non-Natives enjoyed over American Indians were not permanent. Resistance to disease is almost always a function of antibodies acquired through exposure to specific 37 The classic statement of ‘virgin soil’ epidemics is A. Crosby, ‘Virgin soil epidemics as a factor in the Aboriginal depopulation in America’, The William and Mary Quarterly 33:2 (April 1976), 289–99. 38 Glisan, Journal of Army Life, pp. 441–2. 39 For recent scholarship complicating the ‘virgin soils’ model, see D. S. Jones, ‘Death, uncertainty, and rhetoric’ in Beyond Germs: Native Depopulation in North America, ed. C. M. Cameron, P. Kelton and A. C. Swedlund (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2015), 16–49; and T. S. Edwards and P. Kelton, ‘Germs, genocides, and America’s Indigenous peoples’, Journal of American History 107:1 (June 2020), 52–76. For discussions of the European introduction of sexually transmitted diseases, see A. L. Hurtado, Indian Survival on the California Frontier (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 179–80; and J. A. Sandos, Converting California: Indians and Franciscans in the Missions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 111–27. Sandos pointed out that diseases such as syphilis or gonorrhea could be spread by heterosexual or homosexual encounters.

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bacteria or viruses. When non-Natives first arrived in North America, the continent’s Indigenous peoples possessed no antibodies to a host of maladies previously unknown to them. Yet once these infections spread to American Indians, the survivors of the ensuing epidemics possessed the same immunity as non-Natives. By the nineteenth century, non-Natives had been present in North America for several centuries. The immunological gap between Natives and non-Natives was no longer sufficient to explain by itself Indian population decline.40 Indigenous spokespeople understood that disease alone did not cause their death and dispossession. The idea that Natives were fated to disappear because of illness or some other ‘natural’ cause was, they pointed out, little more than a convenient colonial fantasy. ‘We repeat again that the Cherokees are not in decline in numbers and improvement’, remarked Elias Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, in 1828.41 Ostler’s recent scholarship confirms Boudinot’s assertion: the number of Indigenous people east of the Mississippi in fact increased following the birth of the American republic. Between 1775 and 1830, the population of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ – Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks and Seminoles – rose from 40,000 to more than 70,000, while the number of Natives in the upper Midwest grew from an estimated 28,000 to around 45,000.42 *** Reckoning with ‘the bloody ground’ of Indigenous genocide requires recasting the central paradigms of American history. The standard periodisation of US history, with its compartmentalisation of the nineteenth century into a string of discrete events – the War of 1812, the US–Mexico War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age – obscures the ways that each of these incidents intertwined with a single, ongoing process: the invasion and dispossession of the Indigenous peoples in North America through the replacement of Natives with white settlers and the supplanting of Native homelands with the homesteads of US citizens.43 Even before the United States came into existence as an independent nation, Indigenous communities were aware of the dangers that whites 40 Jon Parmenter documented the Iroquois’ ability to recover from newly introduced epidemic diseases after 1634 in The Edge of the Woods: Iroquoia, 1534–1701 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010), pp. 289–92. 41 Cherokee Phoenix, 21 July 1828, 2. 42 Ostler, Surviving Genocide, pp. 5, 188–9. 43 J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); P. Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (December 2006), 387–409.

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posed to them. Over a century and a half of European colonisation in North America preceded the birth of the US, during which time Native nations had watched the once-struggling settlements along the Atlantic balloon into colonies with a population of more than 2 million people of European descent, plus some 500,000 individuals of African descent, the vast majority of them enslaved.44 The latter’s presence served as a potent reminder for Natives of whites’ capacity for brutality. In addition to ‘rob[bing] another nation [from Africa] to till their grounds . . . under the scorching rays of a burning sun’, in Apess’ words, they also enslaved tens of thousands of Native Americans – and would in fact continue to do so for decades to come.45 Recognising settlers’ burgeoning population and their corresponding desire to claim more Indigenous territory, American Indians endeavoured to limit further Euro-American expansion into their homelands. In 1763, they appeared to have accomplished this goal through an extraordinary alliance of Native groups, known to outsiders as ‘Pontiac’s Rebellion’ for the Ottawa leader who led it. Confronted with an unprecedented coalition of Indigenous communities, the British Crown declared a moratorium on settlement west of a line that followed the crest of the Appalachian Mountains. This constraint on the further seizure of Native lands, however, only turned colonists against the British Crown, becoming a precipitating factor in the American Revolution. As George Washington, one of the era’s leading speculators in frontier lands, confided to a friend in 1767: ‘I can never look upon the Proclamation in any other light (but this I may say between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians & [one that] must fall in a few years especially when those Indians are consenting to our Occupying the Lands.’46 Exhibiting much the same attitude as the future leader of the new United States, many colonists ignored the Crown’s effort to prohibit their expansion into Indigenous lands. The Treaty of Sycamore 44 I. Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 369–71. 45 Apess, On Our Own Ground, p. 157. For more on Native enslavement, see A. Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016); A. Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and L. R. Bailey, Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest (New York: Tower Publications, 1966). 46 George Washington to William Crawford, 21 September 1767 in The Washington– Crawford Letters: Being the Correspondence Between George Washington and William Crawford, From 1767 to 1781, Concerning Western Lands, ed. C. W. Butterfield (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1877), p. 3.

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Shoals that the Cherokee leader Dragging Canoe charged with creating ‘the bloody ground’ was undertaken by private individuals (including the soon-tobe-famous Daniel Boone) in violation of the Proclamation of 1763. It was for such reasons that, when the American Revolution broke out, most Indigenous communities along the fringes of the colonies supported the Crown, which they perceived as (slightly) less threatening than a nation led by a settler elite committed to immediate further Native land cessions. As a result, although conventionally thought of as a rebellion by Euro-American colonists against British rule, the event known as the American Revolution also needs to be understood as a struggle between settlers and Indigenous peoples over the future ownership of North America.47 This struggle would prove longer and more brutal than the conflict between the rebel colonists and the British Empire. Even before the opening acts of the revolution at Concord and Lexington, bands of Shawnees, Lenapes and Cherokees had taken up arms in an attempt to expel encroaching settlers from lands west of the Appalachians. Once fighting broke out between the British and rebellious colonists – and the Crown threw its support behind its Native allies – the nascent US launched a series of devastating reprisals. Building on pre-existing practices of colonial violence, colonists targeted not simply male combatants but entire Indigenous communities. The US concentrated its attacks on those targets that were easiest to locate – Native villages – a tactic that inevitably produced casualties among not only Indian men of fighting age, but also women, children and elders. Assaults on Native communities also led to the destruction of houses, crops, livestock and other elements of Indigenous subsistence. The effect of such policies was not only to kill Indians directly, but also to create conditions of starvation and exposure that would inflict casualties on Native populations long after US forces had departed.48 Emblematic of the nascent republic’s strategy towards American Indians was the Sullivan–Clinton campaign, launched in 1779 against the Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee). This was one of the most ambitious US operations of the entire revolution, consuming a majority of the Congressional budget for 1778.49 Some 47 For more on how tensions over access to Native land helped to precipitate the American Revolution, see P. Spero, Frontier Rebels: The Fight for Independence in the American West, 1765–1776 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018); C. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995); and White, Middle Ground. 48 For more on colonial patterns of violence, see Chapter 11 in this volume, by Gregory D. Smithers. 49 R. Koehler, ‘Hostile nations: quantifying the destruction of the Sullivan–Clinton Genocide of 1779’, The American Indian Quarterly 42:4 (Fall 2018), 427–53, at 430–1.

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4,500 troops converged on the Haudenosaunee homelands with the goal, in the words of Major General John Sullivan, to ‘totally extirpate the unfriendly nations of the Indians’. Soldiers uprooted cornfields and orchards, burned entire villages, and killed hundreds of Haudenosaunees. Women were targets as well as men: Pennsylvania offered its militiamen a bounty for all Seneca scalps, regardless of gender.50 Haudenosaunee women confronted the additional peril of sexual violence. The colonists who attacked his village, recalled one Onondaga leader, ‘put to death all the Women and Children, excepting some of the Young Women, whom they carried away for the use of their soldiers and were afterwards put to death in a more shameful manner’.51 The campaign was timed for early fall, with the intent of leaving the Haudenosaunee unable to replant their crops before the arrival of winter. Many of those who escaped the colonists’ attacks died from cold, hunger or disease: the total mortality rate from the Sullivan–Clinton campaign among the targeted communities approached 50 per cent.52 That the Sullivan–Clinton campaign did not become even more lethal can be traced not to restraint on the part of US forces, but rather to the skill of the Haudenosaunees. Recognising the exterminatory intentions of the US, the Haudenosaunees deployed a strategic combination of armed resistance and evasion. By abandoning villages to US troops as they approached, rather than leaving women, children, and elders in harm’s way, they mitigated the damage they would have otherwise suffered.53 Events at Gnadenhutten in the Ohio country revealed the potential fate of those Native groups that did not use such tactics. In 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen seized a town of Delaware (Lenape) converts to Christianity, who had attempted to remain neutral during the revolution. The militiamen separated the men from the women and children, then brought the members of each group to a ‘slaughter-house’ where the colonists executed the unresisting Natives in a flurry of hammer, sword and hatchet blows before scalping them. A total of 96 Lenape people died at the hands of the militiamen, including 32 women and 34 children.54 50 Grenier, First Way of War, pp. 166–7. 51 Onondaga leader quoted in C. Calloway, The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 249. 52 Koehler, ‘Hostile nations’, 445–6. 53 Ibid., 446. 54 P. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), pp. 268–72; Ostler, Surviving Genocide, p. 67. For a discussion of the aftermath of the massacre, see J. P. Bowes, ‘The Gnadenhutten effect: Moravian

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The Sullivan–Clinton campaign and the Gnadenhutten massacre etched themselves into Native memory, becoming touchstones of the Indigenous discourse about the genocidal nature of whites. More than a decade after the assault on their homeland, the Haudenosaunee still referred to George Washington as ‘town destroyer’ for the scorched earth tactics and civilian casualties he had countenanced in the campaign against them. As the Seneca leader Cornplanter related to Washington in 1790: ‘When your army entered the country of the Six Nations, we called you the town destroyer; and to this day, when that name is heard, our women look behind them and turn pale, and our children cling close to the necks of their mothers.’55 Indigenous leaders viewed Gnadenhutten not as an isolated atrocity, but rather as proof of whites’ willingness to employ violence against even unthreatening Natives. Ohio country Indians asserted in the 1790s that, as soon as the ‘Big Knives’ (an Indigenous term for whites) had ‘Christianize[d] number[s] of them so as to gain their attention, then they would [kill] them, and have killed of such 96 in one day’.56 In 1806, many Lenape opposed efforts to re-establish missions among them, contending that missionaries sought ‘to make the Indians tame, so as to have them killed by the white people, as had been done in Gnadenhütten’.57 In 1810, almost thirty years after the massacre, the Shawnee leader Tecumseh told William Henry Harrison, ‘You recall the time when the Jesus Indians of the Delawares lived near the Americans, and had confidence in their promises of friendship, and thought they were secure, yet the Americans murdered all the men, women, and children, even as they prayed to Jesus?’58 The violence between whites and Indians that accompanied the American Revolution left a profound imprint upon the new nation. The US foundational documents betray settlers’ intense hostility towards Native Americans. The Declaration of Independence charged King George with having ‘endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions’. Imagining Indigenous peoples in this way – as

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converts and the search for safety in the Canadian borderlands’, Michigan Historical Review 34:1 (Spring 2008), 101–17. To George Washington from the Seneca Chiefs, 1 December 1790 at https://founders .archives.gov/documents/Washington/05-07-02-0005 (accessed 6 June 2020). Quoted in Ostler, Surviving Genocide, pp. 105–6. Another term for white was ‘Long Knife’. See A Woman to Curly Head, 25 April 1863 in Dakota Prisoner of War Letters, ed. Canku and Simon, p. 5. Lenape quoted in Ostler, Surviving Genocide, p. 142. Tecumseh quoted in P. R. Misencik and S. E. Misencik, American Indians of the Ohio Country in the Eighteenth Century (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2020), p. 66.

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‘Savages’ who killed ‘all ages, sexes and conditions’ – enabled colonists to respond in kind, laying the intellectual foundations for the genocidal violence towards Native Americans that was exhibited in the Sullivan–Clinton campaign.59 Yet, even as Thomas Jefferson and the other ‘founding fathers’ decried North America’s Indigenous peoples as ‘Savages’, they recognised the need to forge diplomatic relations with them. From 1778 until 1871, the US signed over 300 treaties with Native nations. Tellingly, however, the first treaty negotiated between the US and a Native nation (the Lenape) reveals what Indigenous peoples understood to be the genocidal character of the new republic. Article 6 of the Treaty of Fort Pitt of 1778 alludes to the Lenapes’ belief that the US sought ‘to extirpate the Indians and take possession of their country’.60 The American Revolution officially ended in 1783 with the Treaty of Paris. Understanding the history of Native nations, however, requires alternative periodisation, for conflict between Indigenous peoples and the new US was in essence baked into the treaty. The British Crown had agreed to cede all lands north of the Ohio River and west of the Appalachian Mountains – territories that in reality remained occupied by sovereign Indian nations whom both the British and French crowns had long recognised.61 At the same time, a land-rich but cash-poor US government, committed to a vision of itself as an agrarian republic, rewarded its ex-soldiers with land bounties redeemable in this same region.62 Claiming title through the Treaty of Paris, the new nation pressured Indigenous communities for additional land cessions, outraging Natives unwilling to surrender their homelands. ‘All the Lands we have been speaking of belonged to the Six Nations’, contended the Seneca leader Cornplanter. ‘[N]o part of it ever belonged to the King of England, and he could not give it to you. The Land we live on our Fathers received from God, and they transmitted it to us, for our Children and we cannot part with it.’63 59 Declaration of Independence, www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declarationtranscript (accessed 26 June 2020). 60 Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, ed. C. J. Kappler, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904), I I, p. 4. US negotiators tried to dismiss Lenape (Delaware) worries over the US’ exterminatory nature as a ‘false suggestion’, but the fact that they acknowledged this concern in the treaty demonstrates how widespread it was among Native nations. 61 White, Middle Ground, pp. 416–21. 62 For a discussion of the role of agrarianism in genocide, see Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 29–33, 165–8. 63 To George Washington from the Seneca Chiefs, 1 December.

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The US attempted to resolve its tensions with the Indigenous inhabitants of the Ohio country through the Northwest Ordinance. Passed in 1787, this measure provided the template for all future US expansion onto Indian lands. At first glance, the ordinance offered a vision of what might be termed expansion with honour, stating that ‘The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.’64 Yet, as events soon revealed, the ordinance laid the foundation for potentially genocidal violence. The Northwest Ordinance did not articulate a policy of exterminating Indians simply for being Indians. Yet the ordinance committed the US to a land policy that depended upon the dispossession of Indigenous communities and their replacement by white yeoman farmers. If individual Native nations willingly surrendered their lands, the US did not anticipate inflicting violence on them. On the other hand, if a Native community refused the ‘good faith’ efforts of the US to negotiate the purchase of their homelands, the US felt justified to respond with ‘lawful wars’ that differed little from the campaigns of the American Revolution, in which troops had targeted entire Indigenous communities for destruction.65 Given the voracious appetite of the new US for Indian lands, it was not at all coincidental that an almost uninterrupted string of Indian ‘wars’ followed the Northwest Ordinance. Conflicts included the Franklin–Chickamauga War (1788–94), the Creek Troubles (1792–3), the Ohio Indian War (1790–5), the War of 1812 (1812–15), the First US–Creek War (1813–14), the First US– Seminole War (1817–18) and the US–Sauk War (1832).66 The orders issued by Secretary of War Henry Knox in 1790 betray the brutality the US permitted itself in these ‘lawful wars’. Knox directed the new nation’s military to proceed against the ‘savages’ in the Ohio country and ‘to extirpate, utterly, if possible, the said Banditti’.67 As in the Sullivan–Clinton campaign, the troops targeted not only male combatants but also entire villages and the

64 An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio, www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=8 (accessed 16 June 2020). 65 J. Ostler, ‘“Just and lawful war” as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832’, Journal of Genocide Research 18:1 (February 2016), 1–20. 66 Grenier, First Way of War, p. 171; C. Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020), p. 232. 67 Knox quoted in Grenier, First Way of War, p. 195.

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foundations of Native livelihood. Soldiers could be found ‘burning and destroying everything that could be of use [to the Indians]: corn, beans, pumpkins, stacks of hay, fencing and cabins, etc.’, related one officer.68 As in the American Revolution, the failure of the US to ‘extirpate, utterly’ the ‘savages’ can be attributed not to a lack of intent but rather to the Native strategy of removing the majority of their population from harm’s way, while resisting with force of arms the invasion of their homeland. In fact, the Indians of the Ohio country inflicted some of the worst military defeats the US ever suffered in its Indian ‘wars’ (including 637 US soldiers killed and 263 wounded at the Battle of the Wabash in 1791).69 Even as the US shifted in the 1820s to a policy of forced removal, in which Indigenous peoples were expelled to lands west of the Mississippi River, its practices of extreme violence in ‘lawful wars’ against Native Americans remained. Federal officials portrayed removal as a benign policy, designed to protect Indians from the corrosive effects of contact with whites. Few Indigenous communities, however, were willing to abandon their homelands for settings so distant and so ecologically different that they even lacked many of the ceremonial and medicinal plants necessary to sustain Indigenous cultures and sense of peoplehood.70 ‘[O]ur prospects are dark with horror; and our hearts are filled with bitterness’, stated the Cherokee in a petition protesting removal. ‘[A]re we to be despoiled of all we hold dear on earth? Are we to be hunted through the mountains, like wild beasts, and our women, our children, our aged, our sick, to be dragged from their homes like culprits and packed on board loathsome boats, for transportation to a sickly clime?’71 The Cherokee, like many other Native nations, did not oppose removal through force of arms, favouring alternative forms of resistance. They realised that contesting removal militarily would render them vulnerable once again to brutal attacks on entire communities. Having suffered repeated invasions since the revolution, the Cherokee recognised their precarity as well as the willingness of the US to inflict severe harm upon them. As the Cherokee Nation pled in a memorial to Congress in 1838: ‘Already we are thronged with armed men; forts, camps, and military posts of every grade, 68 Officer quoted in Ostler, ‘“Just and lawful war”’, 8. 69 Ibid., 11. 70 R. A. Vick notes that ‘[o]f the 739 plants that are documented to have been used by the Cherokee prior to removal, 230 of them are not native to Oklahoma’. See R. A. Vick, ‘Cherokee adaptation to the landscape of the West and overcoming of the loss of culturally significant plants’, The American Indian Quarterly 35:3 (Summer 2011), 394–417, at 399. 71 ‘Appeal of the Cherokees’, Friends Intelligencer 1:2 (16 April 1838), 41–2.

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already occupy our whole country. With us, it is a season of alarm and apprehension. We acknowledge the power of the United States – we acknowledge our own feebleness.’72 Reflecting similar concerns, the Choctaws reluctantly agreed to the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, which mandated their expulsion beyond the Mississippi, out of fears of what they termed their ‘extermination’ if they refused.73 Native nations had good reason to be haunted by visions of annihilation. Winfield Scott, the US general supervising removal, threatened ‘the destruction of the Cherokees’ if they did not ‘obey’ him.74 Those Seminoles who did resist and fled into the fastness of Florida’s Everglades swamp during the socalled ‘Second Seminole War’ (1835–42) found themselves in a bitter war of attrition. In keeping with President Andrew Jackson’s statement that ‘[t]he laws of war did not apply to conflicts with savages’, army officers conducted what some labelled a ‘War to the Rope’, a term derived from the practice of executing captured adult Seminole men and stringing up their corpses.75 When troops under Lieutenant Colonel William S. Harney seized several Seminole families in 1840, he had his soldiers hang the male captives ‘to the top of a tall tree’ while forcing the Seminoles’ horrified female relatives and children to watch.76 Explained Harney: ‘There must be no more talking – they must be hunted down as so many wild beasts. . .. Let every one taken be hung up in the woods to inspire terror in the rest.’77 Harney continued these harsh tactics in subsequent conflicts with Indigenous communities, leading the Lakota to dub him ‘Woman Killer’ in the 1850s because his troops murdered so many Lakota women during surprise attacks on their camps.78 As in previous campaigns, Seminole women who were not killed outright suffered sexual violence: one US Army private renamed the conflict the ‘squaw-kissing war’ for the way that his compatriots ‘buck[ed] Indian 72 Ibid. 73 Choctaws quoted in Saunt, Unworthy Republic, p. 90. 74 Memoirs of Lieutenant General Winfield Scott, ed. T. D. Johnson (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015 [1864]), p. 166. 75 Jackson quoted in Y. Chiu, Conspiring with the Enemy: The Ethic of Cooperation in Warfare (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), p. 87; Chiu noted that Jackson and others also used the logic that Seminoles were ‘vagrant savages’ to justify violating flags of truce with Seminole leaders. The expression ‘War to the Rope’ can be found in G. R. Adams, General William S. Harney: Prince of Dragoons (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), pp. 76–7; see also L. U. Reavis, The Life and Military Services of Gen. William Selby Harney (St Louis: Bryan, Brand, 1878), p. 146. 76 Adams, General William S. Harney, pp. 76–7. For more on the public exhibition of dead Seminoles, see Saunt, Unworthy Republic, pp. 297–9. 77 Harney quoted in Adams, General William S. Harney, p. 73. 78 N. Estes, Our History is the Future: Standing Rock versus Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London and New York: Verso, 2019), pp. 98–9.

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squaws’.79 The army’s constant pursuit, coupled with its destruction of villages and supplies, rendered the Seminoles’ very existence precarious. ‘[T]hey had lost all their cattle and ponies’, contended the Seminole leader Halleck Hadjo during a parlay in 1838, ‘and their wives and children were dying from the hardship of being chased so much.’80 Removal, however, posed its own perils. Even under the best of conditions, the forced expulsion of close to 90,000 Natives from their homelands east of the Mississippi River would have been gruelling. The Potawatomis removed from Indiana in 1838 marched more than 660 miles along what came to be known as the ‘Trail of Death’. The Creeks displaced from Alabama travelled over 1,000 miles west to Indian Territory, a journey that took three to four months, much of it on foot. Some of the Cherokees removed from Georgia followed a route 1,200 miles long.81 The disruptions of removal compounded the stresses of these journeys. Encroaching settlers forced Indigenous communities to abandon their property prior to relocation, leaving Natives impoverished and brutalised before removal even began. ‘[T]he lowest classes of the white people are flogging the Cherokees with cowhides, hickories, and clubs’, complained the Cherokee leaders Major Ridge and John Ridge; ‘We are not safe in our houses; our people are assailed by day & night by the rabble. . . . This barbarous treatment is not confined to men, but the women are stripped and whipped without mercy.’82 Troops herded Cherokees and Seminoles into stockades to collect them before removal, often holding them for weeks in crowded, unsanitary conditions. These concentration camps facilitated the spread of illnesses such as yellow fever and dysentery – a telling example of how disease and Native population decline were intimately intertwined with the upheavals of colonialism. Poor government planning, compounded by the decision to

79 Bartholomew Lynch quoted in L. C. Shire, The Threshold of Manifest Destiny: Gender and National Expansion in Florida (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), p. 118. 80 J. R. Motte, Journey Into Wilderness: An Army Surgeon’s Account of Life in Camp and Field During the Creek and Seminole Wars, ed. James F. Sunderman (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953), p. 205. 81 For the Potawatomi ‘Trail of Death’, see J. P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 54. For accounts of the distances and times involved in the Creek removals, see Bending Their Way Onward: Creek Indian Removal in Documents, ed. C. D. Haveman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), pp. 294, 424. For distances in Cherokee removal, see Saunt, Unworthy Republic, p. 280. 82 ‘Message From the President of the United States, Relative to the Cherokee Disturbances’, 29th Cong., 1st Sess., H. Doc. 185, 175.

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subcontract much of removal to for-profit companies, left many Indians short of food and supplies.83 The rate of death varied by community but, overall, 14 to 19 per cent of the Indigenous peoples deported perished during removal, with the likely high being the 40 per cent mortality of the Haudenosaunees relocated from New York in the 1840s.84 ‘[W]e were drove off like wolves – lost our crops and our peoples feet were bleeding with long marches’, charged the Creek leaders Spar-ne-Mathla, Cuseter Micco and Micco Hadka in 1836. ‘Our road has been a long one – and on it we have laid the bones of our men – women & children.’85 Yet, even as the lethality of these forced expulsions became clear, state and federal governments proved unwilling to contemplate any changes to the policy. Ironically, almost as soon as the US achieved its goal of expelling most Indigenous peoples west of the Mississippi, removal collapsed as a policy. The US’ breakneck expansion across the continent in the 1840s left the nation without a periphery to which it could displace Natives. In place of removal, the US settled on a policy of reservations. Unlike removal, with its expulsion of Native nations to locales 1,000 or more miles away, the reservation system promised some Indians the retention of at least a remnant of their original homeland. Yet reservations also facilitated greater intrusions into Native society. In 1869, as part of its so-called ‘Peace Policy’, the US turned the management of the reservations over to a variety of Christian religious denominations, in part to suppress Indian spirituality and to replace it with Protestantism or Catholicism. The following year, the federal government inaugurated its first programmes to educate Native youth, giving rise over time to a network of boarding schools designed to uproot Indigenous youth from their families and eradicate their culture.86 As discussed by Preston McBride in Chapter 18 of this volume (‘Lessons from Canada: The Question of Genocide in US Boarding Schools for Native Americans’), these schools have left behind a legacy of troubling questions, particularly in relation to ‘[f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group’, defined as a genocidal crime in the UN Genocide Convention.87 83 Bending Their Way Onward, ed. Haveman, pp. 223–4; Saunt, Unworthy Republic, pp. 219–20. 84 For death rates during removal, see Ostler, Surviving Genocide, pp. 325, 361. 85 Spar-ne-Mathla, Cuseter Micco and Micco Hadka to J. T. Sprague, 21 December 1836 in Bending Their Way Onward, ed. Haveman, p. 414. 86 C. E. Trafzer, J. A. Keller and L. Sisquoc, eds., Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), pp. 11–12. 87 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

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Like the Northwest Ordinance before it, the Peace Policy presented a façade of benevolence towards American Indians, yet retained a genocidal core. Accepting the new reservations not only required Native nations to surrender the vast majority of their territory for a reduced land base that often lacked sufficient resources to support its inhabitants; it also forced Indigenous peoples to endure the imposition of an alien way of life. On the other hand, refusing to relocate to a reservation invited overwhelming violence from the US army or settlers – indeed, Natives’ mere presence off the reservation was often taken as proof of their opposition to US rule, to which the only appropriate response was brute force. According to Lieutenant General Philip Sheridan’s orders of 1869, ‘Outside the welldefined limits of the reservation they [Indians] are under the original and exclusive jurisdiction of the military authority, and as a rule will be considered hostile.’88 This approach left Indigenous communities trapped between two potentially genocidal options: a US-dictated ‘peace’ on the reservation, or physical violence everywhere else. The Lakota leader named Surrounded evoked his people’s dilemma in 1876: ‘When the prairie is on fire, you see animals surrounded by the fire; you see them run and try to hide themselves so that they will not burn. That is the way we are here.’89 Mike Burns, who as a young boy in 1872 had been one of the few Yavapais to survive a US army attack that killed over seventy of his relatives, noted the dislocations the reservation brought to his people. The Yavapais: cried to think of their country deserted by its inhabitants. Once they had lived at peace all over this land, unmolested and unafraid, going all kinds of distances to gather food without having to worry about enemies. They were ours, the valleys, gulches, hills, and mountainsides, the springs, the creeks, and the riverlands [sic], where all kinds of green trees grew, filled with wildflowers and game herds and food and herbs.90

Given such limited options, it should not prove surprising that, despite its name, an almost uninterrupted string of violence towards American Indians 88 Eighth Annual Report of the Board of Indian Commissioners for the Year 1878 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1877), p. 15 (emphasis in original). Commentators at the time noted that Sheridan’s order violated the just-signed 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which permitted Lakotas to hunt on unceded lands off their reservation. 89 ‘Message from the President of the United States, Communicating the Report and Journal of Proceedings of the Commission Appointed to Obtain Certain Concessions from the Sioux Indians’, 44th Cong., 2nd Sess., S. Exec. Doc. 9, 78. 90 M. Burns, The Only One Living to Tell: The Autobiography of a Yavapai Indian, ed. Gregory McNamee (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), p. 51.

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accompanied the Peace Policy. Each bore the misleading label of war: the Yavapai War (1871–5), the Modoc War (1872–3), the Red River War (1874–5), the Great Sioux War (1876–7), the Nez Perce War (1877), the Bannock War (1878), the Cheyenne War (1878–9), the Ute War (1879) and the Sheepeater Indian War (1879), among other conflicts. As in prior campaigns, the army did not hesitate to attack entire Indigenous communities. In fact, its preferred tactic, especially when confronting the equestrian Indians of the Great Plains, was to wait until cold weather led Natives to collect together for the winter and then to surprise their camp at dawn.91 ‘[L]et me find out exactly where these Indians are going to spend the winter’, commented General Sheridan in preparation for an assault on the Piegan (Blackfeet) in 1869. ‘[A]fter a good heavy snow’ when the Blackfeet would be ‘helpless . . . we might be able to give them a good hard blow’.92 Sheridan’s instructions resulted in the early morning massacre on 23 January 1870 of a sleeping encampment of Blackfeet along the Marias River. The US Second Cavalry killed between 150 and 300 Natives, captured their horses, and burned the Blackfeet’s lodges, food, medicine bundles and other possessions. Piegans interviewed after the attack noted that only 15 of those killed were ‘young, or fighting men’.93 The remainder were noncombatants – women, children and elders – causing the Blackfeet leader Three Bears to exclaim, according to survivors, that the soldiers ‘killed us off without reason’ just before troopers shot him to death.94 Of the 219 members in the adjacent camp of the leader Red Horn, only 46 survived (a mortality rate of 79 per cent).95 Among the Blackfeet, the site where the massacre took place became known as Itomot’ ahpi Pikun’i (Killed Off the Piegans).96 Such acts ‘spread terror’ among nearby Indigenous peoples, in the words of observers. ‘The remainder of the Piegan Indians . . . upon hearing of the annihilation of Red Horn’s band, and fearing that they might be called upon to share a similar fate, broke up their camps and fled.’97 No Native nation could withstand such asymmetrical violence for long. The killing of community members of all ages and genders coupled with the destruction of their 91 For more on winter campaigning and dawn attacks, see B. Vandervort, Indian Wars of Mexico, Canada and the United States, 1812–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 181. 92 Philip Sheridan to E. D. Townsend, 21 October 1869 in ‘Expedition Against Piegan Indians’, 41st Cong., 2nd Sess., H. Exec. Doc. 185, 5. 93 W. B. Pease to A. Sully, 6 February 1870 in ‘Expedition Against Piegan Indians’, 7. 94 R. C. Henderson, ‘The Piikuni and the U.S. army’s Piegan expedition’, Montana: The Magazine of Western History 68 (Spring 2018), 60. 95 W. B. Pease to A. Sully, 6 February 1870 in ‘Expedition Against Piegan Indians’, 7. 96 Henderson, ‘Piikuni and the U.S. army’s Piegan expedition’, 70. 97 W. B. Pease to A. Sully, 6 February 1870 in ‘Expedition Against Piegan Indians’, 7.

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subsistence meant that, if they hoped to possess any chance of survival, virtually every Indigenous nation in the US was forced by the mid-1880s to accept the radically reduced land base and cultural impositions of the reservation. Even confinement on a reservation, however, did not guarantee protection against continued violence. During the winter of 1883–4, some 600 Piegans (approximately a quarter of the population) on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation died from starvation – a situation brought about by a decline in local game, especially the once vast buffalo herds, and a callous reduction in rations from the federal government.98 In 1890, alarmed by the messianic movement known among the Lakota as Wanagi Wacipi (‘Ghost’ or ‘Spirit Dances’), reservation authorities requested help from the US army. On 29 December 1890, several units of recently arrived soldiers, armed with rapid-fire Hotchkiss cannons, massacred 250 to 300 Lakotas, most of them women and children, along the banks of Pine Ridge Indian Reservation’s Wounded Knee Creek.99 *** In the years since 1890, Wounded Knee – or, as it was remembered by the Lakotas, Wichakasotapi (‘Where All Were Wiped Out’) – has come to loom large in the historical record as the definitive end point in the US conflicts with Indigenous peoples.100 There is good reason, however, to question the ruptures implicit in such periodisation. One can identify continuities that extend past 1890 and contribute to what could be termed the afterlife of genocide.101 The violence Indigenous peoples experienced in the nineteenth 98 Helen B. West, ‘Starvation winter of the Blackfeet’, Montana: The Magazine of Western History 9 (Winter 1959), 2–19. 99 K. Jacoby, ‘Of memory and massacre: a soldier’s first-hand account of the “Affair on Wounded Knee”’, The Princeton University Library Chronicle 64:2 (Winter 2004), 333–62; J. Ostler, The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 256. The literature on Wounded Knee is extensive. For perceptive recent treatments, see L. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 2017); D. W. Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee: The Lakotas and the Politics of Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); and N. Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 270–2. 100 Grua, Surviving Wounded Knee, p. 92. Among the first authors to define Wounded Knee as the ‘last Indian War’ was Nelson Miles: N. A. Miles, Serving the Republic: Memoirs of the Civil and Military Life of Nelson A. Miles (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911), p. 233. 101 The concept of the ‘afterlife of slavery’ from which I have derived the notion of the ‘afterlife of genocide’ is elaborated in S. Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), p. 6; and

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century still casts long shadows into the present, structuring the lives and experiences of Natives and non-Natives alike. The economic disruptions and deprivation of resources that accompanied removal and reservations have left American Indians with the highest poverty rate of any racialised group in the US.102 The patterns of sexual violence witnessed in attacks on Native settlements in the 1700s and 1800s continue with the forced sterilisations of Indian women in the 1960s and 1970s and the high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the present day.103 The images of savagery that facilitated acts of extreme violence against Indians in the nineteenth century live on in sporting mascots, in the names the US bestows upon its military hardware, and in the over-representation of Native Americans in the criminal justice system.104 The bloody ground remains bloody. The afterlife of genocide also manifests itself in the archive. Those Indigenous people killed in nineteenth-century campaigns by settlers or the US army were, of course, silenced forever – their voices consigned to an unrecoverable void and their perspectives lost to future generations. Yet even those Natives who did not perish in the extreme violence of the 1800s often found their attempts to relate their experiences ignored, while settlers and soldiers enjoyed prominent venues in which to justify their aggression against American Indians. The Western Apache leader Eskiminzin, who survived the massacre of over 140 of his community members in Arizona Territory in 1871, critiqued how Euro-Americans embraced certain narratives about the past while dismissing others: ‘They [the Apache] believe these Tucson people write for the papers and tell their own story. The Apache have no one to tell their story.’105

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Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: W. W. Norton, 2019), pp. 29, 206, 256. ‘The population of poverty USA’, www.povertyusa.org/facts (accessed 25 June 2020). Jane Lawrence, ‘The Indian Health Service and the sterilization of Native American women’, The American Indian Quarterly 24:3 (Summer 2000), 400–19. Statistics on missing and murdered Indigenous women are more advanced as of this writing in Canada than the US. See ‘Reclaiming power and place: the final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls’, www.mmiwgffada.ca/final-report (accessed 25 June 2020). ‘Why army helicopters have Native American names’, www.army.mil/article/240476/ why_army_helicopters_have_native_american_names (accessed 24 November 2020); ‘Race & justice news: Native Americans in the justice system’, www .sentencingproject.org/news/race-justice-news-native-americans-in-the-justice-system (accessed 25 June 2020). Eskiminzin quoted in Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn, pp. 248–9. The massacre of Eskiminzin’s people took place in Aravaipa Canyon to the north of Tucson, hence the reference to ‘these Tucson people’.

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We can catch a telling glimpse of these imbalances in historical storytelling in an event that took place just a few years after Wichakasotapi (‘Where All Were Wiped Out’). In 1893, the US hosted the Chicago World’s Fair, celebrating (one year late) the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ invasion of the Americas. Among the attractions were two of the era’s preeminent interpreters of US expansion: historian Frederick Jackson Turner and showman William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody. In distinct yet mutually reinforcing ways, both Turner and Cody foregrounded narratives that portrayed the US as innocent of any potential genocide against North America’s Indigenous peoples.106 Turner’s history contained almost no Natives at all, just ‘free land’.107 Cody’s account did include Indians, but it was these same Natives’ imagined savagery that Cody identified as the cause of frontier violence, making ‘Buffalo Bill’ a leading exponent of what the historian Philip J. Deloria has termed ‘defensive conquest’: the belief that it was Indian belligerence and white victimhood that forced Euro-Americans to take action.108 Less remembered was the presence at the World’s Fair of a third interpreter of US expansion. For some unknown reason, Chicago’s mayor invited the Potawatomi leader Simon Pokagon to speak to the fairgoers. Prior to the 1830s, when most Potawatomis were removed to Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, they had inhabited the shores of the Great Lakes, including the land where Chicago now stood.109 Much like Apess and Winnemucca before him, Pokagon sought to make the ‘narratives of horror’ that had long circulated among Indigenous communities accessible to non-Natives. This approach caused him to depart not only from the interpretations of Turner and Cody, but from the triumphal tone of the World’s Fair. ‘In behalf of my people, the American Indians’, Pokagon began, ‘I hereby declare to you the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city.’ The fair’s achievements, Pokagon reminded listeners, had come ‘at the sacrifice of our homes 106 For a thoughtful discussion of US claims to innocence during the ‘Indian Wars’, see B. Cothran, Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), pp. 19–24. 107 F. J. Turner, ‘The significance of the frontier in American history’ in The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), 1, 3. 108 P. J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), pp. 15–21. For more on Cody, see L. Warren, Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015); and J. S. Kasson, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 109 K. M. Vigil, Indigenous Intellectuals: Sovereignty, Citizenship, and the American Imagination, 1880–1930 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 1–7.

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and a once happy race’: ‘all our fathers once loved to gaze upon was destroyed, defaced, or marred’. Pokagon highlighted the repeated shockwaves of violence that whites had unleashed on Native Americans: ‘a universal wail as one voice went up from all the tribes . . . “We must beat back these strangers from our shores before they seize our lands and homes, or slavery and death are ours.”’110 ‘Slavery and death are ours’: Pokagon’s listeners may have thought that he was resorting to hyperbole with such a phrase, but these outcomes were indeed the fate of many Natives in the campaigns that soldiers and settlers unleashed against them during the long nineteenth century. Repurposing a traditional Potawatomi building material, Pokagon had his speech printed on sheets of birch bark and hawked it to World’s Fair attendees as a pamphlet entitled The Red Man’s Rebuke. Yet, even as Turner and Cody enjoyed

Figure 16.2 The speech of Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi) at the Chicago World’s Fair, critiquing the violent invasion of their homelands that Native Americans suffered after 1492; printed on birch bark, a traditional Potawatomi building material. (Image courtesy of Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College)

110 S. Pokagon, The Red Man’s Rebuke (Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1893), pp. 1, 2, 4, 9.

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growing public recognition in the aftermath of the fair in Chicago, Pokagon and his booklet soon sank into undeserved obscurity. Today, however, it is Pokagon’s depiction of the grim costs of what he termed ‘the cyclone of civilization’, rather than Turner’s and Cody’s nostalgic portrayals of a vanishing frontier, that calls out to us across the chasm of time.111 The questions Pokagon posed about the protracted campaigns of violence the US inflicted on Natives, and the wilful inattention of nonNatives to the legacies of this painful past, still linger on, unanswered. A resolution of the fraught problem of genocide in United States history can only take place once we confront the insights that Pokagon and other Natives have shared with us for well over a century.

Bibliographic Note To study frontier genocides in the United States is to confront the inequities of the historical archive. The disproportionate loss of Indigenous life in the nineteenth century meant that many American Indians did not survive to create lasting records of their encounters with genocidal violence. Even those Natives who did manage to endure often found white society hostile to their efforts to pass on their memories. While it would be reductive to permit these challenges to turn frontier genocides into a topic inaccessible to the historian, the existence of such glaring imbalances suggests that a sensitivity to absences in the archive and a degree of methodological flexibility are necessary elements to any effort to recapture the Indigenous consciousness of genocide. A significant portion of the Native critique of the white invasion of their homelands in the nineteenth century can be located, ironically enough, in the records of the US government. Army documents, treaty negotiations, investigations of reservation conditions, and even the official correspondence of US presidents – all bear traces of American Indians’ outrage at settler brutality. One must interpret such records with care, given that in the majority of cases it was white commentators who translated and transcribed what originated as oral statements in Native languages. Nevertheless, the frequency with which one encounters detailed Indian criticisms of white behaviour in government records underscores the manner in which Indigenous perspectives inescapably imprinted themselves onto non-Native documents, even those produced by onlookers unsympathetic to the plight of Native Americans. 111 Ibid., p. 4.

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Besides reading the official archive against the grain to recapture Indigenous concerns, one can also encounter the voices of American Indians in the burgeoning number of Native-authored texts produced in the nineteenth century, from William Apess (Pequot) to Blackhawk (Sauk) to Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute) to Charles Eastman (Dakota) to Simon Pokagon (Potawatomi). It is telling, however, that the most detailed discussion of colonists’ sexual violence against Indigenous women can be found in Winnemucca’s memoir. Most of these figures wrote in English in an effort to speak directly to white audiences, but there are also Native newspapers that incorporated English as well as Indian languages, the best known of which is the Cherokee Phoenix. Less used to date by historians, but a potentially rich additional source, would be unpublished materials written in Indigenous languages (often rendered phonetically using the English alphabet), such as the correspondence from nineteenth-century Dakota prisoners recently assembled in Canku and Simon, eds., The Dakota Prisoner of War Letters. Studying Native history also requires an engagement with other, less textual forms of evidence. There exist mnemonic genres of Indigenous recordkeeping that deserve closer attention from historians. Several Plains Indian nations, including the Lakota, Kiowa and Mandan, kept Winter Counts that chronicled the most significant events in a given year. In a similar manner, the Akimel O’odham and Tohono O’odham, of what are today Arizona and the Mexican state of Sonora, utilised calendar sticks made of the ribs from saguaro cactus and marked with distinctive symbols that helped their keepers to recall important events on a year-by-year basis. Oral history can provide especially important vantage points onto how those Native communities that faced genocidal campaigns in the nineteenth century made sense of the violence that they experienced. Leading examples can be found in the interviews with Yavapai elders found in Butler, ed., Oral History of the Yavapai, or the accounts of Diné elders collected in Chee et al., Oral History Stories of the Long Walk. A flexible genre, oral history spans a vast range of materials, from extended first-person narratives to nuanced explications of Indigenous terms for key events or locations. In the latter case, the landscape itself becomes a historical text that, through such haunting site names as Itomot’ ahpi Pikun’i (Killed Off the Piegans) or Wichakasotapi (Where All Were Wiped Out), speaks to the deep intertwining of Native memory and geography with genocide and its afterlife.

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The California Indian Genocide, 1846–1873 benjamin madley On 18 June 2019, California’s Gavin Newsom became the first governor in United States history to apologise publicly for a genocide committed in their state. Shaded by a grove of trees at the site of West Sacramento’s future California Indian Heritage Center, Newsom stood in a circle with tribal leaders. After recounting evidence of state-sponsored mass murder, Governor Newsom insisted: ‘It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was: a genocide, no other way to describe it. And, that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.’ Finally, the governor of the most populous and prosperous state in the wealthiest nation in the world publicly apologised: ‘I’m sorry on behalf of the state of California.’1 Genocide was a formative event in the making of the state. Yet relatively few people, even in California, know this history. State-sponsored mass violence nearly annihilated a number of California Indian communities between 1846 and 1873. Many thousands lost their lives. And the genocide radically transformed California. What follows is a brief history of this genocide, drawn from my 2016 book An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873.2 On or about 5 April 1846, United States Army forces led by Captain John C. Frémont halted near what is now the Northern California city of Redding. At that time, California was still part of Mexico. The seventy-one members of the Frémont Expedition, along with five volunteers from a nearby trading post, had come to the area based on concerns that a group of Wintu Indian people gathered along the shores of the Sacramento River might pose a threat This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Julia Bogany (Gabrielino-Tongva San Gabriel Band of Mission Indians), activist, author, cultural affairs officer, friend, tribal council member and mentor. 1 Indian Country Today, 18 June 2019, embedded video. 2 B. Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016).

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to local whites. More likely, the Wintus were gathered simply to catch and process salmon from the river. Yet Frémont and his men attacked them, three months before the United States began its invasion of Mexican California on 7 July 1846. According to one expedition member, Thomas E. Breckenridge, ‘the or[d]er was given to ask no quarter and to give none’. What followed was a major massacre that, in many ways, prefigured the hundreds of mass killings that would stain California with Indigenous blood in the years to come. The assault began with a barrage of rifle fire from well beyond the range of traditional Wintu weapons. William Isaac Tustin remembered: ‘as soon as we got within rifle shot, they began to fall fast’. Yet Frémont’s men were unscathed. As in many of the California battles and massacres that followed, the overwhelmingly superior range of the attackers’ rifles meant that they could shoot and kill while ‘arrows thrown against us were harmless on account of the distance’. Thus, many attacks on California Indian communities began with long-range rifle fire or, sometimes, cannon fire. Soon, Frémont’s expeditionary force charged – shooting as they advanced – in what would become a typical second phase of many attacks on California Indian people. Participant Thomas S. Martin described men, women and children ‘shot down like sheep’. Now engaged in close killing, the third phase of many California massacres, the assailants swung sabres, and perhaps killed with their pistols and butcher knives. Survivors fled west or into the Sacramento River. Yet Frémont’s forces pursued them, in what would become a final phase of many California massacres: executionary killing. Tustin remembered how Kit Carson and others ‘followed those who took to the plains, and being mounted they literally tomahawked their way through those flying Indians’. Diving into the Sacramento River, others likewise encountered a zone of death: ‘the rest of the party stationed themselves on the bank of the river, and kept up a continual fire on the Indians who had gone into the river and were swimming across’. In sum, it was ‘a slaughter’. As in so many California massacres, eyewitnesses left records of the number of California Indian people killed. Breckenridge recalled, ‘as near as I could learn from those that were engaged in the butchery . . . there were from 120 to 150 Indians killed that day’. Participant Thomas Martin estimated that ‘in less than 3 hours we had killed over 175 of them’. Yet the, eyewitness Tustin reported a far higher death toll. According to him: ‘The Indians killed was somewhere between six and seven hundred by actual count’, not including ‘those killed in the river . . . fully two or three hundred more’. If Tustin’s upperend estimates are accurate, Frémont’s force may have killed some 1,000 people that day. In contrast, there is no extant evidence that the attacking force

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Map 17.1 Selected locations in the California Genocide of 1846–73. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

suffered any men injured, let alone any men killed. This atrocity was the prelude to hundreds of massacres and, ultimately, an American genocide.3

3 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 1, 42–8.

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Intermittent mass killings of California Indians punctuated the first years of United States rule in California, but James Marshall’s January 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill, northeast of what is now Sacramento, precipitated a local genocide in the Nisenan and Northern Miwok lands where the Central Mines soon began booming. Men from Oregon played a leading role in the increasing violence against California Indians. They rarely had connections to California’s existing Mexican economy and society, in which Indigenous peoples played important roles. Moreover, many of these Oregonians saw California Indian people as little more than dangerous obstacles to the rapid acquisition of wealth.4 In 1849, Oregonians’ attacks on California Indian people became more frequent and deadly, particularly in the Central Mines. One Forty-Niner explained, ‘Oregon people had been used to shooting Indians, and they did shoot them freely.’5 The rancher Johann Sutter added that immigrants and Oregonians ‘had commenced a war of extermination upon them, shooting them down like wolves, men, women, and children’.6 Observers in the Central Mines recounted multiple massacres, beheadings and the slaying of surrendered California Indians. Due to spotty primary source coverage, we will likely never know the exact number of California Indians murdered by newcomers in and around the mines in 1849 and early 1850. Yet, hundreds, if not thousands, may have suffered violent deaths. What was clear to observers was the exterminatory nature of such killings, in both their intent and impact.7 Such violence soon spread. In December 1849, Pomo and Wappo people held as unfree labourers rose up and slew their 2 white captors near Clear Lake. This double homicide triggered a cascading series of events that would mark the turning point towards the larger state-endorsed genocide in California. Vigilantes and United States Army soldiers killed as many as 1,000 California Indian people – or more – between December 1849 and May 1850. Vigilantes murdered and massacred substantial numbers in the Napa and Sonoma Valleys north of San Francisco. Then, after authorities arrested 8 of these vigilantes, the California Supreme Court, in its very first case, released them on bail. The United States Army, in multiple campaigns, also sought to avenge the deaths of the 2 white ranchers.8

4 Ibid., pp. 73–7. 5 W. T. Sayward, ‘Pioneer reminiscences’, MSS C-D 197, Bancroft Library, 1882, 5, 7–8. 6 Sutter summarised in T. T. Johnson, Sights in the Gold Region, and Scenes by the Way, 2nd ed. (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1850), p. 140. 7 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 82–102. 8 Ibid., pp. 103–44.

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In a San Francisco newspaper article titled ‘Horrible slaughter of Indians’, one journalist used information provided by United States Army Captain John B. Frisbie to describe a massacre committed by the army on an island in Clear Lake: ‘Little or no resistance was encountered, and the work of butchery was of short duration. . . [Neither] sex, nor age was spared; it was the order of extermination fearfully obeyed’.9 Nathaniel Lyon, the army officer directly in charge, reported ‘not less than sixty’ and probably ‘a hundred and upwards’ Indians killed. His men suffered not a single injury.10 Other sources disputed Lyon’s report and instead estimated that as many as 800 California Indian people died that day.11 Additional killings followed, and the officers involved received promotions.12 A new factor was at work: large-scale, extended vigilante and United States Army killing campaigns tolerated (and soon, as we shall see, supported) by both state and federal authorities. As the gold rush continued, immigrants surged into the state. On the eve of the gold rush in early 1848, there had been 13,000 or 14,000 non-Indians in California.13 By 1860, census-takers counted more than 362,000.14 These many newcomers came primarily in search of wealth. Yet, in seeking to access gold, eat, dress, acquire labour and satisfy their sexual desires, immigrants placed immense pressure on California Indians. These demands triggered an explosion of ranching, hunting, mining and slave raiding. Such activities generated shock waves that had a devastating impact on California Indian individuals, families, communities and nations. California’s new leaders intensified that impact. Under martial law, the United States military officers in charge of administering California had implemented policies that made California Indians second-class subjects with few rights. The 1849 California Constitution then made it nearly impossible for Indians to vote.15 The following year, the new state legislature banned all Indians from voting, barred those with ‘one half of Indian blood’ 9 Frisbie quoted and summarised in ‘Horrible slaughter of Indians’, Daily Alta California, 28 May 1850, p. 2 (emphasis in original). 10 Nathaniel Lyon to E. R. S. Canby, 22 May 1850, 2, microfilm, M210, reel 5:np, Division of the Pacific and Department of the Pacific, Record Group 393, National Archives, Washington, DC. 11 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 131–2. 12 Ibid., pp. 141–2. 13 H. H. Bancroft, The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, 39 vols. (San Francisco: The History Company, 1882–90), XXIII, p.3; M. Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 8. 14 J. C. G. Kennedy, Population of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eighth Census, Under the Direction of the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1864), p. 28. 15 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 146–8, 156.

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or more from giving evidence for or against whites in most criminal cases, and denied Indians the right to serve as jurors.16 California legislators later banned Indians from serving as attorneys.17 In combination, these laws largely shut Indian people out of participation in, and excluded them from protection by, the state legal system. This amounted to a virtual grant of impunity to any who attacked them. Abduction played a major role in California’s Indian population decline. In the 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, state legislators endorsed unfree Indian labour by legalising white custody of Indian minors and Indian prisoner leasing, while allowing courts and juries to reject summarily Indian testimony.18 Indians could thus be forced into unpaid work on trumped-up charges. In 1860, the state legalised the ‘indenture’ of ‘any Indian’.19 Kidnapping, slave raiding and bondage had at least four genocidal impacts. First, slave raiders often used lethal force in order to capture California Indians. For example, in 1862, a correspondent reported ‘a class of pestilent whites’ in northwestern California’s ‘Mendocino, Humboldt, Del Norte and Klamath’ counties who ‘kill Indian “bucks” and squaws for the purpose solely of getting and selling their children’.20 Second, once slave raiders had sold the survivors, these survivors would often be dispersed, making biological reproduction extremely difficult, which only accelerated California Indian population decline. Third, some California Indians held in bondage were treated as disposable labourers. As one lawyer recalled, ‘Los Angeles had its slave mart [and] thousands of honest, useful people were absolutely destroyed in this way.’21 Between 1850 and 1870, Los Angeles’ Indian population fell from 3,693 to 219.22 16 State of California, The Statutes of California, Passed at the First Session of the Legislature. Begun on the 15th Day of Dec. 1849, and Ended the 22nd Day of April, 1850, at the City of Pueblo de San José (San José: J. Winchester, 1850) (hereafter ‘Statutes, 1850’), pp. 102, 230. Only qualified electors could serve as jurors in California courts, so Indians – who had just been denied the franchise – could not serve as jurors: ibid., p. 288. 17 State of California, The Statutes of California, Passed at the Second Session of the Legislature: Begun the Sixth Day of January, 1851, and Ended on the First Day of May, 1851, at the City of San José (n.p.: Eugene Casserly, 1851), p. 48. 18 Statutes, 1850, pp. 408–10. 19 State of California, The Statutes of California, Passed at the Eleventh Session of the Legislature, 1860: Begun Monday, the Second Day of January, and Ended on Monday, the Thirtieth Day of April (Sacramento: Charles T. Botts, 1860), pp. 196–7. 20 Correspondent quoted in Madley, American Genocide, p. 303. 21 H. Bell, Reminiscences of a Ranger: or, Early Times in Southern California (Los Angeles: Yarnell, Caystile & Mathes, Printers, 1881), pp. 48–9. 22 G. H. Phillips, ‘Indians in Los Angeles, 1781–1875: economic integration, social disintegration’, Pacific Historical Review 49 (August 1980), 448.

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Finally, whites sometimes responded to escapes with lethal force. The Lassik/Wailaki Indian woman Lucy Young, who escaped servitude multiple times, remembered: ‘Young woman been stole by white people, come back. Shot through lights and liver. Front skin hang down like apron. She tie up with cotton dress. Never die, neither.’23 Others were less fortunate. After one California Indian woman fled ‘her lord and master [with] his Indian boy’ in 1858, vigilantes massacred ‘some fifteen’ California Indian people on Battle Creek.24 Two years later, a Van Duzen River rancher became so incensed after his California Indian servant visited his family half a mile away, that he ‘slaughtered the whole family – of about six persons – boy and all’.25 Despite such reports, policy-makers failed to intervene, while almost all law enforcement officials turned a blind eye. Congress also made California Indians particularly vulnerable to immigration’s blast. In 1851 and 1852, federal agents of the United States signed eighteen treaties with 119 California Indian tribes, allocating them a total of 7,488,000 acres (11,700 square miles) or about 7.5 per cent of California’s 155,779 total square miles (see Map 17.1).26 Yet, in Washington, DC, United States senators repudiated these treaties and never ratified them. Instead, in 1853, Congress authorised ‘five military reservations not exceeding 25,000 acres each’ and conferred no legal recognition or land titles on California Indian groups. The results were fourfold. First, the government did not patent any of these temporary reservations, and jurisdiction over them was left uncertain. Second, California Indians did not become the explicit wards of the federal government. Third, because jurisdiction remained uncertain, confusion and conflict between and among state and federal authorities prevailed. Finally, United States Army Major General John Wool’s 1857 interpretation of California reservations’ legal status denied Indians on these reservations the full protection of the army: ‘Until these reservations are . . . perfected the United States troops . . . have no right to . . . exclude the 23 L. Young in L. Young and E. V. A. Murphey, ‘Out of the past: a true Indian story told by Lucy Young, of Round Valley Indian Reservation’, California Historical Society Quarterly 20 (December 1941), 358. 24 E. W. Inskeep to Editors, 28 April 1858, and editor in Red Bluff Beacon, 5 May 1858, 2. 25 San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin, 1 June 1860, 2. 26 Redick McKee to Luke Lea, 24 March 1851, in 33rd Cong., spec. sess., 1853, Senate Executive Document 4, serial 688, 67; R. F. Heizer, The Eighteen Unratified Treaties of 1851–1852 between the California Indians and the United States Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 1, 12–15, map 1; and G. E. Anderson and R. F. Heizer, ‘Treaty-making by the Federal Government in California 1851–1852’ in Treaty Making and Treaty Rejection by the Federal Government in California, 1850– 1852, ed. G. E. Anderson, W. H. Ellison and R. F. Heizer (Socorro, NM: Ballena Press, 1978), 1–36, at 26.

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Whites from entering and occupying the reserves, or even prevent their taking from them Indians, squaws and children’.27 Federal officials thus made California Indians particularly vulnerable to kidnapping, slavery, assault, murder and massacre. Meanwhile, California state legislators began to build a state-sponsored killing machine, one that would be materially supported by the federal government. Following violence in early 1850 between Quechans and a group of white squatters along southeastern California’s Colorado River, Governor Peter Burnett – California’s first elected governor under United States rule – called for volunteer militiamen to ‘punish the Indians, bring them to terms, and protect the emigrants’. Thus began the first official volunteer militia operation against California Indians under United States rule. The Gila Expedition of 1850 communicated important messages to the public in California. To begin, the United States Army helped to arm the expedition’s volunteer militiamen with carbines, pistols and sabres, signalling federal support for future state militia operations against California Indians. The volunteer militiamen then marched from coastal Southern California across the desert to the Colorado River and back. The expedition ultimately grew to a force of 142 militiamen in an operation that lasted 91 days, indicating state support for substantial, long-distance, extended militia operations against California Indians. Finally, the militiamen suffered just one wound, but killed perhaps a dozen Quechan people in an expedition supported by both state and federal authorities.28 Over time, such one-sided volunteer California state militia operations became increasingly efficient and lethal. Meanwhile, the pattern of state and federal support for such expeditions would continue. California governors called out or authorised no fewer than 24 state militia expeditions between 1850 and 1861. These operations killed at least 1,342 California Indian people.29 However, their impact transcended the immediate death toll. Militiamen served as a widely publicised state endorsement of Indian killing, communicating an unofficial grant of legal impunity for such killing and inspiring many more vigilante homicides. By demonstrating that the state would not punish Indian killers, but instead reward them, state militia expeditions helped to inspire vigilantes to kill at least another 6,460 California Indian people between 1846 and 1873.30 27 John Wool to D. C. Broderick and Wm. Gwin, 28 January 1857, 2, 4, Interior Department Appointment Papers, Held–Poage Library, Ukiah, California. 28 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 180–1. 29 Ibid., p. 533. 30 Ibid., pp. 363–550.

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On 7 January 1851, Governor Burnett publicly declared – in his ‘Annual message to the Legislature’ – that ‘a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the races, until the Indian race becomes extinct’. Dismissing nascent federal treaty-making as futile, he proclaimed the annihilation to be unstoppable: ‘The inevitable destiny of the race is beyond the power or wisdom of man to avert.’31 Burnett thus used his authority as governor to support additional volunteer state militia expeditions against California’s Indigenous peoples. The following month, state legislators voted to put the power of the purse behind Burnett’s thinly veiled threat. They borrowed $500,000 for past and future anti-Indian militia operations.32 Meanwhile, one state militia leader threatened to unleash the dogs of war. That same month, California’s new governor, John McDougal, sent militia commander J. Neely Johnson (who would become California’s governor in 1856) to meet with federal Indian treaty negotiators. Johnson then ‘promised’ the three negotiators that, should treating fail, ‘he would then make war upon the [Indians], which must of necessity be one of extermination to many of the tribes’.33 Meanwhile, the state built an arsenal of muskets, pistols, rifles, other weapons, ammunition and equipment donated by the federal government.34 The following year, United States Senator John Weller – who would become California’s governor in 1858 – told fellow senators in Washington, DC, that California Indians ‘must soon be crushed – they will be exterminated before the onward march of the white man’, insisting ‘Humanity may forbid, but the interest of the white man demands their extinction.’35 That same year, California state legislators passed a new $600,000 bond measure to support additional state militia operations even as vigilante killings continued.36 The Sinkyone woman Sally Bell provided a rare California Indian eyewitness account of a massacre that took place during the 1850s in northwestern California. Bell remembered: [A]bout ten o’clock in the morning, some white men came. They killed my grandfather and my mother and my father. I saw them do it . . . Then they 31 Burnett quoted in State of California, Journals of the Legislature of the State of California; 1851, p. 15. 32 Madley, American Genocide, p. 190. 33 J. Neeley Johnson, paraphrased in G. W. Barbour, R. McKee and O. M. Wozencraft to Hon. Luke Lea Esq., 17 February 1851, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, M234, Reel 32:106. 34 Ibid., 199–200. 35 Weller quoted in Congressional Globe, 11 August 1852, 32nd Cong., 1st sess., 2175 (emphasis in original). 36 Madley, American Genocide, p. 207.

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killed my baby sister and cut her heart out and threw it in the brush where I ran and hid. My little sister was a baby, just crawling around. I didn’t know what to do. I was so scared that I guess I just hid there a long time with my little sister’s heart in my hands.37

It was a terrifying time to be a California Indian. The United States Congress materially endorsed state-sponsored killing even as state and federal leaders perfected the killing machine. In 1854, Congress allocated over $924,000 to reimburse the state of California for its past militia operations, retrospectively endorsing them, financially supporting them and thus fuelling genocidal campaigns.38 That same year, California state legislators’ Act to Prevent the Sale of Fire-arms and Ammunition to Indians made the sale or transfer of arms or ammunition to Indians punishable by a fine and/or a jail sentence, further imperilling California Indians by limiting their ability to defend and feed themselves.39 The following year, in his annual report to the California Legislature, State Quartermaster and Adjutant General William C. Kibbe – who ran California’s militia system from 1852 through 1863 – emphasised the state militia’s genocidal purpose: ‘There are but two alternatives before us, viz: either to wage a war of extermination, or abandon a large and productive territory.’40 In 1855, to help perfect the killing machine, Kibbe completed a 268-page-long tactical manual which the governor approved as ‘the Tactics of the State of California’. That Christmas Eve, United States Secretary of War Jefferson Davis – the future president of the Confederate States – sent the California militia ‘ninety two copies of the system of Tactics recently adopted for Light Infantry and Riflemen’.41 Meanwhile, in 1855, Congress promised 160 acres of land to any regular, militiamen or volunteer who had participated in a battle, or served for at least fourteen days, as long as the United States eventually paid for the operation. This act thus provided a powerful new material 37 Bell quoted in G. A. Nomland, ‘Sinkyone notes’, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 36:2 (31 December 1935), 149–78, at 166–7. 38 Madley, American Genocide, p. 230. 39 California, The General Laws of the State of California, from 1850 to 1864, Inclusive: Being a Compilation of all Acts of a General Nature Now in Force, with Full References to Repealed Acts, Special and Local Legislation, and Statutory Constructions of the Supreme Court, compiled by T. H. Hittell (San Francisco: H. H. Bancroft, 1865), p. 532. 40 William C. Kibbe, quoted in Office of the Quartermaster and Adj’t General, ‘Annual report of the Quarter-Master and Adjutant General’, 4, in California, Appendix to Journal of the Seventh Session of the Assembly of the State of California, Begun on the Seventh Day of January, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty Six, and Ended on the Twenty-First Day of April, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Fifty-Six, at the City of Sacramento (Sacramento: James Allen, 1856). 41 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 239–40.

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inducement to volunteer for militia expeditions against California Indians. Then, in 1857, California state legislators appropriated an additional $410,000 for militia operations, with predictable results.42 Finally, in 1861, even as the Confederate secession was tearing the United States asunder, the United States Congress appropriated up to $400,000 to pay for additional California state militia expeditions.43 Civilians and officials also carried out large removal operations to concentrate surviving California Indians on federal reservations. Such operations sometimes led to mass death, even mass murder. In 1856, vigilantes massacred fifty-five California Indian people while removing one group to the Mendocino Reservation.44 The Lake Yokuts woman Yoi’mut stated that, during the forced removal of her people to the Fresno Reservation, ‘my mother . . . saw 12 Indians killed’, while ‘about ten died on the way’.45 According to Augustus Starr, the Cavalry captain in charge of the 1863 Konkow Maidu Trail of Tears, at least thirty-two people died during this forced removal to the Round Valley Indian Reservation.46 A United States Infantry captain reported that Starr abandoned others to die along the way, ‘by tens for want of care and medical treatment and from lack of food’.47 Once they arrived at federal reservations, California Indians often encountered institutionalised malnutrition and lethal starvation. In 1858, a Humboldt Times journalist warned: ‘Government must take some steps to provide for [reservation] Indians or they will be exterminated.’48 Yet, rather than increase support for California reservations, in 1859 congressmen cut annual funding for California Indians by almost 70 per cent, from $162,000 to $50,000.49 That same year, an army officer reported ‘some eight or ten Indians’ dying each day at the Round Valley Reservation, due to syphilis and inadequate 42 Ibid., pp. 237–8, 253. 43 Ibid., p. 289. 44 Mr Peilsticker paraphrased in ‘Fight with the Indians’, Butte Record, 18 October 1856, p. 2. 45 Yoi’mut quoted in F. F. Latta, ‘Little journeys in the San Joaquin’, Livingston Chronicle, 2 September 1937, p. 4. 46 Augustus Starr to Lieutenant Colonel Hooker, 25 September 1863, in United States War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, 4 series, 130 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1897), Series 1, vol. 50, pt 2, p. 635. 47 Charles Douglas to R. C. Drum, 27 September 1863, in US War Department, War of the Rebellion, 1:50:2, p. 629. 48 ‘Our Indians’, Humboldt Times, 17 July 1858, p. 2. 49 E. D. Castillo, ‘The impact of Euro-American exploration and settlement’ in Handbook of North American Indians, series ed. W. C. Sturtevant, vol. V I I I: California, ed. R. F. Heizer (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1978), 111.

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rations.50 California Indians also described the state’s lethal reservation conditions. The Konkow leader Tome-ya-nem recollected that, after volunteers had forcibly removed his people to the Mendocino Reservation, ‘often we were very hungry . . . and the Con-cows began to die very fast’.51 Other reservations were little better. In about 1860, Tome-ya-nem and his people relocated to Round Valley Reservation where, he recollected, ‘there was even less to eat’.52 Indeed, in 1860, officials typically provided 480–910 calories per day to working Round Valley Indians.53 By 1862, daily rations at Round Valley Reservation fell to 160–390 calories per person.54 Further diminishing these already inadequate rations, those who did not work were infrequently fed, if at all. The reservation possessed hundreds of cattle, but reservation employee William Hildreth testified that ‘[Yuki Indians] were allowed no meat’.55 If some California reservation inmates died of institutionalised starvation, malnutrition weakened the immune systems of others, making them more susceptible to lethal diseases. Starvation and malnutrition also, predictably, depressed fecundity, while increasing miscarriages, stillbirths and infant mortality. Some reservation officials and colonists used California reservation Indians as disposable labourers. According to one Round Valley resident, ‘About three hundred died on the reservation [during the winter of 1856–7], from the effects of packing them through the mountains in the snow and mud. . . They were worked naked, with the exception of deer skin around their shoulders – some few had pantaloons and coats on; they usually packed fifty pounds, if able.’56 On California reservations, such wilful neglect took an untold number of lives. Federal employees also killed large numbers of California Indian people more directly. United States Army forces killed substantial numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, but during the United States Civil War, 15,725 California men enlisted in the Union Army, and many of them remained in 50 Edward Johnson to W. W. Mackall, 21 August 1859, in State of California, ed., Correspondence Relative to Indian Affairs in Mendocino County (Sacramento: Chas. T. Botts, 1859), p. 9. 51 Tome-ya-nem quoted in A. G. Tassin, ‘The Con-Cow Indians’, Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine 4:19 (July 1884), 7–14, at 10. 52 Ibid. 53 B. Madley, ‘California’s Yuki Indians: defining genocide in Native American history’, Western Historical Quarterly 39:3 (Autumn 2008), 303–32, at 323. 54 Madley, American Genocide, p. 306. 55 Madley, ‘California’s Yuki Indians’, 323–4, and William Hildreth quoted in ibid. 56 Benjamin Arthur quoted in Madley, American Genocide, pp. 260–1.

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California.57 As United States troops, these California volunteers revolutionised the California killing machine. They replaced relatively small, short-term state militia expeditions with bigger, longer-lasting army campaigns. The United States Army now fielded the largest, most sustained military operations yet seen in California. Vigilante campaigns flourished alongside them, but the continuing genocide was now primarily a federal project. The United States Army first deployed the California volunteers against California Indians in 1862. In their initial campaign, these United States soldiers killed at least 120 California Indian people.58 Many more died in succeeding operations. California volunteers also sometimes killed prisoners en masse. In 1863, Cavalry Captain Moses McLaughlin proudly reported how, 10 miles from Keysville, on the Kern River, ‘I had all the bucks collected together and . . . thirty-five . . . were either shot or sabered . . . none escaped’. McLaughlin concluded, ‘They will soon either be killed off, or pushed so far in the surrounding deserts that they will perish by famine.’59 The United States Army continued killing California Indians through the late 1860s. For example, early in 1868, soldiers massacred twenty Owens Valley Paiute Shoshone people near Independence.60 Then, on 6 May of that year, solders collaborated with vigilantes to kill sixteen Northern Paiute people in northeastern California’s upper Surprise Valley.61 And, in January of 1869, they again worked with vigilantes to kill four Nongatl men and four Nongatl women near Larabee Creek in northwestern California.62 By 1870, the California Indian population had declined dramatically. That year, federal census takers enumerated only 7,241 survivors.63 This was likely an undercount. And while the anthropologist C. Hart Meriam later estimated 30,000 California Indian people still alive that year, this population decline – in combination with California Indians’ survival strategies and the fact that many of them now lived with non-Indians – helps to

57 State of California, Records of California Men in the War of the Rebellion, 1861 to 1867 (Sacramento: State Office, J. D. Young, Supt State Printing, 1890), p. 11. 58 Madley, American Genocide, p. 302. 59 M. A. McLaughlin to Drum, 24 April 1863, in US War Department, War of the Rebellion, 1:50:1, pp. 208–9. 60 ‘A.’ in Daily Alta California, 2 March 1868, p. 1. 61 Susanville Sagebrush, 16 May 1868, p. 3; Shasta Courier, 30 May 1868, p. 2. 62 Humboldt Times, 9 January 1869, p. 3. 63 US Department of the Interior, The Statistics of the Population of the United States, Embracing the Tables of Race, Nationality, Sex, Selected Ages, and Occupations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1872), p. 16.

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explain the fact that no massacres of California Indians were reported in 1870.64 The last recorded large-scale massacre of California Indian people occurred the following year. After a cow went missing near the headwaters of Mill Creek, in northeastern California, four ranchers massacred ‘about thirty’ Yana people in a cave. In 1915, Frank Norvell wrote, ‘In the cave with the meat were some Indian children. Kingsley could not bear to kill these children with his 56-calibre Spencer rifle. “It tore them up so bad.” So he did it with his 38-calibre Smith and Wesson revolver.’65 Finally, the gun fell silent. Still, events to the north would soon trigger one more state-sponsored annihilation campaign against California Indians. The infamous 1872–3 Modoc War was the United States Army’s final major military operation against the Indigenous peoples of California. More than two years after a group of Modocs fled a southern Oregon reservation and returned to their ancestral lands, US cavalrymen and local auxiliaries attacked them. The 165 Modoc men, women and children who survived retreated into the lava beds of northeastern California. United States Army troops, California volunteers, Oregon militiamen and American Indian scouts surrounded them. When negotiations failed, Modocs killed a general and 2 others.66 The highest-ranking officer in the United States Army, William T. Sherman, now proclaimed to the local commanding general, via his commander: ‘You will be fully justified in their utter extermination.’67 The field commander, Brevet Major General Alvan Gillem, then stated his plan to ‘exterminate the tribe’, but failed to do so.68 Still, even after United States Army officers captured or accepted the surrender of Modoc leaders, the army tried, hanged and decapitated 4 of them before shipping their severed heads to the United States Army Medical Museum in Washington, DC.69 That same year, California’s new state penal code finally barred judges and juries from summarily rejecting 64 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 334–5. 65 Mr Novall [Norvell] and D. B. Lyon in T. T. Waterman, ‘The Yana Indians’, University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 13:2 (27 February 1918), 35–102, at 59 (emphasis in original). Theodora Kroeber thought that this killing occurred in ‘1870, 1871, or 1872’. See Kroeber, Ishi in Two Worlds: A Biography of the Last Wild Indian in North America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002 [1961]), p. 239. 66 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 336–41. 67 W. T. Sherman, General to Gen. Schofield, 12 April 1873 in Daily Alta California, 14 April 1873, p. 1. 68 Gillem quoted in Madley, American Genocide, p. 342. 69 E. N. Thompson, Modoc War: Its Military History and Topography (Sacramento: Argus Books, 1971), pp. 124–6.

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Indians’ testimony in criminal cases.70 Direct and overtly violent systematic mass killings of California Indian people now finally came to an end. The California Indian catastrophe fits the two-part legal definition set forth in the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention. First, on multiple occasions, perpetrators – from California state governors down to vigilante leaders – demonstrated, in word and deed, their ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Second, they committed examples of all five genocidal acts listed in the Convention. ‘Killing members of the group’ occurred in more than 370 massacres, as well as hundreds of smaller killings, individual homicides and executions.71 Sources indicate that, from 1846 to 1873, vigilantes, militiamen and soldiers killed at least 9,492 to 16,094 California Indian people, and probably many more.72 During the same period, California Indians killed fewer than 1,500 non-Indians.73 Other acts of genocide proliferated too. Many rapes and beatings occurred, and these meet the Genocide Convention’s definition of ‘causing serious bodily harm’ to victims on the basis of their group identity and with the intent to destroy the group. The sustained military and civilian policy of demolishing California Indian villages and their food stores while driving survivors into inhospitable desert and mountain regions amounted to ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’. Some United States Office of Indian Affairs employees administering federal reservations in California committed the same genocidal acts. Further, because malnutrition and exposure predictably lowered fertility while increasing the number of miscarriages and stillbirths, some state and federal decision makers also appear to have imposed ‘measures intended to prevent births within the group’. Finally, the state of California, slave raiders and federal officials were all involved in ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’. Between 1852 and 1867 alone, 3,000 to 4,000 or more California Indian children suffered such forced transfers.74 By breaking up families and shattering communities, these forced removals also constituted ‘imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group’. In effect, the state legalised the abduction and 70 California, annotated by C. Haymond and J. C. Burch, The Penal Code of the State of California (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1874), p. 455. 71 Madley, American Genocide, pp. 361–480. 72 Ibid., p. 12. 73 Ibid., p. 522. 74 S. F. Cook, ‘The conflict between the California Indian and white civilization: III. The American invasion, 1848–1870’, Ibero-Americana 23 (20 April 1943), 1–115, at 61, and Castillo, ‘Impact of Euro-American exploration and settlement’, 109.

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enslavement of California Indian minors, slavers exploited indenture laws, and federal officials prevented United States Army intervention to protect the victims. Ample evidence exists to designate the California Indian catastrophe under United States rule a case of genocide, according to the 1948 United Nations definition. Elected California state officials were the primary architects of annihilation. Legislators created a legal environment in which Indians had almost no rights, thus granting those who attacked Indians virtual impunity. Moreover, two governors threatened annihilation, and governors and elected officials co-operated in building a killing machine. California governors called out or authorised twenty-four militia expeditions between 1850 and 1861, which killed 1,342 to 1,876 or more California Indians. State legislators also passed three bills that raised as much as $1.51 million to fund these operations, usually ex post facto. Finally, in 1863, after the United States Army supplanted the militias as the primary state-sponsored Indian-killing force, California state legislators passed a bill allowing the state to raise an additional $600,000 to encourage more men to enlist in the United States Army as California volunteers.75 Thus, some California officials engaged in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, direct public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. Yet, despite their leading role, California officials did not act alone. The United States Army played a crucial part in the California Genocide, creating the exclusionary legal system, setting genocidal precedents, helping to build and fund the killing machine, participating in killing, and finally taking control of it. In total, United States Army soldiers and their auxiliaries killed at least 1,688 to 3,741 California Indian people between 1846 and 1873.76 Ultimately, some members of the army engaged in genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity in genocide. If state legislators were the main architects of genocide in California, federal officials helped to lay the groundwork, became the final arbiters of the design, and ultimately paid for most of its official execution. United States senators played a pivotal role in making California Indians into victims. In 1852, senators repudiated the eighteen treaties signed between federal treaty commissioners and California Indian leaders, thus dispossessing California Indians of their remaining land and their negotiating role, while dramatically 75 State of California, The Statutes of California, Passed at the Fourteenth Session of the Legislature, 1863: Begun on Monday, the Fifth Day of January, and Ended on Monday, the Twenty-Seventh Day of April (Sacramento: Benj. P. Avery, 1863), pp. 662–6. 76 Madley, American Genocide, p. 550.

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increasing their vulnerability by subsequently denying them land rights and full federal protection. Federal officials then failed to feed and care for them adequately on reservations. Moreover, rather than protect California Indians, they allowed militiamen to hunt and kill them. Congress could have reined in militia activities or simply withheld funding for militias. Instead, it passed two bills allocating up to $1,324,259 to reimburse California for past state militia expeditions, retrospectively endorsing them, financially supporting them, and fuelling additional genocidal operations. By 1863, the federal government had given California more than $1 million for its militia campaigns.77 Congress thus approved genocide ex post facto by paying California for the killings carried out by its state militias. Of course, by 1863, the United States Army had taken over as the primary state-sponsored killer, and Congress controlled that institution’s budget. Indeed, federal legislators paid for some or all of the many state-sponsored lethal campaigns against California Indians between 1846 and 1873. Some federal officials thus committed genocidal acts, as later defined by the United Nations Genocide Convention. The resulting loss of human life remains staggering. During the maelstrom years of 1846–73, the California Indian population plummeted from some 150,000 people to perhaps 30,000 survivors.78 Unsurprisingly, the genocide remains a defining feature of life for some 21st-century California Indian people. In 2020, the Pomo elder Clayton Duncan – whose greatgrandmother survived the infamous 1850 Bloody Island Massacre on Clear Lake – explained: ‘Genocide is still in our mind and our soul.’79 Nevertheless, California Indians survived. As the historian William J. Bauer, Jr (Round Valley Reservation) has written, while ‘the specter of genocide and drastic population decline hangs over the narrative’ of California Indian history, the epic of California Indian survival is ‘a story worthy of marvel’.80 Despite being hunted by vigilantes, state militiamen and United States armed forces, despite being held in abysmal conditions on federal Indian reservations, and despite assaults that continued after 1873, California Indian people survived. 77 Ibid., p. 320. 78 For twenty-three estimates of California’s Indian population between 1845 and 1880, see ibid., p. 347. 79 Clayton Duncan in Sasha Khoka and Suzie Racho, ‘Marking a California massacre – with a native ceremony of forgiveness’, KQED, www.kqed.org/news/11818362/mark ing-a-california-massacre-with-a-native-ceremony-of-forgiveness. 80 W. J. Bauer, Jr, We Were All Like Migrant Workers Here: Work, Community, and Memory on California’s Round Valley Reservation, 1850–1941 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 204.

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With a population estimated at some 150,000 people in 2009, their histories continue.81 As of 2018, more than 66,666 people were enrolled citizens of the 109 California Indian tribal nations in California that the federal government of the United States officially recognises.82 Many others are members of the 60 non-federally recognised California Indian tribes in California that the state enumerated that year.83 Due to nineteenth-century forced removals, still others are enrolled citizens of federally recognised tribes in the US states of Oklahoma and Oregon.84 These descendants of genocide survivors are playing ever more public roles in culture and politics. In 2018, Tommy Pico (Viejas Band of Kumeyaay Indians) won a $50,000 Whiting Award in Poetry for his book Nature Poem.85 That same year, James C. Ramos (Serrano/Cahuilla, San Manuel Band of Mission Indians) defeated Republican Henry Gomez Nickel to become the state’s first California Indian state assemblyman.86 The following year, the author, tribal chairman, HBO producer and literature professor Greg Sarris (Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) won the Multicultural Nonfiction bronze medal for How A Mountain Was Made from the Independent Publisher Awards.87 Despite such accomplishments, the challenge of addressing genocide remains, both within and beyond California. Like California Indians, Native Americans throughout the western hemisphere suffered devastating population losses following the arrival of newcomers. Thus, despite the many written histories of violence against Native 81 K. G. Lightfoot and O. Parish, California Indians and Their Environment: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), p. 3. 82 California Governor’s Office of the Tribal Advisor, 2018 Directory: Tribal Governments, State Agencies, Federal Agencies, 2nd ed. (West Sacramento: Governor’s Office of the Tribal Advisor, 2018), 2–10, 2–12, 2–14, 2–16, 2–18, 2–20, 2–22, 2–24, 2–26, 2–28, 2–30, 2–32, 2–34, 2–36, 2–38, 2–40, 2–42, 2–44, 2–46, 2–48, 2–50, 2–52, 2–54, 2–56, 2–58, 2–60, 2–62, 2–64, 2–66, 2–68, 2–70, 2–72, 2–74, 2–76, 2–78, 2–80, 2–82, 2–84, 2–86, 2–88, 2–90, 2–92, 2–94, 2–96, 2–98, 2–100, 2–102, 2–104, 2–2-106, 2–108, 2–110, 2–112, 2–114, 2–116, 2–118, 2–120, 2–122, 2–124, 2–126, 2–128, 2–130, 2–132, 2–134, 2–136, 2–138, 2–140, 2–142, 2–144, 2–146, 2–148, 2–150, 2–152, 2–154, 2–156, 2–158, 2–160, 2–162, 2–164, 2–166, 2–168, 2–170, 2–172, 2–174, 2–176, 2–178, 2–180, 2–182, 2–184, 2–186, 2–188, 2–190, 2–192, 2–194, 2–196, 2–198, 2–200, 2–202, 2–204, 2–206, 2–208, 2–210, 2–212, 2–214, 2–216, 2–218, 2–220, 2–222, 2–224, 2–226. Note: nine tribes did not provide enrolled population numbers for this directory. 83 Ibid., 2–232 to 2–261. 84 Examples include the Modoc Tribe of Oklahoma and the Klamath Tribes (which include Modocs) in Oregon. 85 www.whiting.org/awards/winners/tommy-pico. 86 https://a40.asmdc.org/biography. 87 https://greg-sarris.com; ‘Announcing the results of the 2019 Independent Publisher Book Awards’, www.independentpublisher.com/article.php?page=2381&urltitle=An nouncing+the+Results+of+the+2019+Independent+Publisher+Book+Awards.

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Karuk Reservation

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Quartz Valley Fort Bidwell Reservation Reservation Alturas Cedarville Rancheria Yurok Reservation Rancheria Big Bend Hoopa Valley Rancheria Likely Rancheria Reservation Lookout Rancheria 6 Montgomery 7 Roaring Creek Creek Rancheria 8 Rancheria Redding Susanville Rancheria Rancheria Round Valley Grindstone Paskenta Greenville Reservation Rancheria Rancheria Rancheria Enterprise Rancheria 9 Chico 12 10 11 Rancheria Berry Creek Rancheria 13 Mooretown Rancheria 17 18 14 Colusa Rancheria

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Tuolumne Benton Paiute Reservation Rancheria Chicken Ranch Bishop Reservation Rancheria North Fork Rancheria Big Pine Reservation Picayune Rancheria Big Sandy Rancheria Table Mountain Rancheria Fort Independence Reservation Cold Springs Lone Pine Rancheria Santa Rosa Reservation Timbisha Shoshone Reservation Rancheria Tule River Reservation

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Map 17.2 Some federally recognised California Indian lands, 2021. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

Americans, the details revealed by the California case suggest the need for more local and regional studies to provide the data that will permit an assessment of genocide’s occurrence, variability, and frequency or absence

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in other regions, from the tip of Patagonia to the shores of the Arctic Ocean. We need to build on our existing knowledge, with new research, in order to understand the full picture for the United States and the entire hemisphere. The United Nations Genocide Convention provides historians with a standardised, internationally recognised rubric and a coherent definition that can be consistently applied on a case-by-case basis. The many Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced and resisted colonisation in diverse ways. Rather than lumping all of these histories into a single, flat narrative of genocide or not genocide, historians should carefully examine each one, employing the Genocide Convention to assess genocidal intent and genocidal acts. Carefully studying each history will dignify unique Indigenous experiences, illuminate differences between colonising regimes, move the discussion of genocide in the Americas towards clarity, and ultimately create a more accurate history of both Native America and the western hemisphere. The Native American population catastrophe is painful to contemplate and cannot be undone. Yet it demands our attention.

Bibliographic Note The organised destruction of California Indian people under United States rule has never been a closely guarded secret. Mid-nineteenth-century California journalists and private individuals, as well as state and federal officials, frequently addressed – and often even encouraged – what we now call genocide. By 1890, the California historian Hubert Howe Bancroft called the mass killings ‘one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all’ (The Works of Hubert Howe Bancroft, X X I V, p. 474). Early-twentieth-century writers were sometimes equally candid about the genocide that took place in California under United States rule. In 1935, United States Indian Affairs commissioner John Collier observed to the United States Senate: ‘The world’s annals contain few comparable instances of swift depopulation – practically, of racial massacre – at the hands of a conquering race’ (Hearings before the Committee on Indian Affairs, United States Senate, Seventy-Fourth Congress, First Session on S.1793 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1935), p. 6). Five years later, the historian John Walton Caughey entitled a chapter in his history California ((New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), pp. 379–91), ‘Liquidating the Indians: “wars” and massacres’. Soon thereafter, in 1943, the historical demographer Sherburne F. Cook produced ‘Conflict between the California Indian and white civilization’, the first major study addressing mass violence against California Indians 431

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under United States rule. Using varied sources, Cook quantified the violent killing of 4,556 California Indian people between 1847 and 1865. He concluded that ‘since the quickest and easiest way to get rid of [the Northern California Indian] was to kill him off, this procedure was adopted as standard for some years’ (pp. 106, 115, 5). A major theoretical intervention would soon reshape discussions of these events. In the same year that Cook published his ground-breaking study, the Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin of Poland, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), coined a new word for an ancient crime: genocide (pp. xi–xii, 9). Four years later, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 9 December 1948, Treaty Series, Vol. 78: No. 1021, 280). Lemkin planned chapters titled ‘Genocide against American Indians’ and ‘The Indians in North America (in part)’, but died before he could complete either project. See M. A. McDonnell and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin as historian of genocide in the Americas’, Journal of Genocide Research 7:4 (December 2005), 501–29, at 502. Yet others soon began using his new concept to analyse California Indian histories. Beginning in the 1960s, scholars started using the term ‘genocide’ to describe the conquest and colonisation of California under United States rule. In 1968, the anthropologists Theodora Kroeber and Robert F. Heizer, in Almost Ancestors: The First Californians (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1968), mentioned ‘the genocide of Californians’ (p. 19). In 1977, William E. Coffer touched on the ‘Genocide of the California Indians, with a comparative study of other minorities’ (Indian Historian 10 (Spring 1977), 8–15). Two years later, the ethnic studies scholar Jack Norton (Hupa/Cherokee) argued, in Genocide in Northwestern California: When Our Worlds Cried (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1979), that, according to the United Nations Genocide Convention, certain northwestern California Indians suffered genocide under United States rule. Then, in 1982, Van Garner, in The Broken Ring: The Destruction of the California Indians (Tucson: Westernlore Press) added: ‘Federal Indian policy in California . . . was genocidal in practice’ (p. 107). The historian James J. Rawls next made an important intervention. In 1984, in Indians of California: The Changing Image (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), he explained that some whites in California openly ‘advocated and carried out a program of genocide that was popularly called “extermination”’ 432

‘A War of Extermination’: The California Indian Genocide

(p. 171). Following Rawls’ equation of the nineteenth-century word ‘extermination’ with the twentieth-century term ‘genocide’, a growing chorus of voices mentioned genocide in California. For example, the anthropologist Russell Thornton (Cherokee) asserted, in American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), that ‘the largest, most blatant, deliberate killings of North American Indians by non-Indians surely occurred in California’ (p. 201). By the year 2000, the historians Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher concluded, in their textbook The American West: A New Interpretive History (New Haven: Yale University Press), that California was the site of ‘the clearest case of genocide in the history of the American frontier’ (p. 249). (See also B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 349–54.) Seventeen years later, the authors – now including historian Jon T. Coleman – went further. They called the violence ‘the starkest case of genocide in the history of American frontiers’. See R. V. Hine, J. M. Faragher, and J. T. Coleman, The American West: A New Interpretive History, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 251. Twenty-first-century scholarship has deepened our understanding of genocide in California under United States rule. In When the Great Spirit Died: The Destruction of the California Indians, 1850–1860 (Sanger: Word Dancer Press, 2003), the author William Secrest described racism and violence against California Indians between 1850 and 1860, but did not mention genocide. The historian Brendan C. Lindsay then examined the roles of racism, democracy and the press in his important monograph Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846–1873 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). Finally, my book, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, became the first year-by-year, comprehensive recounting of genocide in California under United States rule between 1846 and 1873. Much of the data on the killings, as well as the primary sources used in American Genocide to document the killings, are now accessible online and can be mapped by region, via the California Native American Heritage Commission’s Digital Atlas of California Native Americans, at https://cnra .maps.arcgis.com/apps/View/index.html?appid=03512d83d12b4c3389281e3a0 c25a78f&extent=-130.0858,31.7873,-109.6622,42.6447. Clicking on a region will open a timeline of killings with hyperlinks to primary sources related to those events.

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Canadian class-action lawsuits and the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) gave rise to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). The TRC concluded in 2015 that the Canadian government had committed ‘cultural genocide’ through a system of government-supported residential schools that aimed, from at least 1894, to assimilate forcibly Canadian First Nations, Inuit, Inuvialuit and Métis peoples.1 Canada had modelled its schools after boarding schools for Native Americans in the United States. The two countries founded a continentwide system of institutions to achieve the total assimilation – sometimes called cultural genocide – of their Indigenous populations.2 As defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention (UNGC), both nations are also responsible for the crime of genocide, for instance, by the act of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ (Article I Ie). Given the similarities between these Canadian and US schools, a comparative analysis of the links between each nation’s violent history of forcible assimilation exposes the depth of these national crimes and, in Canada, deepens understandings of the TRC’s findings.

The author thanks Ned Blackhawk, N. Bruce Duthu, Karl Jacoby, Ben Kiernan, Benjamin Madley, Bill Nelson, the UCLA American Indian Studies Center, the UCLA History Department, and the UCLA Institute for American Cultures. 1 IRSSA, 8 May 2006, www.residentialschoolsettlement.ca/IRS%20Settlement%20Agree ment-%20ENGLISH.pdf; The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) (hereafter ‘HTR’), p. 1. 2 Nicholas Flood Davin to the Minister of the Interior, ‘Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds’, 4 March 1879, 13, Public Archives of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. See also J. Morsink, ‘Cultural genocide, the Universal Declaration, and minority rights’, Human Rights Quarterly 21:4 (November 1999), 1028–9.

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Signed on 8 May 2006 by Canadian parliamentary officials, former residential school survivors and church leaders, the IRSSA settled multiple classaction lawsuits against the Canadian government and mandated the TRC’s establishment.3 This parliamentary act set financial compensation at no less than C$1.9 billion for ‘common experience payments’; C$125 million for healing initiatives; C$60 million for TRC investigations; and C$20 million for forms of national commemoration and preservation of survivors’ testimonies.4 Many have criticised the TRC because it could not ‘hold formal hearings, nor act as a public inquiry, nor conduct a formal legal process’.5 The commissioners did not ‘possess subpoena powers’ and could not reference ‘the misconduct of any person’ or ‘possible civil or criminal liability of any person or organization’.6 Thus, the final report lacked juridical teeth: it could not reference any crime in Canadian criminal or civil statutes. Nonetheless, the report contains clear evidence of genocide. Residential schools, in particular, caused cultural loss. The report appeared after a six-year-long inquiry, including testimony by more than 6,000 witnesses.7 It summarised how Canadian federal and church officials removed Indigenous children and young adults from their homelands, often through coercion, and placed them in institutions designed to destroy their languages, cultures, religions and traditions, while simultaneously replacing them with non-Indigenous substitutes. School administrators and staff forced students to learn English, to develop mechanical or domestic trades, and subjected them to militarised discipline. Most had their hair removed, and their traditional clothing and regalia destroyed. Sexual, physical and mental abuse became rampant. Epidemics created by overcrowding, forced labour, malnourishment, psychological trauma and wilful neglect compromised student immune systems. Meanwhile, institutionalised conditions incubated infections and promoted 3 A. Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), p. 273; IRSSA, pp. 43–4, 61–2. 4 ‘Summary notice’, IRSSA, p. 1. 5 Schedule N, ‘Mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, p. 3, in IRSSA. Individuals who have critiqued the TRC process include: K. Petoukhov, ‘An evaluation of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) through the lens of restorative justice and the theory of recognition’ (MA thesis, University of Manitoba, 2011); R. Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, 2nd ed. (University of Toronto Press, 2017); Woolford, Benevolent Experiment; D. B. MacDonald, The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation (University of Toronto Press, 2019). 6 Schedule N, ‘Mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’, 3, in IRSSA. 7 HTR, p. v.

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contagion.8 As the report concluded, ‘the schools were sites of hunger, overwork, danger and disease, limited education, and, in tens of thousands of cases, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect’.9 It conceded: ‘The number of students who died . . . is not likely ever to be known in full’ because of record destruction and haphazard reporting.10 Still, the report documented at least 3,201 deaths, noting that the ‘residential school death rate was 4.90 times higher than [Canada’s] general death rate’.11 While the exact numbers remain unknown, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s 2008 Apology to former residential school students recognised that Canada ‘separated over 150,000 Aboriginal children from their families and communities’.12 The removals lasted until the 1990s when the last residential school was closed. The TRC referenced the same number.13 David MacDonald, however, has estimated 150,000 people to be at only onefifth of the ‘group’.14 The removal of Indigenous children constituted, in short, a demographic reordering of Indigenous communities across Canada. These Canadian numbers also suggest the magnitude of what happened in the US, where the federal education system ensnared more Indigenous students (see Table 18.1). Between 1890 and 1960, US officials enrolled between 6.6 and 14.2 per cent of all Native Americans in the United States in boarding, day and mission schools. The figures increase to 22.5 and 46.8 per cent when considering only school-aged Indigenous children. US schools targeted Native American children in forcible campaigns of cultural genocide for much of the century after the Civil War and Reconstruction.15 8 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) (hereafter ‘CRS, I:1’), I:1, pp. 5, 131, 141, 143, 249, 252–6, 615–42; The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: Missing Children and Unmarked Burials (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) (hereafter ‘CRS, I V ’), I V, pp. 4 50–3, 84–106. 9 CRS, I V:15. 10 CRS, I:1, p. 131; HTR, p. 90. 11 HTR, p. 93. 12 Harper, in ibid., p. 369. For a critical analysis of Harper’s apology, see A. Simpson, ‘Whither settler colonialism?’ Settler Colonial Studies 6:4 (2016), 438–45. 13 HTR, p. 3. 14 MacDonald, Sleeping Giant Awakens, pp. 62–3. 15 These government figures are contested. For Canada, see Canada, Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 31st December, 1890 (Ottawa: Brown Chamberlin, 1891), pp. 217, 245; Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended June 30, 1900 (Ottawa: S. E. Dawson, 1901), I I, pp. 44, 166; Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended March 31, 1910 (Ottawa: C. H. Parmelee, 1910), I, p. 368, and I I, pp. 132, 133; Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended March 31, 1920 (Ottawa: Thomas Mulvey, 1921), pp. 14, 35. I have assumed that the percentage of school-aged children in Canada matched the US for the given year when data is not available. For the US, enrolment includes schools run and funded by the government, but not students enrolled in public schools. See Department of the Interior, Fifty-Ninth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1890), p. 334; Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs [ARCIA], 1900, p. 635; ARCIA,

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Table 18.1 US and Canada Indian school enrolment and percentage of group Canada Day, boarding and industrial school Year enrolment

First Nations, Inuit, Inuvialuit and Métis population

Estimated Percentage population of of school-age school-age Percentage children children of ‘group’ group

1890 6,671 1900 9,634 1910 10,625 1920 12,196

122,585 99,010 110,597 109,249

22,225 31,881 30,600 32,556

5.4% 9.7% 9.6% 11.2%

30.0% 30.2% 34.7% 37.5%

US Day, boarding and industrial school Year enrolment

American Indian and Alaskan Native population

1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

248,253 237,196 265,683 244,437 332,397 333,969 343,410 546,228

16,377 26,451 37,833 30,942 31,853 33,774 (1952) 40,000 42,567

Percentage Estimated of school-age population of school-age Percentage children children of ‘group’ group 45,000 76,377 80,768 72,842 98,057 87,834 94,094 189,343

6.6% 11.1% 14.2% 12.7% 9.6% 10.1% 11.6% 7.8%

36.4% 34.6% 46.8% 42.5% 32.5% 38.5% 42.5% 22.5%

TRC Commissioner Murray Sinclair (Peguis Ojibwe) labelled what happened in the residential schools ‘genocide’ and did not require any modifications to the multi-year inquiry that he oversaw.16 In April 2018, another 1910, p. 56; ARCIA, 1920, p. 147; ARCIA, 1930, p. 55; Office of Indian Education Programs, Report on BIA Education: Excellence in Indian Education Through the Effective Schools Process (Washington, DC: Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1988), p. 27; Department of Commerce, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1943), I I , p. 19; Department of Commerce, U.S. Census of Population: 1950 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1953), I I:1, p. 88; Department of Commerce, U.S. Census of Population: 1960: Nativity and Parentage (Washington, DC: GPO, 1965), I I, p. 12. Data from the 1940 Census is estimated by adding the percentage distributions for age brackets 5 to 9, 10 to 14, and 15 to 19. Because life-expectancy for American Indian people was lower than for the US as a whole, this led to an undercount (Department of Commerce, Sixteenth Census of the United States, I I, p. 26); ARCIA, 1890, p. 265 (average of estimates given); estimated using ‘Percentage distribution by age, Nonwhite’ (Department of Commerce, U.S. Census of Population: 1950, I I:1, p. 91); Department of Commerce, U.S. Census of Population: 1960: Nonwhite Population by Race (Washington, DC: GPO, 1963), p. 2. 16 Sinclair, in A. Woolford, J. Benvenuto and A. L. Hinton, eds., Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), p. 1.

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preston mcbride ARCTIC OCEAN

Reservation/residential school

56

School mentioned in text

48

N 3 38

35

53 51

23

8

30

22 Vancouver 20 2 Seattle

54

Calgary

52 13 26

47

21 49

41

14

50

39 Winnipeg

7

40 24

45 44

42 32

31

36

43

New York Philadelphia

6

Chicago

Denver

15

Kansas City

28 46 27

Toronto 1

10

18 San Francisco Los Angeles

33

Ottawa

34

55

37

Montreal

4

29

9

5

12 19

16

17

11

25

ATLANTIC OCEAN

Fort Marion PA C I F I C OCEAN

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

New Orleans

0

500 mi

0

800 km

Mohawk Institute (1832) Mission (1863) Fort Providence (1867) Shingwauk Home (1873) Hampton (1878) Carlisle (1879) Chemawa (1880) Battleford (1883) Chilocco (1884) Genoa (1884) Albuquerque (1884) Haskell (1884) Lebret School (1884) Round Lake (1884) Grand Junction (1886) Santa Fe (1890) Fort Mohave (1890) Stewart (1890) Eastern Cherokee (1890)

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Kuper Island (1890) Pine Creek (1890) Kamloops (1890) Williams Lake (1891) Pierre (1891) Phoenix (1891) Regina (1891) Perris (1892) Fort Lewis (1892) Fort Shaw (1892) Red Deer (1893) Flandreau (1893) Pipestone (1893) Mount Pleasant (1893) Tomah (1893) St. Peter's (1894) Wittenberg (1895) Greenville (1895) St. Peter's (1895)

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Brandon (1895) Morris (1897) Marieval (1898) Clontarf (1897) Chamberlain (1898) Fort Bidwell (1898) Rapid City (1898) Sherman (1902) Fort Albany (1902) Carcross (1903) Sandy Bay (1905) Fort Alexander (1905) Cross Lake (1912) Kamsack (1928) Fort George (1931) Prince Albert (1944) Intermountain (1949) Stringer Hall (1959)

Map 18.1 Selected Canadian and US schools for Indigenous children and young adults. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

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Lessons from Canada: US Schools for Native Americans

commissioner, Wilton Littlechild (Ermineskin Cree), additionally asked the UN Special Advisor on Genocide to study the Canadian residential school system using the UNGC.17 The TRC itself had not addressed the issue of genocide in international law (or what might be called ‘physical’, as distinct from ‘cultural’, genocide) because its ‘post-judicial mandate’ forbade it from referencing the Canadian criminal code, in which genocide is a crime.18 Nevertheless, the TRC changed how many Canadians viewed the residential schools; across the nation, many concluded that they were sites of genocide. A formal investigation and/or in-depth scholarly research could do the same in the United States. Scholars may consider using the TRC investigation as a blueprint for exploring the US boarding schools for Native Americans.

Analysing Potentially Genocidal Crimes To date, studies of genocide in US boarding schools have largely addressed ‘cultural genocide’, but not genocide in international law (the UNGC).19 Following the insights generated by the Canadian TRC, how might scholars now analyse the question of genocide in US schools for Native Americans? Since both deeds and prolonged lethal policies provide ample evidence of ‘specific intent’ to destroy the group in whole or in part, it is crucial to determine what, if any, genocidal crimes occurred in these schools. What follows is a roadmap, based upon Canadian findings, that can guide investigations into the question of physical genocide in US schools for Native Americans. I shall proceed through the UNGC’s Articles IIa–IIe, listing the ‘acts’ of genocide. 17 Wilton Littlechild, at United Nations 17th Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, 5th Plenary, http://webtv.un.org/search/5th-plenary-meeting-permanent-forum-onindigenous-issues-17th-session/5772804133001/?term=%22permanent%20forum%20on %20indigenous%20issues%22&sort=date&page=5 [2:28:20]. 18 MacDonald, Sleeping Giant Awakens, pp. 107–9; IRSSA, Schedule N. Genocide under Canadian domestic law includes only sections a and b of the UNGC (Canada, Criminal Code, RSC, 1985, C-46, s. 318). 19 For three key examples, see K. T. Lomawaima and J. Ostler, ‘Reconsidering Richard Henry Pratt: cultural genocide and native liberation in an era of racial oppression’, Journal of American Indian Education 57:1 (Spring 2018), 79–100; M. Tamez, ‘Necropolitics, Carlisle Indian School, and Ndé memory’ in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, ed. J. Fear-Segal and S. D. Rose (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 233–57; A. Smith, ‘Boarding school abuses, human rights, and reparations’, Social Justice 31:4 (2004), 90. There are notable exceptions (Woolford, Benevolent Experiment). Other scholars speak of linguistic or spiritual genocide in the institutions.

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(a) Killing Members of the Group Although the TRC documented few direct killings, commissioners heard numerous allegations of ‘manslaughter and murder’.20 In 1911, for example, one Canadian Indian Affairs official reported that residential school students ‘are disciplined to death’.21 Many deaths similarly occurred in US boarding schools. While the vast majority resulted from disease, some students were the victims of murder. In 1907, a Chemawa Indian School (Chemawa) employee shot and killed 14-year-old Charles Fiester (Klamath), after finding him trying to ‘get something to eat’ from a Chemawa store-room.22 Punishments were also sometimes not only excessively violent but even lethal. Evidence exists of administrators ordering students to beat other students, sometimes resulting in their deaths.23 Further study may help to determine whether or not ‘killing’ in the US schools rose to a systemic level and comprise a state-level intent for genocide. (b) Causing Serious Bodily or Mental Harm to Members of the Group Acts which caused serious bodily or mental harm to Indigenous children in residential and boarding schools were numerous and varied. Canada’s TRC found all of these elements in residential schools, including survivors who continue to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).24 Separation alone was often traumatic in itself. Frederick Ernest Koe, a survivor from Aklavik, Northwest Territories, recalled being forcibly taken to a residential school in 1958. A policeman marched him to a plane with his friend, ‘like we’re criminals’. Frederick lamented, ‘I didn’t get to say goodbye to my dad or my brother Allan, didn’t get to pet my dogs or nothing, 20 CRS, I:1, p. 539; National Post (Ontario), 3 January 2014, https://nationalpost.com/ne ws/canada/at-least-4000-aboriginal-children-died-in-residential-schools-commissionfinds. 21 Benson, in CRS, I V:93. 22 R. G. Henderson, Sam McCuch and Ignace Seymour Testimony, 22 April 1907, 1–2, 10, 12, in RG75, Chemawa Indian School, Student Case Files, 1894–1957, Box 13, Folder 1796, National Archives and Records Administration, Seattle, Washington (hereafter ‘Chemawa Student Files, [Box], [Folder], NARAS’); RG75, Chemawa Indian School, CH28: Index to Student Files, Box 5, NARAS. 23 D. K. Lajimodiere, Stringing Rosaries: The History, the Unforgivable, and the Healing of Northern Plains American Indian Boarding School Survivors (Fargo: North Dakota State University Press, 2019), p. 271; R. A. Trennert, ‘Corporal punishment and the politics of Indian reform’, History of Education Quarterly 29:4 (Winter 1989), 607–8; L. L. Grover, ‘From assimilation to termination: the Vermilion Lake Indian School’, Minnesota History 58:4 (Winter 2002/2003), 229. 24 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Canada’s Residential Schools: The Legacy (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015) (hereafter ‘CRS, V ’), V : 140.

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you know, we’re going.’25 Many students did not want to go but did not want their parents imprisoned for their truancy. Donna Antoine (Shuswap) of British Columbia asked, ‘who’s gonna look after us if our parents go to jail?’26 The TRC report is full of analogous cases. US boarding school student files exhibit a similar trend. Although some went willingly, most did not want to be separated from their families and communities. As in Canada, separation was often traumatic, and countless students suffered homesickness.27 Once at school, physical and mental harms escalated. Survivors told TRC Commissioners of systemic physical, mental and emotional abuse. The commissioners concluded: ‘Students were not only strapped and humiliated . . . they were also handcuffed, manacled, beaten, locked in cellars and other makeshift jails, or displayed in stocks.’28 Survivors recalled other punishments. Fred Brass (Key First Nation) attended a Catholic school in Saskatchewan. He recalled: ‘I saw my brother with his face held to a hot steaming pipe and then getting burned on the arm by the supervisor . . . And I saw my cousin get beat up to the point where he was getting kicked where he couldn’t even walk and then it was my turn.’29 Edmund Matatawabin (Mushkegowuk Cree) attended a residential school in Fort Albany, Ontario. He testified that officials buckled him into a metal-framed chair before running an electric current through his body on at least three separate occasions. Simeon Nakoochee (Mushkegowuk Cree) corroborated Edmund’s account: ‘I never wanted to get in that chair, you know . . . I never volunteer, or raised my hand, you know, and I just, and then she called my name, the nun.’30 Officials beat some with a leather strap so badly that they reported they could not sit for months. Others threw children down stairs. Some punishments paralysed children.31 Administrators also forced students to beat each other. Harvey Behn (Fort Nelson First Nation) remembered ‘the gauntlet’: ‘a row of people standing with weapons in their hands, their fists clenched and the offending students were made to run through this group of people and get hit and get beat. And if they didn’t participate, then they were forced to run through this gauntlet.’32 These abuses caused lasting physical and mental damage and compounded the larger intent of the 25 Koe, in The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Survivors Speak: A Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (n.p., 2015) (hereafter ‘SS’), p. 23. 26 Antoine, in SS, p. 13. 27 HTR, p. 288. 28 SS, p. viii. 29 Brass, in SS, p. 140. 30 Metatawabin and Nakoochee, in SS, p. 143. 31 Antoine and Plamondon, in SS, p. 143. 32 Behn, in SS, p. 169.

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institutions to detach children from their cultural and political identities as members of Native nations, in order to prepare them for assimilation into Euro-Canadian society. US boarding school punishments were similarly harsh. In 1892, the US Indian Affairs Commissioner proclaimed that Indians ‘are naturally brutish . . . and can be reached apparently in no other way than by corporal punishment, confinement, deprivation of privileges, or restriction of diet’.33 Students were locked up in school jails where they received only bread and water, a practice also documented by the TRC.34 A 1914 congressional investigation discovered severe beatings at Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Carlisle, Pennsylvania). Lewis Braun (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) testified: ‘punishments . . . have been brutal’. Braun explained that, in one case, ‘There were three boys . . . taken into [the disciplinarian’s] office and whipped with a baseball bat, and one of them the arm was hurt so he had to go to the hospital.’ He added, ‘Mr. Denny caught [James Kalawat] upstairs and hit him [with his fist] and knocked him clear down the first flight of stairs.’35 Even after another Indian Affairs Commissioner banned corporal punishment in 1929, it continued.36 The TRC report also documented numerous rapes and systematic forms of sexual violence. One survivor of the Cross Lake School in Manitoba recalled: ‘During that time, I was sexually, physically, emotionally, and mentally abused by both the sisters and brothers.’37 Thousands of others echoed this statement. As of 31 January 2015, the Independent Assessment Process, established by the IRSSA, received 37,951 claims for injuries from physical and sexual abuse in residential schools. According to the final report, this accounted for ‘approximately 48% of the number of former students who were eligible to make such claims. This number does not include former students who died prior to May 2005.’38Although the data was not analysed, the TRC found ‘appalling level[s]’ of sexual violence.39 Sexual violence was also prevalent in US boarding schools for Native Americans. Several high-profile cases as late as the 1980s suggest its extent. An Indian Affairs Committee investigation detailed a series of individuals 33 Morgan, in ARCIA, 1892, p. 617. 34 ‘Charles Mecum’ in RG75, Chemawa Indian School, E-35: Daily Sick List, Box 1, 130, NARAS; Yavapai tribesman, in Trennert, ‘Corporal punishment and the politics of Indian reform’, p. 600; CRS, I:1, p. 538, 4:98. 35 Braun, in US Congress, Hearings before the Joint Commission of the Congress of the United States to Investigate Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: GPO, 1914), X I, pp. 996–7. This student was likely Lewis or Louis Brown. 36 ‘Indians’ charges to be aired today’, New York Times, 23 May 1930, p. 16. 37 Yellowback, in SS, p. 153. 38 CRS, V:145. 39 HTR, p. 105.

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who had abused Indian children: Paul Price molested at least twenty-five young boys at the Cherokee Reservation school in North Carolina; John Boone sexually assaulted 142 Hopi boys at the Polacca Day School in Arizona; Terry Hester sexually abused children at the Kaibito Boarding School on the Navajo Reservation; and J. D. Todd molested children at the Greasewood Boarding School, also on the Navajo Reservation.40 The full extent of sexual violence at the US boarding schools for Native Americans remains unknown, as scholars and lawyers continue to uncover these crimes.41 Coerced physical labour itself is not genocidal, but when imposed under conditions of institutionalised malnutrition, with intent to destroy the group, it constitutes the infliction of serious bodily or mental harm. Isabelle Whitford (Keeseekoowenin First Nation) testified of Manitoba’s Sandy Bay school: ‘We were like slaves.’42 Campbell Papequash (Key First Nation) recalled of a school he attended in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, ‘there was a lot of slave labour in there because we had all the children, they all had to do, we all had our own jobs to do’.43 For students, days were long and exhausting, especially without adequate food. Frederick Loft (Six Nations of the Grand River) remembered, ‘I recall the times when working in the fields I was actually too hungry to be able to walk, let alone work.’44 Because US boarding school students experienced similar forced labour, the TRC findings suggest the need to look more closely at labour regimes in the US schools and the often limited rations that they provided. As vocational institutions, the US schools emphasised menial labour. All students worked half-days; however, many circumstances led to children working full days.45 Physical labour comprised their education. In 1928, 40 Select Committee on Indian Affairs, ‘A Report of the Special Committee on Investigations of the Select Committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate’, November 1989, 101st Cong., 1st Sess. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1989), 95–100. 41 See Lajimodiere, Stringing Rosaries; Zephier, et al. v. United States, ‘Order and “Opinion”’, 29 October 2004, Civil Case No. 03-768L; Zephier, et al. v. Catholic Diocese of Sioux Falls, et al., 2008 SD 56; One Star v. Sisters of St. Francis, 2008 SD 55; M. H. Irwin and S. Roll, ‘The psychological impact of sexual abuse of Native American boarding-school children’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 23:3 (September 1995), 461–73. 42 Whitford, in SS, p. 80. 43 Papequash, in SS, p. 79. 44 Loft, in CRS, I:1, p. 176. 45 R. Trennert, Jr, The Phoenix Indian School: Forced Assimilation in Arizona, 1891–1935 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p. 73; ‘Ray Cooper’ in RG75, Sherman Institute, Student Case Files, 1903–81, Box 127, Grace Goulding, National Archives and Records Administration, Riverside, California (hereafter ‘Sherman Student Files, [Box], [Folder], NARAR’); W. W. Roblee, MD, Physician, to Conser, 23 August 1922, in Sherman Student Files, Box 82, Tichenor Cummings, NARAR. See also K. Whalen, Native Students at Work: American Indian Labor and Sherman Institute’s Outing Program, 1900–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016).

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a congressionally chartered study known as the Meriam Report found what it called ‘Over-activity’ in ‘almost all children in Indian boarding schools’, noting: ‘The amount of work to be done is almost unlimited and the children must do it.’46 One student at Carlisle recalled weeding a field with 200 to 300 other students while the school’s farmer kept ‘the line of progress as straight as he could by the aid of a whip, which he used freely when any one lagged behind’.47 Labour could also be punitive. At Sherman Institute, a hungry 15year-old student stole oranges in 1930 and was sentenced to hard labour ‘with pick and shovel for a year’.48 Student complaints, investigations and superintendent correspondence also reveal that the US schools institutionalised malnutrition. Student complaints about hunger were common, and hospital records reveal student cases of scurvy and other nutritional deficiencies.49 Superintendents, too, wrote to their superiors warning that prescribed rations bred hunger.50 A Red Cross nurse investigating US boarding schools in 1922 witnessed ‘marked symptoms of malnutrition’.51 Labour performed by students was also sometimes dangerous. The TRC documented mangled Indigenous bodies in residential schools. Students died from buildings collapsing, falling ice from uncleared buildings, vehicle accidents and falls.52 Countless others suffered injuries in school workshops. Of such injuries, the TRC concluded: ‘the use of these machines could not realistically be described as “vocational training.” [These] are best understood as the result, not of training or education, but of the use of child labour.’53 Removed from their families, Native American children were

46 Institute for Government Research, The Problem of Indian Administration (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1928) (hereafter ‘Meriam Report’), p. 331 (emphasis added). 47 J. José Osuna, ‘An Indian in spite of myself’, Summer School Review 10:5 (August 1932), 3. 48 E. J. Young to F. M. Conser, Superintendent, 20 January 1930, and Application, in Sherman Student Files, Box 337, Harry Smith, NARAR. 49 For an example of a student complaint, see Andrew Hodge ([Hupa]) to W. P. Campbell, 8 February 1908, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 21, 2843, NARAS; Chemawa Sanitary Record, 1896–9, Box 4, 11, NARAS. 50 Hall, Superintendent, to The Honorable, The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 8 September 1898, 5, in Sherman LS, NARAR; Thos. M. Potter, Superintendent, to Hon. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 27 June 1899, in Chemawa Letters Sent, Box 4, 22, NARAS. 51 US Senate, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs United States Senate Seventieth Congress Second Session Pursuant to S. Res. 79 A Resolution Directing the Committee on Indian Affairs of the United States to Make a General Survey of the Condition of the Indians of the United States, Part 3 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1929), p. 962. 52 CRS, I V:450. 53 CRS, I:1, 347.

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institutionalised into labour systems with limited preparation for the mechanical training forced upon them. As in Canada, accidental maiming and workplace deaths in US boarding schools for Native Americans were common. In 1902, Charles Quein (Wyandotte) died from sunstroke while forced to labour in a farmer’s fields near Haskell Institute.54 Chemawa’s doctor amputated the hand of Dorothy Louise Dionne, a 12-year-old Chinook student, after a laundry machine mangled it in 1908.55 The following year, Ellen Woods (Walla Walla) died from burns suffered in the school’s kitchen.56 In 1919, James Sousea, a Laguna Pueblo student at Sherman, also died from burns sustained while labouring in the school kitchen.57 And multiple students at the Mount Pleasant boarding school in Michigan died from ‘farm accidents’.58 Compulsory work at US boarding schools killed untold numbers of Native American children. Canadian residential school conditions also imposed serious mental stress on Indigenous students, sometimes leading to suicides. Paul Dixon (First Nation of Waswanipi), who attended schools in Quebec and Ontario, recollected: ‘Homesickness was your constant companion besides hunger, loneliness, and fear.’59 Looking for an escape from abuse and mental anguish, at least six residential school students took their own lives. Many others considered or attempted suicide.60 The Kuper Island School in British Columbia forced students to observe a student who had committed suicide. Antonette White ([Coast Salish]) remembered: ‘they brought us in there, and showed, showed us, as kids, and they just left him hanging there, and, like, what was that supposed to teach us? You know I’m fifty-five years old, . . . and that’s one thing out of that school that I remember.’61 US boarding schools for Native Americans were often spaces of similar traumas for survivors and their families. Forced separation, cultural suppression, overwork and abuse – physical, sexual and mental – all caused serious bodily and mental harm. Asa Daklugie (Chiricahua Apache) recalled these 54 The Indian Leader (Haskell Institute), 25 July 1902, p. 2. 55 W. P. Campbell, Acting Superintendent, to Hon. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 19 May 1908, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 21, Dorothy Louise Dionne, NARAS. 56 C. F. Hauke, Chief Clerk, to E. L. Chalcraft, Esq., Superintendent Salem Indian School, 4 December 1909, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 24, Ellen Woods, NARAS. 57 Burton L. Smith, Principal, to Supt F. M. Conser, 28 June 1919, in Sherman Student Files, Box 341, James Sousea, NARAR. 58 E. Stafford, ‘Mt. Pleasant Indian boarding school students remembered’, The Morning Sun (Alma, MI), 6 June 2016, www.themorningsun.com/news/nation-world-news/ mt-pleasant-indian-boarding-school-students-remembered/article_2a540ac2-d39c-502e -be16-1c639f1f3027.html. 59 Dixon, in SS, p. 110. 60 CRS, I V:26. 61 White, in SS, p. 117.

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practices at Carlisle as ‘torture’.62 Attempted and successful suicides also occurred in US boarding schools.63 The TRC investigation also revealed that residential schools forced students to live in dangerous conditions. The impact of life in the residential schools lingered. Ruby Firth’s (Inuit) medical records attest to physical abuse in the form of numerous broken bones. Today, her lungs work at 50 per cent capacity, and she suffers from PTSD related to the abuse.64 Other Canadian survivors likewise suffer the ongoing impacts of ‘serious bodily or mental harm’, conditions they share with US boarding school survivors.65 One study has linked elevated Yakima suicide rates to conditions in US boarding schools.66

(c) Deliberately Inflicting on the Group Conditions of Life Calculated to Bring About Its Physical Destruction in Whole or in Part Nearly all of these policies – the denial of adequate food, water, shelter, clothing, sanitation and medical care – were common in both Canadian residential and US boarding schools. TRC evidence indicates that students were often hungry, given inadequate or no medical treatment, poorly clothed, and incarcerated in dilapidated and dangerous buildings lacking adequate heat and ventilation. At Fort Alexander School in Manitoba, Faron Fontaine (Long Plain First Nation) remembered ‘kids starving’.67 Andrew Paul (Inuvialuit), who attended a Catholic school in Aklavik, recalled: ‘we cried to have something good to eat before we sleep. A lot of the times the food we had was rancid, full of maggots, stink.’68 Officials sometimes forced students to eat everything on their plate, making them sick. In the 1960s, Bernard Catcheway (Skownan First Nation) remembered from his days at Manitoba’s Pine Creek School: ‘we had to eat all our food even though we didn’t like it. There was a lot of times there I seen other

62 E. Ball, Indeh: An Apache Odyssey, 2nd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), p. 144; L. Standing Bear, My People, the Sioux, ed. E. A. Brininstool (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1928), p. 141. 63 The Evening Sentinel (Carlisle, PA), 24 June 1918, p. 6; Hall, Supt, to Chas. Dagenett, Indian Outing Agent, 15 May 1906 telegram, 128, in Sherman Institute, Box No. 106, NARAR. 64 CRS, V:140. 65 CRS, V:3–9; K. Brown-Rice, ‘Examining the theory of historical trauma among Native Americans’, The Professional Counselor 3:3 (2013), 117–30. 66 T. C. Luce and C. E. Trafzer, ‘The invisible epidemic: suicide and accidental death among the Yakima Indian People, 1911–1964’, Wicazo Sa Review 31:2 (Fall 2016), 17. 67 Fontaine, in SS, p. 71. 68 Paul, in SS, p. 71.

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students that threw up and they were forced to eat their own, their own vomit.’69 Complaints about US boarding school food were also common. Carlisle’s nineteenth-century superintendent, Richard H. Pratt, recalled: ‘the school allowance was wholly inadequate and it would be impossible for me to conduct a school of hungry children with any hope of success’.70 He described rations as a ‘starvation supply’ that would ‘breed rebellion’.71 In 1902, Chemawa’s superintendent reported that students’ ‘chief complaints are about the food’, noting that Charles Billy (Swinomish) complained of not eating any meat ‘for 3 weeks because it was either . . . half-cooked or rotten’, and that Sebastian Kwina (Lummi) ‘said he would have starved’ had he not stolen food.72 Federal investigators noted malnutrition among Native American students as late as 1928 – ‘the government has not allowed sufficient funds with which to feed these children’ – and concluded: ‘The survey staff finds itself obligated to say frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate.’73 Even the best schools were ‘faulty’ in this regard.74 Indeed, hunger was nearly universal, amounting to what Margaret Connell Szasz has termed ‘slow starvation’.75 The TRC also determined that medical care was substandard in Canadian schools. Commissioners documented ‘limited medical and dental attention’ and even unearthed evidence of non-consensual medical experimentation and purposeful withholding of medical treatment and nutrition.76 This may be considered ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. Catcheway, a former Pine Creek student, testified that ‘when we were sick we were never taken to a hospital, never’.77Another student recalled: ‘Even though a lot of times once somebody caught something and it spread in the whole school like wildfire . . . whether it’s measles, mumps, sores, bedbugs, all that kind of stuff, we just had to live with it.’78 A student died of what seems to have been tetanus and 69 Catcheway, in SS, p. 74. 70 R. H. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964), p. 233. 71 Pratt, in C. Ryan, ‘Carlisle Indian Industrial School’ (PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 1962), 43. 72 T. W. Potter to Mr Campbell, 10 October 1902, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 13, Sebastian Swina, NARAS; Index to ‘Register of Students Admitted, 1880–1928’ in RG75, Chemawa Indian School, Microfilm P2008, NP, NARAS. 73 Meriam Report, pp. 11–12, 221. 74 Ibid., p. 327. 75 M. C. Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination since 1928 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), p. 19. 76 SS, p. 177; CRS, I:2, pp. 279–86. 77 Catcheway, in SS, p. 177. 78 Cromarty, in SS, p. 177.

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neglect after stepping on a nail because the doctor ‘didn’t come until it was too late’.79 Firth (Inuit) contracted pneumonia seven different times, often the result of inadequate clothing during the winters.80 In 2018, she testified, ‘I have scabies scars from my waist down to my ankles . . . They never put me in the hospital . . . until I couldn’t even stand up.’81 Canadian schools lacked adequate medical facilities. The principal of Alberta’s Red Deer School complained: ‘For sickness, conditions at this school are nothing less than criminal. We have no isolation ward and no hospital equipment of any kind. The dead, the dying, and the sick and the convalescent, were all together.’82 Meanwhile, between at least 1948 and 1953, administrators and scientists performed treatment, nutrition and haemoglobin studies on residential school students.83 As in Canada, US schools provided insufficient medical care. Some also conducted medical experiments on students.84 In December 1887, for example, Chemawa suffered a measles outbreak, and an unknown disease in March. During these epidemics, Chemawa provided minimal medical care. It lacked not only a hospital but a physician.85 At least ten students died that year.86 In 1901, when Chemawa officials sent John Waydelich (Alaskan Native) home ‘in a dying condition’, a physician in Alaska diagnosed his case as ‘one caused by absolute neglect and filth’. All the child needed was ‘proper food and care’.87 At Haskell in 1904, an Indian Affairs supervisor exposed similar neglect. The exposure forced the Indian Affairs Commissioner to remind superintendents, ‘Under the law these children are taken from their parents . . . and brought to a Government institution; and there is no reasonable excuse why the Government should not furnish proper medical care and attention for them.’88 Still, medical care remained substandard for 79 Gladstone, in CRS, I V:3. 80 CRS, V:140. 81 Ruby Firth testimony, Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, 24 January 2018, National Inquiry into MMIP Truth-Gathering Process, Part 1 Public Hearings, 118 vols. (Toronto: A.S. A.P. Reporting Services Inc., 2018), X L I I , p. 5. 82 Woodsworth, in CRS, I V:63. 83 CRS, I:2, pp. 227–65. 84 CRS, V:143; Bray, in ARCIA, 1894, p. 373; Hall, in ARCIA, 1905, p. 416. 85 John Lee, Superintendent, to The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 20 September 1888, in ARCIA, 1888, p. 275; RG75, Chemawa Indian School, E-35: Daily Sick List, Box 1, 17, 22– 7, NARAS; John Lee, Supt, to Hon. J. D. C Atkins, Comr. of Indian Affairs, 29 November 1887, 125, in RG75, Chemawa Indian School, Letters Sent, Box 2, NARAS. 86 ‘Medical statistics of the United States Indian service for the fiscal year 1888’ in ARCIA, 1888, p. 461. 87 J. W. Waydelich, 25 July 1901, in W. A. Jones, Commissioner, to Superintendent Salem Indian School, 12 August 1901, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 12, John Waydelich, NARAS. 88 A. C. Tonner, Acting Commissioner, to Superintendent, Haskell Institute, 2 December 1904, 2, in RG75, Haskell Institute, Letters Received, Box 139, National Archives and Records Administration, Kansas City, Missouri.

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decades. Sherman Institute’s doctor sent Leonard Graham (Chukchansi) to a California tuberculosis sanatorium in March 1928. Upon Graham’s arrival, the sanatorium director wrote a letter describing ‘evidence of neglect in the treatment of patients’ at Sherman. Graham’s ‘skin [was] so thickly covered with dirt that in places it was caked on and could be rolled off with the dry fingers’.89 As the doctor concluded, proper hygiene and medical care were especially important in the treatment of tuberculosis, which killed an estimated 50 per cent of untreated or poorly treated patients.90 Further, a 1976 US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report documented at least twenty-four medical experiments ‘not considered usual or customary’, including several boarding school studies funded by the National Institute of Health, universities and pharmaceutical companies.91 Findings from the TRC also suggest the need to understand the physical environments in which Native American students lived and worked: dormitories, workshops and classrooms. The TRC provided substantial evidence of ‘badly built and poorly maintained [Canadian] schools’.92 Because the US Indian Office sought to minimise expenses, US schools were similarly maintained. In 1882, the Indian Affairs Commissioner lamented, ‘Children who shiver in rooms ceiled with canvas, who dodge the muddy drops trickling through worn-out roofs, who are crowded in ill-ventilated dormitories, who recite in a single school-room, three classes at a time, and who have no suitable sitting-rooms nor bath-rooms, are not likely to be attracted to or make rapid advancement in education and civilization.’93 Due to inadequate heating and ventilation, students ‘suffered greatly’.94 In 1909, one administrator explained, ‘each year the superintendent finds it more difficult to conduct the school efficiently on this per capita basis’.95 Funding remained stagnant for decades, despite rising costs.

89 P. K. Telford, Awhahnee Sanatorium, Medical Director, to F. M. Conser, Supt, Dept of Interior, Indian Service, 8 March 1928, in Sherman Student Files, Box 131, Leonard Graham, NARAR. 90 Ibid.; L. V. Adams and J. R. Butterly, Diseases of Poverty: Epidemiology, Infectious Diseases, and Modern Plagues (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), p. 124. 91 Elmer B. Staats, Comptroller General of the United States, to The Honorable James G. Abourezk, United States Senate, 4 November 1976, Enclosure 1 ‘Summary of information obtained’, www.gao.gov/assets/120/117355.pdf. 92 CRS, V:143. 93 H. Price, Commissioner, to Hon. Secretary of the Interior, 10 October 1882, in ARCIA, 1882, p. XXXVIII. 94 Eadle Keatah Toh (Carlisle Indian School), 1:7 (November 1880), 3. 95 F. M. Conser, Superintendent, to The Honorable, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 13 July 1909, 272, in Sherman LS, Box 43, NARAR.

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Government appropriations strained local administrators’ ability to operate schools. These conditions existed because Canadian and US schools operated on a per-capita funding basis. This system incentivised superintendents to increase funding by admitting as many students as possible, yielding perpetual overcrowding. The TRC established: ‘Overcrowding . . . meant that [children] grew up in an atmosphere of neglect.’96 In the US, overcrowding became such an issue that, on 21 September 1903, the Indian Affairs Commissioner ordered it discontinued, warning: ‘Indian children should be educated, but should not, however, be destroyed in the process.’97 In 1910, another commissioner described how this policy, in which ‘[e]very child represented so much money for the maintenance of the school’, resulted in ‘little regard . . . for the welfare of the child’.98 Nearly every year, schools remained over-enrolled and admitted unhealthy children to alleviate fiscal strain. Such chronic crowding and poor health conditions only increased the mortalities. Of the 3,200 Indigenous students who died in Canadian residential schools, hundreds remain buried in unmarked cemeteries.99 The TRC, tasked with locating and identifying gravesites, noted, ‘the cemeteries . . . are abandoned, disused, and vulnerable to accidental disturbance’.100 The commissioners concluded: ‘Those children did not have to die. The spread of disease was fed and facilitated by crowded living conditions at the schools, along with a lethal combination of substandard sanitation, poor nutrition, and an appallingly low quality of medical care.’101 These are preliminary findings. Subsequent research will likely reveal many more deaths, as recent revelations suggest. In British Columbia, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation hired its own investigator to examine a mass grave site. By May 2021, the ground-penetrating-radar specialist located the remains of 215 students at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.102 Meanwhile, the Brandon 96 SS, p. viii. 97 Jones, in F. P. Prucha, The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), I, p. 845. 98 Robert G. Valentine, Commissioner, to [The Secretary of the Interior], 1 November 1910, in US DOI, Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1910, 2 vols. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), I I, p. 14; ‘An Act Making Appropriations for the Current and Contingent Expenses of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for Fulfilling Treaty Stipulations with Various Indian Tribes, and for Other Purposes, for the Fiscal Year Ending June Thirtieth, Nineteen Hundred and Eleven’, 4 April 1910, in US Congress, The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, from March, 1909, to March, 1911, Concurrent Resolutions of the Two Houses of Congress, and Recent Treaties, Conventions, and Executive Proclamations, 125 vols. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1911), X X X V I, p. 271. 99 CRS, I V:1. 100 CRS, I V:11. 101 CRS, V:139. 102 C. Dickson and B. Watson, ‘Remains of 215 children found buried at former B. C. residential school, First Nation says’, CBC News, 27 May 2021, www.cbc.ca/new

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Residential School Cemeteries project, a collaboration begun in 2012 between the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation and three universities, is working to identify the remains of 104 children found on the grounds of that southern Manitoba school.103 By June 2021, the Cowessess First Nation uncovered as many as 751 unmarked graves at the site of the Marieval Indian Residential School near Grayson, Saskatchewan.104 After these revelations came to light, Commissioner Sinclair reflected that the death roll of residential schools is ‘well beyond 10,000’.105 These gruesome findings would likely be replicated elsewhere in the US and Canada, as many school cemeteries remain unmarked. As in Canada, the US death toll is currently unknown. Death at some US Indian boarding schools remains hidden in plain sight as dozens of school cemeteries bear mute testimony to the system’s lethality. Carlisle’s cemetery contains the remains of at least 179 students. Chemawa’s holds more than 200; Haskell’s, 102; Sherman’s, 67; and Mount Pleasant’s, upwards of 116.106 For many US boarding schools, cemetery locations remain unknown. Other cemeteries contain undetermined numbers of bodies. Genoa Indian School has a single marker memorialising children who died there between 1884 and 1934, which recognises those who ‘may be buried near here’. Albuquerque Indian School cemetery is now a city park, and all its graves remain unmarked. Superintendents also sent dead and dying students home so as not to record their deaths.107 So many students died that,

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s/canada/british-columbia/tk-eml%C3%BAps-te-secw%C3%A9pemc-215-childrenformer-kamloops-indian-residential-school-1.6043778. ‘Sioux Valley Dakota Nation working to identify children buried at Brandon residential school site’, CBC News, 4 June 2021, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/siouxvalley-dakota-nation-brandon-residential-school-investigation-1.6054270. I. Austen and D. Bilefsky, ‘In Canada, another “horrific” discovery of Indigenous children’s remains’, New York Times, 24 June 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/ 06/24/world/canada/indigenous-children-graves-saskatchewan-canada.html. Sinclair, in ibid. New South Associates, Ground Penetrating Radar Survey of the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery, Old Burial Ground, and the Carlisle Barracks Plot Cemetery (St. Louis: US Army Corps of Engineers, 2017), p. 1; M. Dadigan, ‘Unmarked graves discovered at Chemawa Indian School’, Al Jazeera, 3 January 2016, www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/ 01/unearthing-dark-native-boarding-school-160103072842972.html; M. Vucˇkovic,́ Voices from Haskell: Indian Students between Two Worlds, 1884–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), p. 206; D. M. Bahr, Students of Sherman Indian School: Education and Native Identity since 1892 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), p. 28; M. Ranzenberger, ‘Tribe to take ownership of former boarding school, cemetery’, The Morning Sun (Alma, MI), 22 April 2011, www.themorningsun.com/tribe-to-take-ownership-of-formerboarding-school-cemetery/article_6225fc6c-9eaa-5479-8687-0fd0b8690153.html. See Entries 1327–9, in RG75, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (hereafter ‘NARADC’); R. H. Pratt, 1st

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by 1916, the Indian Affairs Commissioner lamented, ‘We cannot solve the Indian problem without Indians. We cannot educate their children unless they are kept alive.’108 Still, federal officials continued operating the system long after its lethality was well known. Boarding school superintendents reported an absolute minimum of 1,500 student deaths on campus to the Indian Affairs commissioners, to say nothing of the many students sent home to die.109 This level of mortality, decade after decade, especially among children, who would normally have the lowest ageadjusted death rates in any population, suggests that federal officials deliberately inflicted conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.

(d) Imposing Measures Intended to Prevent Births within the Group Although most Canadian residential school students were children, many were of reproductive age. National policies made reproduction difficult. Over 12,000 Indigenous people have filed claims in Canadian courts asserting that the Canadian government prevented Indigenous births.110 The TRC determined that residential schools ‘strictly separated’ male and female students.111 Meanwhile, malnutrition and epidemics diminished students’ capacity to reproduce – these conditions, in addition to surveillance, depressed fecundity, fertility and births.112 If evidence of forced abortions and sterilizations in residential schools exists, it does not appear in TRC reports. The historian J. R. Miller has contended that ‘Harms that were specific to female students, such as pregnancy and forced abortion or adoption, were not included [in Lieutenant, in charge, to The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 5 October 1880, in ARCIA, 1880, p. 179; ‘Medical and vital statistics of the Indian tribes for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880’ in ARCIA, 1880, p. 276; Pratt to [Indian Affairs Commissioner], 15 October 1881, in ARCIA, 1881, p. 184; ‘Table showing prevailing disease among Indians, number of cases of sickness treated, &c.’ in ARCIA, 1881, pp. 310–11. 108 Cato Sells, Commissioner, to Superintendents and other Employees of the United States Indian Service, 10 January 1916, in RG75, Sherman Institute, Central Classified Files, 1907–39, Box 9, Folder 112, NARAR. 109 See superintendent reports and medical statistics, in ARCIA, 1880–1928. 110 D. MacDonald, ‘First Nations, residential schools, and the Americanization of the Holocaust: rewriting Indigenous history in the United States and Canada’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 40:4 (December 2007), 1008. 111 CRS, I:1, p. 648. 112 M. K. Shenk, ‘Fertility and fecundity’ in The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, ed. P. Whelehan and A. Bolin (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015), 395; J. A. McFalls, Jr and M. H. McFalls, Disease and Fertility (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, Inc., 1984), pp. xix, 60; C. S. Wood, Human Sickness and Health: A Biocultural View (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1979), p. 123.

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IRSSA].’113 This gendered gap in the TRC, aside from ignoring genocidal crimes, suggests a need to investigate fecundity and violence more completely in both countries. Although data is limited, medical statistics reported by the US Indian Affairs Commissioner reveal conditions consistent with reduced fecundity. Between the 1892 and 1894 fiscal years, there were 5 documented abortions and 109 cases of amenorrhea, or the absence of menstruation, and menstrual suppression, suggesting malnutrition and other stressors.114 Registered births numbered only 9 in the schools, versus 5,601 on reservations; fertility rates were only 1.707 births per 1,000 women of childbearing age at the schools, and 49.102 on reservations.115 Schools expelled pregnant students and forced them into marriages.116 Meanwhile, there is suggestive evidence of infanticide in the schools.117 For students whose pregnancies escaped official surveillance, stillbirths likely occurred because of stress and malnutrition, further limiting births within the group. Students were also sentenced to hard labour for sexual relations.118 Thus, administrators largely prevented births within the group. Whether or not these circumstances warrant the genocide label is debatable. Further research is needed.119 113 J. R. Miller, Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History (University of Toronto Press, 2017), p. 130. 114 ‘Medical statistics’ in ARCIA, 1892, 962, 965; ‘Medical statistics’ in ARCIA, 1893, 688, 692; ‘Medical statistics’in ARCIA, 1894, 672, 675. 115 Fertility rates are calculated as births divided by childbearing population multiplied by 1,000. The childbearing-age population for boarding schools only considers the population of government-run off-reservation boarding schools because students at reservation boarding schools tended to be younger, and divides that by 2.1 to account for fewer female enrollees. For the childbearing population on reservations, I have assumed a 55/ 45 male/female sex distribution, further assuming that only 25 per cent of women were of childbearing age. These rates likely undercount to a degree births in the schools because pregnant students were often expelled to give birth on their reservations. ‘Medical statistics’, 965, ‘Statistics as to Indian schools’, 766–78, and ‘Population, civilization, and religious, vital, and criminal statistics’, 800, in ARCIA 1892; ‘Medical statistics’, 692, ‘Statistics as to Indian schools’, 612–24, and ‘Population, civilization, religious, vital, and criminal statistics’, 708, in ARCIA, 1893; ‘Medical statistics’, 675, ‘Statistics as to Indian schools’, 510, and ‘Population, civilization, religious, vital, and criminal statistics’, 584, in ARCIA, 1894. 116 Students were often expelled ‘in a delicate condition’: M. D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 312–15. 117 US Senate, Survey of Conditions of the Indians in the United States (Washington, DC: GPO, 1930), V I I, pp. 2955–66. 118 For an example, see F. M. Conser, Superintendent, to Stephen Janus, Supt, Fort Hall Indian Agency, 15 April 1929, in Sherman Student Files, Box 111, NARAR. 119 The growing body of literature is beginning to address these issues. See A. Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005); M. Arvin, E. Tuck and A. Morrill, ‘Decolonizing feminism: challenging

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Figure 18.1 Kent Monkman (Cree), The Scream, 2017. (By permission, Denver Art Museum: Native Arts acquisition fund, purchased with funds from Loren G. Lipson, MD, 2017.93. Image courtesy of the artist)

(e) Forcibly Transferring Children of the Group to Another Group In boarding school histories and in Genocide Studies, Article I Ie of the Genocide Convention has received the most attention. Indeed, the mass transfer of students to boarding schools was one of the largest migrations in North American Indigenous history. Although exact numbers remain unknown, over 150,000 Indigenous children and young adults attended Canadian residential schools. Many came through violence. Canada’s 1894 Indian Act enabled agents ‘to secure the compulsory attendance of children at school’.120 Royal Canadian Mounted Police often took students by force. Daniel Kennedy (Assiniboine) recalled: ‘In 1886, at the age of twelve years, I was lassoed, roped and taken to the [Qu’Appelle Indian Residential] School at Lebret’, Saskatchewan.121 Federal police ‘kidnapped’ Howard Stacy Jones connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy’, Feminist Formations 25:1 (Spring 2013), 8–34; B. Gurr, Reproductive Justice: The Politics of Health Care for Native American Women (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); and B. Theobald, Reproduction on the Reservation: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Colonialism in the Long Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019). 120 CRS, IV:37–45. 121 CRS, I:1, p. 173.

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(Pacheedaht) at the age of 6. He remembered: ‘two witnesses saw me fighting, trying to get away . . . from the two RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] officers that threw me in the back seat of the car and drove off with me. And my mom didn’t know where I was for three days.’122 Other students went to school because they did not want their parents to be imprisoned, as national educational policies initiated punishments for all Indigenous families who did not send their children to school.123 Approximately 250,000 Indigenous children attended US boarding schools, many involuntarily.124 US policy-makers instituted compulsory attendance ten years before Canada. In 1884, the Indian Affairs Commissioner ordered agents ‘to keep the schools filled with Indian pupils, first by persuasion; if this fails, then by withholding rations or annuities’.125 Congress codified these regulations in 1891 and 1893.126 In 1901, an Indian inspector reported, ‘It seems as if the poor Indian boy and girl has no friend under heaven. They are turned over, sometimes forcibly, to . . . Superintendents who have no more heart than the Plymouth Rock . . . On the reservations the police are sent out to gather them into unhealthful and loathesome dormitories, where the mortality is such as to make us shudder.’127 The next year, the commissioner admitted that superintendents gathered Native American students ‘[p]artly by cajolery and partly by threats, partly by bribery and partly by fraud, partly by persuasion and partly by force’.128 In 1907, the commissioner explained that a Native American child ‘must go to school . . . whether he likes it or not. And if he then still does not listen to the words of the Government, we send the policeman or the soldier to show him that we mean business.’129 As in Canada, US officials sometimes called in soldiers or police to take students forcibly to schools. For Chemawa’s inaugural 1880 class, The Oregonian alleged that Army Captain and Superintendent Wilkinson, with General Miloy’s consent, ‘has forcibly taken children from the Puyallup 122 SS, p. 23. 123 SS, p. 13. 124 For annual enrolments, see ARCIA, 1880–1932. 125 H. Price, Commissioner, to US Indian Agents, Circular No. 126, 15 May 1884, in NARA, RG75, ‘Procedural issuances: orders and circulars, 1854–1955’, Microfilm Publication M1121, reel 5. 126 US Congress, The Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 126 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1891–5), XXVI: 1014; XXVII:635; XXVIII: 313–14, 906. 127 McConnell, in D. T. Putney, ‘Fighting the scourge: American Indian morbidity and federal policy, 1897–1928’ (PhD dissertation, Marquette University, 1980), 39. 128 W. A. Jones, ‘A new Indian policy’, World’s Work 3 (March 1902), 1838. 129 Leupp, in B. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 74.

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reserve for the Indian school at Forest Grove’.130 Children could also be held against their will as political hostages to ensure parents’ good behaviour. In the early 1880s, nine exiled Nez Perce children from Chief Joseph’s Band attended Carlisle. The Indian Affairs Commissioner noted that these children of influential leaders ‘would be hostages for the good behavior of their people’.131 Two-thirds of these students either died at Carlisle or were sent home sick.132 Federal officials punished parents for resisting the enrolment of their children. In 1895, US authorities imprisoned nineteen Hopi parents on Alcatraz Island specifically ‘because they would not let their children go to school’. These Hopi opposed the schools because ‘they had seen a number of their offspring die in there from the effects of some contagious disease, and so they laid the deaths at the door of too much learning’.133 Hopi resistance continued. In 1905 and 1906, some Hopi villages withheld their children from school, and the Indian agent Theodore Lemmon led police to arrest the leaders of the protest.134 Lemmon’s force found resistant Hopis in a kiva on Second Mesa. He threatened to pour ammonia and formaldehyde into the kiva if they did not turn over their children.135 The Hopis only surrendered after a hand-to-hand struggle, which resulted in at least one Hopi death. Two days later, Lemmon returned with a police captain whom he ordered ‘to call up all the men and not stop killing as long as there was a living Hopi man in the village’.136 Then, in 1916, the Western Navajo Agency Superintendent Walter Runkie authorised Ashley Wilson, Acting Truant Officer, to arrest Taddytin (Diné), using ‘all necessary means at your command to bring this order into effect’.137 During the 130 The Oregonian, in The New Northwest (Portland, OR), 3 June 1880, p. 3. 131 ‘Charles Bear’, E-1328, Box 5; ‘Dolly Gould’, E-1329, Box 6; ‘Mary Harriet [Elder]’, E-1327, Box 52, Folder 2587; ‘Samuel John’, E-1329, Box 5; ‘Rebecca Little Wolf’, E-1328, Box 2; ‘Jesse Paul’, E-1329, Box 13; ‘Luke Phillips’, E-1328, Box 3; ‘Sophia Rachel’, E-1328, Box 6; and ‘William Young’, E-1328, Box 6 – in RG75, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, NARADC; Hayt, in Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, p. 220; J. D. Pearson, The Nez Perces in the Indian Territory: Nimiipuu Survival (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), pp. 233–7. 132 See Carlisle files in E-1327-9, NARADC. 133 ‘Moquis on Alcatraz’, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 February 1895, p. 7. 134 P. M. Whiteley, Deliberate Acts: Hopi Culture through the Oraibi Split (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988), p. 104. 135 Theo G. Lemmon to The Honorable, The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 16 March 1906, in P. M. Whiteley, ‘The Orayvi split: a Hopi transformation, Part II: The documentary record’, American Museum of Natural History Anthropological Papers 87 (2008), 977. 136 [Theodore Lemmon] to The Honorable, The Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 20 April 1906, in Whiteley, ‘Orayvi split’, 982. 137 ‘Warrant for arrest’, Walter Runkie, United States Indian Superintendent, to Ashley Wilson, Acting Truant Officer, 10 January 1916, in Records of the District Courts of the

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arrest, Wilson shot Taddytin in the head, killing him.138 Federal courts in Arizona tried Runkie, Wilson and other officials for murder, but a jury acquitted them all.139 The power wielded by the Indian Office over Indigenous peoples was palpable. Federal officials also worked to keep children from returning home. Thousands of students escaped, but superintendents often telegrammed and contracted police to capture and return escapees.140 Departmental regulations also required reservation officials to return escapees and students who failed to return to school.141 After a visiting delegation of chiefs and headmen left Carlisle in 1880, Pratt had the train searched at the Carlisle and Harrisburg stations. Pratt’s men took at least three students, against their will, back to the school.142 Officials also often re-enrolled students without consulting parents or guardians. In 1912, a Skagit father complained that his children ‘were only enrolled for a term of three years, their time was up four years ago, and still no visit from them’. He hoped, ‘I will not be compelled to appeal to the Department of the Interior’ for their return.143 Florence Banimka (Hopi) entered Sherman Institute in 1922. Six years later, she explained to the school’s superintendent that she would not return because ‘I signed up for three years with understanding that at the end of this duration I was supposed to be freed . . . instead I re-enrolled for another three years . . . because Mr. Miller insisted . . . and my time has expired.’ Florence returned to the reservation where officials ‘insisted on taking [her] back to school [in] spite of [her] mother’s protest [that she not] go to

138

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United States for the District of Arizona, Prescott Division, Box 2, Entry 45, Folder 78, NARAR. Ashley Wilson deposition, 11 February 1916, 25, in Records of the District Courts of the United States for the District of Arizona, Prescott Division, Box 2, Entry 45, Folder 78, NARAR. The Coconino Sun (Flagstaff, AZ), 6 October 1916, p. 1. Conser, Supt, to Chief of Police, Santa Barbara, 4 May 1909, p. 209, in RG75, Sherman Institute, Box 106, Folder ‘Telegrams sent 4/1/1904–9/13/1909’, NARAR; Superintendent to Chief Police, Seattle, 6 June 1915 telegram, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 16, Folder 2430, NARAS; HEM, Clerk, to Chief of Police, Holtville, Cal., 10 May 1921, in Sherman Student Files, Box 1, Clarence Abeita, NARAR; Telegram to Chief of Police, Seattle, Spokane & Fallbridge, ND in Chemawa Student Files, Box 15, Folder 2249, NARAS. R. G. Valentine, Commissioner, to Superintendents of Indian Schools, Education Circular No. 518, 27 March 1911, in NARA, RG75, ‘Procedural issuances: orders and circulars, 1854–1955’, Microfilm Publication M1121, reel 9. G. E. Hyde, Spotted Tail’s Folk: A History of the Brulé Sioux, 3rd ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979 [1961]), p. 325. T. V. Horn to H. E. Wadsworth, 29 June 1912, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 18, Folder 2613, NARAS.

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Sherman’.144 Schools held many other students beyond their terms of enrolment.145 Regardless of the exact percentages, federal officials did ‘forcibly transfer children of the group to another group’ in substantial numbers, leading to broad and sustained impacts on Indigenous children and communities for more than a century.

Conclusion Genocides rest within the roots of Canadian and US Indigenous educational policies. Both governments sought to assimilate forcibly and, ultimately, erase Indigenous cultures. This intent was clear. Official words and sustained policies also seem to have set out to accomplish the elimination of Indigenous people: while ‘killing the Indian in him [to] save the man’, the schools claimed the lives of an untold number of Indigenous children and young adults.146 The number that perished appears to have been a ‘substantial part of the group’. Though it avoided using the UNGC to guide its analysis, the Canadian TRC provided evidence of genocidal crimes. Indeed, after providing the UNGC definition, the TRC concluded: ‘It is the Commission’s view that if Canada were to attempt to do today what it did in the nineteenth century through residential schools, it could face severe international consequences.’147 US boarding school records support similar conclusions. Both countries killed substantial numbers of Indigenous children with their educational systems. The schools ‘caus[ed] serious bodily or mental harm’ by forcibly removing children from their communities, then subjecting them to systemic cultural, physical, sexual and mental abuse, child labour, malnutrition and unsafe work environments resulting in maiming and death. Survivors suffered ‘grave and long-term disadvantages . . . to lead[ing] a normal and constructive life’. Some still suffer high levels of PTSD and 144 Florence Banimka to Supt Conser, 7 September 1928, in Sherman Student Files, Box 23, Florence Banimka, NARAR. 145 C. F. Larabee, Acting Commissioner, to Superintendent, Indian Training School, 28 April 1905, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 12, Folder 1717, NARAS; SAM Young, Supt & SDA, to Supt E. L. Chalcraft, 2 July 1910, in Chemawa Student Files, Box 17, Folder 2461, NARAS; Edmond G. Warren, Teacher in Charge Chimopvy Day School, to Edgar K. Miller, 3 May 1927, in Sherman Student Files, Box 289, Louis Pinto, NARAR. 146 Pratt, in I. C. Barrows, ed., Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction at the Nineteenth Annual Session Held in Denver, Col., June 23–29, 1892 (Boston: Geo. H. Ellis, 1892), p. 46. 147 CRS, V:126.

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intergenerational trauma, as well as health, education and labour disparities. Generations have struggled to establish close familial ties both with their tribal nations and with their children due to the neglect inflicted by such removal. The schools’ thousands of burials are a testament to the lethal impact of these conditions. School officials may also have ‘impos[ed] measures intended to prevent births’ by separating students by sex, condoning sexual violence, forcing abortions and institutionalising malnutrition, dangerous living environments and inadequate medical care. Finally, US and Canadian officials ‘forcibly transferred children of the group to another group’ through legalised kidnappings that ignored consent laws, and often prevented students from returning to their families. School officials maintained these practices with threats of starvation, denial of annuities, armed confrontation and, as among the Hopi, chemical warfare. Whether or not these crimes rose to the level of genocide in the United States cannot be conclusively answered. More evidence is needed. To this end, in September 2020 US Representative Deb Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced ‘The Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States Act’ to investigate the institutions. In the meantime, scholars of US boarding schools can learn from the Canadian TRC, genocide case law and the substantial body of scholarship dedicated to understanding these schools.148 Examining the US boarding school in the context of genocide serves as a historical frame for broader legal claims based on the violation of federal–tribal trust doctrine. Indeed, boarding and residential schools are but one chapter in the larger discussion of genocide, child removal and colonialism in North America.

Bibliographic Note Since the 1980s, scholars have been publishing works on the boarding schools for Native Americans, many of them arguing that these institutions were sites of genocide, ethnocide and/or cultural genocide. A small sample of important works includes: R. D. Chrisjohn and S. L. Young, The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada (n.p.: Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1994); W. Churchill, Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential 148 A recent case study is A. Woolford and W. Hounslow, ‘Criminology’s time: settler colonialism and the temporality of harm at the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg, Canada, 1958–1973’, State Crime Journal 7:2 (Autumn 2018), 199–221.

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Schools (San Francisco, CA: City Lights, 2004); Woolford, Benevolent Experiment; C. M. Nunpa, ‘Historical amnesia: the “hidden genocide” and destruction of the Indigenous peoples of the United States’ in Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory, ed. A. L. Hinton, T. La Pointe and D. Irvin-Erickson, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2013); T. Starblanket, Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Children, and the Canadian State (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, Inc., 2018); MacDonald, Sleeping Giant Awakens. The two dominant approaches have been surveys and case studies. Despite dozens of monographs and articles, hundreds of on- and offreservation schools remain unstudied. Boarding school survivors have added to this literature with memoirs and first-person accounts. Still, these works shed little light on specific health conditions or mortalities at the twenty-six off-reservation US Indian boarding schools as a whole. To date, only one monograph significantly details health conditions in a boarding school (J. Keller, Empty Beds: Indian Student Health at Sherman Institute, 1902–1922 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002)). US boarding school sources can be found in local historical societies, college archives and boarding school museums, but the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) holds the overwhelming majority of related documents. Although some records have been destroyed and US privacy laws block access to personal information, NARA holds extant correspondence between the schools and superiors in Washington, DC; student case files; medical records; rosters; photographs; and other materials.

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Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1928 lyndall ryan

Kartiya didn’t try to like ngumpin. They just shot them. What I’ve recorded here, well that’s how they started off. They just massacred them on their own country. And what for? Because kartiya came and found a big mob of ngumpin living here on this country. They had to shoot them . . . They cut them down on their own country.1

Introduction In 1988, the bicentenary year of the British invasion of Australia, journalist Bruce Elder published the first book entirely devoted to the topic of frontier massacres of Aboriginal people in Australia from 1794 to 1928.2 The purpose, Elder said, was ‘to create a broad-based level of awareness of the scale of the massacres of Aboriginal people so that this dimension of Australian history can become part of the Australian consciousness. The massacres of Aboriginal people, painful and shameful as they are, should be as much part of Australian history as the First Fleet, the explorers, the gold rushes and the bushrangers.’3 Designed for the general reader, the book examined more than seventy instances of frontier massacre drawn from scholarly information published since 1970. Although the book did not include a definition of frontier massacre or a clear attribution of the sources for each instance, it did raise a key question that historians had been largely avoiding since it was first raised by historian Tony Barta in 1985. If massacres of Aboriginal people were

1 Ronnie Wavehill, in E. Charola and F. Meakins, eds., Yijarni True Stories from Gurindji Country (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2016), p. 32. 2 B. Elder, Blood on the Wattle: Massacres and Maltreatment of Aboriginal Australians since 1788 (Sydney: Child & Associates, 1988). 3 Ibid., p. 6.

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widespread across the colonial frontier in Australia, were they an expression of genocide?4 This chapter considers the debate about frontier massacre from its origins in the nineteenth century to the end of 2019. It begins with a definition of massacre and how the British brought the practice of frontier massacre to Australia in 1788. It then considers the key texts on the subject in the nineteenth century, and how in the first part of the twentieth century frontier massacre disappeared from historical texts until it re-emerged in the 1970s. It then became the focus of serious study until the History Wars broke out in 2000 and turned the debate on its head. In the aftermath, scholars devised new methods to investigate the subject and deployed new technologies to map its incidence across Australia. The chapter concludes by returning to the question: were massacres on the Australian colonial frontier an expression of genocide? Unlike genocide, which is defined in the UN Convention on Genocide of 1948, there is no legal definition of massacre. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘massacre’ as the ‘unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a number of human beings, as in barbarous warfare or persecution, or for revenge or plunder’.5 The word appears to have entered the English language in the late sixteenth century from French Protestant translations of descriptions of the mass killings of undefended Protestant Huguenots by well-armed French Catholic troops on St Bartholomew’s Day in Paris in August 1572. In that terrible event, which took place over several weeks, thousands of defenceless Huguenots were trapped and slaughtered in the streets of Paris, and their bodies defiled.6 Despite its brutal origins, English Protestant colonists quickly deployed the practice in Ireland, their first overseas colony, in the subjugation of their Irish Catholic subjects.7 By the time the British began to colonise Australia in 1788, the practice of massacre was an integral part of the process of settler colonial conquest. It was usually justified in the Australian colonies on the grounds that the victims, the Aboriginal owners of the land, were ‘heathens’ or ‘savages’ who, by virtue of their ‘uncivilised’ state, held no inherent right 4 T. Barta, ‘After the Holocaust: consciousness of genocide in Australia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 3:1 (1985), 154–61. 5 Macquarie Dictionary of Australia, 2 vols. (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2017), I I, p. 926. 6 M. Greengrass, ‘Hidden transcripts and personal testimonies of religious violence in the French wars of religion’ in The Massacre in History, ed. M. Levene and P. Roberts (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), 69. 7 B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), ch. 5.

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to the land, thus rendering the Australian continent as terra nullius. The British had no understanding of how Aboriginal people considered the land as ‘Country’ (to use their modern English term) which ‘owned’ them and was managed by them according to a complex system of kin and totem obligations.8 When Aboriginal people resisted the British invaders by taking their crops and livestock for food as payment for trespass, and killing shepherds and stockmen for breaking cultural protocols, the British saw themselves as victims of unwarranted attack and responded with organised assaults on Aboriginal campsites at dawn, killing defenceless men, women and children. The first recorded act of frontier massacre took place in 1794, six years after the British arrived in Australia, and it is widely accepted that the last reported frontier massacre occurred 134 years later in 1928. In the nineteenth century, Australia’s leading historians, such as John West, William Westgarth and G. W. Rusden, readily acknowledged that frontier massacres of Aboriginal people took place during the white settler conquest of Australia, yet were reluctant to discuss particular incidents, knowing that some of the perpetrators were now leading statesmen in colonial society.9 In the few cases where massacre details were too well known to ignore – such as Pinjarra in Western Australia in 1834 – and led by the governor, James Stirling, the massacre was sometimes re-labelled as a battle, as a way of making it a more honourable military encounter.10 In Tasmania, however, James Bonwick investigated ‘what actually happened’ in the first violent encounter between the British and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people at Risdon Cove in 1804. He chased down missing documentary records and interviewed unnamed settlers who were in the colony at the time of the ‘affray’, and concluded that it was a massacre in which many Aboriginal people lost their lives.11 Following the federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 which established Australia as an exclusively white settler nation, based on the doctrine of terra nullius rather than conquest, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander 8 D. B. Rose, ‘Exploring an Aboriginal land ethic’, Meanjin 47:3 (1988), 378–87. 9 J. West, The History of Tasmania, 2 vols. (Launceston: Robert Dowling, 1852), I I, p. 26; W. Westgarth, The Colony of Victoria: Its History, Commerce and Gold Mining (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1864); G. W. Rusden, History of Australia (Melbourne: G. Robertson, 1883). 10 G. F. Moore, Letter 1 November 1834, in Diary of Ten Years Eventful Life of an Early Settler in Western Australia and Also a Descriptive Vocabulary of the Language of the Aborigines (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 1978 [1884]), p. 237. 11 J. Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians; or The Black War in Van Diemen’s Land (London: Sampson Low, Son & Marston, 1870), p. 36; A. Curthoys, ‘The history of killing and the killing of history’ in Facts, Fictions and the Writing of History, ed. A. Burton (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 360.

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people were considered to be on the brink of extinction and so were not included in the national census. For the next sixty years, during which a ‘cult of forgetfulness’ about Aboriginal people prevailed, they virtually disappeared from national histories.12 A major shift in public awareness began in 1967 with the success of a referendum to count Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the national census, and laid the basis for political scientist Charles Rowley’s three-volume series, Aboriginal Policy and Practice.13 In volume I, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, he did not use the word ‘genocide’ but left the reader in no doubt that, since 1788, official policy towards Aboriginal people had never wavered from the belief that they should ‘disappear’, either being killed outright or being dispossessed of their land and identity and assimilated into the mono-racial ‘white’ settler community.14 He acknowledged that the practice of massacring Aboriginal people was an abiding feature of the colonial frontier and listed seven of the best-known massacres as case studies: Risdon Cove in Tasmania in 1804; Pinjarra in 1834 and Forrest River in 1926, both in Western Australia; Myall Creek in New South Wales in 1838; the poisonings at Kilcoy in 1842 and the Mitchell River massacres in 1864, both in Queensland; and the Coniston Massacres of 1928 in the Northern Territory. He considered that most of them were carefully planned punitive expeditions, comprising groups of heavily armed settlers, and sometimes police, who tracked down and slaughtered numbers of Aboriginal people in reprisal for alleged attacks on particular colonists and/or their livestock. He also noted that a code of silence imposed in the immediate aftermath made detection extremely difficult.15 Yet, despite the active participation of the colonial state in four of the seven massacres, he concluded that it was the settlers rather than the colonial state who were the decision makers in authorising them, by virtue of their economic power as large-scale sheep and cattle farmers.16 Rowley’s open admission of frontier massacre, which in effect established the field of Massacre Studies in Australia, encouraged a new generation of 12 See, e.g., W. K. Hancock, Australia (London: Ernest Benn, 1930); M. Clark, A Short History of Australia (New York: Mentor Books, 1963); R. McGregor, Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory, 1880–1939 (Melbourne University Press, 1997). 13 C. D. Rowley, Aboriginal Policy and Practice, vol. I: The Destruction of Aboriginal Society; vol. I I: Outcasts in White Australia; vol. I I I: The Remote Aborigines (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970–2). 14 Rowley, Destruction of Aboriginal Society, pp. 2–3. 15 Ibid., p. 176. 16 Ibid., pp. 13, 153, 222–3.

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historians to reframe the frontier history of Aboriginal/settler relations. They diverged, however, in locating massacre at the forefront of frontier histories or as simply one aspect of a complex frontier story. R. H. W. Reece and Michael Christie developed the first trajectory by considering the frontiers in colonial New South Wales and Victoria during the British settler land grabs of the 1830s and 1840s.17 Reece cited twenty incidents of frontier massacre and noted the difficulty of identifying the perpetrators, along with the time and place of their actions. To understand how it happened, he made a particular study of the only case to reach the courts in the nineteenth century, the arrest and trial of some of the perpetrators of the massacre at Myall Creek on 10 June 1838. In that case, a settler and eleven stockmen slaughtered twentyeight undefended Aboriginal people, largely old men, women and children, at a cattle station on the Gwydir River in northwest New South Wales. Eleven of the twelve perpetrators were arrested and charged with murder, and seven of them were convicted and hanged.18 Christie identified at least eight frontier massacres of Aboriginal people, along with their perpetrators, and cited the assessment made by contemporary settler E. M. Curr, that between 15 and 25 per cent of the Aboriginal population in Victoria had ‘died by the rifle’.19 Massacre Studies was still in its infancy, however, and neither historian offered a definition of frontier massacre, nor seriously considered its characteristics. The other trajectory was taken by historians of Aboriginal resistance, led by Henry Reynolds, Richard Broome and the present author, Lyndall Ryan.20 We found that the colonial archive contained more evidence of Aboriginal attacks on settlers and their property than of settler massacres; and, from Aboriginal people themselves, we found that more of their communities had survived their alleged extinction than previously realised. So we developed accounts of Aboriginal resistance to the settler invasion and argued that, contrary to widespread belief, Tasmanian Aboriginal people had not died out, they had survived to the present and were now demanding their rights as a sovereign people, and restitution of stolen lands.21 We considered that the 17 R. H. W. Reece, Aborigines and Colonists: Aborigines and Colonial Society in New South Wales in the 1830s and 1840s (Sydney University Press, 1974); M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86 (Sydney University Press, 1979). 18 Reece, Aborigines and Colonists, pp. 140–74. 19 Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria, p. 78. 20 H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1982); R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians: Black Responses to White Dominance 1788–1980 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1982); L. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981). 21 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, pp. 184–201; Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 260–1.

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colonial frontier was the site of many guerrilla wars but that massacre by settlers was a rare event and, like the settlers, most Aboriginal people were killed in ones and twos, although at a far greater rate. My estimate of an Aboriginal/settler death ratio of 4:1 in the Black War in Tasmania supported this view.22 Yet the estimates made independently by Broome and Reynolds for the entire Australian frontier, of 20,000 Aboriginal deaths and 2,000 settler deaths, suggested otherwise.23 Nevertheless, our narratives tended to confirm the view held by many academic historians when Elder’s book was published in 1988, that, as a phenomenon, frontier massacre was a rare event and more the outcome of the breakdown of law and order on the frontier than a determined policy of extermination. Tony Barta disagreed. As a specialist in German history, he considered that the Aboriginal people of Australia were victims of a conscious policy of genocide by the settlers. The first stage, he argued, comprised the settlers’ deliberate killing of at least 20 per cent of Aboriginal people ‘by the rifle’, leaving the survivors vulnerable to being ‘wiped out by disease, degradation, alcohol and despair’.24 Barta contended that, from the outset of colonisation, settlers developed ‘relations of genocide’ with Aboriginal people, based on the belief that they held an inalienable right to the land and Aboriginal people ‘counted for nothing’. When Aboriginal people resisted the colonists, they were ‘taught a lesson’ by outright killing.25 As a historian of the survival of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, I was puzzled by Barta’s apparent obsession with genocide. It seemed to me that he was simply updating the conclusions of early twentieth-century historians such as R. W. Giblin that Tasmanian Aboriginal people had become extinct by ‘fading away’ before the more technologically sophisticated settlers.26 Other historians, however, tended to agree with Barta. Geoffrey Blomfield, in his account of the frontier massacres of Aboriginal people in the Three Rivers region of northern New South Wales in the 1840s and 1850s, estimated that about 1,000 had lost their lives.27 Neville Green’s investigation of the 1926 Forrest River massacres in the Kimberley region of Western Australia revealed that the settlers considered Aboriginal people to be 22 Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians, p. 174. 23 Broome, Aboriginal Australians, p. 43; H. Reynolds, Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and the Land (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987), pp. 29–30, 53. 24 Barta, ‘After the Holocaust’, 156. 25 Ibid., 157. 26 See R. W. Giblin, The Early History of Tasmania, vol. I I: 1804–28 (Melbourne University Press, 1939), p. 10. 27 G. Blomfield, Baal Bora: The End of the Dancing (Sydney: Alternative Publishing Company, 1981).

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a menace, and if they could not be subjugated then they would be exterminated.28 Peter and Jay Read’s recordings of the Warlpiri people’s memories of the Coniston massacres of 1928 revealed the ruthless practices of the police and local settlers in driving the Warlpiri from their homelands, in reprisal for their killing a dingo trapper for abducting an Aboriginal woman.29 Like the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in 1592, which continued for weeks, the Coniston massacres were also spread over several weeks and only ended when the Warlpiri people were driven from their homelands (to which very few have, ever since, had the courage to return).30 Scholars of the colonial frontier in Victoria, however, produced the most reliable evidence in support of Barta’s claims. Jan Critchett’s meticulous study of the frontier in Southwest Victoria in 1834–48 found that more than 60 per cent of the recorded Aboriginal fatalities were from frontier massacres.31 The first map of massacre sites across the Victorian colonial frontier prepared for The Koori Aboriginal Heritage Trust of Victoria identified 68 massacre sites, with an average of 17 fatalities per massacre and a total of 1,200 Aboriginal deaths. The grim statistic left the viewer in no doubt that frontier massacres were a critical component of the 80 per cent Aboriginal population decline in Victoria, from an estimated 10,000 in 1835 to 1,907 in 1853.32 Ian D. Clark’s geographical register of massacre sites in Western Victoria, 1803–59, confirmed some of the characteristics mentioned by Rowley in 1970: frontier massacre takes place in secret; its intention is to destroy or eradicate the victims; and a ‘code of silence’ prevails in the immediate aftermath to preserve the anonymity of the perpetrators, making detection extremely difficult. These factors were compounded by the colonial legal system in Eastern Australia, which prevented Aboriginal witnesses from presenting evidence in court until 1874, and enabled the perpetrators to escape conviction.33 Clark’s register also provided a template for the collection of 28 N. Green, The Forrest River Massacres (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1995). 29 P. and J. Read, eds., Long Time Olden Time: Aboriginal Accounts of Northern Territory History (Alice Springs: Institute for Aboriginal Development Publications, 1991). 30 For the most recent account of the Coniston massacres, see M. Bradley, Coniston (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2019). 31 J. Critchett, A Distant Field of Murder: Western District Frontiers 1834–1848 (Melbourne University Press, 1990), pp. 242–55. 32 The map can be found online, https://cv.vic.gov.au/stores/aboriginal-culture/indi genousstories-about-war-and-invasion/massacre-map. The tally of 1,200 is from an analysis of the casualties listed on the map. For the statistics of population decline, see R. Broome, Aboriginal Australians, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994), p. 61. 33 I. D. Clark, Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria, 1803–1859 (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, 1995), pp. 2–9.

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massacre data and how the sites could be recorded. An analysis of the data revealed that, of the 430 Aboriginal deaths recorded in the register, 331 were killed in 32 incidents of massacre of five or more people.34 Put together with the Koori Map, they were the best statistical demonstration to date that frontier massacres of Aboriginal people in colonial Victoria represented the first stage of genocide. However, Richard Broome, the leading historian of the Victorian Aboriginal people, was at pains to point out that, although the outcome was ‘not dissimilar to genocide’, it was certainly ‘unintended’.35 Finally, Peter D. Gardner’s detailed investigations of frontier massacres in the Gippsland region between 1840 and 1850 found that most took place in retaliation for the Aboriginal killing of a single settler or his cattle; that the settlers carefully planned their reprisal as a massacre and went to great lengths to carry it out in secret; that most were carried out at places where Aboriginal people could be trapped, such as waterholes, peninsulas, or islands in river estuaries, or in rock crevices; that Aboriginal survivors and settler witnesses who lived to tell the tale would sometimes speak out long after the event; and that the code of silence about particular incidents still prevailed in parts of the region more than 150 years later.36 This important new work, however, rather than opening up a new approach to the study of frontier massacre as the first stage of genocide, was largely ignored by Broome, Reynolds and myself. In our view, the cluster of twelve frontier massacres, seven of which had been identified by Rowley in 1970, along with another at Waterloo Creek in 1838 and four others carried out by Aboriginal people, were rare events.37 Broome considered that, at least until 1850, the frontier wars were a fairly even contest between the Aboriginal spear and the slow-loading British flintlock Brown Bess musket.38 Reynolds wondered whether the number of Tasmanian Aboriginal people actually killed in the Black War ‘may have been less than supposed’ and closer to 34 R. Broome, ‘Statistics of frontier conflict’ in Frontier Conflict: The Australian Experience, ed. B. Attwood and S. G. Foster (Canberra: National Museum of Australia, 2003), 94. 35 R. Broome, Aboriginal Victorians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), pp. 91–2. 36 Peter D. Gardner, Gippsland Massacres: The Destruction of the Kurnai Tribes 1800–1860, 3rd ed. (Ensay, Vic.: Ngarak Press, 2001), pp. 95–101. 37 For the Waterloo Creek massacre, see Roger Milliss, Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1992). The fourth massacre of settlers by Aboriginal people was at Benalla in Victoria in April 1838, and noted in Alan Atkinson and Marian Aveling, eds., Australians 1838: A Bicentenary History (Broadway, NSW: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1987), pp. 48–50. 38 R. Broome, ‘The struggle for Australia: Aboriginal–European warfare, 1770–1930’ in Two Centuries of War & Peace, ed. M. McKernan and M. Browne (Canberra: Australian War Memorial and Allen & Unwin, 1988), 104.

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the estimated number of colonial fatalities.39 Yet he did observe in 1998 that there were now two closely interrelated stories of Australia: those that tell about ‘battlers making good in a new world and uniting in praise of equality and a fair go for all’, and others that tell of the ‘fate of the Aborigines [which] casts long deep shadows over those sunny narratives’.40 It would be the latter view that would provide the tinder for Australia’s ‘History Wars’, which would turn the debate about frontier massacre on its head. The first shots were fired in 1993 by historian Geoffrey Blainey, in response to the Australian High Court’s Mabo Decision of 1992, which overturned the

Darwin

X

N

Forrest River NORTH ERN TERRITO RY

X Coniston

QU E E N S LA N D

Cullen la Ringo X

WES TERN A US TRALIA

Homet Bank X

Brisbane

KilcoyX

SO UTH AUSTRALIA

Waterloo Creek X X Myall Creek NEW SOUTH WALES

Perth

X Pinjarra

Adelaide

Maria

0

300

600 mi

0

500

1000 km

X

Sydney Canberra

VICTORIAX Benalla Melbourne

TASMANIA

X Risdon Cove Hobart

Map 19.1 Selected frontier massacre sites in Australia, 1788–1930. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

39 H. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People: A Radical Re-Examination of the Tasmanian Wars (Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1995), pp. 81–2. 40 H. Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), p. 245.

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doctrine of terra nullius and declared that Australia’s Indigenous people had not surrendered native title to their ‘Country’.41 Blainey coined the term ‘black armband’ to describe historians’ focus on the frontier wars and argued that it had tipped the balance sheet of Australian history from the successful pursuit of equality and fairness to questioning the legitimacy of white Australian society.42 The wars intensified during the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 when Phillip Knightley, a London-based Australian journalist, produced estimates of Aboriginal fatalities in the frontier wars and implied that they could be compared with the losses suffered by the Jewish community during the Holocaust: [A]ny figure for the numbers of Aboriginals killed by white settlers in the wars and massacres in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can only be intelligent guesswork. But experts I have consulted say that 50,000 would not be an exaggeration. It could be as high as 100,000. Given the small size of the Aboriginal population, the loss of even 50,000 of its people was devastating.43

To illustrate his point, Knightley cited four of the iconic frontier massacres: the Battle of Pinjarra in 1834; Waterloo Creek in 1838; Forrest River in 1926; and Coniston Station in 1928.44 Knightley’s arresting claims, made before a global audience, provoked an immediate response from journalist Keith Windschuttle in the conservative magazine Quadrant.45 In ‘The invention of massacre stories’, he acknowledged that the evidence for the Myall Creek and Coniston massacres was irrefutable, but that Pinjarra and Waterloo Creek were ‘legitimate police actions’, and that Forrest River was a fabrication by the missionary J. E. Gribble.46 Windschuttle simply ignored the pioneering methodological work of Critchett, Clark and Gardner, which contended that, in relation to frontier massacre, the most reliable evidence was usually provided by a younger settler or junior official long after the event took place. He made the 41 R. D Lumb, ‘The Mabo case – public law aspects’ in Mabo: A Judicial Revolution. The Aboriginal Land Rights Decision and Its Impact on Australian Law, ed. M. A. Stephenson and S. Ratnapala (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1993), 1–23; B. Attwood, ed., In the Age of Mabo: History, Aborigines and Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996). 42 G. Blainey, ‘Drawing up the balance sheet of our history’, Quadrant 37:7–8 (1993), 11–15. 43 P. Knightley, Australia: A Biography of a Nation (London: Jonathan Cape, 2000). I have quoted from the Vintage paperback edition (London: Vintage, 2001), pp. 107, 108. 44 Ibid., pp. 108–11. 45 K. Windschuttle, ‘The break-up of Australia’, Quadrant (September 2000), 9–15; ‘The invention of massacre stories’, Quadrant (October 2000), 8–21; ‘The fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll’, Quadrant (November 2000), 17–24; ‘Massacre stories and the policy of separatism’, Quadrant (December 2000), 6–20. 46 Windschuttle, ‘The invention of massacre stories’, 10–13.

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counter-argument that leading settlers or senior officials were the most reliable witnesses of frontier massacre and cited the judicial inquiry which was held in the aftermath of the Waterloo Creek massacre. He deployed the rhetorical strategy of denial to dismiss the young sergeant’s evidence that ‘forty or fifty’ Aboriginal warriors were killed, preferring the evidence of the senior officer who said he saw only three Aboriginal bodies, even though he admitted that he was not present during the ‘engagement’.47 Windschuttle’s analysis provided the first insights into his methods of investigating the evidence of frontier massacre. Two years later, Windschuttle self-published The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. I: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, a revisionist account of the Black War in Tasmania.48 In the Introduction, he contended that the book was a contra-account of recent historical texts on the Black War and its aftermath – those written by Reynolds, Lloyd Robson and myself – to show how we had purportedly invented frontier massacres to make the case that genocide had been committed.49 Undaunted by the fact that none of us had contended that frontier massacres were widespread during the Black War, let alone that what had happened to the Tasmanian Aboriginal people constituted genocide – indeed, Reynolds specifically argued in An Indelible Stain? that it didn’t – Windschuttle deployed another rhetorical strategy, guilt by association, to assert that we had.50 In addition, although each of us had devoted only a paragraph to the Risdon Cove massacre of 1804, on the grounds that it had little bearing on the Black War which broke out twenty years later, Windschuttle expended an entire chapter on the incident, because it was an integral part of the international literature on the subject and highlighted by Raphael Lemkin, the founder of Genocide Studies, the evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond and the journalist Mark Cocker.51 47 Ibid., 15. 48 K. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. I: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002). 49 Ibid., p. 3. 50 H. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne: Viking Penguin Books, 2001); Windschuttle, Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pp. 9, 12–14. The texts Windschuttle foregrounded were: L. L. Robson, A History of Tasmania, vol. I: Van Diemen’s Land from the Earliest Times to 1855 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1983); Reynolds, Fate of a Free People; L. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996). 51 Windschuttle, Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pp. 11–28. Lemkin is quoted in H. Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 11; J. Diamond, ‘In black and white’, Natural History 10 (1988), 14; M. Cocker, Rivers of Blood, Rivers of Gold: Europe’s Conflict with Tribal Peoples (London: Jonathan Cape, 1998), p. 125.

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The massacre at Risdon Cove took place on 3 May 1804, at the outset of the British colonisation of Tasmania.52 The incident is known from three key sources. Two of them were reports made in the immediate aftermath by the key perpetrators, Magistrate Jacob Mountgarret and the senior military officer, Lieutenant William Moore. They said that the Risdon outpost of about 80 British people was attacked without warning by 500–600 Tasmanian Aboriginal people and that, in defence, Mountgarret ordered the firing of a 12pound carronade loaded with shot, that three Aboriginal people were killed including the parents of a little boy, who was then abducted by Mountgarret.53 The third source, the testimony of former convict Edward White, was made twenty years later to a government inquiry. He stated that 300 Aboriginal people were present, that the soldiers fired first in an engagement that lasted three hours, that ‘a great many Natives were slaughtered and wounded’, and that, in the aftermath, Mountgarret sent two casks of Aboriginal remains packed in lime to Sydney.54 The best-known account of Risdon Cove remains that by James Bonwick in 1870, and referred to earlier. Lemkin, Diamond and Cocker each drew on Bonwick to assert that the massacre was the first action in the extermination of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.55 In his determination to raise doubt about Bonwick’s approach and hence demonstrate that Lemkin and the others had accepted an unreliable account, Windschuttle produced four new pieces of evidence. A map of the outpost demonstrated, he said, that from where White said he was standing, he could not have seen the events he described. The carronade, he claimed, was only used for ceremonial purposes and thus could not have been used to kill anyone. White’s ‘story’ that Mountgarret packed Aboriginal bones in two casks and sent them to Sydney was an invention; and Bonwick’s assertion that ‘a settler of 1804’ 52 For the historiography of the Risdon Cove massacre, see L. Ryan, ‘Risdon Cove and the massacre of 1804’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 4 (2004), 107–23. For the most recent opposing account, see W. F. Refshauge, The Killing at Risdon Cove (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2016). 53 Mountgarret’s report is reproduced in The Diary of Robert Knopwood 1803–1838, ed. M. Nicholls (Hobart: Tasmanian Historical Research Association, 1977), 3 May 1804, p. 51; Moore’s report is reproduced in Collins to King, 15 May 1804, in Historical Records of Australia (HRA), Series I I I , vol. I I I , ed. F. Watson (Sydney: Library of the Commonwealth of Australia, 1925), p. 238. 54 White’s testimony is reproduced in ‘Report of the Aborigines Committee, 15 May 1830’, enclosure in Arthur to Murray, 16 April 1830, in Historical Records of Australia, Resumed Series I I I, vol. I X, ed. P. Chapman (Melbourne University Press, 2006), pp. 233–4. 55 For Lemkin’s debt to Bonwick, see A. Curthoys, ‘Raphael Lemkin’s “Tasmania”: an introduction’ and ‘Tasmania: Raphael Lemkin, edited by Ann Curthoys’, Patterns of Prejudice 39: 2 (2005), 162–96; Diamond, ‘Black and white’, 14; Cocker, Rivers of Blood, p. 125.

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said that Moore ‘saw double that morning from an over-dose of rations rum’ and that the ‘firing arose from a brutal desire to see the Niggers run’, was also an invention.56 No settler of 1804, Windschuttle claimed, was still in the colony when Bonwick arrived in 1841, ‘who could have observed Lieutenant Moore’s condition or heard him speak on 3 May’.57 The first three claims were quickly refuted by the historian of Risdon Cove, Phillip Tardif. The map, he pointed out, was made in September 1803, and by May 1804 was well out of date. In the interim, the settlement had increased in population from forty nine to more than eighty, and the farm in question where White said he was working was no longer in the gully cited on the map, but relocated on higher ground and ‘considerably advanced beyond the rest’, placing White in a very good position to see the events unfold.58 The carronade, one of two taken from Matthew Flinders’ ship, Investigator, was sent to Risdon ‘with shot and other Materials’, with the specific purpose of protecting the settlement from French attack and a possible convict uprising. Thus, its ‘principal purpose at Risdon was to do what they were built for – to kill and to maim’.59 As for White inventing the story that Mountgarret sent two casks of Aboriginal remains to Sydney, Tardif noted that everyone at Risdon Cove lived ‘cheek by jowl’ in overcrowded small huts: it is hard to imagine even the most minor piece of gossip passing . . . without every resident knowing about it, let alone the removal of bodies from the field, their dissection and their storage for shipping to Sydney three months later. We know from Mountgarret’s own pen that he dissected at least one of the bodies. To have then removed the flesh and preserved the bones for further medical and scientific examination would have been entirely consistent with contemporary practice.60

The final claim, that Bonwick could not have interviewed ‘a settler of 1804’, is also incorrect. The ‘settler ‘ is most likely Moore’s senior officer in the New South Wales Corps, Captain Anthony Fenn Kemp, who arrived in Tasmania in November 1804 and died there in 1868.61 We know that Bonwick interviewed Kemp in 1841, because he is named in another part of the book.62 56 Windschuttle, Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pp. 22–5. 57 Ibid., p. 25. 58 P. Tardif, ‘Risdon Cove’ in Whitewash on Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, ed. R. Manne (Melbourne: Black Inc. Agenda, 2003), 221. 59 Ibid., 221. 60 Ibid., 222. 61 Entry on Kemp in Australian Dictionary of Biography Volume 2, ed. A. G. I. Shaw and C. M. H. Clark (Melbourne University Press, 1967), 39–42. 62 Bonwick, The Last of the Tasmanians, p. 105.

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Kemp’s intimate knowledge of the events at Risdon Cove, which he could only have gained from Moore, was revealed at a public meeting in Hobart in 1830 where he admitted that ‘some officers of his own regiment . . . had . . . most improperly fired a four pounder upon a body of them, which having done much mischief, they had since borne that attack in mind and retaliated upon the white people whenever opportunity offered’.63 Windschuttle’s method of assessing the evidence, which he called a ‘plausibility model’, was plainly insufficient for the purpose of investigating frontier massacre. As historians looked more closely at his methodology and realised that it was deeply flawed, it became apparent that frontier massacres were probably more widespread in the Black War, and of greater bearing on the outcome, than Reynolds, Robson and I had originally believed. The History Wars, rather than shutting down the subject of frontier massacre as Windschuttle had attempted to do, would generate new approaches to the subject. Turning to the international scholarship on the subject, the typology devised by French sociologist Jacques Semelin, from his investigation of civilian massacres in the aftermath of the Srebrenica case in Bosnia in 1995, resonated with the characteristics identified by Rowley, Clark and Gardner. Semelin analyses a massacre as a carefully planned operation that usually takes place in response to the killing of an important person or the alleged theft of important property, leaving the survivors in a state of weakness, politically and economically. Rather than demanding the arrest of murderers, the survivors take the law into their own hands to restore lost prestige. Thus, the massacre is carried out in secret with the purpose of disempowering or eradicating the victims. In the immediate aftermath, a code of silence is imposed by the perpetrators, making detection extremely difficult, and it is not uncommon for them to deny that a massacre has taken place. However, witnesses and/or perpetrators sometimes speak out long afterwards when fear of reprisal and threat of prosecution have passed. This means that the best evidence is often found not in the immediate aftermath, but in a later period. Thus, the researcher must immerse themselves in every aspect of the event to understand how it happened. Semelin’s final point is that the ‘weight of fear and the imaginary’ in the lead up to the massacre and in the aftermath are strongly correlated and together form an important factor in the search for evidence.64 63 Colonial Times, 24 September 1830, p. 3. 64 J. Semelin, ‘In consideration of massacre’, Journal of Genocide Research 10: 3 (2001), 377–89.

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In my revised history of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people, I incorporated the typology within the framework of settler colonialism as set out by A. Dirk Moses, and included the definition of a frontier massacre as the indiscriminate killing of 6 or more undefended people in one operation. The definition endorsed the view that most Aboriginal people in the colonial period camped in extended family groups of 20 or more, and therefore an unlawful killing of 6 people in a single operation destroyed 30 per cent of the group.65 Native American scholar Barbara A. Mann considers a killing of this proportion to constitute a ‘fractal massacre’, in that the survivors become much diminished in their ability to continue as a viable group.66 Using this model, I was able to identify 26 instances of frontier massacre in the Black War with the loss of more than 350 lives.67 How then, could the hypothesis be tested for the entire colonial frontier in Australia? How much did the state know, and when did it know it? To explore the question, I formed a research team to collate what was known about frontier massacre for inclusion on a digital map as a way of gaining a sense of the scale of the phenomenon and enhancing our ability to answer the questions (see Figure 19.2).68 By deploying the methodology used above to locate and record frontier massacre sites across Australia, the map provides a visual image of the massacre site; the Aboriginal and nonAboriginal name of the location; the geographical co-ordinates for the location; the date and time of day the massacre took place; the names of the Aboriginal and, in some cases, non-Aboriginal victims and perpetrators; the kind of massacre – whether it was a reprisal or opportunist and pre-emptive; numbers killed; weapons used; a narrative of the incident, including who gave the orders; and a list of corroborating sources. Where there is uncertainty about the number killed in the incident, for instance, if the estimate is between twenty and eighty, the lower estimate of twenty is used. Stage 3 of the map, launched in November 2019, includes 290 incidents of frontier massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders people across the Australian frontier from 1794 to 1928. The statistic of 290, although incomplete and provisional, offers the first opportunity to make comparative analyses of 65 L. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012); A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and settler society in Australian history’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 3–48. 66 B. A. Mann, ‘Fractal massacres in the Old Northwest: the example of the Miamis’, Journal of Genocide Research 15:2 (2013), 167–8. 67 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 142. 68 https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/colonialmassacres.

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Timor Sea Gulf of Carpentaria

Cairns North Territory

Coral Sea

Queensland Western Australia

AUSTRALIA Brisbane South Australia

Perth

New South Wales

Great Australian Bight

Sydney Canberra

Victoria Melbourne N W

Bass Strait E

Tasmania

Tasman Sea

S

Figure 19.2 Colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1780–1930. (Courtesy of The University of Newcastle, Australia, 2017–20)

frontier massacres of Aboriginal people across Australia. The most useful way to address the questions, is by organising the data into two roughly equal historical periods: 1794–1859 and 1860–1928. See Tables 19.1 and 19.2.

1794–1859 For the first period which includes 182 frontier massacres of Aboriginal people, the research is relatively complete. It covers the British colonies in southern Australia such as New South Wales (NSW), established in 1788; Tasmania, established in 1803 as Van Diemen’s Land; the southern part of Western Australia established in 1826; the Port Phillip District established in 1835 and renamed Victoria in 1850; and South Australia established in 1836. For most of the period, these colonies were under direct British rule.

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Frontier Massacres in Australia, 1788–1928

Table 19.1 Frontier massacres, 1794–1859 Settler Colony massacres

State massacres

Joint operation

Total massacres

Est. Ab. fatalities

Av. no. killed

NSW TAS VIC SA WA Total

20 6 12 2 1 41

16 16 2 1 6 41

80 32 52 11 7 182

2007 424 1194 111 110 3846

25 13 23 10 15 21

44 10 38 8 0 100

Table 19.2 Frontier massacres, 1860–1928 Colony/ territory

Settler massacres

State Joint Total Est. Ab. massacres operation massacres fatalities

Av. no. killed

NSW QLD* NT/SA* WA* Total

2 6 19 17 44

0 1 2 14 17

210 34 35 25 34

0 30 11 4 45

2 37 32 35 106

420 1264* 1115* 885* 3684*

* Incomplete

The map shows that, in each colony, British forces were usually the initial perpetrators of frontier massacres of Aboriginal people. In NSW, for example, although the first recorded massacre in 1794 was carried out by settlers on the colony’s first frontier at the Hawkesbury River, the colonial garrison, the NSW Corps, quickly took control and carried out other massacres in the region until 1810. The garrison continued this role at Risdon Cove in Tasmania in 1804, and at Appin on the southwest frontier in Sydney in 1816. In the 1820s, with the rapidly expanding sheep and cattle industries occupying large areas of Aboriginal land in NSW and Tasmania, martial law was imposed on three occasions to enable British troops to massacre the Aboriginal owners with impunity. Martial law was also imposed in South Australia in 1840 to track down and hang the Aboriginal killers of the shipwrecked survivors of the Maria at the Coorong. British troops also carried out massacres of Aboriginal people at frontier outposts at Raffles Bay in the present-day Northern Territory in 1827, at Stradbroke Island in Moreton Bay in present-day Queensland in 1831, and at Pinjarra in Western Australia in 1834. Apart from South

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Australia and Western Australia, where the perpetrators were on horseback, the massacres were carried out on foot as attacks on Aboriginal campsites at night. The last known deployment of British infantry on the frontier in Eastern Australia was at the incident known as the Battle of One Tree Hill, although it is almost certainly a massacre, near presentday Toowoomba in September 1843.69 The increase in the availability of horses from the early 1830s enabled settlers in the mainland colonies to push sheep and cattle beyond the frontiers of formal settlement, and infantry units were replaced by mounted police units, comprised of soldiers from serving British regiments, to act as mobile forces in tracking down Aboriginal groups in daylight. In the 1830s and 1840s, settlers carried out most of the frontier massacres and, to prevent detection, burned the bodies afterwards. There are also cases of flour poisoned with arsenic and strychnine being given to Aboriginal people. In NSW, settlers often followed up a preliminary massacre by mounted police in their region, or worked in concert with them to carry out their own frontier massacres. In Victoria, the settlers made increasing use of mounted Native Police units to eradicate Aboriginal resistance, and by the 1850s similar units were in operation in the northern frontier of NSW. By the 1850s, an increasing number of joint operations between settlers and police are recorded, in reprisal for alleged Aboriginal attacks on settlers and their property. The average number of Aboriginal people killed in a frontier massacre increased from about 7 or 8 along the Hawkesbury in the 1790s to 13 in Tasmania in the 1820s, 30 in Victoria in the 1830s and 1840s, and 25 in the Northern District of NSW in the 1850s. In South Australia, an average of 10 Aboriginal people were killed in each massacre, and an average of 15 in Western Australia, producing an average of 21 across the Australian frontier for the entire period, giving a total of 3,846 Aboriginal people killed in frontier massacres.

1860–1928 In this period, 106 frontier massacres of Aboriginal and Torres Straits Islander people are recorded. Although the statistics are provisional, important trends can be identified. 69 R. Kerkhove and F. Uhr, The Battle of One Tree Hill: The Aboriginal Resistance that Stunned Queensland (Brisbane: Boolarong Press, 2019).

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Most frontier massacres in the period took place across Australia north of the tropic of Capricorn. The area includes the northern parts of the presentday states of Queensland and Western Australia and all of the Northern Territory. It is in these regions that the second wave of pastoral expansion took place after 1860. When Queensland became a separate self-governing colony in December 1859, it paid little attention to imperial concerns about the treatment of Aboriginal people.70 In 1861, South Australia acquired the Northern Territory from New South Wales and began an aggressive programme of pastoral expansion that lasted until 1911, when it passed the territory to federal jurisdiction. Even so Aboriginal people were still subjected to frontier massacre at least until 1928.71 Western Australia, although a Crown colony until 1890, pioneered the opening up of the Kimberley region in the far north for cattle grazing in the 1880s. Across northern Australia, Aboriginal labour was required to work on the pastoral stations. In some cases, Aboriginal communities were subjugated beforehand, and for decades afterwards remained under its constant threat. Settlers may have been outnumbered by Aboriginal people but they were able to call on police forces to subdue Aboriginal resistance. In Queensland, the Native Police operated as a paramilitary force on the frontier between 1861 and 1905. Led by former army and police officers from across the British Empire, they were formidably successful in deploying frontier massacres as pre-emptive strikes to open up new regions for pastoral occupation.72 In the Northern Territory in the South Australian period, and in Western Australia, mounted police forces were reliant on Aboriginal trackers to identify Aboriginal camp sites and ceremonial sites, as places to carry out massacres.73 The statistics show that the average number of Aboriginal people killed in a massacre in this period increases from 18 to 34. The provisional number of people killed is 3,684. An important aspect of this phase is the increasing number of Aboriginal people – such as Ronnie Wavehill, whose testimony is cited at the beginning of the chapter – willing to provide important evidence of frontier massacres of their relatives. 70 A. Curthoys and J. Mitchell, Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-Government in Colonial Australia 1830–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2018). 71 G. Reid, A Picnic with the Natives: Aboriginal–European Relations in the Northern Territory to 1910 (Melbourne University Press, 1990); Bradley, Coniston. 72 J. Richards, The Secret War: A True History of Queensland’s Native Police (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008). 73 Reid, A Picnic with the Natives; C. Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905 (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016).

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Conclusion From the statistical analysis, we can return to the questions raised earlier – who gave the orders and who carried them out? How much did the state know? If massacres of Aboriginal people were widespread across the colonial frontier in Australia, were they an expression of genocide? The University of Newcastle map indicates that agents of the colonial state were the leading perpetrators from the outset, then trained the settlers, many of whom were former defence personnel, in the practice of frontier massacre. From the 1840s, Native Police forces performed an increasingly important role in carrying out frontier massacres, along with mobile police units in the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Of the 290 sites identified on the map so far, 150 of them – that is, just over 50 per cent – were the result of military and police actions, or joint operations between settlers and police. The statistic accords with Rowley’s finding that the settlers, rather than the colonial state, were the decision makers in authorising the massacres, by virtue of their economic power as large-scale sheep and cattle farmers. The statistic also accords with Barta’s view that frontier massacres comprise the first stage of the genocide of Australia’s Aboriginal people. Further, in relation to the language of genocide, the ‘reluctance to admit anything which questions the legitimacy of our society’, still prevails.74 Finally, how does the enlarged information about frontier massacre resonate with Elder’s call in 1988 for the need ‘to create a broad-based level of awareness of the scale of the massacres of Aboriginal people so that this dimension of Australian history can become part of the Australian consciousness’? There is certainly a greater awareness of the subject in Australian school curricula and in the community-based movement for Aboriginal reconciliation. Increasingly, massacre sites are being acknowledged in ceremonies of Aboriginal and settler communities across Australia. The bestknown is the annual ceremony to commemorate the Myall Creek massacre in northern New South Wales.75 However, it will be another decade at least before frontier massacres become embedded in the Australian consciousness. 74 Barta, ‘After the Holocaust’, 157. 75 L. Ryan and J. Lydon, eds., Remembering the Myall Creek Massacre (Sydney: NewSouth Books, 2018).

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Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871 rebe taylor

Introduction Van Diemen’s Land, renamed Tasmania in 1856, is Australia’s largest offshore island and, since 1901, one of its six states. To its Indigenous people, the Palawa, it is Lutruwita: their Country since time immemorial.1 In European understandings, Palawa history dates back at least 40,000 years. This is one of the world’s oldest continuing cultures. The Palawa survived the last Ice Age when rising seas created their island, and they survived genocide committed by the British in the nineteenth century. There were an estimated 6,000–8,000 Palawa when the British settled Tasmania in 1803.2 Relations between the two groups were violent from the beginning. British officials shot at the Palawa, seized their children, and committed a massacre within the first year of colonisation. This aggression increased as settlement spread, especially as a pastoral expansion provoked the contemporaneously named ‘Black War’ of 1823–32. Palawa resistance was effective and terrifying; settlers called for their total extermination. But, with ostensible ‘humanitarian’ motives, the colony’s governor directed the Aborigines’ complete removal. By 1835, almost all survivors had been exiled to one of Tasmania’s northern offshore islands. They numbered around 120. Palawa children were removed from their families, and conditions were unconducive to sustaining life. Only two residents remained when the government closed the Aboriginal Settlement in 1871.3 When the last of 1 Lutruwita and Palawa are names used in the language palawakani, reconstructed by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC), http://tacinc.com.au/programs/palawa-kani (accessed 1 October 2020). Tasmanian Aboriginal people also refer to their island as ‘Trouwanna’, and to themselves (especially in northern Tasmania) as ‘Pakana’: pers. comm. from J. Everett-puralia meenamatta, 28 May 2020, and L. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines: A History since 1803 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2012), pp. 3–42. 2 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 14. 3 Ibid., p. 267.

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Map 20.1 Colonial settlement of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1830. (Cartography by Robert J. Anders)

these residents, Trukanini, died five years later, her ‘race’ was deemed ‘extinct’.4 In fact, a narrative of survival parallels that of ‘extinction’. From the early nineteenth century, Palawa women and their European male partners created independent settlements away from British colonial centres, including the Bass Strait islands and Nicholls Rivulet, south of Hobart. Their children ensured the

4 H. Ling Roth, The Aborigines of Tasmania (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trüber & Co., 1890).

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Genocide in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), 1803–1871 Clan No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Palawa Clan Name Leetermairremener Linetemairrener Loontitetermairrelehoinner Toorernomairremener Poredareme Laremairremener Tyreddeme Portmairremener Pydairrerme Moomairremener Peeberrangner Leenerrerter Pinterrairer Trawlwoolway Pyemmairrenerpairrener Leenethmairrener Panpekanner Punnilerpanner Pallittorre Noeteeler Plairhekehillerplue Leenowwenne Pangerninghe Braylwunyer Larmairremener Luggermairrernerpairrer Leterremairrener Panninher Tyerrernotepanner Plangermairreenner Plindermairhemener Tonenerweenerlarmenne Tommeginer Parperloihener Pennemukeer Pendowte Peerapper Manegin Tarkinener Peternidic Mimegin Lowreenne Ninene Needwonnee Mouheneenner Nuenonne Mellukerdee Lyluequonny

Map 20.1 (Cont.) Table of Palawa clans. © Robert J. Anders 2021

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English Clan Name St Patrick’s Head North Moulting Lagoon North Oyster bay Schouten Passage Little Swanport Grindstone Bay Maria Island Prosser River Tasman Peninsula Pittwater, Risdon Pipers River

Cape Portland Port Sorell Quamby Bluff Hampshire Hills Emu Bay New Norfolk Clyde-Derwent junction Ouse and Dee Rivers West of Dee Great Lake Port Dalrymple Norfolk Plains Campbell Town

Table Cape Robbins Island Cape Grim Studland Bay West Point Arthur River mouth Sandy Cape Pieman River mouth Birches Inlet Low Rocky Point Port Davey Cox Bight Hobart Bruny Island Huon River Reserche Bay

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continuation of their remaining language and culture. By the 1970s, their descendants won their struggle to be recognised as a living Aboriginal community.5 The idea of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ ‘extinction’ and the recognition of Palawa endurance have created a distinctive body of historical writing that has informed an extensive analysis of genocide. From the mid nineteenth century, historians sought to understand the Aborigines’ ‘extinction’, concluding broadly that it was a preventable humanitarian tragedy. This writing captured the attention of Raphael Lemkin as he researched the phenomenon of genocide in the 1940s. Lemkin’s conclusion that Tasmania constituted a clear example of genocide found wide agreement among international genocide scholars by the late twentieth century, but Australian historians expert in Tasmania were reluctant to share in this wider agreement. A chief reason was the question of intention. Tasmania was settled when humanitarian ideals were ascendant among British political leaders. From the early nineteenth century, colonial governors were presented with contrary orders: to facilitate an unprecedented imperial expansion while protecting, if not improving, the lives of the Aboriginal peoples whom they were to dispossess.6 This paradox meant that, while Tasmania’s governor’s stated motive was protecting Aborigines, he took actions that resulted in the near total destruction of their society. Interpretations of this contradiction have varied. This chapter concludes that, since genocide does not require a motive, the governor’s policies and orders, especially those that resulted in a pattern of Aboriginal massacres, comprise evidence of a ‘specific intent’ to destroy the Palawa, at least ‘in part’. While the massacres comprised the destructive policies towards the Palawa, this chapter presents a narrative illustrating how genocide in Tasmania principally took the forms of killings, serious bodily harm and child abductions from 1803 to 1831, of creating conditions unconducive to sustaining life, and of sponsoring the systematic removal of children after 1832.

Representations of Tasmania’s Colonial Past Tasmania has a distinctive place in Australia’s history and culture. While Australia’s mainland is known popularly as the ‘wide brown land’, Tasmania is often compared to Switzerland, to which it is roughly equal in size. Situated 5 L. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1981), p. 257. 6 A. Lester and F. Dussart, Colonization and the Origins of Humanitarian Governance: Protecting Aborigines across the Nineteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 9–10.

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40 to 43 degrees south of the Equator, Tasmania is an island of snow-capped mountains, wild rivers and lakes. The island’s limited arable land runs in a central corridor between the capital, Hobart, settled on the southern Derwent River in 1803, and Launceston, founded the following year on the northern Tamar River. British pastoralists occupied the most accessible and fertile land in this corridor by 1823.7 Their free grants did not recognise the boundaries or ownership of Tasmania’s nine original Palawa nations. They encompassed hunting lands cleared by millennia of fire-based land management and cut across the seasonal routes to the coast. It was on this arable land, contemporaneously named the ‘Settled Districts’, that Tasmania’s frontier violence and policies of enforced removal were the most concentrated. Nearly a half of an estimated 2,000 Palawa living in this area were killed by 1834. Half of those deaths were in massacres committed between late 1826 and 1830. This was possibly the highest number of Indigenous killings committed in the shortest period of any Australian frontier. But it was not onesided. The Palawa killed nearly 200 colonists between 1823 and 1834. The average ratio of Aboriginal to colonists’ deaths was 4:1 – disproportionate, but far lower than that of 12:1 in nearby Port Phillip (later Victoria). That so many combatants on both sides of Tasmania’s frontier lost their lives at such speed earned the conflict its name and notoriety.8 Tasmania’s Black War (1823–32) came to be remembered as the most brutal and shameful in Australia’s past, if not in British imperial history. The War was recounted by historians even as it was ending, and continues to inspire popular books and films. Tasmania’s remote and distinct landscape has flavoured representations of the War with a sense of ‘gothic’ drama, as has the idea that it caused the Aborigines’ ‘extinction’.9 Racial ‘extinction’ was an idea based upon an obsolete assumption that only a ‘full blood’ could be an Aboriginal person. The many Palawa with European ancestors from the 1830s were disregarded as ‘half-castes’ while still suffering continued racism. From the mid nineteenth century, the predicted demise of the Tasmanian Aborigines was presented in evolutionary terms as ‘a key instance’ of the predicted demise of all colonised 7 S. Morgan, Land Settlement in Early Tasmania: Creating an Antipodean England (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 21. 8 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 143; L. Ryan, ‘List of multiple killings of Aborigines in Tasmania: 1804–1835’, Mass Violence and Resistance – Research Network, 5 March 2008 (accessed 6 October 2020). 9 R. Taylor, ‘Genocide, extinction and Aboriginal self-determination in Tasmanian historiography’, History Compass 11:6 (2013), 405–19; R. Taylor, ‘National confessional’, Meanjin 3 (2012), 22–36; and J. Davidson, ‘Tasmanian Gothic’, Meanjin 49:2 (1993), 307–24.

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‘primitives’, signifying for Europeans the power of empire at its unprecedented height.10 But the tone of most British ‘extinction’ narratives was less celebratory than it was melancholic, if not reprimanding. James Bonwick’s 1870 book The Last of the Tasmanians blamed the destruction of the Aborigines on the British administration. The book was published months after the international scandal caused by the unlawful dissection of William Lanne’s body, the supposed ‘last’ Tasmanian Aboriginal man, by Hobart’s most senior surgeons.11 More than a century later, the popular 1978 film The Last Tasmanian screened internationally with the tag-line ‘the story of the swiftest and most destructive genocide on record’.12 In 1980, Australian art historian Bernard Smith argued for Trukanini to ‘stand’ for a national history of genocide.13 By this time, the two terms, ‘extinction’ and ‘genocide’, had become almost interchangeable within non-specialist histories of Tasmania.14 Reiterating the idea of a Tasmanian Aboriginal ‘extinction’ in the late twentieth century undermined a continuing struggle for Palawa selfdetermination, and sustained the racialist assumptions inherent to it.15 By this time, biological science had broadly abandoned the racial concepts on which the idea of racial extinction was based, while Australian archaeologists had realised that Tasmania had once been part of a larger Australian continent and thus shared its deep human past.16 From the 1980s, leading historians in Tasmanian history Lyndall Ryan and Henry Reynolds wrote new, pioneering histories that recognised Aboriginal survival and resistance.17 Their histories moderated the narrative of the impact of settler violence on Tasmania’s early frontier, especially the prevalence of massacres.

10 P. Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 124; and T. Lawson, The Last Man: A British Genocide in Tasmania (London, New York: I. B. Taurus, 2014), p. 171. 11 Lawson, The Last, p. 156. 12 Ronin Films, The Last Tasmanian Study Guide, www.roninfilms.com.au/get/files/987 .pdf. 13 B. Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, Boyer Lectures (Sydney: Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980), p. 10. 14 A. Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: the history of an idea’ in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 229–52, at 240–1. 15 Taylor, ‘National’, 29–30. 16 R. Taylor, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity (Melbourne University Press, 2017), pp. 177–88. 17 H. Reynolds, Fate of a Free People: A Radical Re-Examination of the Tasmanian Wars (Melbourne: Penguin Books Australia, 1995); Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians.

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Nevertheless, in 2002, reactionary historian Keith Windschuttle accused Ryan and Reynolds of the opposite – that is, of fabricating and exaggerating Tasmania’s frontier violence.18 Windschuttle’s real target was arguably the popular representation of Tasmania as a shameful humanitarian failing and as a clear case of genocide in which mass killings were highlighted. As Ryan notes in Chapter 19 of this volume, the controversy stirred by Windschuttle has, contrary to his ambitions, inspired new and extensive research into Tasmania’s frontier warfare to reveal not only the veracity of the massacres he denied, but that their number was far greater than previously understood. In this chapter, I use the definition of a massacre (or mass killing) as a single violent event that takes six or more lives.

Early Settlement: 1803 to 1822 No Aboriginal census was attempted when the British first began colonising Tasmania in 1803, and pre-settlement population estimates have varied from 2,000 to 15,000.19 The lowest estimate, first proposed in 1859, was likely influenced by the racial fatalism of its time, being accompanied by the argument that the Tasmanian Aborigines’ population was too weak to survive the social change of colonisation.20 But most population estimates by contemporaneous observers and recent experts correspond at an original population of 6,000–8,000 Palawa. Archaeological research reveals that, at the time of British settlement, the Palawa population was probably increasing and expanding into new parts of the island.21 How was this flourishing population reduced so rapidly?22 There are no historical accounts of large numbers of Palawa suffering from the kinds of epidemics that impacted Indigenous populations in Australia’s mainland colonies shortly after the British arrived. The Palawa may have gained some immunity from diseases introduced by European explorers before 1803.23 Venereal diseases impacted coastal Aboriginal communities 18 K. Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, vol. I: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (Sydney: Macleay Press, 2002). 19 B. Madley, ‘From terror to genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian penal colony and Australia’s History Wars’, Journal of British Studies 47:1 (2008), 77–106, at 78; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 14. 20 J. Milligan, ‘Vocabulary of dialects of Aboriginal tribes of Tasmania’, Papers and Proceedings of the Royal Society of Tasmania 3 (1859), 239–74. 21 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 14, 26, 29, 34, 37, 42. 22 L. Ryan, ‘“The long shadow of remembrance”: remembering the debate about massacre in the Black War in Tasmania’, Coolabah 3 (2009), 5–59, at 52. 23 J. Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2008), p.197; Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’, 105.

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who were in early and frequent contact with whalers, sealers and timbercutters. Respiratory disease caused a potentially high number of fatalities among the communities in Tasmania’s south around 1827 and was the major cause of deaths for incarcerated Aborigines after 1832.24 Historians who have argued that introduced disease was a major cause of Palawa deaths have done so without convincing evidence, chiefly to diminish the role of settler violence.25 The forty-nine British officers who settled at Risdon Cove to found a convict prison colony on the Derwent River were not the first Europeans the Palawa had encountered, but they were the most hostile.26 From their first encounters, the British shot into groups of Palawa along the Derwent and took a Palawa child, inspiring reprisals. Similarly, in the new British northern camp on the Tamar River, a ‘friendly’ exchange quickly disintegrated into a fight that killed at least one Aboriginal man and left the commanding officer ‘fearful’ of ‘mischief’ to follow.27 Being outnumbered enhanced the British officers’ fears and aggressive predisposition. While this usually resulted in indiscriminate shootings, on 4 May 1804 it resulted in Tasmania’s first and most notorious massacre. On that day, around 300 Moomairremener (or mumirimina) of the Oyster Bay nation people drove a mob of kangaroos towards Risdon Cove, presumably ‘as they had always done’.28 Commanding officer Jacob Mountgarret’s response was extreme. He ordered his men to begin shooting at the Moomairremener at 11 o’clock in the morning. They did not cease until three hours later when Mountgarret ordered the carronade to be fired (a ship’s gun then being deployed in the settlement). ‘[A] great many Natives were slaughtered and wounded’, testified convict witness Edward White at an 1830 inquiry.29 They ‘died of their injuries, on their ground where they fell’.30 Mountgarret’s atrocities continued after the killing ended. He dissected a Moomairremener man, packed his remains into barrels with lime and sent them to Sydney. Mountgarret took a little Moomairremener boy whose parents had been killed and had him baptised Robert Hobart May.31 These offences, in addition to the sanctioned mass killing, reveal how British 24 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 71, 93, 160, 237. 25 Windschuttle, Fabrication of Aboriginal History, pp. 372–5; J. Erskine Calder (1875) quoted by Ryan, ‘The long shadow’, 54. 26 Morgan, Land, pp. 144–5; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 22. 27 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 42. 28 TAC, ‘waranta tangara takariliya mumirimina, lungkana risdon cove-ta’, https://taci nc.com.au/3rd-may-1804 (accessed 23 September 2020). 29 See L. Ryan, ‘Frontier massacres in Australia, 1788–1928’ (Chapter 19 in this volume), for further references and analysis on the Risdon Cove massacre, including the 1830 inquiry. 30 TAC, ‘waranta’. 31 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 51.

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officials perceived and treated the Palawa from the beginning of Tasmanian settlement: as a problem to be eradicated and as curiosities to be collected. While the following two decades are considered by historians to have been ‘relatively peaceful’,32 settlement continued to have devastating impact on localised Palawa populations. The sealing and whaling industries based along the southeastern coasts of Australia from the late 1780s generated more wealth for the British Empire than Australia’s subsequent pastoral industry, but at a huge cost to Indigenous people. Unchecked seasonal workers raided Palawa communities on the north and south coasts of Tasmania, abducting women and girls for sex and labour while killing men who defended them. Timber-cutters committed similar offences in southern Tasmania after 1804. During the first six years of settlement, the British relied on kangaroo hunting for fresh meat. Armed and often unsupervised convicts thus not only ravaged the Palawa’s vital food supply, but, by 1806, were conducting an informal war with them. Some convicts escaped British custody and became notorious ‘bushrangers’, harassing settlers as well as the Palawa. But the hunters had to negotiate as well as coerce their access to hinterlands and coasts. Many formed relationships with Aborigines that played a key role in ensuring the Palawa’s longer-term survival.33 Still Tasmania’s growing numbers of free settlers had little need for such collaborative relationships. From 1807, over 600 Norfolk Island colonists were induced with free grants to migrate to Tasmania to establish an agricultural economy. By 1814, they had spread along the Derwent and Tamar Rivers. These settlers understood they were entitled to farm without interference or reprisal from the traditional owners. They and their servants regularly shot Palawa who ‘trespassed’, and they seized their children.34 Church records show that nearly fifty Palawa children were living in settler homes near Launceston and Hobart between 1803 to 1835, with most baptisms occurring between 1811 and 1820. This is a significant number of children removed from a relatively small area and a sharply waning population, but it is unlikely to represent the total. John Helder Wedge, the colony’s assistant surveyor, had five children in his ‘care’ between 1828 and 1834, none of whom were baptised, suggesting there were far more Palawa children living in the British community than were listed in parish records. Many of the children 32 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 29; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 197. 33 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 15–19, 43–60; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 58–62; R. Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2001); P. Cameron, Grease and Ochre: The Blending of Two Cultures at the Colonial Sea Frontier (Hobart: Fullers Bookshop, 2011). 34 Morgan, Land, pp. 12–13, 145–6; Hobart Town Gazette, 20 March 1819; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 58, 66–7.

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were abducted during violent raids on their families. Those who underwent baptism were mostly aged about 6 – young, considering they were taken principally to provide free domestic and farm labour.35 The children were known to be sexually and physically abused in addition to the emotional abuse of their abduction and slavery.36 Many died from illness or ran away. Some of the best-known leaders of Palawa frontier resistance were escaped stolen children. While some government leaders made calls for their return or placement into government ‘care’, settlers countered that the children were their property. By 1818, after 15 years of settlement, the Palawa had suffered a considerable loss of at least 2,000 people.37 Their population of about 5,000 was now roughly on par with the British, who occupied only about 15 per cent of the island, or about 132,000 acres. That was soon to change.

War: 1823 to Early 1832 In 1823, colonial authorities issued more than 1,000 grants to free settlers, a total of 442,000 acres. The northern and southern settlements quickly spread until they met in the midlands, and the British population swelled to over 10,000.38 By 1828, the Van Diemen’s Land (VDL) Company alone had been granted nearly 500,000 acres of land, effectively the island’s entire northwest corner.39 Although the free grant system was not abolished until 1831, most of Tasmania’s arable land was allocated by 1824. The rate of economic and social change in Tasmania was ‘almost unprecedented in the annals of colonial history’.40 The architect of this transformation was one of ‘the most powerful political leaders the island has ever known’.41 Lieutenant Governor George Arthur came to Tasmania in 1824 as a 40-year-old Calvinist evangelical with a military background and a strong standing in humanitarian political circles.42 Arthur’s 35 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 62–7; G. Finlay, ‘Good People Always Crackney in Heaven’: Mythic Conversations in lutruwita / Tasmania (Hobart: Fullers Publishing, 2019), pp. 202–9 36 Draft letter from J. H. Wedge to Dr Ross, 14 November 1832, MLMSS 188, State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW). 37 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 71, 73. This figure is based on updated research; Ryan’s previous estimate was ‘below two thousand’ Aborigines in 1818: L. Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996), p. 79. Boyce notes that officials numbered Aborigines at 7,000 in 1818 without any accuracy: Van Diemen’s, pp. 99–100. 38 Morgan, Land, pp. 19–22. 39 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 202. 40 J. H. Wedge, ‘Autobiographical sketch’, 1837, A 576, SLNSW, p. 21. 41 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 164. 42 A. G. L. Shaw, ‘Arthur, Sir George (1784–1854)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/

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previous, and only other, colonial posting had been in Honduras, where he had challenged local colonists by successfully advocating for the amelioration of slaves’ conditions. Leading abolitionist William Wilberforce subsequently recommended Arthur for the role of Tasmanian governor. In the context of imperial expansion, British ‘humanitarianism’ was not based upon an idea of equality with Aborigines. Indeed, the very assumption of British superiority underpinned the belief that they were entitled to receive grants of land, and could ‘improve’ the lives of the people they colonised. Arthur’s career was both shaped by, and influential in, the essentially paradoxical policies of British humane governance. He conducted an aggressively militarised frontier war while promoting, at least on paper, Aboriginal conciliation and protection. He also engineered one of the empire’s most punitive penal systems while advocating for convict rehabilitation. These two objectives were at once distinct and intricately connected. Arthur transformed Tasmania from penal outpost to profitable pastoral economy while simultaneously managing a threefold increase in Tasmanian convict transportation. During his term from 1824 to 1837, the prisoner population rose from 6,000 to 18,000. Indeed, his economic achievement as governor depended upon the utilisation and control of prisoners. Almost ‘every measure’ of Arthur’s administration was, as he put it, ‘framed with reference to convict discipline’.43 He increased the colony’s military; constructed prisons, courts and roads; and established a system of thorough record keeping. If the Palawa had no formal place within this penal/pastoral dualism, they were in fact central to its success and deeply affected by it. Arthur’s moral and economic objectives depended upon the dispossession of Aboriginal lands. His dual role as governor and commander of the armed forces allowed him to mobilise and extend the military systems established to manage convicts and use them to suppress Palawa insurgency and effect their removal. By late 1823, the Palawa began resisting the massive pastoral expansion into their lands. Within six months, five stockmen had been speared and the presumed leaders of those attacks hanged, to wide media attention. The British reprisals, including a massacre in March 1824, went almost unreported. By autumn 1826, three more stockmen were killed and two more Palawa hanged in what Arthur termed a ‘conciliatory’ measure, reflecting the distinct meaning of that word in 1820s Tasmania. By 1826, the Palawa had killed a total of thirty-six British. Most were convict stockmen, but when a ‘respectable’ arthur-sir-george-1721/text1883, published first in hardcopy 1966 (accessed online 29 July 2020). 43 Lester and Dussart, Colonization, p. 69.

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settler was found speared, tensions increased. The press politically closest to the government depicted the Aborigines in increasingly dehumanising terms: they were ‘savage’, ‘debased’, ‘cruel and barbarous’. One newspaper editor threatened that, unless the Aborigines were rounded up and removed to Bass Strait, ‘THEY WILL BE HUNTED DOWN LIKE WILD BEASTS, AND DESTROYED!’44 Arthur instead hoped to force the Palawa to surrender and retreat into the island’s north. He adapted a British Parliamentary Order that had been issued in 1825 to manage Aboriginal retaliations in the New South Wales colony. The Order of 29 November 1826 authorised Tasmania’s district magistrates to sanction military-led parties to pursue any Aboriginals reported by settlers to have committed a felony, and to ‘use such force as is necessary’ to prevent their escape.45 The November 1826 Order had a significant and immediate effect. From December 1826 to October 1828, Britons killed around 400 Palawa in the Settled Districts, a third of their population in that area. About 250 of these deaths were the result of 16 mass killings, each of 6 or more Aborigines. The massacres followed a pattern: sanctioned parties searched at night and waited until dawn to shoot the Palawa as they attempted their escape. About 100 Palawa were killed in this way by Corporal John Shiners’ party west of Launceston during just 18 days in June 1827. The following month, Arthur toured the districts to remind magistrates of their powers to sanction search parties.46 Settlers and VDL Company workers also committed massacres during this period. In early 1828, the wife of a Company employee recorded the massacre of 12 Aborigines, adding that workers considered such killings ‘an honour’. The following month, Company shepherds forced 30 Peerapper men, women and children of the North West nation to plummet to their deaths off the cliffs at Cape Grim. Company manager Edward Curr wrote to his directors that his ‘whole and sole object was to kill’ the Aborigines. He considered it ‘his duty’.47 Late 1826 to late 1828 was the most devastating period in the Black War for Aboriginal casualties, but it failed to produce Arthur’s hoped-for surrender. Over 60 colonists were killed in this period. The Palawa carried out 70 attacks between September 1827 and March 1828. Arthur responded by formally 44 L. Atkinson-MacEwen, ‘The demonization of Tasmanian Aborigines in the early Vandemonian press’, Journal of Australian Colonial History 23 (2021), 55–70. The quote in all caps was the title of an article by A. Riley Sousa which is referenced fully in the Bibliographic Note below. 45 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 82, 77–83. 46 Ibid., pp. 99, 142; Ryan, ‘List’. 47 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 167; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 203–5.

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partitioning the Settled Districts and deploying 300 foot soldiers to expel any Palawa from the area, orders that resulted in another massacre. From August to October 1828, the Palawa carried out nearly 40 more attacks, including their first killings of settler women and children. In late 1828, Arthur proclaimed the Settled Districts to be in a state of martial law.48 The purpose was to ‘inspire’ the Palawa ‘with terror’. The military could now legally apprehend or shoot Aborigines on sight. Civilians could do likewise if their actions were ‘necessary’, a justification that proved to be astonishingly broad. In 1829, VDL Company workers shot an Aboriginal woman as she ran away and then killed her with an axe as she lay dying. The Solicitor-General determined her killing as ‘justifiable’ since, under martial law, she was an ‘enemy’.49 That the killing occurred beyond the defined geographical limits of martial law was a technicality that the Solicitor-General would surely have known, but chose to overlook. Lasting from late 1828 to early 1832, Tasmania’s period under martial law was the longest in Australia’s history.50 Britons killed around 350 Palawa during this period in the Settled Districts, nearly half of their estimated population in that area. Almost a third of those deaths – an estimated 100 Palawa – were the result of massacres. Britons committed 9 known mass killings between early 1829 and early 1830, following the same pattern established since 1826, of night searches and dawn shootings. From mid-1829, the government funded 6 civilian ‘roving parties’ in addition to the military units.51 John Batman, who later established a settlement at Port Philip (later Victoria), reported that, in early spring 1829, his roving party killed what he estimated was 12 Palawa in a dawn raid. Batman also took 4 captives: a woman, her 2-year-old son, and 2 men so severely injured that even ‘after trying them by every means in [his] power’ Batman could not get them to walk. He was, as he grimly put it, ‘obliged therefore to shoot them’.52 His ambush 2 weeks later of 11 women, children and young men was hailed a ‘humanitarian’ success because the Aborigines were not killed, a telling indication of what that term could mean in colonial Tasmania. Governor Arthur awarded Batman 2,000 acres and allowed him to keep a Palawa child.53 48 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 87–104. 49 Reynolds, Fate, pp. 111–12. 50 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 105. 51 Ibid., pp. 107–12. 52 John Batman to Thomas Anstey, 7 September 1829, ‘Reports of roving parties’, CSO1/ 320/7578 Vol. 7, 142–5, Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office (TAHO); A. H. Campbell, John Batman and the Aborigines (Malmsbury: Kibble Books, 1987), pp. 31–2; N. Brodie, The Vandemonian War: The Secret History of Britain’s Tasmanian Invasion (Melbourne: Hardie Grant, 2017), pp. 99–100. 53 J. Batman to T. Anstey, 21 September and 13 October 1829, ‘Reports of roving parties’, 146–7, 155–8; Campbell, John Batman, pp. 31–4; Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829–1834, ed. N. J. B. Plomley, 2nd ed.

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Despite the increased organisation of pursuant parties, Britons committed fewer massacres under martial law than following the 1826 Order. The Palawa were becoming harder to find. By mid-1829, probably fewer than 1,000 Palawa survived in Tasmania. This reduced population comprised few children and grandparents. Most of the surviving Palawa were able-bodied adults who could fight or flee.54 Doing so became a principal occupation. Between November 1828 and March 1830, the Palawa committed about 120 attacks on settlers. The increase was due both to additional reporting and to the Palawa’s resolve.55 They were fighting for their Country and lives, raiding huts for food as well as to kill, and with highly effective methods. Several Palawa spear could be thrown in the time it took to recharge a flintlock musket, and their knowledge of Country and bushcraft was superior.56 They could appear more numerous than was the case. Arthur estimated there were 2,000 Palawa in Tasmania in mid-1829 – two to four times their probable number – and rationalised his response to their attacks accordingly.57 Arthur was also aware that, in the face of unrestrained force, the Palawa risked annihilation. He had written to his district magistrates in late 1828 that, in proclaiming martial law, his administration was ‘by no means . . . seeking the destruction of the Aborigines’, but rather seeking to ‘punish the leaders’ of ‘atrocities’ and thus bring to an end the ‘warfare . . . which must terminate in the annihilation of the Natives’.58 It was an incongruous argument. The Palawa were deemed responsible for their potential demise, which the proclamation of martial law would prevent. But the letter demonstrates that Arthur wanted to record his humane purpose as he authorised open war, as insurance against future criticism for what he knew were exterminatory tactics and, more, that he envisioned a possible Aboriginal annihilation and wanted to avoid it. Indigenous extinction was a growing concern among British humanitarians. In British North America, Europeans presumed that many First Nation peoples were doomed to extinction.59 State governors sought to record their ‘dying’ languages and cultures and to affect their ‘protection’ by removing them onto reserves. The British observed these actions with growing

54 56

57 59

(Launceston: Queen Victorian Museum and Art Gallery and Quintus Publishing, 2008), pp. 945–6. Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 197. 55 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 121, 144. This is well illustrated in Reynolds’ chapter, ‘Those days of terror’ in Fate of a Free People, and in N. Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2014), pp. 79–90. Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 107. 58 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 109, 121–2. Brantlinger, Dark, pp. 2–4.

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interest, especially when the Beothuk of British Newfoundland, Canada, were pronounced ‘extinct’ in 1829.60 In late 1830, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Sir George Murray, warned Arthur that taking any ‘line of conduct’ or enacting any ‘secret object’ that would affect the Tasmanian Aborigines’ ‘extinction’ would ‘leave an indelible stain upon the character of the British Government’.61 Murray’s words reveal how political motive could drive the policies of humane governance. His first concern was the reputation of his government, not Aboriginal lives. His caution extended to Arthur’s career. Extinction would be an administrative failure for Arthur, but losing control of the Settled Districts was not an option either. Arthur had to win the War with a clear record of his humanitarian intentions and a critical number of Palawa survivors whom he could visibly ‘protect’. He had to ‘inspire terror’ humanely. Meeting these contradictory goals created increasingly divergent instructions. Months after proclaiming martial law, Arthur commissioned around 100 painted ‘Proclamation Boards’ to be displayed throughout the Settled Districts to explain British ‘justice’ to the Palawa. An Aboriginal man was pictured hanging after he had speared whites, and, in reverse, an image that was never a reality in Tasmania: a British man hanging for shooting Aborigines. Other scenes showed similar unrealities under martial law: uniformed British men shaking hands with Palawa, and black and white families embracing.62 In an equally perfidious contradiction, the roving parties were equipped with weapons and convicts handpicked for their nefarious reputations, yet they were ordered not to kill Aborigines. They would receive cash bounties only for live captives: £5 for an adult, and £2 for a child. In yet another gruesome paradox, Nicholas Fortosa, a pardoned convict and former soldier chosen to lead a roving party, negotiated to receive his bounties for dead Aborigines.63 Months after he proclaimed martial law, Arthur employed a ‘conciliator’ to establish a settlement on Bruny Island for local Palawa and those displaced by the War. George Augustus Robinson, a London-born bricklayer who had migrated to Tasmania in 1824, was involved in the Church Mission Society 60 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 153; F. Polack, ed., Tracing Ochre: Changing Perspectives on the Beothuk (University of Toronto Press, 2018). 61 H. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne: Viking Penguin Books, 2001), p. 4. 62 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 113–15. 63 Brodie, The Vandemonian War, pp. 227–9.

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and influenced by North American protection policies. He aimed to ‘become acquainted with the history, manners, and language’ of the Palawa, whom he feared would ‘at no distant period become extinct’.64 In 1830, accompanied by Palawa guides, Robinson made genuinely friendly contact with the Aborigines living beyond Tasmania’s Settled Districts.65 Meanwhile, within the Settled Districts, Arthur mounted his most aggressive policies to date against the Palawa. By late 1830, he extended martial law across the entire island and called on every able-bodied man in the colony to form a levée en masse that soon became known as the ‘Black Line’, or simply ‘the Line’. In October 1830, he mobilised over 500 troops, 700 convicts and 1,000 civilians – a total of 2,200 men – to sweep the Settled Districts from a wide northern frontier into a narrow southern point on the Tasman Peninsula.66 The five weeks of the Line’s operation cost more than half the colony’s annual budget. Labour was redeployed from farms and industries not only to join the Line, but to supply it with food, clothing and footwear. Work on the Line was constant. Searches took up the days, and watches continued through the nights. Forests were stripped bare to fuel the campfires that visually connected the interspersed encampments, and to build the obstacles to fortify the gaps between them.67 ‘Skirmishing parties’ were sent forward to capture the presumably ensnared Aborigines. It is testimony to the Palawa’s fighting proficiency that they managed to elude and challenge a force nearly ten times their own number. In the second week of the Line, the Palawa attacked 13 settler homes north of Hobart, plundering supplies, killing a colonist, and wounding 3 more. Only once did a search party track down a Palawa group. They reported killing 2 men at dawn and seized an older man and a boy. They were the Line’s only captives.68 The Line, which began by mobilising and unifying the colony, ended in November 1830 by being publicly ‘ridiculed’.69 Over the following year, Arthur persisted in his attempts to clear the Settled Districts. He mounted smaller levées of convicts and soldiers and maintained several mobile units. The Palawa thus had to keep moving, forming smaller and smaller groups both for safety and because their numbers were rapidly declining. In October, Arthur instructed Robinson to locate any survivors. He found the last group of exhausted Palawa in December 1831. They numbered 26. Of these, 9 were 64 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 151. 65 Ibid., pp. 151–75. 66 Ibid., pp. 126, 128, 130–5 67 Clements, The Black War, pp. 131–40; Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 117–18; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 137. 68 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 137–8. 69 Wedge, ‘Autobiographical’, 20.

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women, and only 1 was a child. They agreed to remove to Flinders Island in Bass Strait on the understanding they could live freely there and would be allowed back to their Country on mainland Tasmania when peace returned. It was a treaty the British dishonoured, but it was at least willingly made. This was not the experience of most of the Palawa removed after 1830. While 46 Aborigines left under this agreement, the colonial government would eventually remove some 150 others by deception or force.70

Removals and Incarceration, 1832–1871 Sporadic conflict continued north of the Settled Districts; 40 Palawa and 10 colonists died fighting between 1832 and 1834.71 Still, most of the Palawa remaining on Tasmania’s main island – an estimated 200 people – were living comparatively peaceably in its south and northwest. They were reasonably healthy, included complete families and, importantly, were no longer under threat of expanding settlement. From 1832, the sheep grazing ventures in the northwest retracted, and the Macquarie Harbour penal settlement on the border of the Northwest and Southwest Palawa nations closed in 1833. Nonetheless, between 1832 and 1834, government authorities made extraordinary efforts to track down these remaining Palawa and to remove them into incarceration on Flinders Island, where most of them died from epidemics. Robinson’s 1830 travels ended as the Line was drawing to its failed conclusion. Pressure was mounting for some ‘conciliatory’ success. Robinson had earned the trust of the Plangermairreenner clan of the Ben Lomond nation. He promised them a trip to nearby Swan Island where he knew they wanted to collect bird eggs. They went and were never allowed to return to their Country. As they waited for his return, Robinson proposed to the government that he could similarly effect ‘the voluntary removal of the entire black population’.72 Chief Justice John Lewes Pedder cautioned that the government had the authority to remove only hostile Aborigines or those who had sought protection.73 He worried that Aborigines removed by inducements would ‘soon . . . pine away’ once they became aware that their situation was one of ‘hopeless imprisonment’.74

70 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, p. 133; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 295–6. 71 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 139–41. 72 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 279–80. 73 J. Fox, Bound by Every Tie of Duty: John Lewes Pedder, Chief Justice of Van Diemen’s Land (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018), pp. 227–8. 74 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 281–2.

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Still the idea of an Aboriginal-free island appealed to Arthur. He responded to Pedder that it would be ‘better’ that the Palawa ‘meet . . . their death’ with ‘every act of kindness’ shown to them, rather than ‘fall a sacrifice to the inevitable consequences of their continued acts of outrage upon the white inhabitants’.75 The Aborigines were once again made responsible for their inevitable demise, although this time the government sought to ease rather than prevent such an outcome. Arthur characterised the remaining peaceable Palawa as uniformly hostile in order to legitimise their removal, and falsely reported to London that he had offered them protection if they remained peaceful or if they moved onto a settlement. The subsequent forced removals were thus never sanctioned by the Colonial Office, but neither were they questioned by Britain’s parliament as they should have been.76 In 1832, Robinson tracked down a group of northwestern Palawa and enacted what he privately termed a ‘ruse de guerre’. He promised them an ‘excursion’ to nearby Hunter Island, then left them there for three months. There, 75 per cent died from respiratory infections waiting for transport to take them to Flinders Island, where twenty other captives had recently died from similar illnesses.77 The Palawa had little immunity to introduced diseases that spread quickly in the crowded and unhygienic camps. The following year, Robinson set out to the mid-west coast well-armed. On at least six occasions, Robinson revealed his gun or ordered his servants to do likewise when the Palawa attempted to escape or refused to leave. Robinson made use of the convict station at Macquarie Harbour to imprison the Palawa while he searched for those still at large. The station’s Grummet Island, little more than a rock, had been used to punish the worst convict offenders. It was there that a group of 7 Palawa adults and a boy were imprisoned for 100 days, ‘for no other reason than that they were Aboriginal’.78 Indeed, being held without formal charge meant some Palawa at Macquarie Harbour received neither the rations nor the medical treatments normally issued to prisoners. Once again, 75 per cent of the captives died waiting for transport. Robinson then sent them to Flinders Island, knowing an epidemic had recently claimed another 19 Palawa lives.79 The final removals in 1834 in the northwest included 20 Palawa who, two years earlier, had vowed to ‘kill’ Robinson and never leave their Country. Robinson’s journal offers no detail how he convinced the group to go to Hunter Island, but he was ‘astonished’ they did not try absconding when put 75 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 184. 76 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 277–8, 285. 77 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 198–9; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 298, 305. 78 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 300. 79 Ibid., pp. 300–4; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 210.

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briefly onshore en route to Flinders. The last group of Palawa left willingly to Flinders Island in early 1835, keen to see their families there. Reunion was the only reason the Palawa voluntarily left their Country after 1832.80 After 1835, several groups of Palawa remained undetected in the northwest for up to five decades, by which time a third generation of cross-cultural Palawa was being born in the Bass Strait and in Nicholls Rivulet.81 By then, the British assumed their colony in Van Diemen’s Land had achieved what Charles Darwin described in 1836 as the ‘great advantage of being free from a native population’.82 Historian James Boyce argued that a ‘persuasive psychological appeal’ had driven the colonial government to carry out the removals, as reflected in its celebration of their presumed success.83 Robinson wrote to Arthur in 1835 that he had ‘scrupulously’ kept his word to the Palawa. They were at all times aware that their ‘customs were to be respected’ on Flinders Island in ‘uninterrupted tranquillity’.84 Whether a product of either self-delusion or falsehood, the report allowed Arthur to report to London that the Aborigines had been removed ‘for their benefit, and in almost every instance with their own free will and consent’. Robinson promoted this ‘humane policy’ widely, hoping it would soon ‘be adopted towards the aboriginal inhabitants of every colony throughout the British empire’. Indeed, the ‘friendly’ removals offered a model of Aboriginal protection that helped to rationalise further expansion into southeast Australia and New Zealand.85 The ‘humane policy’ killed over half the Palawa in the process of their removals, and nearly half of those who made it to Flinders Island within a decade of their being removed. From 1833, the Aboriginal Establishment on Flinders Island was called ‘Wybalenna’, meaning ‘black man’s houses’. The houses and a chapel were solidly built from locally crafted bricks. Here, 46 British tradesmen, clergy officers and their families took up residence.86 It was a significant government investment in a lethal project. The epidemics that had ravaged the incarcerated Palawa from 1831 continued. It was clear within months that Wybalenna’s facilities could not support even a healthy exiled community. The huts were

80 Friendly, ed. Plomley, journal entries for 15 and 24 April 1834, pp. 913–14; Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 212–14; Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 302. 81 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 214–15. 82 University of Tasmania Library, Charles Darwin in Hobart Town, February 1836, www .utas.edu.au/library/exhibitions/darwin/hobart.html (accessed 8 September 2020). 83 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 308. 84 Friendly, ed. Plomley, p. 975, n. 28. 85 Lester and Dussart, Colonization, pp. 81–2, 49, 8–9, 45–7, 80–3. 86 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain?, p. 78.

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poorly ventilated, the water impure, the supply ships intermittent, and the natural food resources soon exhausted. When Robinson took up residency as superintendent of Wybalenna in late 1835, there were 123 Palawa. Nearly half had died by 1839, the year Robinson left to take up the role of Aboriginal Protector in Port Phillip.87 A series of superintendents of varying ineptitude took up his mission of transition of the Palawa into British ‘civilisation’. Throughout constant sickness and bereavement, the Palawa women were required to follow a strict domestic routine; the men were supposed to build roads and cultivate farms; and the children were taken from their families. Few Palawa children had survived the War and the removals. The fourteen children at Wybalenna in 1836 were accommodated separately from their parents to accelerate their cultural inculcation.88 Two children were sent to live with Lady Franklin, the governor’s wife, in 1838 and 1841, so she could ‘experiment’ with their ‘civilisation’.89 On the recommendations of a government report, in 1841, eight children from Wybalenna were sent to the reputedly horrible Queen’s Orphan Asylum, also known as the Orphan School, in Hobart.90 The children were returned to Wybalenna in 1844, but in 1847, in a move seemingly ‘determined to prevent the community’s survival’, Governor William Denison removed nine of the eleven Palawa children to the Orphan School.91 In 1846, the Wybalenna community used the British education they had received to petition Queen Victoria to honour the original agreement, brokered between her government and members of their community, to leave their Country in exchange for freedom on Flinders Island.92 The Colonial Secretary’s advice to close Wybalenna in 1847 was influenced as much by cost as by the petitioners’ complaints. Governor Denison agreed with the Colonial Secretary to move the Establishment to a location south of Hobart to prevent the Wybalenna and the cross-cultural Bass Strait Islander communities having new families together, and thus increasing the numbers of Tasmanian Aboriginal survivors.93 Forty-nine Palawa made the journey to Oyster Cove in 1847, the same number as the British officers who had settled Risdon Cove in 1803. Oyster Cove was 87 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 239. 88 Ibid., pp. 225–7. 89 A. Alexander, ‘Mathinna (c. 1835–?)’, People Australia, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://ia.anu.edu.au/biography/mathinna-29655/tex t36623 (accessed 15 September 2020). 90 Find&Connect, ‘Queen’s Orphan Asylum (1833–1879)’, www.findandconnect.gov.au/ ref/tas/biogs/TE00053b.htm, created 12 January 2011 (accessed 10 September 2020). 91 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, pp. 242, 255. 92 Ibid., pp. 219, 247–9; L. Stevens, Me Write Myself, The Free Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land at Wybalenna (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017). 93 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 250.

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a former convict station that had been abandoned owing to its unhygienic conditions. The water was unclean, and the damp rotted the wooden buildings. The superintendent, Joseph Milligan, failed even to record Palawa deaths properly. When Robinson visited in 1851, he noted that thirteen Palawa had died since 1847, and sketched where they were buried. Helen MacDonald suggests his record was made to facilitate the subsequent theft of their human remains. Indeed, Robinson left Oyster Cove with numerous skulls.94 The cemeteries at both Oyster Cove and Wybalenna were repeatedly plundered well into the twentieth century to facilitate an international trade in Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestral remains.95 After nearly seventy years of colonisation, the British continued to regard Palawa as curiosities to be collected, or as a problem to be eradicated. With the death of William Lanne, the supposed ‘last man’ in 1869, it seemed they had effectively achieved the latter. Only two residents survived there when Oyster Cove closed in 1871, one of whom died that year. Trukanini, who then spent her last five years with a Hobart family, began to earn international fame as the ‘last Tasmanian’. But she assuredly was not. Trukanini had safeguarded the continuation of her culture. Oyster Cove was part of her South East nation and close to Bruny Island, the traditional Country of her Nuenonne clan.96 Less than a day’s walk away was Nicholl’s Rivulet, where Fanny Smith lived with her husband and growing family. Fanny had been born in Wybalenna in about 1834 to Palawa parents, although later in her life, amateur scientists contested that she was a ‘half-caste’.97 Trukanini regularly took Fanny’s children onto Country and taught them culture, a role that Fanny continued after Trukanini died in 1876. Then, in 1899, in the Hobart rooms of the Royal Society of Tasmania, Fanny performed one of the most significant acts of Indigenous self-determination in Australian history. Fanny sang in traditional language as a Tasmanian Aboriginal woman, determinedly challenging the widely held belief that her people were ‘extinct’. Fanny’s unforgotten songs remain a testimony and inspiration to the enduring Palawa community.98

94 H. MacDonald, Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection (Melbourne University Press, 2005), p. 95. 95 P. Turnbull, Science, Museums and Collecting the Indigenous Dead in Colonial Australia (Cham: Palgrave PacMacmillan, 2017). 96 C. Pybus, Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2020), p. 4. 97 Taylor, Into the Heart, pp. 95–6. 98 National Film and Sound Archive, ‘Fanny Cochrane Smith’s Tasmanian Aboriginal songs (1899)’, Australian Screen, https://aso.gov.au/titles/music/fanny-cochrane-smithsongs (accessed 29 September 2020).

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Conclusion When Lemkin first determined that the British had committed a genocide in Tasmania, he attributed the Aborigines’ destruction to a combination of actions by both individuals and government, and to warfare and incarceration. Neither state-planned mass killings nor the supposed outcome of Aboriginal extinction dominated Lemkin’s findings, but those were the two aspects that came to shape most accounts of Tasmanian genocide that followed.99 In a sound revisionist effort to recognise Indigenous agency, Ryan and Reynolds wrote histories framed by resistance and survival, but not by genocide. As Taylor’s 2013 article on the subject explains in more detail, Ryan’s 1981 history mentioned the term ‘genocide’ only once, arguably because of its close association at the time with the idea of ‘extinction’. Reynolds’ 1995 history avoided the term ‘genocide’ entirely. Reynolds framed the events on Tasmania’s frontier as a war fought valiantly by Indigenous warriors, and ended by a negotiated peace.100 Both historians observed that the Aboriginal death rate was lower in Tasmania than on other Australian frontiers, although – importantly – they focused on data from after 1828. From this initial research, Ryan and Reynolds concluded that massacres did not form a major part of frontier violence in Tasmania. They mentioned only the Cape Grim and Risdon Cove killings, in passing.101 In 1997, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission handed down its report on the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, Bringing Them Home. The report’s reference to the 1948 Convention on Genocide (Article I Ie: ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’) seemed a step too far for many Australians, who associated genocide solely with the Holocaust.102 But this was precisely how Tasmania’s colonial history had been presented in popular discourse. The 1978 film The Last Tasmanian had been promoted as: ‘Our own awful Holocaust’.103 Bringing Them Home not only made genocide a national issue in Australia, but also inspired historians to return to Tasmania with fresh interest and context. 99 A. Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: the history of an idea’ in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008), 229–52, at 235, 239–40. 100 Taylor, ‘Genocide’, 408–9. 101 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 76–9; Ryan, The Aboriginal Tasmanians, pp. 75, 135; Ryan, ‘Frontier massacres’ (Chapter 19 in this volume). 102 Lawson, The Last, p. 16; Taylor, ‘Genocide’, 412. 103 G. Tippet, ‘Our own awful Holocaust’, The Sun, 3 October 1978.

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Reynolds’ 2003 book, An Indelible Stain?, titled after Murray’s 1830 despatch to Arthur, sought to bring British humanitarian discourse into the genocide debate. This work built upon Reynolds’ characterisation of Arthur in his 1995 history as a sincere Christian whose strong actions against the Aborigines were taken in pressured response to their effective resistance, and who regretted his part in their destruction with ‘feelings’ that were ‘quite genuine’.104 Noting the 1948 definition of genocide as ‘acts committed with intent to destroy’, Reynolds concluded genocide had not occurred in Tasmania.105 In 2004, Reynolds extended his argument. The distinction between warfare and genocide was crucial to determining the intent to commit genocide, Reynolds contended, but such a distinction required evidence that was missing from the Tasmanian records. While Arthur had ‘intended to use whatever force was required to crush the indigenous insurgency’, there was ‘little evidence’ that he ‘wanted to reach beyond that objective and destroy the Tasmanian race in whole or in part’. Thus, Reynolds concluded, the question as to whether Arthur ‘strayed over the unmarked border between warfare to genocide cannot be answered with any certainty’.106 In 2008, three historians published their insights into the question of intent in Tasmanian genocide. Ann Curthoys noted that Tasmania, like mainland Australia, was a settler colony where the British wanted Aboriginal land, not their labour. Because land was vital to both Aboriginal culture and economy, the British had created what historian Tony Barta identified as genocidal ‘relations’ between pastoralists and traditional owners. As historian Patrick Wolfe observed, settler colonialism had a ‘logic of elimination’. Curthoys concluded that the British committed genocide in Tasmania not with explicit intent, or by ‘state planning . . . or mass killing’, but by granting pastoral land and then failing to protect the Aborigines from subsequent settler attacks.107 Tom Lawson extended this point in 2012, noting that genocidal intent was ‘not always evident’ in Australian settler colonies – ‘indeed colonialism was often spoken of in terms of protection and improvement’. Lawson asked, ‘if we ought simply to revise the idea of genocide as purely a state crime in the light of Australian history. After all, the frontier represented the most lethal threat of violence in . . . Tasmania . . . and it was space defined by the absence of the state’.108 104 Reynolds, Fate of a Free People, pp. 121–2. 105 Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? pp. 17, 49–98. 106 H. Reynolds, ‘Genocide in Tasmania?’ in Genocide and Settler Society, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 128–50, at 147. 107 Curthoys, ‘Genocide’, 243–4. 108 Lawson, The Last, p. 19.

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Ben Madley observed that ‘multiple perpetrators articulated, in word and deed, “intent to destroy”’ the Tasmanian Aborigines. These perpetrators did not include colonial officials, Madley acknowledged, but nor did they need to. In international law, ‘prosecutors need not produce a written statement of intent to convict a party of genocide’, Madley explained, nor is there a requirement that ‘all genocide perpetrators . . . be state actors’. Madley observed that penal transportation had created a British society in Tasmania that, by the 1820s, was not only disproportionately criminal in number, but brutalised by an ‘official culture of terror’. Britain’s failure to protect the Aborigines from such indurate ruthlessness was effectively to sanction their destruction.109 James Boyce presented evidence that the Aboriginal removals from 1831 had been planned and enforced by the state. He described them as ‘government-sponsored ethnic clearances’. Boyce also asked how, in the absence of any recorded epidemics, did so many Tasmanian Aborigines die before 1830, if not by mass killings?110 Seeking an answer, Ryan consequently uncovered the hitherto undetected number of massacres carried out in direct consequence of Arthur’s 1826 Order and his 1828 proclamation of martial law. Ryan concluded that these killings revealed that Arthur ‘may have considered massacre . . . a necessary strategy’ for gaining control of the Settled Districts, especially before 1828.111 Historians had overlooked this earlier period of the War because the records relating to attacks were richest from 1828. These were records created on Arthur’s instructions, to justify his responses.112 Ryan recognised that, in 1830, the Aboriginal Committee heard evidence of six massacres but reported only one to London: the Risdon Cove massacre. This event, that had occurred twenty-one years before Arthur’s term began, was blamed for stirring the Aboriginal revenge that followed.113 What in fact made the Risdon Cove massacre distinct was not its rarity, but that it occurred in broad daylight, not at dawn, and that it was remembered. The British were genocidal from their first arrival in Tasmania, and through to their neglectful administration of the Aboriginal Establishment until 1871. Indeed, Tasmania’s genocidal policies continued to the late twentieth century with the use of the Cape Barren Reserve Act 1912 and the Infants Welfare Act 1935 to control the lives of Aboriginal people and to authorise the 109 Madley, ‘From terror’, 105–6. 110 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, pp. 296, 197. 111 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 144. 112 Boyce, Van Diemen’s, p. 197. 113 Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines, p. 125.

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removal of their children.114 But the main historical focus – and point of debate – of genocide in Tasmania has been the years of Arthur’s rule. This was the period of the Black War, forced removals and Wybalenna. It was when government actions were the most destructive to Aboriginal society, and when both colonial and metropolitan leaders most clearly articulated that their objectives were to ‘protect’ Aboriginal lives. As historian Ben Kiernan has explained, genocide ‘requires “specific intent”, that is “the act must be specifically committed to accomplish complete or partial destruction of a group”’. But genocide does not require any specific motive. Motive in this context, and in criminal law more generally, is distinct from intent. Motive is what drives or impels intent. As Kiernan notes, the term ‘motive’ was deliberately absent from the Genocide Convention, and, in 2001, the ICTY Appeals Chambers ‘stressed “the necessity to distinguish specific intent from motive”’. The Chambers added that: ‘The personal motive of the perpetrator of the crime of genocide may be, for example, to obtain personal economic benefits, or political advantage.’ As Kiernan summarised: ‘Destruction of an ethnic group, then, need not be a motive for subjecting the group to genocide.’ The ‘“specific intent” to destroy a group requires only intentional action and a purposefulness or conscious desire to accomplish the act’.115 Thus, it is not Arthur’s personal motive – what ‘he wanted’ – that should determine whether he ‘strayed over the . . . border between warfare and genocide’ (a concept implying the two are mutually exclusive), but his intentional actions. Arthur’s motive in removing Aborigines was to protect both them and the settlers. His actions included formal orders resulting in a pattern of massacres that intentionally destroyed the Palawa, at least ‘in part’. Tasmanian colonisation may have been ‘spoken of in terms of protection’, but, considering Arthur’s seeming ‘strategy’ of killings, the island’s frontier cannot be ‘defined by the absence of the state’.116 In Arthur’s Tasmania, hanging Aborigines was portrayed as a ‘conciliatory’ measure, seizing women and children as a ‘humanitarian’ act. Officials promoted extensive preventable deaths in custody as a model of humane governance to rationalise further imperial expansion. Arthur played a key 114 Australian Human Rights Commission, ‘Chapter 6: Tasmania’, in Bringing Them Home, https://bth.humanrights.gov.au/the-report/part-2-tracing-the-history/chapter-6-tas mania (accessed 22 September 2020). 115 B. Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 17–18. 116 Lawson, The Last, p. 19

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role in affecting ‘shifts in humanitarian governmentality’.117 He demonstrated the British ability to obfuscate mass killings with benevolent discourse. Humane governance amid forcible dispossession presented colonial officials with a set of impossible and contradictory orders. They were impelled to state as their chief objectives the protection of Aboriginal people, while deliberately destroying them and their societies to facilitate imperial expansion. This was the contradiction that led the British to commit an intentional genocide in Tasmania with ‘humanitarian’ motives.

Bibliographic Note The most comprehensive account of Tasmanian genocide is Ryan, Tasmanian Aborigines. This book is substantially different from Ryan, Aboriginal Tasmanians. For concise summaries, see Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 265–80; and Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’. Studies of Tasmanian genocide within international contexts include: Lester and Dussart, Colonization; B. Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research 6:2 (2004), 167–92; B. Madley, ‘Tactics of nineteenth-century colonial massacre: Tasmania, California and beyond’ in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killings and Atrocity throughout History, ed. P. G. Dwyer and L. Ryan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. 110–25; and A. Riley Sousa, ‘“They will be hunted down like wild beasts and destroyed!”: a comparative study of genocide in California and Tasmania’, Journal of Genocide Research 6:2 (2004), 193–209. For discussions of Tasmanian genocide and British and Australian nationalisms, see Lawson, The Last; T. Lawson, ‘“The only thing to be deplored is the extraordinary mortality”: Flinders Island and the imagination of the British’ in Monstrous Geographies: Places and Spaces of the Monstrous, ed. S. Montin and E. Tsitas (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013); and Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? Histories that provide important context for Tasmanian genocide include: Morgan, Land, and Boyce, Van Diemen’s Land. Boyce’s appendix, ‘Towards genocide, government policy on the Aborigines, 1827–38’, outlines the forced removals. Historiographies of Tasmanian genocide include: Curthoys, ‘Genocide in Tasmania: the history of an idea’; Madley, ‘From terror’; and Taylor, 117 Lester and Dussart, Colonization, pp. 45, 68–83.

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‘Genocide, extinction and Aboriginal self-determination in Tasmanian historiography’. Explorations of Tasmanian Aboriginal resistance and endurance during the War and its aftermath include: Reynolds, Fate of a Free People; and Stevens, ‘Me Write Myself’. Detailed accounts of the Black War include Brodie, The Vandemonian War, and N. Clements, The Black War: Fear, Sex and Resistance in Tasmania (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2014). The primary records that have informed many of the above publications can be found in: Plomley, Friendly; N. J. B. Plomley,Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Settlement (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987); and Historical Records of Australia, Series III, ed. Watson; resumed by Chapman, ed.

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Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824–1928 raymond evans

Conventionally, Australian frontier historiography examines individual colonies and states, each possessing singular race conflict histories – narratives constructed with little inter-connection or sense of an interlacing thematic unity. In this chapter, however, the subtropical and tropical zones of Queensland and the tropical regions of the Northern Territory and Western Australia will be analysed as a vast, congruent arc of settler colonialism, broadly designated as Northern Australia (see Map 21.1). It was transformed by largely British frontier intrusion from the 1820s to the 1920s, and secured by systems of forceful dispossession, with decidedly genocidal outcomes. The concept of colonial genocide has mostly met with a marked reticence in Australian academic discourse. Its terminology is considered slippery and forbidding by many, while proof of overt intentionality, demanded from documentation, has been found wanting. The appeal of a normalising nationalist ideology, with its reassuring sense of communal rectitude, has also provided a deterrent brake upon bolder enquiry. In this investigation, the charge of genocide will be shown as more than supposition or possibility. To begin with, across the entire spread of Queensland, the Northern Territory from roughly Alice Springs northward, as well as the Kimberley and pearling coast districts of Western Australia, rich and largely incontrovertible evidence of massive societal destruction through systematic, foundational violence – often pursued to the point of extermination or, at least, near-eradication – is manifest. In Queensland alone by the 1890s, for instance, white invaders had killed tens of thousands of members of the host societies – possibly more than a fifth of the population. In the light of the 1948 United Nations definition of genocide, the essential elements – of killing targeted group members en masse, deliberately inflicting 508

Genocide in Northern Australia, 1824–1928 Melville Island (Fort Dundas) Cape York Raffles Bay, Arafura Station Timor Sea Alligator River Gulf Country/ Katherine Gulf of Roper River Oodnadatta Carpentaria Cooktown Nulla Nulla (station) Victoria River District Nicholson River Palmer River Mistake Creek Victoria Downs (station) Broome Hall’s Creek Bentinck Island Kimberley Roebuck Bay Turnoff Lagoon Burketown

NORTHERN TERRITORY

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Shark Bay

Perth

Camooweal

Coral Sea

Bowen

Peak Downs Coniston QUEENSLAND Canoona Fitzroy River Alice Springs Gladstone Dawson River Fraser Island AUSTRALIA Burnett District Maryborough Charlotte Waters Wide Bay Channel Country Baroon Bribie Island Maranoa River Condamine Moreton Darllng Downs Brisbane Island South Stradbroke Australia Island

New South Wales Adelaide

Great Australian Bight

Sydney

Melbourne N W

E S

Map 21.1 Locations of racial conflict mentioned in the text.

conditions that render survival parlous, inhibiting births and forcibly transferring offspring – are all extant in empirical evidence, repeating itself across a century or more of devastating impacts. Similarly, conspiracy, public incitement and complicity, as well as overt attempts, region by region, to support and inflict genocidal acts – particularly when a combination of official action and private initiatives are considered – are apparent in the perpetuation of what the legal scholar Michael Grewcock terms ‘the establishment and consolidation of capitalism in Australia’. He adds that ‘the foundational violence inherent to settler colonialism and the processes of primitive accumulation that underpinned it . . . created the conditions of ongoing structural violence, inflicted through . . . arguably genocidal state practices designed to disrupt – if not eliminate – the social worlds and collective identities of Aboriginal people’.1 1 M. Grewcock, ‘Settler-colonial violence, primitive accumulation and Australia’s genocide’, State Crime 7:2 (2018), 222, 225.

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This thrust of official policy, emanating at first from the metropoles of Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, grew more audacious the further northward and westward it extended, as earlier restraints upon severity – already meagre – were more flagrantly abandoned, and communal, settler initiatives, in particular, fed the mayhem of usurpation. The demand for explicit, transparent documentation to prove intentionality ‘to destroy in whole or in part’ an ethnical group tends to offer an escape clause from an unambiguous genocidal conclusion. Perpetrators do not normally provide researchers with uncamouflaged statements of their own criminal intent. A similar response may be offered towards the Rome Statute of 1998, where it specifies that a conviction for extermination, a crime against humanity, requires an imprimatur of the intentional infliction of a widespread and systematic attack. This crime embodies not only massacres but also deprivation of access to resources – nutritional and medical – calculated to bring about the destruction of at least part of a population. For the historian, if not for the criminal lawyer, attribution of overt responsibility should not require freely volunteered, preserved confessions – rare documentary detritus of self-incriminating admission. Rather, the reasonably foreseeable consequences of colonisation provide for a predictable calculus of outcomes. Instead of requiring assertions of guilt from perpetrators’ pens, such may be inferred from the egregious processes themselves.2 The immense northern zone under examination here was the last region to be colonised, so to those undertaking that colonisation it was already obvious, from the preceding record of Australian land-taking, what the outcome would be. (See Tony Barta’s Chapter 2 in this volume.) Indeed, it was certain to become more parlous, given the advances in weapon technology from the mid nineteenth century and the lessons learned from frontier sorties and massacres, already perpetrated since 1788. Expansion in the Queensland region accelerated from the 1840s, reaching an apogee in the late 1860s and 1870s. The Northern Territory frontier then burgeoned from the 1870s, and the Kimberly frontier from the 1880s, in a continuous saga of dispossession and advance, all emanating mainly out of Queensland itself. The colonising lessons learned farther south, rather than being digested as salutary, cautionary or inhibitory, were instead absorbed as preparatory, instructional and encouraging. 2 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Genocide and settler society in Australian history’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Children in Australian History, ed. A. D. Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 28–30.

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Responsibility for conscious acts of forcible annexation, the expectation of mass killing, the release once again of decimating pathogens, the accustomed withholding of human rights, legal protections and medical prophylaxis, accompanied by the usual welter of racist excuse and denialism, were already well-rehearsed responses. They unfolded without a priori concern for the consequences of the infliction in the pursuit of land engrossment and primitive material profit, as Australia’s northern reaches were now taken and held. In considering this wide, destructive swathe, it should be added that the UN definition and the Rome Statute – though apposite here – do not entirely cover the definitional grounds of what in total was being inflicted. For neither classification encompasses the cultural and environmental onslaughts simultaneously occurring – that is, not simply the imposition of mass physical death upon host populations, but also the accompanying processes of social, spiritual and environmental death as well. Hence, the efficacy of the concept of Indigenocide to the present analysis. This term, as rehearsed elsewhere, embodies not simply intentional invasion and exterminatory killings, but also incorporates, to begin with, an ideological accompaniment, rendering the targeted populations as a kind of subhuman creation, whose social and cultural organisations are frontally assaulted, whose land-ties are unrecognised and severed, and whose country itself is destructively transformed with rigour. Thus, Indigenocide posits the combined infliction of mass homicide (i.e. bodily destruction), ethnocide (i.e. cultural denigration and destruction) and ecocide (i.e. environmental seizure and destruction) – all inflicted simultaneously in one encircling, incorporative offensive.3 Northern Australia composes an effective arena for such observation. In size, Queensland, plus the tropical regions of the Northern Territory and Western Australia, covers roughly 4 million square kilometres – more than half of the Australian land mass (7.7 million sq. km). This is 17 times larger than the territory of its imperial metropole, Great Britain, from where it was colonised by trans-oceanic migrations. The pre-contact population of First Nation peoples in the north was possibly approaching 400,000 occupants. Perhaps as many as 300,000 Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders inhabited Queensland alone, in roughly 140 language groupings. There were up to a further 30,000 in tropical Western Australia across some 30 language groups, 3 R. Evans, ‘“Crime without a name”: colonialism and the case for “indigenocide”’ in Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History, ed. A. Dirk Moses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 133–47.

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and around 70–80,000 in the Territory, comprising around 80 language groups.4 This northern zone, therefore, represented what Aboriginal people today call Country for roughly half of the tribal configurations in Australia, as well as close to half of the overall Aboriginal population (calculated in the range of 750,000 to 1 million). By the 1920s, due to colonial dispossession, original populations had disastrously plummeted. In Queensland, only 16–17,000 ‘Aborigines and half-castes’ remained; approximately 5,000–6,000 survived in the Kimberley and along the pearling coast, with perhaps another 17,000 in the Territory, northward from Alice Springs. This 40,000 or so represented almost two-thirds of the 60–70,000 Aborigines remaining across Australia at this time.5 Yet it was only, at best, around 10 per cent of the pre-contact population, ravaged by multiple diseases, birth decline, hunger, persistent violence and intense trauma induced by colonisation. In some places, such as the Victoria River and Alligator Rivers districts of the Territory, consecutive attrition rates of up to 95 and 97 per cent have been calculated.6 The outcome was foreseeable, anticipated and even, in certain quarters, encouraged, in light of a dominant ‘logic of elimination’, based on concepts of cultural superiority, scientific inevitability (the ‘doomed race theory’), imperial ‘destiny’ and entitlement, and an unquenchable ‘land-hunger’.7 Thus, by Federation in 1901, around half a million supplanting colonisers, mainly from the British Isles, inhabited North Australia. Some 498,000 of these lived in Queensland, with only approximately 3,000 in the Territory’s north and a mere 1,000–1,500 in the tropical reaches of Western Australia.8 The enforced transformations of colonialism, therefore, had created a near-equivalent demographic substitution, albeit unevenly spread across the region. Non-Aboriginal visitors – Macassan, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese and British, either as regular trading sojourners or temporary, curious arrivals (sometimes called ‘discoverers’) – had contacted Indigenous peoples across 4 R. Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited: Colonial Queensland and the ‘History War’ (Brisbane: Lux Mundi, 2011), pp. 11–15; C. Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son Is Guilty’: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016), pp. 5–6. 5 R. Evans, A History of Queensland (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 170; A. Markus, Governing Savages (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1990), pp. 1, 5–6. 6 D. B. Rose, Dingo Makes Us Human: Life and Land in Australian Aboriginal Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 7–8. 7 P. Wolfe, ‘Settler colonialism and the elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:4 (2006), 402–3. 8 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001 Census of Population and Housing – A Snapshot of Australia, 1901, www.abs.gov.au>websitedbs>D3110124 NSF (accessed 2/01/20).

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Northern Australia since at least the early seventeenth century, frequently bringing conflict and violence. Yet colonial intrusion, leading to permanent replacement and the fixed habitation of incomers, may be measured only from the 1820s. There was an abortive military/convict settlement, Fort Dundas, constructed on Melville Island from 1824, and another, Fort Wellington, at Raffles Bay on the Cobourg Peninsula from 1827. Situated in what is now the Northern Territory, these were the only British Army fortifications to defend against Aboriginal attack ever built in Australia. Their stay was brief, however, as both were abandoned in 1828–9 after considerable frontier struggles with the Tiwi, Munupula and Iwaidja peoples, who eventually drove the strangers out.9 Thus, the brutal secondary punishment centre for re-sentenced convicts established at Moreton Bay from 1824 was the first permanent settlement in the north – the site of the capital city, Brisbane. Queensland became a separate colony from New South Wales in 1859, and frontier relations correspondingly hardened. Thus, Northern Australia, in both the tropics and subtropics, began its European trajectory with convicts and soldiers, a recipe in itself for considerable difficulties. Yet the violence expanded significantly with the beginnings of a rapidly moving pastoral frontier in Queensland’s southeast region from 1840. Absorbing enormous tracts of Aboriginal land, pastoralism and its products (wool, meat, hides and tallow) became the mainstay of the economy until the 1960s. Sheep and cattle stations, many as large as entire British counties, sprawled across occupied Aboriginal Country. By 1860 in Queensland, they had spread north of the Tropic of Capricorn; and two decades later had alienated prime lands to the far reaches of a colony more than half the size of present-day Europe. The voracious advance did not stop at the western colonial border but spread into the Territory along the Roper River ‘Coast track’ – also known as ‘the Queensland road’ – as well as a second stock route running east/west from the Nicholson River, known as ‘Hedley’s track’, both following well-marked Aboriginal pathways.10 Therefore, although the Northern Territory came politically under South Australian control from 1863, the principal source of its actual colonial expansion was the Queensland Gulf Country. Cattle-men from across northern and western Queensland conducted the largest and longest animal drives 9 J. Connor, The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1834 (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002), pp. 68–75. 10 T. Roberts, Frontier Justice: A History of the Gulf Country to 1900 (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2005), pp. 8, 43.

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in Australian history, passing into the Territory by the 1870s and westward into the Kimberley by the 1880s. Indeed, by 1885, pastoral stations were stocked over the entire breadth of Northern Australia with huge numbers of cattle, sheep and horses, almost entirely from the eastern colonies. Fourteen stations alone in the Territory covered some 230,000 sq. km.11 Other economic ventures, principally gold-mining but also maritime, agricultural and urban/commercial enterprises, contributed to this rapid territorial seizure. Gold rushes expanded from southern Queensland into northern Cape York from the 1850s, culminating in the Palmer River rush from 1873, drawing in immense numbers of European and Chinese prospectors. The Pine River goldrush in the Territory, beginning in 1872, was intense but less well sustained; and, in the Kimberley, Hall’s Creek from 1885 drew in many thousands. Unlike the steady pastoral takeover, mineral rushes were demographically intrusive, though intermittent and comparatively temporary in nature. Pastoralism and mineral rushes were both highly destructive of Aboriginal societies and their biospheres. Gold extraction introduced unsustainably large and feverishly intent populations, albeit fleetingly; while pastoralism contributed its vast herds of environmentally devastating, hard-hooved herbivores across much larger areas. Similarly, maritime enterprises around Cape York and the Western Australian pearling coast, from Shark Bay to Kuri Bay, were harsh and rapacious. In the West, the largest pearling grounds in the world incorporated bonded Aboriginal workers, secured with rifles, shackles and stock-whips, whose survival became conditional on their lucrative enslavement. Beginning with the so-called ‘Battle of Roebuck Bay’ near Broome in 1864 – actually a major massacre – pearling ‘was to prove one of the most brutal and bloody businesses in Australian history’, concludes historian John Bailey.12 So the intrusion was multi-pronged and swept along by two interactive vectors. The first was a political power, residing in the hands of the most successful land-takers, dominating colonial legislatures (labelled ‘the squattocracy’ but including mine-owners, pearlers and planters) for whom land acquisition and primitive profit extraction were always uppermost. Their material fixation, described in such terms as ‘land hunger’ or ‘grazing mania’, brooked no recognition of a prior political sovereignty or traditional land-holding – and thus eschewed formal negotiation, treaties and compensation. The pressures 11 Ibid., pp. 1, 97. 12 J. Bailey, The White Divers of Broome: The True Story of a Fatal Experiment (Sydney: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 17–22.

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applied throughout the economic system, from top to bottom. Pastoralists often borrowed large sums to purchase their stock, and could not afford to risk failure in protecting their assets. The banks from which they borrowed had made huge investments in the profitable occupation of Aboriginal land, and could use their considerable political influence to safeguard those investments. Aboriginal people and their land rights fell far outside that purview. This politico-economic thrust, always preferring profitability over humanitarian concerns, was fortified by a second vector of expanding racial theories, supplied by western science, positing, in increasingly popularised forms, that the displaced peoples were one of the most reduced and flawed examples of global humanity, or perhaps not really human at all. Such hierarchical beliefs, burgeoning worldwide by the later nineteenth century, targeted Australian Aborigines most exactingly. On the North Australian frontier, they promoted widespread prejudices and violent behaviours, contributing to genocidal outcomes. Thus, intensifying racist ideology and lethal northern expansion went hand in hand. Under the headline, ‘Killing no murder’, a correspondent from a pastoral station, Peak Downs, in the central Queensland district of Rockhampton, wrote to the Brisbane Courier newspaper in late 1861: It is the duty of government . . . to abolish the absurd and false law which makes it murder to kill a wild beast . . . [W]e are at war with the blacks, and all means of killing them are lawful. We wish to effect a conquest . . . it is the law of nature . . . all traces of an hostile, barbarous and useless set of beings must be swept away by a torrent of Christian civilisation.13

Such assertions grew commonplace, rarely attracting reproof. A decade later, the Maryborough Chronicle, emanating from coastal Queensland, maintained in successive annual pronouncements that Aborigines were a ‘different species’ to whites: ‘mere vermin differing from other wild animals that infest the country only in their greater capacity for inflicting injury . . . and consequently [are] to be shot and hunted down without scruple and in all places, and on all occasions in which their presence proves destructive to the progress of settlement’.14 Such cultural incitement provided complicity for massacres and other conscience-less acts throughout the region and timeframe. Colonists spoke of slaughtering Aborigines with the same equanimity displayed in hunting wild game. Killing Aborigines was compared to killing crows, rabbits or wild dogs. As a later New South Wales attorney general, 13 Brisbane Courier, 19 November 1861. 14 Maryborough Chronicle, 15 December 1870 and 6 December 1871.

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Charles Heydon, a witness to frontier violence in North Queensland, averred: ‘Private persons go out to kill blacks and call it “snipe-shooting”. Awkward words are always avoided you will notice.’15 Official and communal euphemism, along with outright denial within the historical record, often hampers a clearer understanding of the degree of frontier violence that occurred. Sometimes known as a ‘conspiracy’ or ‘freemasonry of silence’, and even ‘the bushman’s code of honour [sic]’, this tendency for the expiation of atrocity was continually apparent across Northern Australia. The general rule was ‘either stand in with the mob’ in manning reprisal parties ‘and keep your mouth shut or refuse to stand in and also keep your mouth shut’.16 Anyone threatening to break ranks by making damning disclosures ‘was soon persuaded to keep quiet if he wanted to live’. It was thus difficult, if not impossible, to mount successful legal prosecutions, even against those who behaved habitually as serial or mass murderers on these distant frontiers. As West Australian historian Tom Austen explains: ‘It was hard to acquire direct evidence. Offending squatters were adept at covering their tracks and little was committed to station day books or any kind of records.’17 Usually, however, no official interference was contemplated. Most court cases actually mounted tended to collapse under the weight of social boycott, lack of co-operation or unavailability of willing witnesses. Throughout this ‘farce of legality’, there is not a single case across Northern Australia of any colonist receiving the prescribed death penalty (or virtually any other penalty) for the frontier killing of Aboriginal peoples, either singly or in groups.18 From the distant imperial metropolis, Whitehall contributed its ineffectuality. Writing specifically in relation to Queensland frontier atrocities, a Colonial Office official admitted in 1866: ‘the Home Government can but hold up its hands. There is no effectual power to interfere in their case.’19 British historian Alison Palmer concludes: ‘the lack of importance placed upon the well-being and even survival of Aborigines is evident in the failure 15 Sydney Morning Herald, 15 January 1874. 16 T. Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013); Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 56, 138. 17 T. Austen, A Cry in the Wind: Conflict in Western Australia 1829–1929 (Darlington Publishing Group, 1998), p. 108. 18 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, p. 60; R. Evans, ‘The country has another past: Queensland and the History Wars’ in Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, ed. F. Peter-Little, A. Curthoys and J. Docker (Canberra: Australian National University ePress, 2010), 23. 19 F. Rogers, Colonial Office Minute, 29 January 1866, Public Records Office (UK), CO 234/13, 57283.

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of the Colonial Office to effectively follow through [on] any . . . protests’.20 Its permanent undersecretary of state, Sir Robert Herbert, had been Queensland’s first premier. He breezily concluded in 1876 and 1880, ‘I fear it is not possible that the Aborigines can be saved from extinction or even much ameliorated.’ Collisions were ‘inevitable’ and would eventually obliterate ‘this interesting but hopeless race. Nothing more can be done.’21 In this manner, fates of entire peoples were sealed in the highest official sanctums. Despite such prescriptions, there nevertheless exists a steady, shallow stream of eyewitness narrations, whistleblower charges, press columns from crusading journalists, and even the confessions of perpetrators, seeking absolution in later life. Sparse, though searing, testimony from Aboriginal survivors rounds out a picture of narrative consistency, each account bearing testament to the single-minded exterminatory thrust of much of the violence. From the 1820s, there were clear admissions that the aim was to ‘extermininate’ – even suggestions that Aboriginal women, as ‘breeders’, should be specifically targeted.22 From South-East Queensland in the early nineteenth century to the West Kimberley in the early twentieth, there is verisimilitude throughout this tranche of evidence – uncollaborated testimonies painting a single corroborative image of merciless assault. Several examples must suffice here – small snapshots of a gruesome, ongoing cavalcade. A Bigumbal man remonstrates with a squatter on the Condamine in 1847: ‘Which way you [go] . . . supposing this way you shoot ’em, supposing that way you shoot ’em; all around shoot ’em!’23 A British immigration advocate, Ebenezer Thorne, delivers a lengthy disclosure on how often local squatters he knew in southern Queensland ‘joyed at’ surrounding Aboriginal camps at night, and ‘exterminating all the tribe . . . at a blow’: ‘Others . . . looked to poison as a better plan for clearing the country . . . I once travelled through a beautiful plain, on one side of which lay the whitening bones of a whole tribe who had thus been disposed of with the exception of one lad . . . One could fill pages with pleasant stories of this sort.’24 Already, by 1857, ‘whole tribes had been rubbed out’ in the north, writes the world traveller William Stamer: ‘No device by which a race could be exterminated had been left untried. They had been hunted and shot down 20 A. Palmer, Colonial Genocide (Adelaide: Crawford House Publishing, 2000), p. 201. 21 J. Herbert, Colonial Office Minutes, 30 August 1876 and 14 February 1880, Public Records Office (UK), CO 234/36, 59128, and CO 573/80. 22 J. Kociumbas, ‘Genocide and modernity in colonial Australia, 1788–1850’ in Genocide and Settler Society, ed. Dirk Moses, 97. 23 Evans, History of Queensland, p. 73. 24 E. Thorne, ‘A white Australia – the other side’, United Australia 2:4 (1901), 11.

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Figure 21.1 Depiction of a Native Police ‘dispersal’ of the Guwa (Koa) people at Skull Hole on Bladensburg pastoral station, near Winton, central Queensland, in 1877. (C. Lumholtz, Among Cannibals: An Account of Four Years’ Travels in Australia and of Camp Life with the Aborigines in Queensland (London: John Murray, 1889, p. 375))

like wild beasts – treacherously murdered while sleeping . . . and poisoned wholesale.’25 Special correspondent to the Melbourne Argus, Frederick Sinnett, reporting from the mining fields of Canoona, inland from Gladstone (in later Queensland), witnesses continual ‘shooting excursions’, reporting on a border ‘war to the knife’ being as savagely waged across ‘the Fitzroy, the Dawson and the adjacent districts . . . as any war . . . in any part of Australia’.26 Though racial conflict had been severe farther south, Maranoa pastoralist Gideon Lang lectured in 1865, the killing in Queensland had become 25 W. Stamer, Recollections. A Life of Adventure (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866), pp. 98–9. 26 F. Sinnett, The Rush to Port Curtis (Geelong, Victoria: Ray and Richter, 1859), pp. 45–6, 50–1, 69–72.

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‘wholesale and indiscriminate . . . carried on with a coldblooded cruelty . . . quite unparalleled’. Aborigines were being ‘crush[ed] . . . out like so many ants’.27 For ‘this is what we Queenslanders do’, crusading Danish journalist Carl Feilberg noted from Cooktown in 1880: ‘we alone have descended to the kinchin lay [child abuse] of extermination’.28 ‘We were not backward in doing what we were ordered to do’, confessed the mayor of Bowen, Korah Wills, regarding ‘dispersal’ (i.e. massacre) activity in which he engaged: ‘In my time they were dispersed . . . very much on the quiet . . . by hundreds if not by thousands’.29 Thus, frontier expansion brought a steady escalation of excess as it spread northward and westward. Though the Territory was administered from Adelaide and the Kimberley from Perth, these distant centres, much like Brisbane in southeastern Queensland, exercised little more than nominal administrative control over far-off scenes of mayhem, rapine, and annihilation. Queensland, with its reputation for brazen overkill, was the fount of this development. Intrepid pastoralists and their workforces, white and Aboriginal, along with waves of mining prospectors, bent on rapid acquisition, flooded across the Territory and into the farthest reaches of Western Australia as ‘t’othersiders’, largely from Queensland, perpetuating its processes – the extreme beliefs and attitudes, the well-honed tactics and the baleful outcomes. From the late 1870s, the Coast Track from Burketown to Katherine was ‘possibly the most violent and dangerous place in Australia’.30 As Aboriginal people saw it: ‘Europeans preferred to shoot rather than converse . . . and . . . held the lives of human beings to be of less value than those of cattle’. Anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose comments: ‘[T]his is not the stuff of proud legends.’31 Witness accounts in these regions, some from perpetrators themselves, frankly reveal serial genocidal episodes. The cattle-herding ‘overlanders’, testified the government resident, Judge Charles Dashwood, in 1899, ‘shot the blacks down like crows all along the [stock] route, right and left’, from Turn Off Lagoon to Victoria Downs.32 Summarising the general zeitgeist, the Northern Territory Times editorialised in 1875: 27 P. Collins, Goodbye Bussamarai: The Mandandanji Land-War, Southern Queensland (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2002), pp. 150–4. 28 Cooktown Courier, 10 January 1877; Queenslander, 3 July 1880. 29 K. Wills, ‘Reminiscence’, Brandon Papers, 1895, Oxley Memorial Library, OM75/75/3, 106–7. 30 Roberts, Frontier Justice, p. 42. 31 Rose, Dingo, p. 2. 32 Roberts, Frontier Justice, p. 64.

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The only things that have proved of any value in bringing the niggers to their senses have been dogs and revolvers . . . The Queenslanders . . . have dearly bought their experience and it would be unwise for us not to profit by it. We are invading their country . . . and . . . must go into actual warfare with them. Shoot those you cannot get at and hang those that you do catch to the nearest tree.33

‘The business of establishing a cattle empire depended on killing’, concluded journalist Ernestine Hill almost a century later.34 The first strategy was to kill ruthlessly, and the second was to incorporate surviving small remnants forcibly into station workforces. Aboriginal survivors remembered: White people hunt us . . . shootem people like kangaroo, like bird. Oh, terrible days we used to had. (Barnabas Gabarla Roberts) Women bin run away: they round ’em up, shoot ’em . . . [Babies and children] Gottem stick, knock ’em in the head or neck . . . like a goanna. Hittem longa tree . . . Bash ’em longa stone . . . You know too small to shoot ’em, too small. (Sandy Membooky) Oh they bin like to kill ’em, finish ’em up tribe. Take all their country. (Chicken Gonagun)35

Similar reportage emerged from the Kimberley, where violence peaked in the 1890s. Western Australian Undersecretary Octavius Burt observed in 1895: ‘There can be no doubt . . . that a war of extermination is being waged on these unfortunate blacks . . . How often do we read that the police “fell in” or “came up” with a party of natives and then there follows a record of the slain or a statement that “they were taught a severe lesson”.’36 A former police officer publicly admitted in July 1901 that Aborigines ‘have in places been shot by scores, put in heaps and burnt, both men and women’.37 In poignant corroboration, an Aboriginal informant, Dolly Watby, recalled of one large-scale poisoning and police massacre on Bedford Downs station, some two decades later: ‘They loadem big pile . . . and chuckem allawood. Chuckem, chuckem, chuckem kerosene. Dey bin light that big fire. Terrible.’38 This pre-emptive ethnic clearing of Country for undisturbed cattle ranching was also averred by Mary Durack of Argyle station, commenting on the general belief, emanating from Queensland, 33 34 35 37 38

Northern Territory Times, 27 November 1875, quoted in ibid., p. 120. E. Hill, The Territory (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1954), p. 175. Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 160–8. 36 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, p. 359. ‘The Nor’ West Blacks’, Kalgoorlie Miner, 31 July 1901, quoted in ibid., p. 391. Owen, Every Mother’s Son, p. 440.

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that land would be secure ‘for whites only when the last of the blacks had been killed out – by bullet or by bait’.39 Given such revelations from the frontlines of struggle, it is arresting that Australian academic writing took so long to confront the issue. Nineteenthcentury frontier accounts, in private and official records as well as in memoirs and biographies, are far more candid and numerous than later historical analyses would become. Here, patriotic promotion of the ‘good nation’ accompanying Federation from 1901 drew down its curtain of denial upon uncomfortable disclosures.40 The most influential texts barely mentioned Aboriginal people, let alone frontier conflict. Thus, an original frontier ‘freemasonry of silence’ had become a larger, consensual ‘Great Australian Silence’, blanketing much of the historical terrain. The most utilised post-war textbook, Gordon Greenwood’s edited volume Australia: A Social and Political History (1955), did not include Aborigines in its index. Its successor, Frank Crowley’s anthology A New History of Australia (1974), was almost as dismissive. The editor even claimed that ‘the Aborigines were insignificant . . . Our message is that Aborigines just were not important in the early history of white settlement.’41 Northern Australia as a region was almost as widely ignored in these accounts as were the Aboriginal peoples themselves. So, the earlier historiography is problematic. From the mid-1960s, however, the white blindfold was beginning to slip – almost imperceptibly at first, with unpublished theses on the frontier, and then, during the 1970s, articles, documentary collections and full-scale histories, displaying the intensity of the dispossession. A series of confronting studies now gave the lie to the prevailing ‘quiet continent’ thesis. Significantly, much of this early work concentrated itself upon Northern Australia – particularly Queensland. Yet there were only rare mentions of colonial ‘genocide’ per se, even though much attention was directed at massacre and warfare scenarios.42 The interpretive direction changed when the neo-liberal 1980s introduced a spate of reactive studies, emphasising consensual relations of ‘accommodation’, leading eventually to the recriminatory ‘History Wars’ of the late 1990s 39 M. Durack, Kings in Grass Castles (London: Constable and Co., 1959), p. 137. 40 J. Rutherford, The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (Melbourne University Press, 2000), pp. 7–10. 41 G. Greenwood, ed., Australia: A Social and Political History (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1955); F. Crowley, ed., A New History of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974), and interview, 27 June 1975, quoted in R. Pascoe, The Manufacture of Australian History (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 107. 42 R. Evans, K. Saunders and K. Cronin, Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination: Race Relations in Colonial Queensland (Brookvale: Australia and New Zealand Book Co., 1975), p. 65.

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and early 2000s, in which historians of the conflict were pilloried as fabricators during a renewed surge of ebullient and cavilling white nationalism. Nevertheless, through all the smoke of this eruptive ‘warfare’, genocide research was also tentatively emerging in a time hardly conducive to its widespread acceptance. Beginning with Tony Barta’s influential ‘Relations of genocide’ chapter in 1987, a range of works now began to appear.43 Yet, significantly, parallel frontier studies on Northern Australia continued, for the most part, to eschew specific examination of genocide, and to avoid the terminology, even though such works are replete with clinching, detailed evidence of genocidal process. An interesting case in point is Timothy Bottoms’ recent Conspiracy of Silence: Queensland’s Frontier Killing Times (2013). It too was published without overt reference to genocide. Yet this was not the author’s original intent. His initial introduction, establishing the concept’s applicability, was excised when his ‘publishers felt that discussing genocide would turn off potential readers’. Thus, in effect, Conspiracy of Silence succumbed to a further conspiracy in order to mount a publication hurdle. In a subsequent online addenda, ‘Genocide in Colonial Queensland, Australia’, Bottoms ably demonstrates how eight specific stages of the genocidal process (as described by Gregory Stanton) – ‘classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, identification/preparation, extermination and denial’ – are applicable across the almost 200 massacres of Aboriginal peoples that his volume encompasses.44 The identification and responsibility of violent frontier perpetrators is complicated. Colonists engaging in this communal violence cover all class sectors of the invasive society. ‘It is probable’, Queensland historian Kay Saunders notes, ‘that all categories of servants worked in conjunction with the proprietors to exterminate [Aborigines].’45 Furthermore, most colonists collaboratively protected the active killers and were thus complicit. Most importantly, manifest private assaults were augmented – and probably outpaced – by official campaigns of elimination. Thus the State, itself deeply 43 T. Barta, ‘Relations of genocide: land and lives in the colonization of Australia’ in Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, ed. M. Dobkowski and I. Wallimann (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1987), 237–52. 44 T. Bottoms, ‘Genocide in colonial Queensland, Australia’, Honest History (26 May 2017), honesthistory.net.au (accessed 10 Janaury 2020); Bottoms, Conspiracy, pp. xii–xv; Gregory Stanton, ‘The eight stages of genocide’, http://genocidewatch.net/2013/03/ 14/the-8-stages-of-genocide. 45 K. Saunders, quoted in G. Horne, The White Pacific: US Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas after the Civil War (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), p. 17.

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involved in violence, only very rarely implicated private perpetrators, while the society in general did not implicate anyone non-Aboriginal, either communally or officially. State aggression was particularly marked in Queensland, where a Native Police force, introduced first by the New South Wales government from 1848, remained in official service into the early twentieth century. This involved armed squads of Aboriginal troopers, normally recruited from distant tribal regions and placed under the quasi-military control of white officers. Operating as a mounted infantry, it functioned as a frontier force of single-minded destructiveness, becoming more extreme in effect after Queensland’s Separation from New South Wales. Institutionally, it was at its most widespread and virulent from the late 1860s into the mid 1880s – ‘a violent and terrifying Imperial tool’.46 Almost 200 Native Police camps, each operational for from several months to two decades, have recently been archaeologically identified. An average tenure was around seven years, during which monthly patrols were conducted. They targeted Aboriginal groups, who were ‘dispersed’ using the formidable technology of Terry breech-loaders and Snider Enfield rifles. From the 1880s, the more accurate Martini Henry and Winchester rifles were adopted. Across more than half a century, therefore, this state organisation conducted an illegal terror warfare against people officially designated as ‘British subjects’, yet treated as enemy insurgents, resisting colonial invasion.47 The process, in short, represented, as Grewcock argues, ‘a continuum of criminogenic, arguably genocidal state practices . . . an egregious form of state criminality’.48 In the Territory too, the Top End and Central Australian Native Police forces operated from 1885 to 1900, succeeding a prior body run by the South Australian government from 1852 to 1857. Their ruthlessness has become legendary, especially under the control of Constable William Willshire, who boastingly wrote in 1895: ‘It’s no use mincing matters – the Martini Henry carbines . . . were talking English in the silent majesty of those great eternal rocks.’49 In 1891, Willshire’s relentless dispersal activities, using Aboriginal 46 J. Lydon, ‘The bloody skirt of settlement: Arthur Vogan and anti-slavery in 1890’s Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 45:1 (2014), 46–70. 47 R. Evans and R. Ørsted-Jensen, ‘Pale death around our footprints springs: assessing violent mortality on the Queensland frontier from state and private exterminatory practices’ in Civilian Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous People in Settler Societies, ed. M. Adikhari (University of Cape Town Press, 2019), 139–64. 48 Grewcock, ‘Settler-colonial violence’, 222, 245. 49 W. Willshire, The Land of the Dawning (Adelaide: W. K. Thomas Co., 1896), pp. 40–1.

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troopers recruited from Alice Springs, Charlotte Waters and Oodnadatta, culminated in his arrest for murder after an attack on sleeping Aboriginal workers on Tempe Downs station. Some 200 leading colonists raised his bail, while former South Australian Premier and Attorney General Sir John Downer – one of the ‘Fathers’ of Australian Federation – conducted his defence, leading to his acquittal in a one-sided trial. Willshire was subsequently transferred farther north by Downer to the Victoria River district, ‘with no supervision but an endless supply of ammunition’ to continue his career in the slaughter and rape of ‘an unknown number of Aboriginals’ between 1893 and 1895.50 Subsequently, as both Queensland and the Territory were phasing out these necrotic forces, an Anglo-Australian consortium, the Eastern and African Cold Storage Company, with South Australian ex-Premier Sir John Cockburn as one of its directors, was, from 1905, employing its own private ‘army’ of Aboriginal and other vigilantes, armed with Winchesters, ‘to shoot Aboriginals on sight’. This company managed the massive Arafura station, incorporating five extensive former holdings and covering the entire eastern half of Arnhem Land, until 1908. Missionary Rex Joynt described how ‘the natives . . . referred to as “black animals” and terms even worse . . . were shot down like game and hundreds killed’.51 In tropical Western Australia, despite urgent calls from pastoralists to institute a Queensland-style system, the pressure was officially resisted. To what effect is unclear. For, as historian Chris Owen shows, white police patrols were invariably augmented by two or three armed ‘Native Assistants’, often recruited from Queensland. These doubled the number of available police. Frequently sent out unsupervised on armed patrols, they were responsible for a great deal of the shooting. Furthermore, this system survived into the 1940s, decades after the process had been abandoned elsewhere. As Owen observes: ‘we see similarities with the Queensland model . . . especially when large scale shootings occurred and no prisoners were taken . . . Police could effectively “use” them to do their “dirty work” and not be held responsible.’52 Thus, deracinated Aboriginal troopers and Native Assistants – often ‘boys from Queensland’ – were immediate, fatal perpetrators.53 Their white officers, 50 T. Roberts, ‘The brutal truth: what happened in the Gulf Country’, The Monthly (November 2009), www.themonthly.com.au (accessed 8 January 2020). 51 T. Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 153–4; J. Harris, One Blood (Sutherland: Albatross Books, 1990), pp. 700–1. 52 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, pp. 170, 425. 53 Judge Charles Dashwood, Minutes of Evidence 1899, quoted in Roberts, Frontier Justice, p. 135.

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directing operations and often joining in the massacres or individual shootings, were arguably even more culpable – as were the state bureaucracies and the colonial and post-colonial legislatures that directed and condoned the official ‘clearances’. Privately, those over-landing cattle and sheep, acting usually at the behest of their employers, as well as the eager gold-seekers, often became serial perpetrators, increasingly skilled through tradition and practice in the arts of massacre. They, too, were often joined by their employers in united perpetration – and, in crisis times of reprisal, banded together with orthodox forces in a concentrated official/vigilante occlusion. The employers – pastoral landholders in the main – usually held the political reins back in the towns, and were the beneficiaries of the forceful land-taking. By the time of Federation in 1901, in one of the largest and least restrained land-grabs in global colonial history, around 1,500 immigrant families from Queensland to the Kimberley, among a North Australian incomer population of roughly half a million, had succeeded to the traditional Country of almost 400,000 First Nation people, extinguishing their rights, looting their lands, erasing and socially dismembering them without recognition or recompense. Between 1835 and 1849, a mere 1,019 squatters had seized 17.7 million hectares of territory, from Port Phillip in the south to central Queensland – the stolen homelands of hundreds of thousands of Aboriginal people.54 By 1857, some 450 pastoralists in the Queensland zone alone held an area larger than the colony of Victoria. By Federation, around 1,000 families had secured squatting leases across a Queensland territory close to two-thirds the size of Europe.55 Moving into the Territory, fourteen immense cattle stations commandeered all of the landmass from Camooweal to Katherine by 1885, with Victoria River Downs being the largest cattle station in the world.56 Simultaneously, in the Kimberley, some forty extensive leases initially covered 208,000 sq. km of former Aboriginal Country, half of which was controlled by an absentee cartel of half a dozen wealthy investors in Perth, wielding considerable political power.57 This was dispossession at its most intense, implicating this tiny, powerful elite as the core source of violent penetration. For this ruling sector controlled all the essential historical levers, holding not only the majority of the alienated lands, but also guiding the policy decisions defining the contours of 54 J. Boyce, 1835: The Founding of Melbourne and the Conquest of Australia (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2011), pp. 202–4. 55 Moreton Bay Courier, 12 September 1857; Evans, History of Queensland, p. 64. 56 Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. xvii, 97; Rose, Dingo, p. 1. 57 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, p. 96.

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frontier practice – establishing and maintaining official eliminatory forces, while turning a blind eye to manifold private killings, whether singularly or en masse. As Rose summarises, ‘Power and terror were key values . . . in . . . forcibly wresting control of the land from the people who already lived there . . . This . . . undeclared war of conquest was based on a single intent: winning’.58 Armed, militant resistance to colonisation by First Nation peoples was maintained throughout with a consistency of determination, from the earliest clashes on Melville Island in the mid-1820s in the far north and on Stradbroke and Moreton Islands, off southern coastal Queensland, in the early 1830s. Resistance across Aboriginal territories in the Queensland zone was persistent and at times monumental, as in the so-called ‘Black War’ period there, emanating from the Bunya region of Baroon, Bribie Island and the Darling Downs across the southeast and west, from 1843 to 1855; the campaigns of the Badjala, Dulingbara and Ngulungbara, out of Fraser Island, in the Wide Bay and Burnett districts, from the 1840s to the 1860s; the guerrilla forays against the gold-mining rush at the Palmer River in Cape York, 1873–8; and the frontier campaigns of the Waanji, Garawa and Kalkadoon in the Gulf of Carpentaria region during the later 1870s into the 1880s – among many others. As historian Ray Kerkhove reveals, this form of frontier resistance was often prosecuted ‘by inter-tribal gatherings and sophisticated signalling, relying heavily on economic sabotage and guided by [wily] . . . lonerleaders’. He notes such strategic and tactical innovations as ‘a move away from pitched battles to ambush affrays, the development of full-time “guerilla bands” and use of new materials such as iron and glass’.59 This warfare was temporarily successful in denuding flocks and herds of thousands of stock, in forcing the rapid abandonment of farms and pastoral stations, and even in placing small townships under threat of abandonment. The extent and longevity of such obstruction relied heavily upon the suitability of terrain for resistance efforts – such as island refuges, difficult mountainous fastnesses with labyrinthine gorges, as well as near impenetrable rainforests. In more open areas of flat, rolling plain-lands or semi-desert reaches, there was far less chance of Indigenous military success. The mounted mobility of the incomers, and especially the Native Police, skilled 58 Rose, Dingo, p. 1. 59 R. Kerkhove, ‘A different mode of war? Aboriginal “guerilla tactics” in defining the “Black War” of south-eastern Queensland 1843–1855’, 2014, www.academia.edu (accessed 20 January 2020).

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in bushcraft, armed with devastating weaponry and aided by inland railways and coastal steamer services, inevitably swung the struggle in the direction of the invaders, no matter how valiantly local peoples managed for a time to resist. Whereas, in Queensland, some 1,500 of the invaders were killed and probably at least as many wounded, in the Territory’s more open regions, it was a different story. Roberts shows that less than a score of the overlanders, at most, perished from frontier violence. Similarly, in the Kimberley, though there were considerable stock losses, no more than a dozen or so incomers ever succumbed.60 Across the Northern region, therefore, Aboriginal peoples were rarely non-resistant victims or unresponsive targets of one-sided genocidal assaults. It is more accurate to view the conflict in terms of increasingly asymmetrical warfare, where Aboriginal defenders, either gradually or rapidly, lost the upper hand. It may therefore be argued that Indigenocide incorporates a sense of genocidal warfare, and indeed it was sometimes termed by contemporaries a ‘war of extermination’. People fighting gamely on with barbed spears, firesticks and clubs were ultimately no match for mounted adversaries, wielding repeating rifles, used elsewhere for big game hunting.61 Thus, a graph of Aboriginal resistance activity would be paralleled by an upwardly trending line of Aboriginal massacres. Frontier obstruction, economic injury and lethal strikes against white personnel, especially leading pastoralists or white family groups, fuelled white rage, eliciting grossly disproportionate responses. As the Port Denison Times, published in Bowen in tropical Queensland, suggested in 1867, whenever a European life was lost in the struggle, ‘we take say fifty?’ Due to the dangers posed, the government should see it as their official ‘duty . . . to exterminate all the black race’.62 Against the 1,500 coloniser mortalities, it has recently been conservatively estimated, using reported conflict cases as a viable sample, that around 65,000 Queensland Aborigines perished in the fighting between the 1820s and 1890s.63 The average number killed in a Native Police ‘dispersal’ was 12, and, in a private settler assault, around 8. This can be cautiously assessed from compilation of recorded violent frontier incidents where kill-totals are provided – albeit by the perpetrators themselves. As a recent statistical projection of this database has suggested, there were at least 6,000 occasions in 60 Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History, pp. 198–251; Roberts, Frontier Justice, p. 65; C. Owen, pers. comm., 15 January 2020. 61 Evans et al., Exclusion, pp. 25, 62–3, 78–80; Evans, History of Queensland, pp. 93–7, 135–8. 62 Port Denison Times, 11 September 1866, 2 March 1867. 63 Evans et al., ‘Pale death’, 161–2.

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Queensland, from the 1830s to the 1890s, where more Aborigines were killed in a single violent incident than the designated six casualties presently required academically to indicate a ‘massacre’. The figures suggest a ratio of Aboriginal to settler violent deaths of 44:1 – very close to the ratio of ‘at least fifty’ to one reported by future Southern Aboriginal Protector Archibald Meston in 1889, after interviewing elders of over 60 tribal groups.64 Similarly, along the Territory’s cattle routes, Roberts finds that up to 800 Aboriginal people, out of 2,500 or so, may have been killed in 55–60 known massacres and lesser assaults.65 This again provides a comparable ratio of 40:1 for Aboriginal and white deaths. In the Kimberley, with only a dozen or so European deaths against perhaps as many as 1,000 Indigenes killed, the ratio soars towards 80:1.66 Defensive resistance in the face of invasive assault comprises an interactive matrix, or a kind of death-dance, with the latter always trumping the former. Aboriginal resistance campaigns, including the epic stand of Jandamarra and his Bunuba followers, using the invaders’ own weaponry against them in the south Kimberley region from 1894 to 1897, enjoyed temporary success. Yet they eventually succumbed to a tsunami of white land-takers, along with their European and Aboriginal workforces and their rifles, side-arms, horses, and poison. Jandamarra, believed for a time to be immortal, was killed by a Native Assistant; then his head was removed and displayed by a British firearms firm in advertisement of their product.67 Although providing pause to an inexorable colonial advance, resistance could never ultimately succeed. It did not stop Aboriginal Country being seized without compensation. First Nation sovereignties failed to gain even a foothold in the newly imposed polity. The popular white consensus that Aboriginal people were the most degraded ‘human-like’ beings on the planet was not softened by evidence of their military prowess. And the resolve of the combatants in campaigns of spirited defence, rather than saving Aboriginal lives, probably increased the colonists’ appetite for revenge against what they alleged were ‘bloodthirsty savages’.68 Apart from limited numbers of courageous white whistleblowers, usually acting alone in the face of hostile public opinion, there was no movement against this ongoing spate of frontier devastations, well into the twentieth 64 Ibid., 145, 161–2. 65 Roberts, Frontier Justice, pp. 139–42. 66 C. Owen, pers. comm., 15 January 2020. 67 H. Pederson and B. Woorunmurra, Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance (Broome: Magabala Books, 1995); Owen, Every Mother’s Son, pp. 275–7. 68 Evans et al., Exclusion, pp. 70–4.

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century. Isolated, conscience-stricken settlers, crusading newspaper editors and journalists, as well as certain humanitarian religious figures, often unsupported by their churches, at times spoke out – invariably to their detriment. To all intents, colonial Australia collaborated in silence, denial or tacit approval with frontier extermination, often reacting in fury to any hint of a moral ‘whispering in our hearts’.69 Carl Feilberg’s 1880 campaign of frontier exposé in the Queenslander gave rise to ‘one of the most influential tracts in Australian history’, The Way We Civilize, helping to quash the colony’s bid to annex New Guinea in 1883. Yet, as his biographer, Robert Ørsted-Jensen, shows, he became one of the ‘more bitterly hated’ men in Queensland, forced out of employment to become a virtual political exile in Melbourne, leading to illness and an early death. His prodigious journalistic output was soon forgotten and his name ‘obliterated from public and historical memory’.70 Another soon-forgotten man was the British-born New Zealand journalist Arthur Vogan, who, a decade later, produced the sensational, novelistic account The Black Police (1890), based on his personal observations of the Queensland frontier from the western Channel Country to the Far North. He detailed Native Police massacres and the flogging of Aboriginal workers, coupled with his shocked reactions to the relish with which colonists, male and female, applauded punitive expeditions. Though his book became the first Australian publication to reach three editions, it was attacked by reviewers as overdrawn, even though subsequent historical research reveals a zeitgeist equal to his assertions. He was boycotted in most media circles, leaving the eastern colonies to live in Western Australia. His book was ‘considered so anti-Australian . . . that . . . I lost my position on the Australian press and had to give up writing altogether for some years’.71 Vogan positioned himself as part of a ‘little circle of men who have taken up the cause of the unfortunate natives’, but that circle was vulnerable indeed. In an Australian immigrant population approaching 4 million by Federation, they were an ineffectual handful of aggrieved voices, never capable of forming a coherent agitation for reform or practical humanitarian restraint. The opposition from what may be termed a ‘genocidal culture’ was overwhelming. As Cooktown’s police inspector averred in 1885 of the North 69 H. Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 70 R. Ørsted-Jensen, ‘Carl Adolph Feilberg’, The Australian Media Hall of Fame, hallof fame.melbournepressclub.com (accessed 10 January 2020). 71 Lydon, ‘Bloody skirt’, 47, 53; R. Evans, Fighting Words: Writing about Race (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1999), pp. 181–2.

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Queenslanders he had met: ‘humanity is unrecognized – their creed[:] extermination of the natives’.72 Thus, white protesters had far less impact on frontier actions than Aboriginal resisters did. The Revd John Gribble, the author of another revelatory pamphlet, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land (1886), exposing frontier excesses in the Kimberley, was violently driven from the region with physical threats and assaults, pilloried by the press, attacked by colonial politicians, abandoned by the courts and dismissed as a missionary by his own church. Doctors in Western Australia even refused to attend his dying 3-year-old son.73 The Northern Australian frontier story thus traces an unbroken arc of dispossession, resistance, genocidal outcomes, tiny warning cries and stout denials across at least a century of destruction and re-constitution. The last recorded massacre in Queensland was on Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 1918, where around 10 per cent of the small Kaiadilt population succumbed in a raping and killing spree by a party of whites, attempting to take possession.74 In the Kimberley, after a series of recorded massacres at Mistake Creek (1915), Mowla Bluff (1916) and Bedford Downs (1921 and 1924), at Oombulgurri on the Forrest River a series of group killings of Aborigines occurred in 1926 after a station hand who had raped an Aboriginal child was speared. Two police parties, accompanied by Native Assistants, conducted a six-week sortie, armed with Winchesters. A total of 16 deaths were admitted before a subsequent Royal Commission, but the part-owner of Nulla Nulla station, where the spearing had occurred, later admitted that up to 300 people may have been shot.75 Similarly, at Coniston in Central Australia (in the Territory) in 1928, a combined police and settler punitive party, across eight weeks, tracked and killed members of the Warlpiri, Anmatyerre and Kaytetye in reprisal for the murder of a dingo-hunter, suspected of sexual transgressions. Some 31 deaths were officially admitted in 1929, but subsequent research has suggested 100 to 200 killings in a series of assaults at five separate sites. The leader of the reprisal party, Constable William Murray, while admitting publicly to killing 17 himself, privately bragged to fellow officers that it was ‘closer to 70’. In the upshot, the policing measures were fully exonerated by a stacked 72 Lydon, ‘Bloody skirt’, 68; Bottoms, Conspiracy, p. 188. 73 Austen, Cry, pp. 92–3; Owen, Every Mother’s Son, pp. 135–6, 140–1. 74 R. Kelly and N. Evans, ‘The McKenzie Massacre on Bentinck Island’, Aboriginal History 9:1 (1985), 44–5. 75 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, pp. 438–46.

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Board of Enquiry. Murray was hailed by the press as ‘the hero of Central Australia’.76 This pattern of over-reaction, coupled with tight-lipped denial, faithfully replicates the region’s earlier history. Researcher Richard Kimber has concluded that, although ‘over 650’ Aborigines (or around 16 per cent) were killed by police in the region between 1881 and 1891 (and perhaps as many as 1,750 – or 40 per cent – from 1860), official figures allow for only 44 deaths.77 Old habits died hard. Although Coniston is recognised as the last officially ordered massacre, conflict continued in Northern Australia. In the Kimberley, Native Assistants were being investigated for ‘unsupervised . . . promiscuous shootings’ as late as 1944; allegations of slave labour on pastoral stations were being made in 1948, and the cruel neck-chaining of suspected Aboriginal ‘cattle thieves’ was not terminated until 1956.78 Similarly, during World War Two, it was openly asserted, ‘in the Territory, it was nothing to shoot a black if he did not do the right thing’. Uncontested murder remained an ingrained, unexceptional reflex, imbedded in local custom and mundane practice.79 This richly homicidal history was augmented by parallel processes of cultural elimination or ethnocide – not simply in the general dismissal of Aboriginal culture as a vagary, but also in the reduction of up to 363 languages to fewer than 150, Australia-wide, with only 13 presently not considered endangered.80 Significantly, however, the majority of these are still spoken and transmitted in Northern Australia, providing some expectation of hopeful survivals. Yet Christian missions in the north, while offering physical sanctuary from frontier violence, were also calamitous for traditional cultures there, excoriating them as pagan and evil. Overall, Indigenous beliefs and practices were dismissed and dismantled as inferior, simplistic and expendable by encompassing colonial populations. Similarly, a commensurate process of ecocide unfolded in two phases: first, the wholesale annexation from Aboriginal ownership of traditional Country without recognition or recompense – a process whose totality was uniquely Australian; and, second, a severe physical traducing of those lands and 76 J. Cribbin, The Killing Times (Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1984), pp. 163–4; M. Bradley, Coniston (Perth: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2019). 77 R. Kimber, ‘Genocide or not? The situation in Central Australia 1860–1895’ in Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide, ed. C. Tatz (Sydney: Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, 1997), 33–65. 78 Owen, Every Mother’s Son, pp. 444, 447–8. 79 R. Hall, The Black Diggers (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989), pp. 158, 186. 80 A. Dalby, Dictionary of Languages (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 43; D. Short, Redefining Genocide: Settler Colonialism, Social Death and Ecocide (London: Zed Books, 2016).

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waterways. Environments were dramatically degraded by hard-hoofed herds, ancestral grasslands despoiled, as massive land-clearing efforts fragmented habitats and removed half of the forests. Consequently, the nation hosted the world’s highest extinction rate of plants and animals. Since white colonisation began, 59 bird, mammal and amphibious species and more than 60 plant species have disappeared, many during the colonial period. Conservatively, a further 310 species of native animal and 1,180 species of plant are seriously endangered. Deforestation, overgrazing and land degradation has led to the highest salinity and top-soil instability levels, as well as the highest per capita rates of land clearance and CO2 emissions, on the planet – all accomplished, like the mass decline of the human host populations, amid high levels of cultural and political denial and evasion.81 Group homicide, ethnocide and ecocide were therefore imbricated in a singular, interconnected onslaught, settling on Northern Australia as a massive, enduring infliction. Across a vast sweep of space and time, it impacted communally as the violent dispossession of Country, the ‘desolation and utter ruin’ implicit in the full context of Indigenocide, and the stolidity of enduring cultural denial. Historically assessed, in the words of the British Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes of 1837: ‘Every law of humanity and justice has been forgotten or disbanded.’82

Bibliographic Note Closer examination of conflict in Northern Australia slowly began from the mid-1960s, growing more prolific and strident over the following two decades, with such publications as C. D. Rowley, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1970); Evans et al., Exclusion, Exploitation and Extermination; H. Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier (Townsville: James Cook University Press, 1981); and N. Loos, Invasion and Resistance (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982). The colony of Queensland featured prominently in these early works and is now regarded as the epitome of violent racial interaction in Australian history. Yet there exists a bifurcation of emphasis in subsequent investigations between empirical studies of northern frontier zones and specific attention 81 ‘Threatened species and ecological communities in Australia’, Australian Government, Department of Environment and Heritage, 2004, www.environment.gov.au (accessed 12 January 2020); Evans, ‘Crime’, 142. 82 British Parliamentary Select Committee on Aboriginal Tribes (1837, p. vi) quoted in Grewcock, ‘Settler-colonial violence’, 227.

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to the genocide concept. Recent histories of Northern Australia (such as Collins, Goodbye Bussamarai; J. Richards, The Secret War (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008); Ørsted-Jensen, Frontier History Revisited; Bottoms, Conspiracy of Silence – all set in Queensland – as well as Marcus, Governing Savages and Roberts, Frontier Justice, examining the Northern Territory; and M. A. Jebb, Blood, Sweat and Welfare (Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2002) and Owen, ‘Every Mother’s Son Is Guilty’ (set in the Kimberley) do not explicitly engage with the idea of genocide. This is despite their many accounts of mass killings and other assaults leading to sociocultural destruction and elimination. These works hinge more upon a conception of warfare than one of genocide. On the other hand, recent theoretical works addressing genocide either do not directly examine North Australian history or only touch tangentially upon it. Apart from Palmer, Colonial Genocide, comparing Queensland with SouthWest Africa, there is no volume-length study, combining analysis with locational history. Publications by C. Tatz, such as the edited Genocide Perspectives I, and Australia’s Unthinkable Genocide (Curtin, Australian Capital Territory: Xlibris, 2017), occasionally touch upon the northern experience; and there is a smattering of attention throughout A. Curthoys and J. Docker, eds., “Genocide”?: Australian Aboriginal history in international perspective’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001). But there is presently no single, composite treatment of the entire zone. H. Reynolds, An Indelible Stain? The Question of Genocide in Australia’s History (Melbourne: Viking Penguin Books, 2001) examines genocide Australia-wide, though somewhat inconclusively. D. B. Rose addresses the issue in the Territory’s northwest in a micro-capacity in Hidden Histories (Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1991), and Dingo Makes Us Human (Cambridge University Press, 2000). B. Kiernan confronts genocide in a global context in Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), as does Dirk Moses in his edited book Empire, Colony, Genocide, respectively. Otherwise, one must turn to a tranche of articles and chapters in books, such as Kimber, ‘Genocide or not?’; R. Evans and B. Thorpe, ‘Indigenocide and the massacre of Aboriginal history’ (overland 163 (2001)); and Grewcock, ‘Settlercolonial violence’, among others, for a more thorough exposition. In the broadest sense, therefore, antipodean scholarship still awaits an extended meeting of the idea of genocide with the theme of frontier conflict and the historio-geographic locales of northern Australia.

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Genocide and the Forcible Removal of Aboriginal Children in Australia, 1800–1920 anna haebich

Surprisingly little has been written about genocide and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children in Australia during the nineteenth century, compared to the extensive literature on genocide and the ‘Stolen Generations’ of the twentieth century. This is despite evidence of colonists’ violent abductions of, and life-threatening cruelty to, Indigenous children, with few reprisals by authorities. Missionaries forcibly removed children to Christianise and civilise them. The separation from kin and deleterious conditions on missions proved fatal for many children. There were critics of child removals in the colonies and in Britain, but Australian public discourse largely advocated removal of Aboriginal children as a ‘humane’ way to ‘civilise’ Aborigines and contain the threat of their violence to colonial progress.1 Recent research has uncovered Aboriginal letters to colonial officials protesting at their removals and conditions, and actions recorded by colonists, of Aboriginal rebellion, escape, desperation and, in some cases, resigned submission to their fate. While there has been as yet no comprehensive survey of the official records to determine the precise numbers of children forcibly removed in nineteenth-century Australia, previous work demonstrates that removals resulted in extensive abuse, trauma and deaths of children, and were devastating to Aboriginal societies. While not always state-sponsored, the removals of Aboriginal children in nineteenth-century Australia contributed to the foundations of the modern ‘Stolen Generations’.2 1 S. Robinson and J. Paten, ‘The question of genocide and Indigenous child removal: the colonial Australian context’, Journal of Genocide Research 10:4 (2008), 501–18, at 502. 2 S. Robinson, ‘Queensland settlers and the creation of the first “stolen generations”: the unofficial removal of Aboriginal children in Queensland, 1842–1897’, Journal of Australian Cultural History 4:1 (2002), 1–16, at 16.

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The removal of Aboriginal children had a central place in the ‘heterogeneity of ways’ in which nineteenth-century colonial dispossession devastated Aboriginal societies.3 Before their removal, children suffered the same violence experienced by many of their kin: killings, physical wounds, mental harm and trauma, rape, starvation and illnesses, including venereal diseases. But removed children suffered the additional trauma of abduction and the subsequent mental, physical and sexual abuse, ill health and death that often followed being removed. There was also the devastating impact caused by even small numbers of child removals on the biological reproduction of quickly waning populations. These acts correspond to the genocidal acts listed in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) – in particular, that of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.4 Raphael Lemkin’s original formulation included the undermining of a group’s way of life – that is, cultural genocide. The omission of cultural genocide from the Convention has been significant to debates in Australia concerning the history of Aboriginal child removals. The Australian Human Rights Commission 1997 report, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, notably included within its definition of genocide the intention to destroy Aboriginal culture: ‘one principal effect of the forcible removal policy was the destruction of cultural links. This was of course their declared aim.’5 This inclusion of cultural genocide acknowledged the terrible experiences of generations of Aboriginal children, and the ways in which their suffering was systematically forgotten. Nonetheless, this chapter’s historical analysis of the forcible removal of Aboriginal children during the ‘long’ nineteenth century follows the rubric of the Genocide Convention’s narrower definition in order to chronicle the specific and unrelenting genocidal cruelty, abuse and deaths of children at colonists’ hands in that era. Many of the sources of clearly stated government policies, laws and Aboriginal testimony that exist for the twentieth century do not exist for this earlier period. Statistical data for nineteenth-century child removals is scarce compared to the twentieth century, due to the negligent 3 R. van Krieken, ‘Rethinking cultural genocide: rethinking Aboriginal child removal and settler-colonial state formation’, Oceania 75:2 (2004), 5–151, at 143. 4 The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide-convention.shtml (accessed 18 March 2022). 5 Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 1997), p. 202.

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governance of children in institutions and in employment, and colonists’ pacts of silence over their cruel treatment of Aboriginal children. But sufficient records do exist to roundly support the argument that the forcible removal of Aboriginal children was genocidal in the colonial period. Official documents and public discourse are often alarmingly frank about their cruel intentions towards children, and there is indisputable proof of the forcible transfer of Aboriginal children from their own group ‘to another group’. There is evidence of genocidal intent to destroy Aboriginal societies veiled by supposed benevolence; of removals exposing susceptible children to injury and death from the other genocidal acts listed in the Convention, such as killing, imposing physical and mental harm, physical destruction, and preventing biological reproduction of the group; and evidence of genocidal intent in the repetition of strategies of forced institutionalisation and employment akin to imprisonment and slavery that were known to have caused physical harm and mortality. There is clear evidence of widespread removal of Aboriginal children over the nineteenth century, but as yet no definitive statistical records. On the basis of evidence of extensive and systematic removals over the twentieth century from thousands of hours of personal testimony and archival data, the report Bringing Them Home concluded for that century that: ‘most [Aboriginal] families have been affected in one or more generations, by the forcible removal of one or more children’.6 The following narratives explore the histories of Aboriginal child removals in Australian colonies between 1800 and 1920: Tasmania (known as Van Diemen’s Land from 1803 to 1856), New South Wales, Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria. The narratives focus on how and why practices of removal changed and varied in particular times and places in these colonies, as well as their commonalities. In all five colonies, free settlers claimed that their right to remove and keep Aboriginal children superseded those of the biological parents, and they endorsed public and private institutions and employment as drivers of change. British and colonial officials often approved and supported settlers keeping Aboriginal children. While some Aboriginal children gained European education and skills, such as numeracy, literacy, menial domestic and farming skills, and rudimentary Christianity, their removal also enabled ongoing dispossession of their land, caused many child deaths, and prevented biological reproduction of many local groups, and stopped the transmission of knowledge and culture to younger generations. 6 Ibid., p. 37.

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N Beagle Bay Mission

WESTERN AUSTRALIA

Moore River Native Settlement

Parramatta NEW SOUTH Native WALES Institution Black Blackttown Blacktown N Native ati tivve IInstitution nstitution Sydney

New Norcia Mission Perth Smithies Wesleyan Mission

Carrolup Native Settlement

Albany Annesfield Mission Home

Wybalenna Flinders Island 0 0

Orphan School

100 200 300 400 500 mi 200

400

600

TASMANIA Hobart

800 km

Oyster Cove

Map 22.1 Locations and institutions referred to in the text. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

Tasmania provides a useful starting point, with its unique record of calamitous policies and actions that set dangerous precedents for other Australian colonies. Occasional statements of protection from politicians and humanitarians in Britain, and legislation in the colonies, failed to halt the catastrophe. The stakes in the fight for children were high: Aboriginal survival as a sovereign people versus the colonists’ assumed sovereignty – as well as life versus death. The early nineteenth-century penal colony of Tasmania has been described as ‘among the most violent penal colonies in history’.7 It was a cruel world for its convict inhabitants, including thousands of boy 7 B. Madley, ‘From terror to genocide: Britain’s Tasmanian penal colony and Australia’s History Wars’, Journal of British Studies 47:1 (2008), 77–106, at 78.

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prisoners. It was also a site of genocide for the Palawa whose ancestors had lived there continuously for over 40,000 years. The estimated population of 6,000–8,000 in 1803 was reduced to only around 120 incarcerated survivors by 1835. This captive population was dead by 1876.8 The Palawa survived by forming relationships with Europeans in areas beyond the colonial centres. Benjamin Madley concludes that the ‘near-annihilation’ of the Tasmanian Aborigines is sufficient to ‘designate the Tasmanian catastrophe genocide’, a genocide that, Madley and other writers concur, included colonists ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’.9 Colonists kidnapped Palawa children in the first year of settlement in Risdon Cove. Senior colonial officials were convinced of their rights to the children. In May 1804, in the aftermath of the Risdon Cove massacre, commanding officer and surgeon Dr Jacob Mountgarrett collected the bodies of several slaughtered Palawa, and a living 2-year-old boy. He then invited the Chaplain, Reverend Robert Knopwood, to dine with him, to observe Mountgarrett dissect a Palawa cadaver, and to baptise the little boy Robert Hobart May.10 From 1803 to 1832, as Rebe Taylor demonstrates in her Chapter 20 in this volume, Tasmania became the site of brutal warfare, with increasingly violent punitive attacks by whites and guerilla retaliation by the Palawa. Governor Arthur’s famed 2,200-strong ‘Black Line’ across the island in 1831 aimed to clear remaining Palawa from the island’s Settled Districts and bring the survivors into captivity. For colonial leaders, the Palawa were a ‘natural feature capable of being pushed aside in much the same way as the bush was cleared for ploughing’.11 The results of their decisions in Hobart and London were ‘cataclysmic’. They began removing the Palawa, placing them in temporary prisons in various offshore islands, from 1831. By 1833, almost all the Palawa were incarcerated at Wybalenna on Flinders Island in Bass Strait.12 During the years of frontier fighting, Palawa children and their families were killed and injured, and often starved as they were forced to keep moving. Children witnessed shocking acts of violence against their families and often became separated and orphaned during the fighting, leaving them vulnerable and at the mercy of predatory colonists. They were treated like 8 A. Haebich, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000 (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2000), pp. 65–130. 9 Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’, 104. 10 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 65–6. 11 Friendly Mission: The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson 1829–1834, ed. N. J. B. Plomley (Hobart: Tasmanian Historial Research Association, 1966), p. 28. 12 Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’, 100.

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the booty of war and kept as captives and slaves. When Aboriginal families tried to reclaim their children, government proclamations were issued to end the hostility that arose from colonists’ ‘robbery of their children’. Colonists were instructed to provide evidence of Aboriginal parental consent or they would have the children taken from them. The colonists’ practice continued regardless.13 By the early 1830s, the forced removal and permanent separation of all Palawa children from their families, never to be returned to them, had become routine. The Governor’s conciliator, George Augustus Robinson, whose role it was to move the last Palawa survivors forcibly to Wybalenna, had travelled with the families and observed their love for each other. Nevertheless, he too supported the removal of children, and wrote in his diary that the ‘evil derived from such a measure is more than counterbalanced by the good . . . They [the children] are the main prop upon which our future exertions must rest and the only source from which we can expect to derive any solid advantages.’14 Colonists seemingly had little sympathy for their mourning families: one grieving mother taunted by a sentry threw a stone at him and was struck in the head with the buttend of his musket.15 Norman Plomley found that, between 1810 and 1836, an estimated eighty-nine child survivors were living with colonists in mainland Tasmania.16 They had varied experiences. Captured youth were drawn into the fighting, acting as mediators bearing official messages of peaceable intentions or guides for roving parties rounding up survivors. Some escaped back to their families, were recaptured, and sent out again. The 16-year-old Mungo admitted he led the parties astray when he saw his families’ tracks. The fate of several girls taken overseas as servants remains unknown. However, the journey of 9-year-old George van Diemen attracted interest at the time. He was sent to England in 1821 as an ‘experiment of instructing and civilizing a boy of a race so little known’, and lived for five years with guardians in Lancashire and Liverpool who praised his excellent memory and ability in mathematics. In 1826, he was returned to Hobart. He was sent to school to become an exemplar for other Palawa boys but died soon after, aged only 15.17 Young servant girls isolated in colonist homes rebelled against their captors, who abused them – if not physically and sexually, then certainly emotionally, and they were blamed for their misbehavior. 13 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 65–6. 14 Ibid., p. 97. 15 Ibid., pp. 84–5. 16 N. J. B. Plomley and K. A. Henley, The Sealers of Bass Strait and the Cape Barren Island Community (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1990), pp. 61–2. 17 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 88–90.

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Dr Temple Pearson complained that his ‘adopted’ daughter, Margaret, had become ‘exceedingly obstinate and perverse’ and he sent her to Wybalenna where she died, aged 15. Colonists blamed puberty, the children’s inherent ‘barbarity’, but few saw the tragic impact of their abusive actions in stealing them from their families for a life ‘little better than slaves . . . trained solely for their usefulness’.18 Children were found struggling to survive in hazardous situations: two teenage street girls imprisoned in Launceston; two 11year-old boys picking pockets and committing robberies for convicts and other criminals; and an 11-year-old girl ‘left in the midst of a notorious nest of the lowest description of men’.19 Wybalenna set out to be a permanent institution, but it became the final resting place for most of those imprisoned there. The colony’s chief justice, J. L. Pedder, deemed it ‘an unchristian attempt to destroy the whole race’.20 This first multi-purpose government Aboriginal institution in the Australian colonies, intended to imprison and civilise the residents, later reappeared in similar guises in other colonies, notably Queensland and Western Australia. Wybalenna was located on a sizeable tract of land, totally isolated and invisible to the outside world, and was supposed to become self-supporting on a shrinking budget. Colonist staff regulated the daily regimes and kept adults and children separated to facilitate ‘Christianizing and Civilizing’ the children. The conditions were lethal: the climate was cruel, and the rough dwellings facilitated fatal epidemics. Deaths mounted – nearly 100 residents died, almost half the population, between 1833 and 1838. Infant mortality was almost 100 per cent in 1837. This is evidence of genocide by ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part’ and the ‘intentional prevention of biological reproduction’.21 The Quaker surgeon, Dr George Storey, persuasively argued that ‘the deaths at Flinders Island, and the attempts at civilising the aborigines, were consequent on each other. If left to themselves, to roam as they were wont, and undisturbed, they would have reared more children, and there would be less mortality.’22 Robinson observed that the people were gripped by a ‘general despondency . . . so that they were coming to wonder whether there was any future for them’, and they asked their captors ‘Do you mean to stay till all the black men are dead?’23 18 Ibid., pp. 87–8. 19 Ibid., p. 85. 20 Cited in ibid., p. 96. 21 Madley, ‘From terror to genocide’, 103. 22 Cited in Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 114. 23 N. J. B. Plomley, ed., Weep in Silence: A History of the Flinders Island Aboriginal Settlement with the Flinders Island Journal of George Augustus Robinson 1835–1839 (Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 1987) p. 109.

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The perspicacity of Storey’s observation was endorsed by the survival of Aboriginal women and their mixed-descent children living outside government control in sealing, or Islander, communities on other Bass Strait Islands. When Robinson arrived in 1830 to remove the Palawa women from these supposed perilous island conditions to Wybalenna, he found healthy children, being schooled by their families and living a robust life. Visiting Tasmania in 1827, Rosalie Hare described an Islander boy as ‘five years old, very tall and stout, and had black curly hair, his complexion was coppercolored. He spoke English well.’24 Many parents resented Robinson’s intrusion: mothers who wanted to remain, and protesting fathers such as Straitsman James Munro who put the families’ case to Governor Arthur in Hobart. Munro was accompanied by 6-year-old George Briggs, who recited Bible verses as testimony to the children’s good upbringing. Yet many of the women and children departed with Robinson, and most perished in captivity at Wybalenna.25 The numbers of Islander children only began to increase in the 1840s. Between 1835 and 1839, a final effort was made to bring all surviving Palawa children under government supervision at Wybalenna, in employment or at the Queen’s Orphan Asylum, also known as the Orphan School, in Hobart. Colonists who still had Aboriginal children refused to relinquish them and little action was taken against them. The pastoralist and Aboriginal bounty hunter John Batman claimed that his workers, abducted from their families, were ‘as much his property as his farm, that he had as much right to keep them as the government’. He argued that all the children should be left with the colonists to be trained as faithful servants who would rear their own children to work for their masters, rather than being sent to ruinous government institutions.26 Batman took these Aboriginal workers with him when he went to found a new colony in Port Phillip (later Victoria) in 1835. The colonial authorities sent some of the children, including eleven from Wybalenna aged between 3 and 16, to the Queen’s Orphan Asylum. Set up as an industrial school for children of convict and destitute women, the forbidding stone building proved dangerous for the traumatised Palawa children. Conditions were ‘cold, comfortless and ill arranged upon a most mistaken parsimonious economy’.27 Fatal epidemics swept through the 24 Cited in Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 103. 25 Ibid., p. 104. 26 Robinson, cited in Plomley, ed., Friendly Mission, p. 833. 27 Cited in the entry for the Queen’s Orphan Asylum at www.findandconnect.gov.au/ ref/tas/biogs/TE00053b.htm#:~:text=The%20Orphan%20School%20was%20the,ho me%20in%20Davey%20Street%20C%20Hobart.

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chilly dormitories. Eight Palawa children died in the Orphan School in 1835, and in 1843 scarlet fever killed fifty-six of the orphanage population.28 Children were shuttled between the Orphanage, Wybalenna and outside work. The 8-year-old Mathinna, who was ‘adopted’ by Governor Franklin’s wife, Lady Jane, and then dumped at the Orphanage after the Governor’s return to England, arrived ‘sobbing and broken-hearted from . . . the luxury and grandeur of government house . . . to a cold stretcher in the dormitory of Queen’s Asylum [Orphan School]. She soon fell sick and was taken to a bed in the Hospital, she had no friends.’29 Mathinna was transferred to Wybalenna in 1844, was then returned to the Orphanage, and finally sent to Oyster Cove Aboriginal settlement. The year of her death is not certain. Walter Arthur applied his literacy skills learned at the Orphanage to protest against conditions at Wybalenna. In 1846, aged 26, he led the residents’ petition to Queen Victoria, calling for recognition of their rights as free people who had negotiated a settlement after a protracted war with the colonists and had met its terms, and requested that the colonists do likewise.30 In 1847, officials finally closed Wybalenna, and the remaining adults and children, forty-nine in all, were moved to the abandoned convict settlement at Oyster Bay on the Tasmanian south coast. Most of the children were sent on to the Orphan School and out to work. Walter and Mary Ann Arthur settled on a nearby 15-acre grant. Walter died in 1861. In 1871, the Oyster Cove settlement was closed, by which time all but two residents had died. Fanny Cochrane Smith (c.1834–1905), who had been born at Wybalenna, married an ex-convict and reared eleven children to become a powerful Palawa matriarch who, after all she had endured, celebrated her cultural knowledge in the first recording of Palawa songs and language.31 Meanwhile, the health and prosperity of the Palawa families on the Bass Strait Islands had improved and they began their own schooling, later with church support, and made a living from hunting mutton birds until encroaching white settlement on the islands reduced their freedoms and economic independence. As the century drew to a close, there was mounting pressure on families to become settled farmers and to move their children to mainland

28 29 30 31

Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 107. Cited in D. Davies, The Last Tasmanians (Sydney: Shakespeare Head Press, 1973), p. 210. Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 119–20. J. Clark, ‘Fanny Cochrane Smith (1834–1905)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre for Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biog raphy/smith-fanny-cochrane-8466/text14887 (accessed online 30 October 2020).

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Tasmania.32 They were called ‘half-caste’ Tasmanian Aborigines, so their Tasmanian Aboriginal ‘blood’ was acknowledged, but their other ancestries were cited in order to deny them the status of Tasmanian ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘native’.33 In New South Wales and Western Australia, officials experimented with a different child-centred institutional model from the early nineteenth century. Small mission homes were part of outreach to the colonies by evangelical bodies such as the British London Missionary Society, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, and the Western Australian Missionary Society. Colonial governors endorsed Christianising and civilising instruction in the missions but provided little financial support or oversight of the children in them. Missionaries spoke of benevolence and a future for these children they considered to be capable of being educated and civilised, once removed from the influence of their families. Once again, parental rights over Aboriginal children were bypassed by officials hopeful that the children could be placed in the small missions with a minimum of fuss and resistance by their parents, in order to create an auspicious endeavour that promised to produce pliable trained young workers and peaceful relations in the colonies. Missionaries claimed that parents gave their permission for the permanent removal of their children. Yet parental resistance suggests otherwise. Living without their children, after everything else they had lost, must have been devastating for Aboriginal families. The missions’ ‘civilising’ goals could be classed as quasi-assimilatory, lacking clarity of intent and outcomes with only vague aims of teaching Christian values, basic literacy and numeracy, and English gendered roles for the skills of domestic and agricultural work. Given the small numbers and isolation from their families and the rest of the colony, training could be more focused and intensive, a model that persisted into the twentieth century. However, the children were being prepared for an indeterminate position in life – separated from their families, but not accepted by colonists, they were ill equipped to survive easily in either context. Mindful of this quandary, missionaries deemed marriages between mission-trained young people to be crucial for the missionary project to enable them to find compatible life partners and to reproduce families living a sedentary Christian family life under mission supervision.34 Colonial women participated in the maternal 32 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 126–30. 33 R. Taylor, pers. comm., 2020. 34 J. Cruickshank, ‘“To exercise a beneficial influence over a man”: marriage, gender and the Native institutions in early Colonial Australia’ in Evangelists of Empire? Missionaries in Colonial History (Melbourne: eScholarship Research Centre in collaboration with the School of Historical Studies, 2008), 115–24.

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‘civilising’ of Indigenous girls and young women. As patrons, as workers in the missions, and as employers of domestic servants, colonial women inducted Indigenous girls and young women into the traditional gendered roles of the British home: Christian mothers and wives who kept their families and homes in good order. At the same time, the women denigrated Aboriginal mothers as dangerous for the physical and moral well-being of their children.35 This intensive, invasive process of re-forming the children’s minds, bodies and relationships from within the intimate domestic spaces of the mission struck at the heart of Aboriginal families as extending networks of kin relationships that constituted the ‘fulcrum and the map of Indigenous law and power’.36 Cut adrift from this learning and protection, Aboriginal children were left at the mercy of strangers, vulnerable and poorly equipped to survive the dangers of life within the institutions and outside in the colonies. Despite the many failures of these small mission homes, missionaries and colonists continued to advocate both small and large institutions for Aboriginal children as their great hope for engineering an end to the ‘Aboriginal problem’. For colonists, institutions were a familiar precedent for solving problem populations of the poor, homeless and criminal at ‘Home’; they captured the Aboriginal ‘problem’ within institutional closed walls where it could be left forgotten and unresolved, at least for a time, until the ‘problem’ re-emerged and a new institution was needed.37 The first of the small missions in Australia was the Parramatta Native Institute in Darug Country in New South Wales, in the present Sydney suburb of Parramatta. It was opened in 1814 under the auspices of Governor Lachlan Macquarie, with his wife as patroness and a committee of seven gentlemen, at the request of the Wesleyan evangelical missionaries William and Elizabeth Shelley. Parramatta was the first institution in Australia to which colonists removed Aboriginal children. Living descendants of survivors have noted the resemblance to the twentieth-century Stolen Generations. Macquarie ‘deemed it an act of justice, as well as humanity, to 35 M. D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), pp. 330–1; S. Robinson, ‘Regulating the race: Aboriginal children in private European homes in colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies 37 (2013), 302–15, at 311. 36 M. Dodson, ‘The rights of Indigenous people in the International Year of the Family’, Family Matters: Australian Institute of Family Studies 37 (1994), 34–41, at 36. 37 A. Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous histories: cases from Australia’s Stolen Generations’, Journal of Social History 44:4 (Summer 2011), 1033–46.

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make at least an attempt to ameliorate their condition and to endeavour to civilize them . . . [with] both genders to be brought up in the habits of industry and decency’.38 In 1814, Macquarie instituted the annual Aboriginal gatherings at Parramatta for feasting on ‘roast beef, bread and ale’ and with the intention of collecting children for the Institute. Elizabeth Shelley informed Macquarie that ‘the chief difficulty appeared to me to be the separation of the children from their parents, but I am informed that in many cases this could easily be done’.39 Shelley became manager of the mission from 1815 to its closure in 1823 after the death of her husband, and the first woman to fill this role in the Australian colonies. Although Macquarie ruled that no child ‘shall be permitted to leave [the mission], or to be taken away by any person whatever (whether Parents or other Relatives)’, this proved difficult to enforce as children still absconded or were removed by their parents.40 Numbers at the Parramatta Native Institution were intended to be small; nineteen students attended in 1818. Several did well in their schooling, and in 1819 Macquarie wrote to the Secretary of State in London, Lord Bathurst, of the success of the experiment, ‘the Children having made very great Progress in all those Useful and Necessary Branches of Instruction they are taught, evincing good Natural Understandings, and an Aptitude for learning whatever is proposed to be taught them’.41 One student, Maria, won first prize in the colony’s public examinations.42 She later married an ex-convict and became a Sydney private landowner. Several married couples, some of whom were former students, were granted land in Black Town, the nearby Aboriginal living area proclaimed by Macquarie (the present-day Sydney suburb of Blacktown), but most of the couples returned to their families in the bush. In 1823, after deaths at the Institution caused parents to reclaim their offspring, the few remaining children were transferred to the Wesleyan-run Native Institution at Black Town. When the Black Town institutions closed in 1833 due to lack of funds, the remaining children there were sent by local Anglican missionaries to the Wellington Valley Anglican Mission, 255 38 Governor Macquarie to Secretary of State, Lord Bathurst, Historical Records of Australia, vol. V I I I (1814), pp. 367–70. 39 Cited in N. Green, ‘Submission no. 1: historical overview of the separation of Aboriginal children’, submitted to the National Inquiry into the Separation of Children, Cottesloe, Western Australia (typescript, 1996), 3. 40 Governor Macquarie, Government notices, The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 17 December 1814, http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/629024 (accessed 10 April 2020). 41 Cited in Cruickshank, ‘To exercise a beneficial influence’, 117. 42 Ibid., 117–18.

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kilometres away in Wiradjuri country, which closed in 1843. As in Tasmania, relocating Aboriginal children without family consent became routine in nineteenth-century New South Wales, severing ties between children and family and Country, making them alone and vulnerable. Mission optimism in London and Western Australia was high in the 1830s and 1840s. The report of the British government’s 1837 Select Committee, appointed to consider the conditions of Indigenous people in its colonies, endorsed the role of missions in its ‘general scheme of improvement’ for ‘imparting the blessings of civilization [through] the propagation of Christianity’.43 Western Australian Governor John Hutt advocated the role of missions in ‘leading [the children] out of their present dark and abject state to the blessings and advantages of Christianity and civilization’.44 In Western Australia between 1836 and the 1870s, several small Protestant mission schools opened, failed, closed and reopened in urban and rural locations around Perth, Albany and York. Growing up in an oral culture, Aboriginal children observed and absorbed it from their earliest days. They learned characteristics of individuality and independence of action to make their own decisions and to assess risks and difficulties.45 This gifted them with courage, strength of character and generous spirits to live within small, close-knit subsistence communities. With freedom to experiment, they became physically skilled, with highly developed visual and aural abilities learned from observation, listening and repetition. Parents and community members bestowed values and behaviours through love and affection, not punishment and control. The contrast with mission homes could not have been sharper.46 The Reverend and Mrs Smithies’ Wesleyan Mission in Perth and later at Wanneroo and York (1840 to 1855) imposed an exhausting daily regime on young Aboriginal children. In Perth in 1841, these missions comprised ‘nearly the whole of the children . . . belonging to the Perth and neighboring tribes 43 British Government, Report of the Select Committee Appointed to Consider What Measures Ought to be Adopted with Regard to the Native Inhabitants of Countries where British Settlements are Made (London: House of Commons, British Parliament, 1837), pp. 44–5. 44 State Records Office of Western Australia, Colonial Secretary’s Office Governor Hutt, 78/139/1840. 45 J. Kearins, Child-Rearing Practices in Australia: Variation with Life-Style (Perth: Education Department of Western Australia, n.d.), pp. 10, 19–21; J. Kearins, ‘Visual spatial memory in Australian Aboriginal children of desert regions’, Cognitive Psychology 13 (1981), 434–60. 46 W. McNair and H. Rumley, Pioneer Aboriginal Mission: the Work of the Wesleyan Missionary Joh. Smithies in the Swan River Colony 1840–1855 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Publishing, 1981), pp. 59–84.

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from the age of 6 to 15’.47 Having such numbers of children removed seriously threatened the survival and reproduction of local populations. The children began their day with two hours in the mission school before learning to do, or actually carrying out, hard domestic or farming chores.48 They completed their day working as servants in the homes of their ‘sponsors’ (employers), where they often had to sleep. This regime operated six days a week. Sundays involved all-day church services, in addition to daily prayer sessions. These children too showed considerable promise, and a school inspection in 1842 reported their success in writing, reading and spelling, and singing hymns in perfect time and in tune. The colonists’ fervent hope was that the children would become useful workers and provide an encouraging example to their families. Instead, parents removed their children and other children escaped, as epidemics of disease and deaths spread through the mission and children were relocated to sites away from Perth.49 In 1846, Smithies wrote despairingly of the ‘difficulties in our Native work’ due to the ‘native character’ and above all to the adults’ ‘incessant efforts to decoy or get away our pupils or scholars in the Institution’.50 Support from government and mission authorities dwindled as the mission floundered. In 1854, only three children remained, and the mission was officially closed the following year. By the 1860s, the humanitarian and missionary optimism was evaporating amongst government officials and policy-makers in both Britain and Australia. A new creed took hold, that of the inherent, permanent inferiority of the socalled ‘black races’. This harsh racial doctrine exacerbated violent clashes on expanding frontiers across northern Australia that coincided with the colonies’ newly granted powers to manage their Aboriginal populations after the granting to all of responsible government from 1856, excepting Western Australia. With its small scattered population and convict transportation commencing in 1850, Western Australia was deemed unprepared for more independence from Britain. This began another stage of brutal treatment of Aboriginal children, now managed through harsh state legislation and policies. Queensland created a legal framework that set a precedent for the other colonies, implementing the familiar civilising strategy to reduce conflict in the colony and create young Aboriginal workers in institutions and forced labour.51 The state’s Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act 1865 was the first 47 Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia 1841, cited by Green, ‘Submission no. 1: historical overview of the separation of Aboriginal children’, 5. 48 McNair and Rumley, Pioneer Aboriginal Mission, pp. 59–84. 49 Ibid.: chapters 4 and 5 document the mission relocations and closure. 50 Ibid., p. 112. 51 Robinson and Paten, ‘The question of genocide’, 264.

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legislation in Australia to explicitly undermine Aboriginal parental rights. Under the law, all Aboriginal children were deemed neglected and could be automatically removed to Aboriginal institutions declared under the Act. Between 1870 and 1901, Queensland established fifteen permanent multipurpose institutions resembling Wybalenna, where children were trained for employment under department control on the outside. Meanwhile, Aboriginal children continued to be abducted on the northern frontiers. Historian Shirlee Robinson estimates that, in Queensland over the nineteenth century, at least 1,000 Aboriginal women and girls were coerced to work in conditions akin to slavery, where they were subject to serious physical injury and death and emotional and sexual abuse and loneliness.52 Victoria in the 1880s faced a very different Aboriginal situation. Catastrophic destruction had slashed the population, estimated as between 10,000 and 15,000 in 1835,53 to 800 survivors, 600 of whom were living in the colony’s community missions and reserves. Of the survivors, 70 per cent were children and 233 had part-European parentage. Assumptions that Aborigines of ‘full’ descent were ‘dying out’ and those of ‘mixed’ descent could assimilate into the European community shaped a cruel new legislative solution. The Aborigines Protection Act 1886 divided the communities by ‘degrees’ of ‘race’, or blood quota. It was the first legislation to do so in Australia. Based on fractional calculations of Aboriginal blood, those of ‘mixed’ descent under the age of 34 were ordered to leave their homes and fend for themselves. Their children became subject to broader welfare legislation. Adults and children of ‘full’ descent families remained on reserves and missions. These children could be transferred from missions to state industrial schools and apprenticed out from age 14.54 Aboriginal women mounted a sustained letter-writing campaign to the Aborigines Protection Board over decades, protesting against the breaking-up of their families and demanding their rights: ‘It seems because we are black people they can do what they like with us . . . they ought to treat us all like as we got relations fighting at the front and they shouldn’t treat our children like this.’55 The 52 Ibid., 264. 53 J. Mitchell and A. Curthoys, ‘How different was Victoria? Aboriginal “protection” in a comparative context’ in Settler Colonial Governance in Nineteenth-Century Victoria, ed. L. Boucher and L. Russell (Canberra: Australian National University Press and Aboriginal History Inc., 2015) 183–201, at 184, https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/ series/aboriginal-history/settler-colonial-governance-nineteenth-century-victoria (accessed 18 March 2022). 54 M. F. Christie, Aborigines in Colonial Victoria 1835–86 (Sydney University Press, 1979). 55 Correspondence to Mr Bailey, MLA, Port Fairy, 1918, cited in E. Nelson, S. Smith and P. Grimshaw, Letters from Aboriginal Women of Victoria 1867 to 1926 (History Department,

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Victorian government’s actions in breaking up families and removing children were genocidal. Many Aboriginal people forced off missions had to battle racism and abject poverty. From the 1890s, Australia was experiencing an economic depression exacerbated by devastating droughts. Poverty only increased the authorities’ rationale for taking Aboriginal children from their families. These often suffered significant physical and mental abuse, which impacted subsequent generations. Western Australian’s north coast and inland expanding frontiers, like those of Tasmania, New South Wales and Queensland, were places where Aboriginal children were victims of massacres, epidemics, dispossession, and cultural destruction. The new pearling and pastoral economies also created a demand for Aboriginal labour that unleashed abductions and subsequent abuse of Aboriginal children. The numbers of deaths and the extent of the irrevocable physical and mental harm may never be known due to the lack of any official regulation of these regions and the pact of silence amongst the perpetrators of these genocidal crimes. Many children were slaves who had suffered abduction, forced labour, severe physical punishments and detention to prevent escapes, as well as sexual abuse and nearstarvation.56 In 1886, the Anglican missionary Reverend John Gribble arrived in Carnarvon on the Pilbara coast of the northwest of Western Australia, to set up a mission near the town. He quickly found himself in the midst of horrific scenes of child abduction by blackbirding pearlers and pastoral bosses and their workers. He recorded his eyewitness accounts of how children suffered in ways that warrant being considered as genocide: forced transfers from their own group to another group, and the imposition of conditions calculated to bring about physical destruction, and of physical and mental harm. If they survived and were no longer of use, children were cast aside and left to fend for themselves. Gribble later wrote in his book, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land: ‘I have seen hundreds of children . . . who have been torn from their mothers, and yet is it said that where the British flag flies slavery cannot exist’.57 A man ‘tore a boy away from his mother . . . the next day the boy was University of Melbourne, 2002), p. 65; and in J. Horton, ‘Rewriting political history: letters from Aboriginal people in Victoria’, History Australia 9:2 (2012), 157-81, at 160, https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2012.11668422 (accessed 3 December 2020). 56 P. Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves: Aboriginal and European Children in Nineteenth-Century Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2002), pp. 147–53. 57 E. Gribble, Dark Deeds in a Sunny Land (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Publishing, 1987), pp. 1–2. First published by the Daily News, Perth (1905).

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put aboard the cutter in spite of screams and struggles’. Children as young as 5 were assigned as servants for years and treated as slaves. Girls of 8 years and less were sexually molested, one in broad daylight in the town in front of Gribble. Two boys who absconded were stock-whipped over a distance of 30 miles back to their employer’s station, and on arrival were tied up and ‘whipped until the second lash was worn out’. For this, their employer was issued a fine by the local magistrate.58 The physical and verbal abuse unleashed against Gribble in Carnarvon and Perth for protesting at such mistreatment reveals the dangers of breaking the local code of silence. Still, he continued his campaign in letters to Perth newspapers, the Aborigines Protection Society in Britain, public lectures in the eastern colonies, and publication of his book. Children in the Kimberley region were similarly mistreated: abducted after violent clashes with colonists and kept as slaves on the stations; starving children whose families were driven to kill cattle for meat were imprisoned for up to two years. Young girls were often sexually abused. In one case brought to court, two men raped four girls under 12. In 1901, three young boys and two girls were chained together and forced to trek 200 kilometres to court in Wyndham where one of the boys was found guilty of shooting pastoralist Patsy Durack and sentenced to death.59 The police were instrumental in allowing the cruelty towards Aboriginal children go on unchecked.60 Such cruelties did not go unheeded in Britain. The colonial governor of Western Australia, Sir William Robinson, wrote to London of a ‘state of things little short of slavery’.61 Britain legislated measures to protect children in Western Australia from the 1870s, and instigated the child apprenticeship scheme of the 1886 Aborigines Protection Act.62 While the scheme was largely ineffective at protecting the children from abuse, pastoralist bosses and pearling masters, who had accumulated vast wealth from the unpaid labour of Aboriginal children, protested against these laws. In 1889, the British government added a clause withholding control of Aboriginal affairs from the new colonial constitution and stipulated a generous quota of colonial revenue 58 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 211–12. 59 Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves, p. 168 60 C. Owens, ‘Every Mother’s Son is Guilty’: Policing the Kimberley Frontier of Western Australia 1882–1905 (Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing, 2016). 61 A. Curthoys, ‘Settler government versus Aboriginal rights, 1883–2001: the shocking history of Section 70 of the West Australian Constitution’, Branch: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, online 2015, www.branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=ann-cur thoys-settler-self-government-versus-aboriginal-rights-1883-2001-the-shocking-history-of-se ction-70-of-the-western-australian-constitution (accessed 19 September 2020). 62 Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves, pp. 144–9.

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to ensure appropriate funding for Aboriginal people. Undaunted, members of the new parliament used their legislative powers to pass harsh punitive laws targeted at tightening control over Aboriginal child labour, including whipping and five years’ imprisonment for boys who breached employment contracts. These laws did not apply to non-Aboriginal young workers. In 1897, the British government bowed to colonial pressure to cede control of Aboriginal affairs because of the boom in colonial revenue from the 1890s goldrushes.63 Racism took a further harsh turn in 1901 with Australian Federation, and the new White Australia policy that was enshrined in immigration laws. The constitution excluded Aboriginal people and placed them under the responsibilities and powers of state governments. Aboriginal populations had decreased dramatically across the continent: a census in the southwest of Western Australia counted only 1,200 out of an original estimated population of 6,000, proof of the devastating losses of the bearers of Nyungar culture.64 Allegations by new Labour politicians of slavery in the pastoral industry, reported in the British press, prompted the appointment of the 1904 Royal Commission into the Treatment of Aborigines in Western Australia, led by Dr Edmund Roth, Protector of Aborigines in North Queensland, to enquire into Aboriginal employment and conditions generally. Roth’s report exposed the corruption of police and employers in Western Australia’s north, who failed to enforce the system of work contracts and apprenticeships, leaving children to survive in the most basic living conditions, exploited as unpaid labour and abused emotionally, physically and sexually.65 Roth was scathing of the ‘most brutal and outrageous behaviour’ of the police who brought boys as young as 6 to court to act as witnesses, malnourished and wearing neck chains.66 Another focus of Roth’s report was the growing population of ‘mixed’ descent, whose children’s future without government intervention, he warned, would be ‘vagabondism and harlotry’. The ‘half-castes’ were a gnawing source of anxiety to the new nation, because of the ambiguous space they occupied within a society divided by clear racial codes. Fear of miscegenation became a white Australian obsession. First mentioned in Western Australian statutes in 1874, ‘half-castes’ were progressively included with ‘Aboriginal people’ in discriminatory laws passed from the turn of the 63 A. Haebich, For Their Own Good: Aborigines and Government in the South West of Western Australia (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Publishing, 1992), pp. 51–5. 64 Ibid., p. 1. 65 Hetherington, Settlers, Servants & Slaves, pp. 152–5. 66 Haebich, Broken Circles, p. 211.

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century. Further legislation took hold following Roth’s recommendation for an effective new administration, and of laws along the lines of the 1897 Queensland legislation that he administered. This led to the passing of the 1905 Aborigines Act by the Western Australian parliament. From this time, the state took control of Aboriginal children and their forced removal. While this provided a new measure of protection from earlier abductions and abuse, it also erased Indigenous parents’ rights by law and exposed their children to new dangers. Under the 1905 Aborigines Act, the Chief Protector of Aborigines became the legal guardian of Aboriginal and ‘half-caste’ children throughout the state, with rights over their welfare and upbringing, to the exclusion of their mothers. Police officers acting on their own initiative could forcibly remove children and deliver them to institutions. This initially happened in lesser numbers to homes like Smithies Mission, but, later, Aboriginal children made up the majority of the 200 to 300 residents in the new large institutions that replaced the smaller homes. These children were never to return to their families. Members of the public, including those who highly valued family and parental rights, justified these interventions on the assumption that Aboriginal families posed a danger for children. The official narrative of removals was one of benevolent child rescue from an Aboriginal mother who had been abandoned by a non-Aboriginal father and who supposedly would forget her baby ‘in twenty-four hours and as a rule . . . was glad to be rid of the child’.67 In this scenario, loving Aboriginal parents and extended family were imagined away. The new laws and increased forcible removals maintained this ‘normalised’ and ‘unremarkable’ treatment for all families of Aboriginal descent. Instead of Indigenous families sharing in Australia’s prosperity, the 1905 Act increased their poverty and vulnerability to the forced removal of their children. The Act charged the Western Australian Aborigines Department alone with providing for their welfare, health and education on a shoestring budget, and denied them access to new federal welfare benefits. The Department controlled where Indigenous families could live and, in collusion with local police and townspeople, forced them to live in town fringe camps without running water, under police control and rules preventing their children from attending school. Children of Aboriginal and Asian descent in the north were especially targeted by officials in order to limit their increasing numbers, but all mixed-descent families were susceptible to forced child removal, ostensibly to give the children a better chance in life. This treatment 67 Haebich, For Their Own Good, p. 82.

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bore no resemblance to the humane standards set for white families in Western Australia’s forward-looking 1907 State Children’s Act, which endorsed family-based care and recognised the potential harm of institutions and the vital role of mothers in shaping the nation’s future citizens.68 Inspecting camps for children in the East Kimberley in 1909, the state’s Aborigines Department’s Travelling Inspector, James Isdell, set down the department’s view in his journal: ‘To see the open indecency, immorality and hear the vile conversations ordinarily carried on, which these children listen to and repeat would convince . . . that separation is absolutely necessary if the future welfare of the youngsters is to be considered. I am convinced that the short-lived grief of the parent is of little consequence compared to the children’s future.’ His subsequent journal entry was triumphant: ‘I was glad to receive telegraphic instructions . . . to arrange for the transport of all halfcastes . . . to Beagle Bay mission’.69 The policy behind establishing the Carrolup and Moore River Native Settlements in south Western Australia was genocidal in intent.70 New white settlers and the state worked collectively to remove Nyungar families from the wheatbelt farming frontier from the early 1900s. Settlers saw the Nyungar people as ‘a horrible menace to the health and morals’ of white society, and in 1915 one even threatened to do ‘a bit of rifle practice as big as the Dardanelles’71 in his town’s Aboriginal camp. The minister for Aboriginal affairs, Rufus H. Underwood, went further. He hoped for total extermination: ‘The sooner the aborigines died out in Western Australia the better it would be for all concerned . . . it appeared they could not preserve the aboriginal race and at the same time settle the white race in their country.’72 From the early 1900s, the Aborigines Department began removing children in settled areas to the small missions and forcing families into the crowded town camps. The next step to meet the farmers’ demands was to remove them to new isolated multi-purpose and multi-generational Native Settlements that lasted from 1914 to the 1950s. Working adults needed by farmers were left behind, and their children were taken away.73 68 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 225–9. 69 State Records Office of Western Australia, Aborigines Department, Consignment 653 Item 1909-213. 70 A. Haebich, ‘“Clearing the wheat belt”: erasing the Indigenous presence in the southwest of Western Australia’ in Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and the Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History, ed A. Dirk Moses (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), 267–89, at 272–7. 71 Truth (Perth), 4 September 1915, n.p. 72 Cited in Haebich, For Their Own Good, p. 149. 73 Haebich, ‘Clearing the wheat belt’, 257–8.

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Figure 22.1 Unnamed Nyungar mother, father and infant, c.1860–80. (State Library of Western Australia, Perth)

The Native Settlements were hazardous places for their mainly elderly and young ‘inmates’. They were set in large isolated areas of land with buildings – dormitories, kitchens, schoolrooms, a church, work rooms and punishment sheds – often built by the ‘inmates’ from used materials, with a minimum of bedding and furniture. The buildings epitomised colonial institutional aesthetics, being constructed in grids with fenced spaces and dismal surrounds to instil the inferior status of ‘inmates’ within the institution and outside. Western Australia had more diabolical plans too. Elders were left to survive in precarious conditions, away from the main buildings and exposed to cold and heat in canvas tents, and fed on rations from the kitchen. Like those before them, the children were taught the ‘three Rs’ and trained in farm and domestic work. They were prohibited from practising their culture. The children’s living conditions were deplorable: no proper

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medical or dental care, poor hygiene, epidemics, deaths, harsh discipline and arduous work. Their institutional ‘keep’ averaged 10 pence a week, a pitiable amount compared to the minimum of 7 shillings for working white children. From around the age of 10, children were sent to work alone on distant farms and stations. Their meagre wages were sent to the Department. Without access to their earnings, there seemed to be no escape. In 1915, the new Chief Protector of Aborigines, A. O. Neville, was appointed. He declared his genocidal vision of a social experiment to use the settlements as ‘clearing houses’ to get rid of Nyungar people altogether.74 Neville’s aim and plan was that Aboriginal elders and their cultural knowledge would pass away, and children of mixed descent moving through the settlements would marry and live as domestic and farm workers and assimilate into the lower rungs of the rural working poor. Calculating fractions of race mixing and Aboriginality, Neville looked forward to a time when repeated intermarriage would erase Aboriginal physical traits and culture altogether. During the 1930s, he promoted the genocidal policy of ‘biological absorption’ legislated for in the Native Affairs Act 1936 that granted powers to him, as the Commissioner for Native Affairs, to direct intermarriage amongst ‘lighter castes’ and with white partners, and to determine the future of their offspring.75 Neville informed the 1937 Conference of Commonwealth and State Protectors of Aborigines in Canberra on his policy of dealing with Aboriginal girls who became pregnant while in domestic service. They were returned to the Settlements, where ‘the child is taken away from the mother and sometimes never sees her again. Thus these children grow up as white, knowing nothing of their environment.’76 Looking back in retirement on his administration, Neville wrote: ‘The native must be helped in spite of himself! Even if a measure of discipline is necessary it must be applied, but it can be applied in such a way as to appear to be a gentle persuasion. The end in view will justify the means employed.’77 The Settlements continued to operate until the early 1950s, and continued as children’s missions into the 1960s, in an effort to erase the Aboriginal populations altogether. 74 Haebich, For Their Own Good, p. 157. 75 Haebich, Broken Circles, pp. 273–9. 76 State Records Office of Western Australia, Aborigines Department Consignment 933 Item 1936-427. A. O. Neville, Conference of Commonwealth and State Protectors of Aborigines Parliament House (Canberra: L. F. Johnson, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1937). 77 A. O. Neville, Australia’s Coloured Minority: Its Place in the Community (Sydney: Currawong Publishing, 1947), p. 80.

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Neville’s genocidal ‘clearing house’ plan was not realised, and the Nyungar population in the southwest in 2020 numbers over 35,000 people.78 However, this outcome does not disavow the genocidal intent and deprivations of administrators who continued to seek to remove Aboriginal children from their families and home communities. During the 120 years of colonisation in Tasmania, New South Wales, Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria discussed in this chapter, officials and colonists repeatedly took genocidal actions to prevent the physical and cultural survival of Aboriginal families, often while claiming to be ‘helping’ them. These genocidal goals ultimately failed. Officials were not able to break up Aboriginal families completely by the forcible removal and institutionalisation of Aboriginal children and attempting to seize control over their marriages and offspring. Growing activism following World War Two amongst Aboriginal families recovering from the catastrophic colonisation of previous decades began forging a new culture of public resistance. Through dogged determination, many families have successfully returned to, or remained together with, their children on their land. Writing this chapter, I have struggled with the enormity of the genocidal crimes committed against Aboriginal children and their kin during the nineteenth century. I have considered what the Genocide Convention of 1948 might offer the victims and survivors, and have concluded that the odds are stacked against achieving restorative outcomes through the Convention. I share the widespread Indigenous and public disillusionment with the Convention’s restricted legal, sociological, judicial and historical methods and its exclusion of cultural genocide, and with the fact that Australia has no legislation to prosecute crimes of genocide. Yet the word ‘genocide’ has remained important to some Indigenous people, and to the public, as a word with the power to represent the enormity of what was done to Aboriginal children and families, and the outcome of what was done, and to hold all this in the public memory. The Euahlayi/Kamillaroi senior barrister, Larissa Behrendt, argues that, for many, the important point from an Indigenous perspective is this – that the outcome was genocidal: it doesn’t matter whether the crime of genocide was committed as it was defined by international law and it doesn’t matter whether there was intention or not. What seems to be more important from the Indigenous 78 M. Tan, ‘Introducing Noongarpedia Australia’s first Indigenous Wikipedia’, The Guardian, 2 September 2016, www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/sep/02/ngeannoonar-noongar-is-australias-first-indigenous-wikipedia-we-want-to-use-our-language (accessed 19 September 2020).

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perspectives are the effects of the actions of the government – these actions have amounted to damage to Indigenous people, families and communities and they choose to use the word ‘genocide’ to describe it. This moves the discussion outside of the words of the statute to the side-effects and legacies of those sanctioned actions.79

Bibliographic Note The 1800–1920 period of Aboriginal Australian child removal is a complex proposition for research. This is a history of private kidnapping of children for their labour and sexual abuse, largely outside of colonial government control and often under a code of silence. Government records of officials, policies and legislation are less extensive in all colonial jurisdictions than they are for later periods. There were numerous changing missions, many small and temporary, and only some with rich extant records. The first Australian text to argue forcefully that practices of Aboriginal child removal constituted crimes of genocide under the Genocide Convention (1948) was the government inquiry report, Bringing Them Home, with its histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century practices of child removals and placements, extensive testimony from Stolen Generations survivors, and robust arguments that the practices of removal constituted crimes of genocide (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Bringing Them Home). For the first national history of Aboriginal child removals, see Broken Circles, A. Haebich’s comprehensive documentation of the genocidal removals, placements and treatment of Aboriginal children in the Australian colonies, states and territories from 1800 to 2000, drawn from archives, government documents and reports, private papers and media sources. The National Library of Australia’s free online research portal, Trove, makes available a large number of historical Australian newspapers containing information on Aboriginal child removal. These sources mainly present colonial perspectives and therefore require careful reading and interpretation to gain a measured understanding of events. Indigenous voices and narratives in these colonial media sources are few, especially those relating to stolen children. For histories that include Indigenous voices and experiences of removals, see L. Stevens for the writings of Palawa residents of Wybalenna (Me Write 79 L. Behrendt, ‘Genocide: the distance between law and life’, Aboriginal History 25 (2001), 132–47, 140.

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Myself: The Free Aboriginal Inhabitants of Van Diemens Land at Wyballena, 1832–47 (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2017)), and, for Victoria, letters written by Aboriginal mothers from mission stations to the Aborigines Protection Board, collected and edited by Nelson et al. in Letters from Aboriginal Women of Victoria 1867 to 1926. From Western Australia, there is residents’ correspondence in the private archive of the Benedictine Monastery at New Norcia, and the letters of Bessie Flowers from Albany and Victoria (see S. Huebner and E. Flowers, 2016, No Longer a Wandering Spirit, parts 1 and 2, video, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne). For further theoretical and historical contexts, see A. Dirk Moses’ editorial analysis (Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004), pp. 2–48) and, in the same volume, ‘case studies’ by P. Lukin Watson (‘Passed away? The face of the Karuwali’, 175–93) and A. Haebich (‘Clearing the Wheat Belt’, 267– 89). Robinson and Paten have analysed colonial genocide discourse and stolen children in ‘The question of genocide’. For early colonial missions in Western Australia, see W. McNair and H. Rumley’s Pioneer Aboriginal Mission, and for New South Wales, see J. Cruickshank’s analysis of gender and mission marriages in ‘To exercise a beneficial influence’. On exploitation and abuse of child workers in colonial Queensland, see S. Robinson, Something Like Slavery: Queensland’s Aboriginal Child Workers 1842–1945 (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), and, for northern Western Australia, see P. Hetherington’s Settlers, Servants & Slaves.

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The Killing Fields of Jiangnan Genocide and China’s Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1864 charles desnoyers

China’s Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) is perhaps history’s bloodiest civil war. 1 But it has remained largely beyond the purview of genocide scholars. In some respects, this is not surprising as it was a non-western conflict in a preindustrial empire, and its historiography, particularly among some Marxist scholars, has generally portrayed it as a ‘progressive’ or ‘revolutionary’ movement, despite its substantially Christian ideological inspiration. This case study argues that, in its uncompromising quest to establish an entirely new society based on an alien ideology, radical attempts at social levelling, dismantling of Confucian culture and society, and purposeful elimination of select ethnic and religious groups, it bears the hallmarks of both current legal and more expansive sociological definitions of genocide, as well as of extermination, and departs in crucial ways from even the largest and most sanguinary conflicts marking the Chinese past. More specifically, the Rebellion’s violence conforms to the definition in the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, designating ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Among the acts listed in the Convention that are attributable to the Taipings are: ‘killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’. It also fulfils all of the criteria for punishment of such crimes listed in Article I II of the Convention, as well as some of the more expansive crimes defined in current international law as ‘extermination’.2 1 Background material for this study may be found in C. Desnoyers, Patterns of Modern Chinese History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 164–75, 209–14. 2 United Nations General Assembly, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, adopted by Resolution 260 (III) 9 December 1948, Articles 1, 2 and 3. See

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Background The South China region itself played an important role in the connections among the movement’s initial participants, in its economics, and in its early leadership. Guangzhou (Canton), China’s southernmost major port, had long been designated as the one through which all international maritime trade would be conducted and regulated. The economy of the adjacent region was vigorous but increasingly dependent on maritime commerce, since it was here that China interacted with global trade networks. Supporting this system was an extensive regional transport network and service industry of hostels, money lenders, shops, restaurants and other providers of necessary items. The abrupt shunting of this trade to more convenient ports opened after the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing (Nanking) caused widespread disruption of the local economy. Political, linguistic and ethnic tensions were never far below the surface as well. From ancient times, the provinces of Guangdong (the location of Guangzhou) and neighbouring Guangxi had a history of defiance towards dynasties centred in the north. This relationship had been particularly strained towards the foreign (Mongol) Yuan Dynasty (1280–1368) and the (Manchu) Qing (1644–1912), whose brutal pacification of the area two centuries before continued to stoke local resentment. In addition, the southern dialects and subdialects are distinct not only from the language of the Manchus (an Altaic language with its own writing system), but from those of other Chinese regions. Another factor is the interplay of minorities. Though participants in the Taiping movement included members of South China’s Zhuang, Miao and Dai minorities, the founder of the movement, Hong Xiuquan (1813–64), and most of his early converts were ‘Hakkas’ (pinyin: kejia – ‘guest families’). Their ancestors had migrated from the north in several waves amid the disorders of recent dynastic changes. In ethnic terms, they were members of the Han Chinese majority who preserved their northern spoken dialect and, against a trend that was prominent in much of China, did not bind the feet of women. Their role as newcomers in the south tended to force them on to less productive land, where they found themselves subject to resentment and hostility from local groups (bendi, ‘natives’). Stigmatised as an unwelcome L. Kuyper, ‘Theoretical issues relating to genocide: uses and abuses’; F. Chalk, ‘Redefining genocide’; H. Fein, ‘Genocide, terror, life integrity, and war crimes: the case for discrimination’ – all in Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions, ed. G. J. Andreopoulos (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 31–46, 47–63 and 95–107, respectively; and Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).

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minority, the ‘Hakkas’ were thus economically marginalised and placed on the fringes of local society. As scapegoats for local difficulties, their villages sometimes suffered attacks by their bendi neighbours, forcing them in some regions to build stout protective walls and fortified inner compounds. In addition to these difficulties, the ‘Hakkas’ shared disproportionally in the economic downturn that marked the opening of the five initial treaty ports and Hong Kong, following the end of the First Opium War with Great Britain in 1842. Although Guangzhou/Canton was one of the five, it had been shorn of its monopoly of maritime trade. Much of Guangzhou’s internal traffic now shifted north, especially towards Shanghai, at the mouth of the Yangzi River. In addition, the expanding opium trade’s depredations increasingly plagued the south and eroded its social and political fabric. The lure of plunder surrounding the opium trade and the increasing unemployment in the region encouraged corruption, banditry and piracy through the 1840s. The need for local defence and resentment towards the government growing from its inability to resist the British saw a dramatic rise in anti-Qing secret society membership. The largest of these various groups, collectively known as the Triads, saw the Manchu Qing as illegitimate and called for the restoration of the previous, ‘Chinese’ dynasty, the Ming. Thus, with ethnic and quasi-ethnic strife, hardscrabble agriculture and economic difficulties, the initial Taiping movement had a considerable pool of discontent from which to draw members.

Historical Sources The Taiping conflict is perhaps nineteenth-century China’s most thoroughly documented event. Local, provincial and dynastic histories, gazetteers, biographies of national and local notables, and memoirs in Chinese all exist in abundance. However, with the exception of a handful of memoirs, excerpts of first person accounts in monographs, and small samples from collections of official documents, few of these have been translated into English.3 Certain 3 R. Huntington, ‘Chaos, memory, and genre: anecdotal recollections of the Taiping Rebellion’, Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 27 (December 2005), 59–91, gives an extensive overview of the extant Chinese literary sources. Among the more important works in English on the Taiping Rebellion are F. Michael and Chung-li Chang, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, 1971); Jen Yu-wen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973); J. D. Spence, God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: Norton, 1996); R. Wagner, Reenacting the Heavenly Vision: The Role of Religion in the Taiping Rebellion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); J. C. Cheng, Chinese Sources for the Taiping Rebellion 1850–1864 (Hong Kong

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Map 23.1 The Taiping movement in China, 1850–64. (Charles Desnoyers, Patterns of Modern Chinese History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 210) University Press, 1963). For English excerpts from memoirs, see T. Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (Stanford University Press, 2013). For a contemporary Chinese account in translation, see Zhang Daye, The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and its Aftermath, trans. Xiaofei Tian (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013). For western-language primary sources, see Prescott Clarke and J. S. Gregory, eds., Western Reports of the Taiping: A Selection of Documents (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1982).

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key elements also remain elusive because of the immense destruction of temples, private and public property, official archives and other historical materials, particularly those of the insurgents. While some recent Chinese studies have illuminated the demographics of participants and victims, estimates of the overall loss of life still vary widely. The pioneering work of Ho Ping-ti has long been a benchmark, and his estimates of 20 to 30 million are still considered authoritative. More recent studies, however, especially the work of Cao Shuji, Nan Li, and Lixin Colin Xu and Li Yang have pushed the possible totals as high as 73 million. At least half of these deaths may be attributed to poor hygiene, inadequate care of wounded and injured, mass famine, and disease, particularly cholera.4 Complicating matters further in terms of casualties on each side is the enormous size and interplay of the conflict. Accurate records even of the size of armies and militia are scant or non-existent. Estimates for Qing forces during the conflict run from roughly 1, to over 3, million; for the Taipings, perhaps 2 million. Factoring in militia and irregular forces, the total may be as high as 10 million.5 The fact that multiple units, even whole armies, changed sides, sometimes more than once during the conflict, particularly as the Qing offered amnesty and rewards for those who deserted the Taipings – further complicates calculating relative casualties, as does the intermingling of conscripts and labourers with the armies. Thus, the overall number of deaths is usually estimated as a whole without breaking down the numbers for each side. Perhaps the most contentious issues concern the nature of the conflict itself. Was it simply a huge peasant rebellion, like many past revolts centered on familiar, recurrent Chinese rural problems such as land reform, high taxes and disaster relief? Marxist scholars, in and outside of the Peoples’ Republic, have generally presented it as a ‘feudal’ class struggle between the peasant majority and an elite scholar-gentry reinforced by a Confucian bureaucracy co-opted by an alien Manchu government. In this narrative the movement also contained ‘revolutionary’ elements anticipating key aspects of the 4 See Ho Ping-ti, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959); Cao Shuji, Zhongguo Renkou Shi (A History of China’s Population) (Shanghai: Fudan Daxue Chubanshe [Fudan University Publishing]), pp. 455, 509; Nan Li, ‘Legacy of war: the long term effect of Taiping Rebellion on economic development in modern China’, paper presented at the HED Workshop on Historical and Economic Development (July 2015); L. C. Xu and L. Yang (2018), ’Stationary bandits, state capacity, and the Malthusian transition: the lasting impact of the Taiping Rebellion’, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, no. 8620. 5 Ian Heath, The Taiping Rebellion, 1851–1866 (London, Long Island City: Osprey,1994, Osprey Military Men-at-Arms Series), pp. 2–4.

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twentieth-century Chinese communist movement, but doomed to fail because the necessary preconditions for socialist revolution did not yet exist.6 Thus the official term used in the Peoples’ Republic of China is ‘The Taiping Peasant Revolutionary Movement’ (Taiping nongcun geming yundong). There are a number of other factors, however, that point to significant differences from past peasant uprisings as well as from this largely class-based perspective. The vast majority of participants were indeed peasants, as they would necessarily be in any large movement in agrarian imperial China. The ideology and precipitant of the movement, however, did not originate with that class. Hong Xiuquan (see Figure 23.1) himself had been an aspiring scholar and a candidate in the local Confucian examinations who converted to Christianity. The Taiping leadership, especially in the crucial formative years of the movement, was drawn from a wide variety of social groups. While Taiping land policies mandating egalitarian holdings and reduced taxes initially proved attractive to peasant cultivators, the regime also stipulated confiscation of food produced above individual subsistence levels for storage in communal granaries. Indeed, all land was considered to belong to God through Hong as ‘The Heavenly King’, and its distribution was based on apportionment of labor duties, not on individual ownership. Communitarianism notwithstanding, peasants occupied the lowest rung of the Taiping hierarchy and punishments for various infractions included ‘reduction to peasant status.’ It should be noted too that, while many joined voluntarily or converted for various reasons, vast numbers of peasants were conscripted into Taiping armies and work battalions. As Jen Yu-wen notes, ‘From the very beginning Hung [Hong] had used coercion as well as persuasion to convert people to the faith, regarding those who refused to be converted as enemies.’ In addition to the later inclusion of mutilation and tattooing, violators of this military discipline faced possible death by beheading or burning alive for desertion, and being torn apart by horses for betrayal.7 Recent scholarship, particularly in the United States, has focused on the conflict as a civil war. This approach is still compatible with an emphasis on its revolutionary aspects – since so many revolutions include or are in fact civil wars – but also lends itself to comparative and transnational study. Moreover, as a civil war this conflict was an early and massive example of ‘total war’ and thus invites comparative study with more recent conflicts. It involved entire civilian populations in roles as militia, conscripts, forced 6 Li Huaiyin, Reinventing Modern China: Imagination and Authenticity in Chinese Historical Writing (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), pp. 89–93. 7 Jen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, pp. 37, 48. For their part, Qing penalties included beheading, death by garroting, and ‘lingering death’ by slicing.

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labourers, support personnel, refugees and deportees, with civilians also comprising the vast majority of casualties. Comparative study of such conflicts over long periods of time in different regions and cultures, and how they are ultimately resolved – or continue to smolder long after their official settlement – though currently a field in its early stages of development promises to be productive as it matures.8 The ideology of the Taiping movement raises another key debate about its nature: How should we assess the degree and kind of Western influence, especially that of Christianity, animating the participants? While much of the Chinese scholarship on the era privileges socio-economic and ethnic factors leading to the Taiping movement, the precipitating events were in many ways conditioned by the diverse cultural influences intermingling in South China in the early nineteenth century. For Western, and particularly American, scholars, this has fuelled considerable debate about the nature and degree of western influence in the region. The startling syncretism of Taiping ideology and religion, and the prominence of non-Chinese sources produced by missionaries, prompted western scholarship of the movement in the 1950s and 1960s to focus on the interaction of Christianity with internal conditions and events in South China. Much of this, however, came in for critique in the 1980s and 1990s by Paul Cohen and others as being westerncentric, rather than China-centred.9 In my view, however, the impact of Christianity on Taiping religious ideology, the nature of its revelations, and the absolute character of Hong’s interpretations of God’s intentions, all play a central role in the movement’s genocidal character.

Perpetrators, Victims and Allies As noted above, the earliest members of the Taiping movement prominently featured South China minority groups, especially Hong’s fellow ‘Hakkas’, and a large collection of those on the margins of Chinese society. As Taiping armies moved north and east, and came to occupy China’s most productive and populous regions, however, rebel demographics grew more diverse. The movement ultimately affected seventeen of China’s eighteen provinces, but the prolonged occupation by Taiping forces of parts of Hunan, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang provinces brought a disproportionate number of their inhabitants directly into the war. 8 Meyer-Fong, What Remains, pp. 11, 13. 9 P. Cohen, Discovering History in China: American Historical Writing on the Recent Chinese Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).

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Despite the drive to eliminate the Confucian scholar gentry as a social and political class, much of the leadership, especially in the early years, came from elites who, for various reasons, signed on to the new order.10 This became increasingly difficult, however, as the war on Confucianism expanded and the need for orderly administration became acute. Indeed, the constant warfare never really allowed for an alternative bureaucracy to be created. Though rules for administration had been promulgated, the Taiping ‘state’ existed in most places as an extraction-driven host animated by the needs of combat and brute survival. Army organisation from the beginning supplanted that of civilians, and government was undertaken essentially by military commanders driven by the requirements of their armies as much as by religious ideology. The strongest arguments in favour of the revolutionary character of the Taiping movement revolve around what Jen Yu-wen calls its ‘triune nature’ of religion, ‘nationalist spirit’ and political aims.11 Unlike past peasant revolts that sought relief from local oppression or to pass the Mandate of Heaven on to a new candidate for the imperial throne, the Taiping movement aimed at a fundamental restructuring of society, mandating a rough egalitarianism of class and gender. Yet there were also elements that might be seen as ‘reactionary’, in the sense that they harkened back to perceived characteristics of pre-Confucian China. For example, Hong and the movement’s highest leaders styled themselves as wang (‘king’), a title used by the leaders of Chinese states before the creation of the first empire in 221 B C E. Moreover, the evolving ideology of the movement held that China had lost its way from true religion because of the institution of Confucianism.12 Thus, in Taiping-controlled areas, all the elements of Confucian society were systematically broken down: the traditional hierarchical relationships between rulers and ministers, husbands and wives, parents and children, elder and younger siblings, friends, and men and women. The Four Books and Confucian Classics were proscribed in favour of Chinese translations of the Bible and Christian literature. All families were required to provide at least one member for military service. Men and women, married and unmarried, were to be segregated in assigned camps and barracks. Private property 10 For example, among Hong’s earlier supporters was a wealthy landlord, Chen Chengyong, who brought his entire extended family and household with him. See Spence, God’s Chinese Son, p. 124. 11 Jen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, pp. 4–6. 12 This is the central thesis of T. H. Reilly, The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom: Rebellion and the Blasphemy of Empire (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004).

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was eliminated: all wealth and goods captured were to be put into a common treasury, while agricultural surpluses were to be stored in communal granaries. Customs considered culturally repugnant to Hong’s core group, such as foot-binding, were forbidden, as were habits deemed physically and/or morally harmful: opium and tobacco smoking, gambling and alcohol consumption. Groups designated as ethnic, class and religious enemies were to be severely marginalised and routinely marked for elimination. The Manchus, as both foreign and Confucian rulers, were naturally prime targets and slaughtered as regular policy. Scholar-gentry and officials of all ethnicities were to be summarily executed unless there was a pressing need for their skills or they swiftly converted. Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist temples were mandated for destruction or to be turned into houses for officers or Taiping Christian churches. Not surprisingly, the memoirs of survivors contain innumerable examples of such excesses. Of the many later accounts of those years, one of the most vivid is that of Li Gui (1842–1903).13 More famous for his diary of a trip around the world in 1876, Li was encouraged by the journalist Wang Tao (1828–97) to write about his experiences as a captive of the Taipings from 1860 to 1862. Forty members of his extended family, including his wife and infant daughter, were slaughtered in the process and he narrowly escaped death on several occasions. In Li’s account, by the 1860s the desperation of the struggle with government forces had eroded any lingering Taiping ethical considerations about dealing with those in contested areas. The belief in the righteousness of their cause and their familiarity with the enemy allowed for little or no quarter and gave licence to especially ruthless and sadistic behaviour – the more so since the enemy, by definition, consisted of the ‘demons’ God had commanded Hong to eradicate (see below). As with Li’s father and uncles, those who desired to stay with family rather than join the collective were routinely killed, having been assured that they would be ‘sent home’ – the euphemism for execution. Commanders separated captives and conscripts into three categories: those who could fight would be made soldiers; those strong enough to carry supplies would be porters; the rest were slated for death unless they could demonstrate their usefulness in some way. Those allowed to live became ‘tools’; if they converted to the Taiping religion, they became 13 Li Gui, Sitong Ji (Bitter Memories), juan (book) 2 (n.p., 1880). Tobie Meyer-Fong includes an examination of themes raised in a wide range of these memoirs in What Remains. On Li Gui’s reasons for recording his experiences, see pp. 204–5.

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‘brothers’ or ‘sisters’; members of the original cohort from Guangdong and Guangxi were ‘old brothers and sisters’.14 By the time of Li’s captivity, the position and treatment of women had markedly deteriorated. Terrified of rape and dishonour, many women and girls in captivity or in danger of capture killed themselves – and often their children – with any means at hand. Despite the putative equality between the sexes, women were expected to be subservient to men, routinely abused, and forced on pain of death into communal concubinage. The phenomenon of child soldiers was also present in the form of a ‘Boys Corps’ renowned for its ferocity.15 The totalistic nature of the physical and cultural assault on the closely interwoven fabric of longstanding Chinese institutions and traditions prompts the question of how the Taipings presented themselves to those they sought to recruit. A fundamental barrier to their efforts was the fact that Christianity had never enjoyed widespread popularity in China and its propagation had been banned by the Qing since 1724. Indeed, Qing propaganda routinely presented Taiping Christianity as a dire threat to Chinese culture as a whole. Thus, the Taipings attempted to place their version of Christianity as ‘God-worshippers’ (their early name for themselves) in the pre-imperial, pre-Confucian context of the worship of the Shang (trad. 1766– 1070 B C E) Dynasty’s chief deity, Di, or Shangdi, a strategy also often pursued by western missionaries. They claimed that emperors in the imperial era (i.e., after 221 B C E ) had usurped the right to worship God/Di and turned China away from its ‘true’ religion, which should have evolved and ultimately merged with that of the outside Christian world. It was the role of the Taipings, therefore, to correct this divergence, drive away the demons that perpetuated it, and connect with contemporary Christian nations. Early Taiping edicts and proclamations, for example, play down the ‘foreign’ origins of Christianity in favour of references from the Shujing and Zhouli (The Book of History/Documents; and the Rites of Zhou) that depict people other than kings as worshipping God or Heaven.16 Though the theological arguments were most effective on the converted, patriotic anti-Qing and anti-Manchu propaganda had much more widespread appeal, as in this 1853 proclamation by the Taiping ‘Eastern and Western Kings’ (Generalissimos): The Manchu demons are different from men. They affront High Heaven, tyrannize our black-haired multitudes, and destroy our people’s lives. They 14 Li, Sitong Ji, juan 1, pp. 5a–7a, 9b 15 Ibid., p. 10b. 16 Spence, God’s Chinese Son, pp. 97–101.

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rely on their stinking odor to becloud Heaven, and cause morals to fall to the ground . . . We, the Generalissimos, are commanded by Heaven not to tolerate the suffering of the people, but to raise the standard of righteousness and to exterminate the Tartar [Manchu] demons.17

While Taiping pronouncements were clear about the Manchus as principal targets of their movement, given such a sweeping attack on China’s institutions, it is difficult to pinpoint other specific groups that suffered the most. Taiping group bonding and creation of insider and outsider group designations may be considered to fall into Giorgio Agamben’s resurrection of the Roman legal concept of Homo sacer, to denote those people who may be killed with impunity and thus excluded from all human consideration.18 Those considered idolaters were generally placed in this category as in this proclamation by Hong’s lieutenant – and later rival – Yang Xiuqing: ‘Now all Buddhist monks and Taoist priests captured in any place should be beheaded, and any person taking the lead in rebuilding temples should also be seized and punished.’19 Evidence also suggests that in Jiangnan, where the heaviest and most continuous fighting took place, the toll among the Confucian scholar-gentry was such that the damage to the area’s renowned literary culture was catastrophic.20 Along with the physical destruction of Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist temples, shrines and literature, it constituted a programmatic form of cultural as well as physical genocide. All accounts agree that, in sheer numbers, peasants were the group that suffered the most on both sides.21 Aside from Taiping actions, the massive Qing effort to suppress the movement also resulted in huge numbers of indiscriminate casualties. The bitter antagonism of the two sides, locked in what both saw as an existential political, cultural and cosmic conflict between good and evil, ensured scant quarter and massive atrocities. Though official Qing policy was supposed to be the traditional one of ‘leniency to those who submit; severity to those who resist’, this was more often honoured in the breach than in practice. Thus, Qing retribution against Taiping fighters and the hapless civilians behind rebel lines was often exterminationist. Moreover, group targeting by the Qing did occur. Qing officials used the term ‘Yue’ (a variant of ‘Viê t’ used to designate the provinces of Guangdong and Guangxi) ˙ 17 Cheng, Chinese Sources, pp. 64–5. 18 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. HellerRoazen (Stanford University Press, 1998). 19 Cheng, Chinese Sources, p. 63. 20 Huntington, ‘Chaos, memory, and genre’, 62. 21 K. Bernhardt, ‘Elite and peasant during the Taiping occupation of the Jiangnan, 1860–1864’, Modern China 13:4 (October 1987), 388–92.

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to specify southerners as originators of the war, and thus especially deserving of punishment. ‘Hakkas’ and those with southern accents were thus targeted for summary execution, even as members of other groups were allowed to surrender. In the mopping up of the southern Taiping areas, perhaps as many as a million deaths may have been inflicted. Thus, Chinese nationalist scholars often asserted that the Qing and their Chinese collaborators who suppressed the rebellion were more wanton killers than the ‘patriotic’ and/or ‘progressive’ Taiping revolutionaries. Aside from government forces attempting to quell the insurrection, however, there were no organised groups specifically allied or aimed at helping the victims of the movement. After 1860, there were Chinese militias drilled, armed and led by foreigners, working with government forces, but the primary aid potential victims received generally came from fellow or potential victims and occasional individual acts by those in the movement. For example, Li Gui, who had the misfortune to be captured twice, was saved from execution the first time by a Taiping guard whom Li’s father bribed to free the boy before the father himself was beheaded. Recaptured as he joined the mass of refugees fleeing the area, Li was again saved from execution by a Taiping commander who, despite having discovered Li’s scholar-gentry background, spared him because he needed a clerk. Many, if not most, of the accounts of survivors note some similar instances of random kindness. They stand out, however, as exceptions to the general rule of the insurgents’ perceived necessity.22

Narrative of Major Events Hong Xiuquan, a native of Hua County in Guangdong Province, had come upon some Christian missionary tracts passed on to him by a Chinese convert named Liang A-fa in 1836. Not long after this, Hong failed the first-level Confucian examination for the third time and suffered a nervous breakdown, during which he experienced hallucinations and disturbing dreams. He eventually recovered and, after failing the exam again in 1843, Hong re-read the tracts and came to believe that they explained the nature of his illness: the Christian God the Father had taken him up to Heaven and revealed to him that he was in fact Jesus Christ’s younger brother. Hong told his family and initial followers that he had been commanded to eliminate the ‘demons’ possessing the country and to initiate a millennial Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace (taiping tianguo) on earth. 22 Li, Sitong Ji, p. 9b.

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With converts among his family and a small band of followers, Hong and his group moved into a mountain stronghold at Jintian in neighbouring Guangxi Province. He began to gather adherents from the disillusioned and unemployed, anti-Manchu elements, secret societies and fellow members of the ‘Hakka’ minority. Hong also sought additional religious training and approached the American Baptist preacher Issachar Jacox Roberts (1802–71) for instruction and baptism, though he was refused the latter. By 1848, the Jintian encampment had become home to tens of thousands. Here, Hong issued the rules of the new religion, whose stern requirements now considerably surpassed the moral strictures of his missionary teachers. In addition to the communitarian regulations listed above, a new 366-day solar calendar with seven-day weeks was introduced. All members were obligated to attend services on the Sabbath. All able-bodied men were required to fight. Women were at first relegated to support roles, but later served with men on the battlefield. All members, male and female, were required to work – a painful obligation for the increasing numbers of women conscripts and converts with bound feet. The injunction to expel the ‘demons’ obstructing the creation of the Heavenly Kingdom made the members’ first priority renouncing loyalty to the Qing. The men thus cut their queues – the mandatory sign of allegiance to the Manchu dynasty – and let the hair grow in on their foreheads, prompting the Qing to refer to them as ‘the long-haired rebels’. By late 1850, they had gathered enough strength to stand against local militia and a provincial government increasingly anxious about the power and ideology of the movement. On 11 January 1851, Hong announced the formation of the new state and took the title of ‘Heavenly King’; the word ‘emperor’ was now tabooed as a holy title reserved for God. For the next two years, they advanced north, extracting their needs from towns and cities along the way, though not occupying any of them for long. Their combat efficiency and the hesitant pursuit by both Manchu Bannermen (the separate Manchu forces) and Green Standard Armies (the government’s regular Chinese troops) buoyed their confidence, gained them followers and conscripts, and fed Hong and his inner circle’s sense of divine destiny. Swollen to as many as 500,000, the host secured several port cities on the Yangzi River, and then made the crucial decision to move east by water to attack Nanjing. In March 1853, Taiping fighters captured the city and made it their capital. The city had immense symbolic value as it had been the first capital of the preceding Ming Dynasty, the last Chinese regime before the coming of the Manchus. It was now renamed ‘Heavenly Capital’ (Tianjing). 574

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In the view of many students of the conflict, the decision to take and occupy Nanjing instead of driving north to the imperial capital of Beijing ultimately cost the insurgents the war. The Qing forces in the north were weak and would likely have been overcome by a determined effort. Instead, however, the Taiping began their belated northern expedition in May 1853. The delay allowed the Qing to strengthen their defences and in December, with the help of a heavy snow, they handed the Taipings their first substantial defeat. For the next decade, however, the Taiping forces would remain in control of much of central and southern China. For missionaries in China, the prospect of a spontaneous Christian movement taking power at first seemed a miraculous vindication of their labours. By the late 1850s, however, the foreign community in China was becoming increasingly dubious about the movement’s theology and intentions. The missionaries were troubled by Hong’s theological interpretations, especially his familial relationship with Christ, and appalled by his huge all-female palace staff and many concubines. On the other hand, Hong and his advisors – particularly his cousin, Hong Rengan (1822–64) – seemed vitally interested in western-style administrative reforms and building a modern industrial base. In the end, however, the prospect of a powerful Taiping China repudiating the ‘unequal’ foreign treaties, the war’s economic disruption of Chinese markets, and Qing submission to Britain and France ending the Second Opium War (1856– 60) induced the treaty powers reluctantly to support the dynasty in suppressing the Taiping movement.23

Resistance Following the dynasty’s desperate victory in saving its capital, Qing forces spent the next several years attempting to roll back Taiping gains, with the ultimate aim of retaking Nanjing. In their struggle to support the cultural fabric of Confucianism, the Qing concentrated on what they perceived as the major weaknesses in the Taiping religion and social order. Taiping communalism was condemned as confiscatory, as violating the natural order of social hierarchy, and as being anti-family. Condemnation of Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism was portrayed as casting aside China’s most sacred traditions and replacing them with a foreign religion. Countering Taiping appeals to overthrow the dynasty, Qing officials also invoked patriotism. As 23 Jen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, p. 7.

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an 1854 proclamation by the leading Qing official, Zeng Guofan (1811–72), put it, China and its civilisation faced the direct threat of cultural genocide: Now, the Yue bandits [Taipings] steal some [cultural] dregs of foreign barbarians and adhere to the religion of God; from their fake king and fake ministers down to the soldiers and menial servants they address one another as brothers . . . In short, the moral system, ethical human relations, cultural inheritance, and social institutions and statutes of the past thousands of years in China are at once swept away . . . How can all those who study books . . . sit comfortably with hands in sleeves [as bystanders] without thinking of doing something about it?24

Relatively few in the occupied and contested areas had any opportunity to keep their hands in their sleeves. Twice, in 1856 and again in 1860, Taiping decoy units drew part of the besieging Qing forces away from Nanjing and broke their encirclement. In 1860, the result was a humiliating rout of the government forces. Taiping fighters advanced into new areas, and soon besieged the pivotal city of Hangzhou. Yet 1860 proved to be a crucial turning point for the dynasty’s fortunes. The treaty of Beijing in that year freed up the Qing forces that had been fighting the British and French in the Second Opium War. Perhaps more importantly, the rapprochement between the Qing and the foreign community fostered a new degree of co-operation. The failure of Qing conventional forces encouraged local and regional officials to form militia, in the belief that they would be more effective fighters for having a vital stake in protecting their homes and culture. The beginning of this ‘Co-operative Era’, as it is sometimes called, offered beleaguered Qing officials such as Zeng Guofan and his protégé, Li Hongzhang (1823–1901), the chance to purchase foreign arms and begin the process of what came to be called China’s ‘selfstrengthening’. On 19 July 1864, their combined force, utilising as its spearhead a hybrid Chinese–foreign unit called ‘The Ever Victorious Army’, finally captured the Taiping capital at Nanjing and forced the suicide of Hong Xiuquan, bringing the movement essentially to an end.

Long-Term Impacts With the capture of Nanjing by Qing forces in July 1864, only a few Taiping remnants managed to escape to remote areas. As for the ‘Hakkas’, who made up many of the original members, there would be an internal migration into 24 Ibid., p. 231.

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Figure 23.1 Statue of Hong Xiuquan in heroic pose, Huadu, Guangdong Province, People’s Republic of China.

Hunan and Sichuan during the 1860s and 1870s in the wake of the Taiping collapse. Those remaining in the southern regions would see years of warfare and struggle over land claims with their bendi neighbours in some areas. Nanjing itself saw the suicide or slaughter of perhaps 100,000 Taiping adherents and civilians, as well as a devastating fire that claimed untold numbers of victims. The decade-and-a-half of continuous fighting in the lower Yangzi Valley and surrounding territory had devastated the region, caused massive refugee flight to neighbouring provinces, destroyed much of the area’s intricate water control and conservancy infrastructure, ruined a vast section of China’s most productive food and cash cropland, and killed people on a scale the world had never seen before in a single conflict. Still other anti-Qing rebellions of a more conventional kind continued in northern 577

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China (the Nian Rebellion) and in the largely Muslim western regions that would become the vast province of Xinjiang in 1884. Thus, the task of reconstruction facing the Qing was perhaps the largest in human history to that point. Though we lack exact figures, the financial cost alone exceeded government revenues for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Customs collections in places affected by the war had been replaced by a joint Sino–foreign administration called the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. Another wartime expedient kept on was the domestic tax system called likin (lijin). Unable to raise tariff rates beyond the 5 per cent mandated by treaties with the foreign powers, the Qing established internal transit taxes on foreign goods to pay for the war effort and subsequent reconstruction. Both systems would survive long into the twentieth century. In addition, rebuilding efforts competed for funds with expensive and often controversial ‘self-strengthening’ programmes. Additional conflicts with the treaty powers and their resulting indemnities, as well as local endemic rebellions, drained Qing resources even further. Despite these difficulties, Hangzhou, Nanjing and a majority of the hundreds of cities and towns destroyed in the rebellion were rebuilt. Along the way, officials took pains to rebuild and construct new temples, shrines, gardens and public buildings as symbols of Confucian resurrection and survival. The increased reliance on local funds and initiative in reconstruction, and the presence of powerful local officials as a legacy of the war, are often cited as marking a shift of power from the central government to the provinces. Recent work by demographers and economists has also suggested a ‘Malthusian’ effect on the region: the destruction and radical depopulation of these areas, in relieving demographic pressures on the land, increasing wages and concentrating capital in fewer hands, ironically aided their long-term industrial development.25 On the whole, however, the war was arguably the largest single factor in forcing the dynasty and empire into their fatal downward spiral. The cultural and psychological residue of the movement is more difficult to gauge. Although Christian missionaries were now permitted to proselytise, the Taiping religion itself never struck deep roots and seems to have essentially disappeared with its armies. Dissatisfaction with the dynasty and Manchus persisted, and was given a powerful boost by China’s humiliating defeat by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the failed ‘100 Days of 25 See, especially, Nan Li, ‘Legacy of war’; Xu and Yang, ‘Stationary bandits, state capacity, and the Malthusian transition’.

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Reform’ in 1898, the ‘race for concessions’ by the foreign powers of the late 1890s, and the Boxer Rebellion, its accompanying foreign intervention, and crippling indemnities in 1900–1. Indeed, twentieth-century revolutionaries such as the western-educated and Christian Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), raised on stories of Taiping exploits, saw them as nationalist models for his own goal of recovering China’s sovereignty. Similarly, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) and the Chinese communists drew (and still draw) inspiration from Taiping communitarianism, as well as their challenge to the Manchus. Even today, a Taiping museum in Nanjing celebrates the revolutionary aspects of the movement. Tobie Meyer-Fong asks, ‘What were the emotional implications of loss for those who lived?’26 In the long-term historical conception of many, the period represented an interval of chaos (luan shi) that alternated with periods of stability. Such intervals most often occurred during periods of dynastic change or rebellion.27 For those who survived and left accounts, those years of luan shi were seared in their memories. Li Gui’s memoir, for example, is called Sitong Ji (Bitter memories); Zhang Daye’s is The World of a Tiny Insect. While the prefaces of many of these accounts are written in a formulaic style, often sharing literary allusions and tropes of suffering and mourning familiar to the literate Chinese public, their sentiments, despite key cultural and temporal divides, bear a striking resemblance to those used in Holocaust memoirs. Moreover, in many cases, there is a time gap of a decade or more between experience and remembrance, suggesting – and often asserting – that the experiences were so painful that only time could make it possible to, as Li says, ‘wish for there no longer to be no words for the unspeakable’.28

Assessing the Role of Race, Religion, Ethnicity, Gender and Territorial Ambition Assessing the Taiping conflict as genocidal with regard to race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and territorial ambition is a tangled task. The Taiping movement itself possessed important aspects of all of these categories, which makes it relatable to other cases involving genocide and extermination. Yet how these categories relate to each other and function in terms of intersectionality makes this interval unique in Chinese history and worthy of close examination with regard to Genocide Studies. 26 Meyer-Fong, What Remains, p. 3. 28 Li, Sitong Ji, p. iia.

27 Huntington, ‘Chaos, memory, and genre’, 60.

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As long-term factors providing a foundation for the demonising of others, representations of race/ethnicity were certainly key factors. The majority Han ethnicity in China even today distinguishes itself from the fifty-five officially recognised ethnic, religious and cultural minorities in the Peoples’ Republic. In cultural, linguistic, and often geographical terms, minority groups were considered to occupy a civilisational periphery, in which the outermost nomadic groups were considered ‘barbarian’ (yi). Outsiders who conquered China and set up dynasties, such as the Mongols and Manchus, thus faced the immense problem of ruling a vast population as a despised minority group. In order to do so, they had to assimilate to some degree to Confucian Chinese culture, yet struggle to keep their own identity. For the Manchus, who had some experience with Confucianism before their conquest of the empire, this meant reinforcing neo-Confucian values of filial piety and hierarchical social relationships as a way of ensuring loyalty to the state, while largely segregating themselves from the Han majority. These conflicting roles were shown in their casting the Qing empire as a multi-ethnic universal state, rather than merely a Han Chinese-centred polity. Even the quotas of Manchus and Chinese mandated for official positions, and the requirement that documents be written in Manchu script as well as Chinese characters, contributed to the otherness of the regime. Thus, revolts were frequent, secret societies such as the Triads took as their motto ‘fan Qing, fu Ming’ (‘oppose the Qing, restore the Ming’), and, in defiance of Manchu cultural demands, cut their queues and let their forehead hair grow out. Whether or not these forces may be called ‘nationalist’ or ‘proto-nationalist’ – thus implying a degree of modernity – the role of race/ethnicity was continually present as an underlying current of revolt. If the ethnic preconditions for dynastic revolt were evident, then the role of religion would turn the conflict into a revolution and civil war. It was the unique nature of Hong’s religious creation and military theocracy that marked the movement as not merely replacing one dynasty with a new, Chinese, regime, but as one that sought to remake Chinese culture and society. Moreover, the revealed injunction to rid the country of designated ‘demons’ added an absolutist urgency and thoroughness to Taiping efforts at extermination. While exceptions might be made for those educated elites and practitioners of other religions willing to convert, Manchus were placed firmly in a category of beings considered less than human, who could be killed with moral impunity. Christianity and its linkage with an imagined preConfucian and pre-imperial past marked by ‘true religion’ made it incumbent 580

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on the believers to reconstruct society along the lines revealed to Hong as marking the foundation of the Heavenly Kingdom. Taiping conceptions of gender relations offer another startling departure from Confucian culture, which, with a few notable exceptions, relegated women to a subordinate role in a society that mandated that men dominate the ‘outer’ sphere of work and social relations, and women the ‘inner’ sphere of home and family. Here, the influence of the ‘Hakkas’ undoubtedly played a role. In ‘Hakka’ culture, women often worked the fields alongside men, and the custom of foot-binding that marked majority Chinese culture had never established itself. Taiping separation of the genders’ living arrangements was meant to aid in fostering communal life, while sexual relations were strictly regulated to help to inculcate discipline and preserve fighting energy and spirit. These restrictions, it is worth noting, were supposed to disappear when the Taiping kingdom was achieved. In many respects, however, this ideal deteriorated fairly rapidly in practice. Hong’s female attendants and concubines were seen inside and outside the movement as glaring, even hypocritical, exceptions to regulations supposedly derived from Christian teaching – even if taken as a prerogative of the temporal and spiritual leader. More damaging was the swift deterioration of ideals of equality and proper treatment of women in occupied territories. The mounting number of new ‘brothers’ often had little inclination to treat female ‘tools’ as human beings, much less equals. Women captives were routinely raped and butchered, or parcelled out to male fighters as communal sexual property.29 A Taiping desire for territorial acquisition is difficult to assess. For the most part, the borders of the imagined Heavenly Kingdom appear to have been limited in practical terms to China. On several occasions, however, including communications with the foreign treaty powers, statements were issued suggesting a universal mandate for the Heavenly Kingdom. One of the key pre-Confucian texts revered by Hong from the Book of Rites envisioned a world united in magnanimity (‘The Great Unity’; datong). His filtering of that concept through his understanding of Christianity seems at times to have conceived it as linking the Heavenly Kingdom with the other Christian nations of the world – though in the leading role.30 One question that rises out of this case study is that of the relationship between genocide and modernity. Creating specific categories of people for elimination by race or ethnicity, or defining some groups as targets because they are considered inimical to modernisation, are generally seen as relatively 29 Ibid., p. 20b.

30 Jen, The Taiping Revolutionary Movement, p. 26.

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recent phenomena. Hence, a familiar scenario for genocide is that of revolutionary nationalism, with its overtones of ‘blood and soil’, ‘rational’ goals of social levelling and progress, and faith in the power of social institutions to mould a ‘new’ individual. While there is no direct connection between these admittedly western eighteenth- and nineteenth-century trends and the Taiping movement, there do seem to be some strong structural parallels with western revolutionary excesses: a unitary, totalistic vision of the ideal state to come; the sacrificing of the population to the requirements of total war; attempts at the complete restructuring of society; and, of course, the identification of ascribed enemies for elimination. As Franz Michael put it: The movement as he [Hong Xiuquan] formed it was totalitarian in character. It was based on a complete control by the leaders of all aspects of the life of their followers. In all their actions they were under military discipline . . . Most important, the religious faith on which the movement was based was a means to establish the control of the leaders over the belief and the thinking of all the followers.31

Yet the central element of the movement is also the one that appears least modern: the predominance of religion. The picture, however, is more complex: English and American Protestant missionary organisations in the mid nineteenth century were regarded by many contemporaries as the modern edge of faith-based action, and were frequently associated with progressive social movements. In China, it was often missionaries who acted as the most vigorous apostles of new technologies and institutions as means of winning hearts and minds for their denominations. In this respect, Taiping revolutionary Christianity and anti-Confucianism eliminated much of the potential for cultural resistance to modern innovation within their movement. The leader’s cousin, Hong Rengan, for example, studied with the missionary and translator James Legge in Hong Kong, and in 1859 proposed a sweeping set of modern innovations for adoption in the Heavenly Kingdom: re-organisation of the army along western lines, largescale industrialisation, railroad and canal construction, and a modern banking and postal system – East Asia’s first such steps towards modernisation – though, due to the exigencies of the war, these were never implemented. What, then, can we conclude about the place of the Taiping movement in exploring genocide and modernity? For one thing, the utterly alien character of the movement presented the populace with a genuine ‘shock of the new’. 31 Michael and Chang, Taiping Rebellion, vol. I, p. 190.

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Hong’s Christian movement raised the possibility of at once shattering tradition and requiring drastic innovation to replace it. His mission, simultaneously to ‘restore’ and create a millenarian vision, however, suffered from its abstractness, and, despite its bid for total control, from an inability to create a viable model. In a pattern all too familiar during the twentieth century, the more perfect the vision, the less perfectible its achievement became, and the more violence was needed to defeat its enemies within and without. Prefiguring many twentieth-century revolutions, the absolute character of Taiping theology and practice allowed no quarter, required utter ideological purity, and brooked compromise only in the service of military necessity. Thus, although its unique religious roots locate it in a very specific place and time, Taiping totalistic theocracy is not unlike that of such contemporary movements as ISIS in its millennial vision and eliminationist ideology. Though completely unrelated to the French Revolution, it bears a striking resemblance to its drive to remake society completely – as it does to Marxist revolutions and, indeed, China’s own twentieth-century revolution. In constituting and targeting groups such as the Manchus as Homo sacer, it resembles Nazi or Khmer Rouge programmes of extermination. Perhaps, then, a useful way of viewing the Taiping movement in this regard might be as Rania Huntington puts it: ‘The Rebellion seems to fall into the gap between two large systems of historical memory and imagination, the modern and the traditional.’32 In this respect, it resembles a Chinese monochrome brush and ink painting in which the minimal visual cues suggest, but never quite fully reveal, the force and character of the subject.

Bibliographic Note While present studies of the Taiping movement do not explicitly examine its genocidal character, all emphasise its vast number of casualties and immense destruction. The tendency to be even-handed in apportioning responsibility for this to both the Qing forces attempting to suppress the movement and the insurgents themselves has largely militated against seeing the movement in genocidal terms, as has the representation of it as progressive and revolutionary. Franz Michael and Chung-li Chang’s magisterial Taiping Rebellion reflects this rather balanced approach, and the accompanying documents are a valuable resource for study. The history of the era as interpreted by Chinese historians, especially in the People’s Republic, is ably treated in one of the only studies of modern Chinese historiography in English, Li 32 Huntington, ‘Chaos, memory, and genre’, 90.

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Huaiyin’s Reinventing Modern China. As a central event of China’s modern history, the Taiping era is subject to subtle reinterpretations of China’s Marxist ‘revolutionary narrative’ with its shifting emphases on ethnic enmity, class struggle, and feudalism versus modernity. Jen Yu-wen’s The Taiping Revolutionary Movement is the most explicit expression in English of nonMarxist, Taiping revolutionary nationalism as a lost chance for China’s modernisation. Taiping religion is treated in all of the works below, but is emphasised most directly in Rudolph Wagner’s Reenacting the Heavenly Vision and in Jonathan Spence’s God’s Chinese Son. Unlike many students of Taiping theology who stress the importance of pre-Confucian Chinese models, as well as Christianity, Wagner locates the prime influences squarely with Protestant evangelicalism, within which Hong and his inner circle constantly struggled to locate correspondences for Hong’s revelations. Spence, starting with theological disputes between Hong and his missionary colleagues, weaves a skilful, vividly imagined narrative of Hong’s inner world as a means to explore the movement. The human cost of the war, and the literature that most directly reflects the totalistic, exterminationist aspects of the Taipings, are found in the work of Bernhardt, Huntington, Meyer-Fong and Zhang. Bernhardt’s article, ‘Elite and peasant’, starkly illustrates the degree to which peasants as well as the scholar-gentry were victimised. Huntington, in ‘Chaos, memory, and genre’, and Meyer-Fong, in What Remains, examining the literature of remembrance in the initial post-Taiping era, detail a wealth of accounts of heroic loyalty to Confucian humanist ideals, and epic suffering and martyrdom at the hands of the Taiping. Meyer-Fong’s book draws on a considerable number of accounts (including Li Gui’s). Zhang’s World of a Tiny Insect, on the other hand, centres on the author’s own remembrances of being a young child during the war and struggling to come to terms thirty years later with his own survival and the suffering he witnessed.

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The Crime of the Congo A Question of Genocide in the Congo Free State, 1885–1908 dean pavlakis

Introduction Born in violence amidst fantasies of wealth and power, cloaked in pieties and ostensibly good intentions, the Congo Free State (1885–1908) grew into a monster of capitalist exploitation that generated a large-scale demographic disaster through murder, deprivation and other forms of depopulation. Genocide, as defined by the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, accurately describes the tragedy of the Congo Free State. Designating the Congo Free State as a genocide causes controversy among historians and politicians today, just as the charge of extermination was hotly contested at the time. By approaching this fraught question with an assessment of the personal, structural and contingent forces that generated a massive death toll and extensive violations of basic human rights, this chapter shows that the resulting extermination of peoples was indeed a genocide. The loss of life in the Congo Free State was the consequence of a heedless drive for profit through conquest and forced labour. The brainchild of Leopold II, king of the Belgians from 1865 to 1909, the Congo Free State’s purpose was to generate wealth for the king and his associates and to adorn Belgium with grand buildings. His Congo colony’s structure produced the ongoing suffering of the peoples of the Congo basin, and efforts to reform the system from within failed in the face of its inexorable logic. If one were searching for a similar system where financial incentives and institutional mechanics inevitably produced such widespread human suffering, the Atlantic slave trade would appear to be a close parallel. Although Leopold hoped that his enterprise would crush the slave trade in the Congo, the similarity was not lost on Leopold’s many contemporary critics.

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Setting the Stage: The Conditions that Created the Congo Free State Political, economic, administrative and personal concerns created the environment that enabled the Congo’s astonishing death toll from 1885–1908. A rapidly industrialising Europe created the motive, the opportunity, and the means for further globalisation and imperial expansion that facilitated the creation of the Congo Free State. The burgeoning appetite for tropical products to feed Europe’s factories and inhabitants brought attention to Africa and Asia. Industry produced new means of communication and transportation to reach faraway places, and the armaments to defend interests and conquer unindustrialised peoples. Even when Africans could win battles, their victories proved in almost all cases to be temporary. European military power and perfidy ensured the defeat of armed resistance everywhere in Africa, except Ethiopia.1 After the nineteenth century’s Long Depression began in 1873, the return of protectionism contributed to the development of the New Imperialism. During this period of falling prices and production challenges, all the world’s industrial powers, except Britain and the Netherlands, embraced protectionism.2 These restrictions made it difficult to obtain products from other empires’ colonies. This exclusivity incentivised empires to annex new colonies, if only to prevent other imperial powers from monopolising their products. Demand for rubber surged with the popularisation of John Dunlop’s pneumatic bicycle tyre in 1889. Rubber demand grew by millions of tons as bicycles found a mass market (the nascent automobile industry was as yet too small to have any real impact). From 1895 to 1905, worldwide rubber production doubled, with a sustained growth rate of over 7 per cent a year. With demand growing faster than supply, prices surged, peaking in 1910 and falling thereafter as rubber from Southeast Asian plantations flooded the world market.3 Unlike British-controlled Malaya and Ceylon, however, central Africa had no rubber plantations.4 In tropical Africa, latex came from 1 T. Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (New York: Random House, 1991). 2 S. Bali, ‘Comparisons between the long depression, the great depression and the global financial crisis’, International Journal of Management Economics and Business 8 (2012), 231, www.ijmeb.org/index.php/zkesbe/article/viewFile/322/248. 3 D. Pavlakis, British Humanitarianism and the Congo Reform Movement, 1896–1913 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 8–11. 4 H. Wolf and R. Wolf, Rubber (New York: Covici Friede, 1936), pp. 129–30, at pp.133–9.

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Landolphia vines, which were more difficult to tap than the Hevea trees that had made Brazil the world’s leading rubber producer through the entire nineteenth century. One persistent myth of the Congo Free State is that its administrators forced local people to work on rubber plantations. Because there were no working plantations, the reality was much worse, as the authorities drove workers into the jungle. Under pressure for quick production, they often killed the vines by cutting them into pieces instead of tapping them, infuriating the Free State’s government and commercial authorities into yet more violence. Advances in disease prevention and treatment had lowered the death rate among whites in the Congo to about 6 per cent a year by the 1880s. At this rate, about a sixth of Europeans in the Congo would die during a three-year stint. More white men (and women) were now willing to take their chances in search of adventure, employment or souls to save. The Congo Free State’s unusual trajectory was determined by its founder’s goals, capabilities and limitations. As a young prince, Leopold was fascinated with colonial matters, echoing his father’s hopes of improving Belgium’s international standing through overseas acquisitions. However, the territorial and financial scale of the prince’s colonial ambitions far exceeded his father’s. In fact, Leopold’s pursuit of empire helped to initiate the aptly named Scramble for Africa that took place between 1876 and 1912. His interest went beyond national prestige and market expansion. He studied the ways in which colonies could be profitable. The model he chose was the Dutch colony of Java. Although the island was the colonial possession of the government of the Netherlands, the Dutch king owned shares in monopoly companies that used forced labour and gave financial incentives to plantation supervisors to increase production. Colonial profits had developed Dutch railroads, showing that colonies run this way could generate surpluses for the metropole. That the Dutch had recently reformed their East Indies labour system was either unknown or uninteresting to Leopold. He aimed to obtain a fertile land with many people who could be forced to work, such as otherwise uncolonised parts of the Philippines, New Guinea, Tonkin or Borneo.5 Forced labour was his object well before his attention fixed on the Congo. When the government of Belgium would not co-operate in his colonial dreams, he resolved to implement the same system in a colony that he himself would control. 5 J. Marchal, L’état libre du Congo: Paradis perdu: l’histoire du Congo 1876–1900, vol. (Borgloon: Bellings, 1996), p. 44.

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The Belgian government’s refusal to make colonial acquisitions may not have been altogether unwelcome to the monarch. In 1869, the young king informed Belgium’s premier that he intended to pursue colonial ventures on his own in light of the government’s lack of interest.6 In the early 1870s, amid his inquiries and negotiations about colonial acquisitions, he toyed with the idea of having an independent colonial state under his personal rule in the Philippines, or his own private company to develop the islands under Spanish sovereignty.7 Either option would give him more control than his constitutional position as Belgian’s monarch allowed, and he was to pursue both strategies in the Congo. Through the nineteenth century, concern for the suffering of distant strangers was becoming increasingly common, at least rhetorically, providing Leopold with a tool to use in convincing Europe and America that he should be entrusted with the oversight of Indigenous people. His ostensible concern for redeeming and civilising Africans, joined with patronage of scientific and exploring missions, gave him a philanthropic reputation that contrasted sharply with his actual intentions.8 From 1876 to 1885, Leopold and his associates took every opportunity to create a claim to the Congo basin that other powers would recognise. At the Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–5, they achieved their goal; by the end of the conference, every state present had recognised Leopold’s wholly owned corporation, the International Association of the Congo (IAC), as a sovereign state, and permitted the organisation to accede to the conference’s final treaty. The new colony’s government structures were put into place, and the IAC changed its name to the Congo Free State that summer. Belgium’s disavowal of responsibility for the king’s colonial ambitions meant that the Belgian parliament and government would not provide any check to the king’s power or oversight for the new colony.9 In 1885, however, the Congo government controlled only a small part of the Congo: the lower Congo plus a few inland stations. Henry Stanley and Leopold’s other agents had collected hundreds of treaties with local rulers in 6 D. Lagergren, Mission and State in the Congo: A Study of the relations between Protestant missions and the Congo Independent State Authorities with Special reference to the Equator District, 1885–1903 (Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells), p. 26. 7 B. Emerson, Leopold II of the Belgians (London: Wiedenfield and Nicolson, 1979), pp. 2433, 58–62; A. Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Hedonism in Colonial Africa (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), pp. 36–8. 8 ‘Declaration’ of the International Association of the Congo, 15 December 1884, quoted in E. D. Morel, Red Rubber (New York: Haskell House, 1970, reprint of original 1906 ed.), p. 3; R. Slade, King Leopold’s Congo (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), pp. 39–40. 9 Slade, King Leopold’s Congo, pp. 37–43, 170–8.

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the early 1880s. These treaties helped to convince other governments to recognise the IAC, but they were of questionable value in asserting government control. Indeed, some treaties did not even mention sovereignty, and those that did were likely not well understood by the Indigenous leaders who signed them.10 To establish its claim under Berlin Conference rules and to begin economic exploitation, the Congo Free State needed to assert effective control over the lands it claimed, subduing those leaders who had refused to sign treaties, as well as leaders who were surprised to learn that their treaties made them subject to all the demands of the new state. In addition, the Congo army had to defeat the Arab-Swahili traders from East Africa who had established slaving states – some quite prosperous, and all with strong armies. The process was an education in warfare. Historian Jean-Luc Vellut concluded that the Congo Free State learned many of its violent practices from its opponents in these wars, such as terror tactics, ‘dirty war’ abuses and the abduction of women for ransom. What began with warfare would spill into economic coercion: the men who participated in the conquest went on to set up the rubber collection regime as agents of the state and of the concession companies. These men may have been totally unprepared for the responsibilities of civil administration, but their experience in the military and in the Arab wars gave them tools that would have devastating consequences.11 Conquering a territory the size of western Europe required a military, local allies and ruthlessness, as in most colonial ventures. The Congo state’s European-led army, the Force Publique, was largely African – initially mercenaries from British West Africa and Zanzibar. It also employed ‘liberated’ slaves before gradually replacing them with conscripts. Though the largest standing colonial army in sub-Saharan Africa, the Force Publique nonetheless needed co-operative allies to make its major campaigns work, and, as elsewhere in Africa, some tribes and states joined the colonisers to achieve ends of their own. Military operations were expensive, and Leopold’s Congo Free State ran short of funds, relying as it did primarily on meagre revenues, mostly from export duties. Leopold undertook three strategies to enhance his finances: getting international permission to levy import duties; conning the Belgian government into large loans; and designing a system of 10 C. Denuit-Somerhausen, ‘Les traités de Stanley et ses collaborateurs avec les chefs africains, 1880–1885’ in Le centenaire de l’etat indépendant du Congo, ed. J.-J. Symoens and J. Stengers (Brussels: Académie royale des sciences d’outre-mer, 1988), 77–146. 11 Jean-Luc Vellut, ‘La violence d’armée dans l’État Indépendant du Congo’, Cultures et développement 16 (1984), 680–1, 694.

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LULONGA ABIR EQUATEUR DISTRICT

Co ng o

It

SOCIÉTÉ ANVERSOISE

CONGO

Stanleyville

i ur

GRAND LACS

CROWN DOMAIN

Kas

Matadi-Leopoldville Railway

Kinshasa Leopoldville

Boma Banana

Matadi

LOMANI

ai

Nyangwe KUBA KINGDOM

KASAI C O M PA N Y Luluabourg

Lusambo

Kasongo

Crystal Mountains

K ATA N G A

N The rubber zone 0 0

100

200 mi

100 200 300 km

Map 24.1 Congo Free State, c.1906, showing the major concessions and Crown Domain. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

economic exploitation to generate revenues, based on the Dutch model.12 Dreams of profits had inspired the colony’s founding, but it was the desperation of imminent bankruptcy that brought about the rapid adoption, ‘without restraint and without control’, of the structures and practices generating the abuses and loss of life for which the Congo Free State became infamous.13 Once the system began generating sizeable profits, it was impossible to reform without jeopardising cash flow, and this the Congo government refused to do. 12 N. Ascherson, The King Incorporated, 2nd ed. (London: Granta, 1999), pp. 145–9. 13 C. Lemaire, Belgique et Congo (Ghent: Université de Gand, 1908), Lemaire Papers, MRAC VIII–59.

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Administrative weakness exacerbated the system’s lethal tendencies. Many African colonial governments ran on tight budgets with limited personnel, and the Congo Free State’s vast size and peculiar geography profoundly limited the state’s control. The bulk of the Congo Free State was cut off from the navigable lower Congo River by over thirty cataracts that crash through the Crystal Mountains for some 200 miles. On the narrow lower Congo territory, the river ran from Matadi, past the colonial capital, Boma, to the Atlantic port of Banana. Here, the Free State government functioned with accountable officials and a flawed but working justice system. Although the state breached the mountains first with a precarious road to Leopoldville and then with a narrow-gauge railroad, communication with the interior was limited. Beyond Leopoldville, government personnel were scarce. Justice was delivered intermittently, if at all, and any appeals had to be heard at Boma. As early as 1891, the governor general in Boma, Théophile Wahis, complained to the Congo Free State bureaucrats in Brussels about how Free State government agents disregarded rules and instructions.14 This problem was worse with the monopoly concession companies that held sway over much of the territory, where they exercised administrative and military powers in addition to economic privileges.15 However, both state agents and company functionaries, however poorly they followed the rules emanating from Brussels and Boma, responded energetically to financial incentives and relentless instructions to deliver ivory, a resin called copal, and, especially, rubber.16 Unlike other genocides, there was no scapegoating of the victims to resolve societal conflicts and no religious resentment. Authorities leveraged ethnic resentments on a limited scale to win allies, but seldom to eliminate entire groups. Race was not a driver of slaughter per se. Yet race made slaughter easier on the consciences of the perpetrators because the distance between white authorities and black subjects made othering easier, as shown in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Extermination in the Congo was driven by an insatiable desire for territory, and the economic system set up to cover the costs of colonisation and generate vast profits. The Industrial Revolution, the protectionism and rivalries of the Long Depression, booming rubber 14 T. Wahis to E. van Eetvelde, 16 July 1891, Van Eetvelde Papers, Reel 4073, Box 37, Archives Generales du Royaume (AGR), Brussels. 15 J. Stengers and J. Vansina, ‘King Leopold’s Congo, 1886–1908’ in The Cambridge History of Africa, vol. V I: From 1870 to 1905, ed. R. Oliver and G. N. Sanderson (Cambridge University Press, 1985), 339. 16 Morel, Red Rubber, pp. 30–9.

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demand, Leopold’s personal ambitions and limited financial capacity, the violence of the conquest, and the weakness of the Congo Free State government all converged to create a system that produced suffering and mass death as surely as it produced large profits.

Devastation in the Congo Free State: Major Events The murderous functioning of the Congo Free State had two fundamental aspects: war, and coercive economic demands. Warfare invariably kills, and the economic system’s large-scale destruction of human life was an incidental consequence that the agents of the state and the concession companies believed to be necessary to its functioning. War and exploitation were intertwined from the beginning because the economic impositions were so extreme that coercion was always required. Despite Governor Wahis’ statement in 1900 that the era of warfare was ending, the Congo Free State was in fact at war for its entire existence.17 The economic system, meanwhile, developed its full destructive potential in the 1890s. War and coercion meant that the death toll would mount for more than twenty years. The pace of system-generated killing slackened in the last few years of the Congo Free State, but it did not end until after Belgium took over in 1908 (called the reprise) and altered its structure between 1910 and 1912.18 Before the conquest, political units in the Congo basin ranged from chiefdoms with informal, traditional governance to more formally organised states. Small units of the Force Publique assisted state agents in punishing resistance from villages and small chiefdoms, as detailed in the diary of Charles Lemaire, the first district commissioner of the Equateur province, and in the memoirs of several military officers.19 We have only spotty records of the devastation this caused – sometimes local people submitted after intimidation or limited skirmishes, but at other times resistance meant the burning of villages and the deaths of some or most of the inhabitants. More challenging to the Force Publique were the new kingdoms controlled by Muslim Swahili-speaking rulers who had moved in not long before from East Africa, to obtain slaves and ivory through violence, trading them through a web of markets that led to the Indian Ocean coast and the island-sultanate 17 Wahis to van Eetvelde, 14 September 1900, Van Eetvelde Papers, Box 41. 18 Pavlakis, British Humanitarianism, pp. 234–46. 19 Lemaire’s 1891–3 diary is available digitally at the Centre Aequatoria website, www .aequatoria.be/04frans/030themes/0353vangroenweghe.htm (modified 11 September 2019).

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of Zanzibar. (Contemporaries called them ‘Arabs’ because of their religion and links to the Arab world.) These states, some quite prosperous, were well armed and inured to brutality. The most sophisticated of the slavers, Tippu Tip (Hamad bin Muhammad bin Juma bin Rajab el Murjebi), became the Congo State’s governor in the Stanley Falls area from 1887 to 1890, where he continued raiding and trading slaves for a few years before retiring to Zanzibar.20 His son and heir fought the Force Publique and lost in 1893. The Garenganze kingdom in the Katanga region became easier to annex once a Belgian officer had killed its ruler, Msiri. Still, annexation did not bring pacification, as Msiri’s subordinate chiefs fell to fighting among themselves. With the double mission of ending the slave trade and securing land and people to exploit, Leopold’s forces were able to defeat the Arab slaving states between 1891 and 1894, at a cost of perhaps 70,000 lives and the destruction of two large, well-organised cities, Kasongo and Nyangwe.21 The Force Publique burned Nyangwe to the ground to ensure that the survivors of the bloody conquest of the town were in no position to use it for ‘treachery’; the war had killed many thousands of Nyangwe’s estimated 30,000 inhabitants, and the remainder had fled into the bush, where many would find survival difficult. The Free State forces took Kasongo more quickly, so more people survived. Slaves remained in the town while the military, determined that the Swahili Arabs should be eliminated from Congo, harried them eastward.22 The destruction of the slaving kingdoms, as horrific as it was for the inhabitants, relieved neighbouring peoples from the threat of raids. Not all Congolese dreaded the coming of the Free State. On the other hand, the Free State left some non-Muslim slaving societies in place. For example, authorities found the Nsapu Nsapu (Zappo-Zap) slaving kingdom to be a convenient ally in the Kasai River basin, using them to force parts of the neighbouring Kuba kingdom to submit to state authority in 1899 and to provide rubber and other products. The Zappo-Zaps continued to engage in slave raiding and trading throughout the Free State period. Obtaining power and valuable commodities were more important to Free State policy-makers than stopping slavery. Were the wars of conquest genocidal? Calculating a total for the number killed during the initial conquest is impossible, because of spotty records and 20 H. Brode, Tippoo Tib: The Story of His Career in Central Africa, trans. H. Havelock (London: Edward Arnold, 1907), pp. 195–7, 216, https://archive.org/details/ cu31924028752644. 21 M. Massoz, Le Congo de Leopold II, 1878–1908 (Liège: Michel Massoz, 1989), p. 577. 22 S. Hinde, The Fall of the Congo Arabs (London: Methuen, 1897), pp. 171–86.

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their frequently vague assessments of deaths. The total killed, while possibly in excess of 100,000, represents a small portion of the population. Yet the killing that accompanied the defeat of the Arab kingdoms, particularly the destruction of the cities of Kasongo and Nyangwe, could be called a genocide. The Free State decided to eliminate the Swahili Arabs and countenanced massacre and forced expulsion to accomplish this goal. Wars continued after conquest. Villages and larger entities fought back when demands for rubber were first made, and then again as rubber ran out in their area and they faced unattainable quotas. When these rebellions occurred among larger groups, especially those better organised and armed or in more remote locations, they could last for years. Examples include the war against the Budja (1898–1905), the Zandé (1895–1904) and the Boa (1895– 1906). More dangerous for the Free State were the mutinies of Force Publique units’ which often lasted for years. Some of the largest occurred at Luluabourg (1895–6; the final defeat of roaming rebel bands occurred in 1908), in the northeast Ituri region (1897), Lusambo (1898) and in the capital, Boma, itself (1900).23 The government managed to defeat or contain these mutinies as it did with the other uprisings. Once the Congo Free State established control over an area, the state and its corporate partners made excessive demands on its new subjects. As in some other African colonies, government authorities and private company employees compelled men to become workers, soldiers and porters, while utilising women for sexual, domestic and labour services. The scale of these conscriptions and kidnappings as well as the methods used led to criticism that the Free State was built on slavery, even while Leopold’s forces eliminated the Swahili states that stood in its way. These practices prompted the first protest to reach a broad public in Europe and the United States. George Washington Williams, a US citizen of African descent, had broad experience as a soldier, lawyer, journalist, minister, politician and historian that gave him the combination of skills that enabled him to prepare and publicise a thorough and thoughtful critique of the Congo Free State during his visit there in 1890. Williams’ untimely death in 1891 left the international rhetorical field to the defenders of the Free State, ironically just as the system of economic exploitation was being built.24 The basis of this new system was the domain policy. Its origins were in a decree of 1 July 1885 that declared all unexploited lands to be the property or ‘domain’ of the Free State. The government began to limit trade in products from these lands 23 I. Ndaywel è Nziem, Histoire générale du Congo: de l’héritage ancien à la république démocratique (Paris: De Boeck et Larcier, 1998), pp. 299, 305. 24 J. H. Franklin, George Washington Williams (University of Chicago Press, 1985).

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in a decree of 17 October 1889. Leopold’s hitherto faithful backer, Auguste Beernaert, who was the premier of Belgium’s government, protested at the restraint of trade inherent in this policy, not least because it affected Belgian merchants. Yet Leopold forged ahead with a secret decree, dated 19 September 1891, instructing some District Commissioners to secure the ivory and rubber on the domain lands for the Free State alone. Officials informed the black inhabitants that they were now forbidden to collect ivory or rubber except to give to the government, and that private traders who attempted to trade with them would be prosecuted as receivers of stolen goods.25 Beginning in 1892, Free State authorities allocated some domain lands to private corporations as concessions, where they assumed the Free State’s privileges. The Congo Free State government typically owned half the shares in these private companies, collecting half the dividends paid by these firms. In 1896, land more than eight times the size of Belgium in the rubber zone was designated the Crown Domain. All profits after expenses from that region went directly to Leopold. Between the Crown Domain profits and the surplus funds of the Congo Free State government, Leopold collected substantial profits from his economic system, eventually totalling well over a billion dollars in today’s money, during the Free State period. As the profits swelled, Leopold lost interest in giving the Congo to Belgium.26 The unusual feature of the Congo Free State (and its French imitator just to the north) was the demand that inhabitants should meet their tax obligations by providing food, or by gathering the products of the land, especially rubber, for desultory payment, if any. These demands were often unreasonable. When the government, the army or concession companies stripped villages completely of provisions, often as punishment for failing to meet quotas or for resisting impositions, the villagers starved to death. Rubber production quotas were arbitrary and ever-increasing, regardless of the depletion of the vines and de jure limits on days of labour. With rising world prices and the Congo’s vast untapped rubber resources, rubber quickly became the Free State government’s focus and the cause of the worst abuses. Violence enabled the state to establish its authority and then continued as a standard method to enforce rubber-gathering. The mostly passionless prose of Charles Lemaire’s journal of 1891–3 describes how he established the Equateur district. He offered chiefs a negotiated submission, formalised through an exchange of blood with Lemaire himself and followed by tribute, 25 Slade, King Leopold’s Congo, pp. 176–8. 26 Emerson, Leopold II, pp. 233–6; Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 277.

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primarily in the form of men and animals. When this did not work or when chiefs violated their subservience by, for instance, refusing to turn over deserters, the response was war. Lemaire led seven major campaigns in two years, during which his military looted foodstuffs, destroyed villages and made war on the recalcitrant. Lemaire later wrote regretfully that he had taken the word of his elders that the Congo was a place of terror and that one needed to use force to overcome it.27 Lemaire received instructions to begin collecting rubber six months after his arrival, which led to new resistance and massacres. On 4 September, they burned the village of Ipeko to the ground for not fulfilling promises. In November, because the chief of the village of Oubangui would not surrender men accused of illegal trading, Lemaire had the village attacked and destroyed. The village of Ikoyo put up stronger resistance when Lemaire attempted to bring its people to heel in January 1892. Fighting there lasted some weeks before the village saved itself by surrendering, promising goats, men and rubber. On 7 July 1892, the Force Publique attacked the recalcitrant Bompopo villages, where they killed twenty villagers and seized thirteen women and children. Lemaire oversaw the expulsion of the Ngombe tribe for the crime of selling rubber to traders. Africans occasionally scored a victory against Europeans, which led to an overwhelming response. After the murder of a state agent and his assistant among the Mongo people, a reprisal raid killed thirty Mongo villagers. When this, in turn, roused some other villages to take up arms, the Force Publique without restraint attacked the other villages in the district, with two chiefs among the dead that Lemaire described as ‘numerous’. The vice governor general blamed Lemaire for the unending violence and recalled him.28 However, the viciousness of his successor as district commissioner, Victor Léon Fiévez, left local missionaries nostalgic for Lemaire – a feeling likely shared by the more submissive of the villages, which found themselves the target of increasingly random terror. Violence was ingrained in the system from the beginning, and the incentives and instructions for the gathering of rubber reinforced its application.29 27 D. Vangroenweghe, ‘Introduction’ to ‘Charles Lemaire à l’Équateur: son journal inédit. 1891–1895’, Annales Aequatoria 7 (1986), 7–10, www.aequatoria.be/04frans/030 themes/0353vangroenweghe.htm; see also, more generally, the criticisms of the vice governor general, Félix Fuchs, undated memo (1908?), Fuchs Papers, HA.01.038, no. 43, Musée royal d l’Afrique Centrale Archives, Tervuren. 28 D. Vangroenweghe, Du sang du lianes: Léopold II et son Congo (Brussels:, Didier Hatier, 1986), pp. 35–54. 29 Governor 1893–5, L. Lufungula, ‘Les gouverneurs de l’Équateur, 1885–1960’, Annales Aequatoria 7 (1986), 150; Vangroenweghe, Du sang du lianes, p. 67. Missionary Charles

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Until 1906, government agents received bonuses that could be substantial, based on how much rubber they delivered and how little they paid for it. Leopold himself designed the first version of this bonus system in August 1890, awarding officials as much as 10 per cent of the revenue if the rubber was obtained at a low cost, to be shared between the agent who collected the rubber from the village and the District Commissioner.30 Because the only way to make rubber was to gather and dry the sap of vines growing here and there in the jungle, they had to coerce men to leave their villages to tap the vines. The journeys to the rubber vines could lengthen to many days as the vines close to the villages became depleted. Shortfalls in production and any suspicion of substandard quality resulted in punishment at the discretion of the local European and subaltern African officials, which could range from beatings and looting to torture, villageburning, executions and mass murder. To improve compliance, the Congo Free State government urged stations to adopt the best practice of taking the women and children of the village hostage, to be redeemed when the men met their rubber quota. With their wives and children imprisoned, men did everything possible to meet their quotas. This policy could have fatal consequences. Women taken hostage could not tend to the subsistence crops, and men out in the forest collecting rubber could not clear new fields as old ones became less fertile. Death by starvation often resulted. The armed men working for the state and concession companies took the crops, animals and women at will. Women held hostage for days or weeks were subject to rape, murder and torture while their neglected garden plots failed. When villages refused, resisted or failed to meet their quotas, government and commercial agents used armed force to compel compliance or to destroy the recalcitrant community as an example. Violence could also be random, even when a community co-operated. The combination of power, isolation and fear tempted some men – white officials and African subalterns alike – into appalling forms of seemingly pointless sadism.31 These troubles come alive in the accounts of Africans, missionaries and activists. The most common image used as evidence of terror is of a young person missing a hand or a foot. Amputation is often erroneously described as a punishment, but this has little evidentiary basis. The most frequent cause of amputation was accounting for bullets. White officials worried that African troops would fire their guns for recreation or hunting, or would wound, Banks complained of Fiévez, ‘When M. Lemaire was Commissioner we never had such butcheries’, Morel F5/2, 6. 30 Lagergren, Mission and State, p. 83. 31 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 161–4.

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rather than kill, their targets. Many officers required that African soldiers provide a severed hand (often smoked for preservation) as proof that each bullet was used only to kill a person, an adaptation of the custom of some Congolese societies. Most severed hands were therefore cut from the dead. However, to account for a bullet that did not kill someone, a soldier would cut off a living person’s hand – often a child, who would be easier to catch. If the victim was fortunate enough not to bleed to death, he or she would become a living symbol of the practices of the Congo Free State. Mutilations provided evidence of abuse long after the event, fascinating people of good will at the time and today, but they were not the worst or most numerous of the crimes committed. When the men of a village fled into the forest to avoid getting orders to gather rubber, officials sometimes ordered the slaughter, starvation or even crucifixion of the women and children they could capture.32 One agent was known for lining up men and shooting them all with a single bullet through their temples. Agents, soldiers and the armed militiamen of the concession companies (called sentries or capitas) shot Congolese as punishment for production shortfalls, to encourage others, for sport, and as a result of misunderstandings. They forced people to eat excrement, to eat rubber, and to have sex with close family members. Torture often ended in murder. Sadism was particularly evident when it came to women. Witnesses reported that soldiers and sentries cut fetuses from the bodies of living women, killing them, and raped women with foreign objects. These examples are only an indication of the horrific experience of villagers living in the rubber zones and on the main transportation routes. Further details can be found in the primary and secondary sources.33 People resisted as best they could. With the disparity in weaponry, opposition often meant fleeing into the bush, out of the rubber zone, and out of the Congo Free State altogether. Women avoided pregnancy because it made flight so much more difficult. Congolese tried to negotiate with local agents, a tactic that sometimes worked and other times provoked the killing of chiefs, their families and/or their people. The oppressed people of the Free State 32 H. R. Fox Bourne, Civilisation in Congoland (Westminster: P. S. King, 1903), pp. 260–1; E. D. Morel, ‘History of the Société Anversoise du Commerce au Congo’, part 1, West African Mail (henceforth, WAM) Congo Issue (May 1904), 11ff. 33 E. D. Morel, King Leopold’s Rule in Africa (London: William Heinemann, 1904), pp. 242–52, https://archive.org/details/kingleopoldsrule00moreuoft; Congo Reform Association, Evidence Laid before the Congo Commission of Inquiry (Liverpool: J. Richardson and Sons, 1905), https://archive.org/details/evidencelaidbefo00congrich; Morel, Red Rubber, pp. 46–77.

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also tried to take advantage of the justice system, which required appeals to be heard at Boma or some other distant location. Witnesses often did not survive the trip, or the wait for the trial to begin. When Leopold formed a Committee of Inquiry in 1904 to reassure critics, Africans came to Committee sessions in the rubber region to testify. They also told any sympathetic white person, missionary or traveller, of the horrors they were undergoing. These reports helped to stir world opinion against Leopold. Activists in Switzerland, France, Belgium, the United States and especially Britain used this information to question the Congo Free State project. In response, Leopold and his minions made minor ameliorative efforts, but they also made it clear that their top priority was to increase production, a condition impossible to reconcile with any fundamental change in the system. Activism in Europe and the United States ultimately led to the surrender of the Congo to Belgium in 1908, and the subsequent reforms that made the Congo far less lethal for its inhabitants. The results were tragic, in terms of both social and individual trauma, as well as a staggering death toll. Reports from the employees of the government and the concession companies did not often document the number of people who died at their hands. The surviving reports that did give numbers indicated that these individuals had killed over 200,000 people. However, most murders went unreported. Monseigneur Prosper Augouard, the leader of Catholic missionaries in French Congo, said that 2 million people had met violent deaths in the Free State. Starvation and disease took many more lives.34 The leading anti-Free State activist, E. D. Morel, wrote that millions had died under the rule of the Congo Free State (1885–1908), and there is little reason to doubt this generalised assertion.35 Morel eventually settled on a reduction of about 7 million, a number which seems plausible based on the subsequent historical studies.36 The section below entitled ‘Long-Term Impact’ explores this question in more depth. Intentionality is a key element of any analysis of potential genocide. The stories of violence in the Congo coming from Africans, missionaries, travellers, state agents and concession company employees underscore multiple overlapping motives for violence. Sometimes agents measured out violence in proportion to the degree of resistance to control – a warfare model directed at villagers. However, most of the stories that emerged from the Congo were far more sensational. Were they indicative of what was considered normal, or 34 M. Massoz, Le Congo, 576. 35 E. D. Morel, letter to The Economist, 27 July 1912, 177. 36 E. D. Morel, Organ (August 1912), 850.

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did they highlight the most egregious examples? Considering that most of the violence in the Congo occurred away from prying eyes, we are compelled to conclude that these stories indicated what was normal – if Congo State agents were willing to commit crimes against humanity in view of missionaries or travellers, we cannot assume that acts in more remote locations were less transgressive. Whether directed at villagers or military units in rebellion, violence was sometimes portrayed as punitive – in that it was the appropriate punishment for something – and pedagogical – in that the murder of some people, innocent or guilty, would teach surrounding peoples to comply. However, both punitive and pedagogical violence, were, in fact, terrorism. The objective in both cases was to rule by inspiring fear through acts of violence undertaken at the whim of an officer, agent or subaltern without any formal adjudication, with or without cause, and often afflicting the innocent as well as those to any degree guilty. Under these circumstances, sadism of every description could be expressed in the process. The idea of economic exploitation based on extermination may seem selfdefeating because it kills its workers. While some agents were attentive to retaining enough of the population to continue to exploit, others seemed heedless. The Congo Free State paid little attention to the falling size of the workforce, perhaps because the population of the area was so large. Killing all the inhabitants of a village was a genocidal act, and targeting entire peoples was even more explicitly genocidal in intent. King Leopold and his top officials in Brussels and Boma were not happy about the reports of ongoing atrocities and would not have desired a genocide of the entire population. However, though Free State policy-makers took steps to moderate its effects, the system remained unchanged. Even when instructions came from the king’s offices in Brussels, demanding that Congolese be treated better, they included the caveat that revenue must always be increased.37 The logic of the system of rule and economic exploitation relentlessly tended towards atrocity and murder.

Primary Sources While most victims of the Congo genocide died without leaving records and most witnesses did not relay what they knew, information about the events 37 P.-L. Plasman, ‘Le gouvernement bicéphale de l’État Indépendant du Congo et le red rubber’ in L’Afrique belge aux XIXe et XXe siècles, ed. Patricia Van Schuylenbergh, Catherine Lanneau and Pierre-Luc Plasman (Brussels: P. I. E. – Peter Lang SA, 2014), 141, drawing on AGR, papiers de la famille Orts, Pierre Orts, Pos 6680, 389, ‘Souvenirs de ma carrière’.

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did come out, at the time and later. African testimony, despite being dismissed by many outsiders as unreliable, was crucial during the reform campaign. Information given to missionaries, to official investigations, to travellers and to courts by Africans was recorded and sent to Europe to be published. The books, pamphlets and periodicals put out by Morel, such as his 1906 book, Red Rubber, conveyed this information to a broader public and to interested government officials. Native Congolese testimony also appeared in official reports, such as the 1904 Casement Report with all individuals anonymised.38 Similarly, some of the evidence collected by Leopold’s Commission of Inquiry appears in its 1905 report, and the evidence it gathered rests in the Belgian archives (some of it published by Morel). Oral history and cultural practices bear witness as well, as documented by the historian and anthropologist Nancy Rose Hunt, and, more controversially, by David Van Reybrouck, a Belgian cultural historian and novelist. Missionaries and travellers also witnessed events themselves. These accounts found their way into missionary journals, Morel’s writings, newspapers and periodicals. We also have reports from Congo Free State officials, both government figures – such as Félix Fuchs, Théophile Wahis and Edmond Van Eetvelde – and military men – such as Charles Lemaire, Edgar Canisius and Edouard Tilkens. Lemaire’s journal from his time as district commissioner is unusual in documenting what some months of pacification and exploitation were like from an official perspective. Finally, there is the official correspondence that avoided the fiery fate of the official documents Leopold burned before handing the Congo over to Belgium.

Long-term Impact Summarising the impact of the Congo Free State is not a straightforward task. Estimating the death toll is fraught with controversy, describing the effects on survivors and their descendants is necessarily impressionistic, and tracing the later problems of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the excesses of the Free State years is more a matter of intuition than empiricism. Yet a cataclysmic event with a 23-year trajectory extending across hundreds of thousands of square miles and affecting millions of people was unlikely to have had limited or narrow impacts. 38 For the original, unredacted report, see S. Ó Síocháin and M. O’Sullivan, The Eyes of Another Race: Roger Casement’s Congo Report and 1903 Diary (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2004).

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Population reduction was the most obvious long-term impact. People were deliberately killed in war and in systematically violent exploitation. They died of wounds inflicted through fighting, punishment or torture. Villagers sent in search of rubber, fleeing from the demands of the state, or homeless because of reprisals died from accidents, attacks by wild beasts, exposure and starvation. The colonial transport system spread fatal diseases, particularly smallpox and sleeping sickness, accelerating a process already put in motion by Swahili-Arab slavers. The malnourishment that attended the Free State’s exactions increased mortality by reducing resistance. In some places, sleeping sickness took 80 per cent of the population.39 Sexually transmitted diseases both took lives and reduced fertility. Fertility also fell due to malnourishment, family disruption and women’s decisions to prevent pregnancy so that flight would be easier if necessary.40 Calculating mortality can be difficult in modern bureaucratic states. For the Congo Free State, such a task is impossible. The starting population is unknown. Estimates range from 11 to 50 million and come from observers who visited small proportions of the vast territory’s 900,000 square miles.41 The datapoint that has some basis in empirical observation is the 10.3 million population estimate for 1925, which itself is an after-the-fact adjustment to an ‘administrative census’ of under 8 million.42 Some observers at the time believed that the population had fallen by roughly a third to a half in the Free State period, an assessment supported more recently by historian Jan Vansina and demographer Leon de Saint Moulin.43 Hochschild combined the census information with the proportional loss to conclude that the population fell by 10 million people from all causes from 1880 to 1925.44 This estimate includes not only death by violence, but also indirect deaths from starvation and sleeping sickness, unrelated causes of death such as the First World War and the 1918–20 influenza pandemic, which occurred after the Free State period, and the fall in the birth rate due to hunger, disease, and familyplanning strategies.45 Because Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost reached such a wide audience, 21st-century commentators often use the 10 million number. A guidebook at Belgium’s Musée royal de l’Afrique Centrale disagreed, 39 L. de Saint Moulin, ‘What is known of the demographic history of Zaire since 1885?’ in Demography from Scanty Evidence: Central Africa in the Colonial Era, ed. Bruce Fetter (Boulder: L. Rienner Publishers, 1990), 303. 40 J.-L. Vellut, ‘Introduction’ in La mémoire du Congo: le temps colonial, ed. J.-L. Vellut (Tervuren: Grand Éditions Snoeck, 2005), 16. 41 Massoz, Le Congo, p. 575. 42 Saint Moulin, ‘What is known’, 303. 43 Ibid.; Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 233. 44 Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 233. 45 Vellut, ‘Introduction’, 16–17.

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claiming a decline of 20 per cent, or just under 3 million people, from 1875 to 1925/30.46 At the other extreme, a popular historian, Michel Massoz, posited a decline of 13 million by averaging several dozen other estimates.47 Some reports from missionaries, officials and other witnesses give specific numbers for the dead in individual events, but many more do not. It is reasonable to assume that no documents exist for most rubber-related killings. The records were either destroyed or not made in the first place. For some areas, we have depopulation estimates, but these reports cannot distinguish between the dead and refugees. The number who died because of official action could have ranged from some hundreds of thousands to close to 2 million. Deaths from privation or disease, likely much larger, are even less amenable to estimation, but could have ranged anywhere between 3 million and 8 million, including the impact of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. These vague estimates imply a total of between 3.4 and 10 million lives lost. Dealing with the after-effects could not have been easy for survivors: those who suffered rape, torture and mutilation; those who had seen family members and friends killed as punishment or at random; and those who fled to the bush after their villages were destroyed. We have only a glimmer of their suffering from the testimony given to missionaries or to the Congo Commission of Inquiry, from Alice Harris’ photograph of an anguished father and furious friends, from the research of Nancy Rose Hunt in A Nervous State (2016), and from Roger Anstey’s interviews in ‘The Congo rubber atrocities’ (1971). Otherwise, we have little specific information about the post-traumatic stress impacts in the short and long terms on individuals and society. However, the title of Hochschild’s book, King Leopold’s Ghost, argues that the Congo Free State warped not only the Belgian Congo but also the post-independence Congo. It raises, but does not answer, the question about how the habits of economic exploitation, violence and unaccountability lasted through the Belgian colonial period of 1908–60 and into the Mobutu and Kabila family kleptocracies of 1965–2019. The situations have parallels, but the chain of causality is difficult to discern. Matthew Stanard’s study of Belgian imperial propaganda shows that there was much at stake for the colonial enterprise after annexation.48 Rather than 46 Musée royal de l’Afrique Centrale, ‘Selection of Exhibition Texts: Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era’, prepared under the direction of Jean-Luc Vellut (Tervuren: Musée royal de l’Afrique Centrale, 2005). 47 Massoz, Le Congo, pp. 575–6; Musée royal de l’Afrique Centrale, Selection of Exhibition Texts, p. 303. 48 Matthew Stanard, Selling the Congo: A History of European Pro-Empire Propaganda and the Making of Belgian Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012).

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portraying themselves as the saviours of a brutalised Congo, Belgian officials believed they were fulfilling Leopold’s vision and heroic empire-building. Propaganda conveyed the idea that colonial rule was good for both the Congo and Belgium. The process secured Belgian rule and reinforced Belgium’s national consciousness despite its religious and language divisions. This suited the needs of the government officials who had inherited the Congo. The choices they made in the years between the reprise and World War One set the groundwork for an official and popular silence, a silence that became ignorance for subsequent generations, publicly broken – to the Belgian people’s shock – only in the wake of King Leopold’s Ghost. Subsequent debates about the Congo Free State have opened the door to a partial reckoning with the colonial past and contributed to new scholarship on Leopold and his genocidal fiefdom.

Bibliographic Note Secondary sources about the Congo Free State began to appear as early as 1916, with relevant books and articles appearing from time to time in English. Much important work is available only in French and Dutch, such as the writings of Belgian historians Jean Stengers, Daniel Vangroenweghe and Jules Marchal. Of these three, Stengers is the only one who also wrote in English. For those interested in focusing on Leopold’s role in the creation and operation of his murderous Congo Free State, Neal Ascherson documented Leopold’s actions as an investor, businessman and autocrat in The King Incorporated, while Barbara Emerson’s biography, Leopold II, King of the Belgians, shed light on his motivations, decisions and responses to outside pressure. Popular historian Thomas Pakenham’s 1991 The Scramble for Africa placed the Congo Free State in the context of the Age of the New Imperialism. The most prominent popular work in English describing the life and death of the Congo Free State is Adam Hochschild’s 1998 best-selling King Leopold’s Ghost. A spate of new work followed in English, French and Dutch. Historian Robert Burroughs, who had earlier examined how Casement and the missionaries gathered and presented evidence, has recently published African Testimony in the Movement for Congo Reform (London: Routledge, 2019), which recovered the voices of Congolese men and women as witnesses to the atrocities. For readers interested in the reform movement, Pavlakis’ British Humanitarianism provides a one-volume analysis of the movement and its most active component, the Congo Reform Association. 604

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Among scholars, debates about the unusualness and brutality of the Congo Free State are long over. Historians have validated the arguments of those who opposed the regime. In stripping the veil from the system, activists portrayed the Congo Free State as uniquely pernicious in a world of many imperial evils. One theme they invoked was extermination – or, as we would say, genocide. Reformers calling the Congo Free State a place of extermination met with strong opposition at the time from Congo apologists, who wrote books, pamphlets and articles purporting to refute the charge that the Congo Free State was exterminating its people. There are scholars today, particularly in Belgium, who have reacted strongly to the description of Leopold as the mastermind of extermination or the Congo as a place where something akin to genocide took place. Despite the careful wording of most historians today, 21st-century journalism and more casual postings on the Internet often condemn the Congo Free State as genocidal. The origins of this recent characterisation seem to be Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost. Hochschild set off a controversy by stating that the Congo Free State had ‘indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions’ (p. 4). One of the field’s most prominent historians, Jean Stengers, whose own works frankly address Congo Free State violence, complained of Hochschild’s summation in an interview: ‘At the time it happened, the most virulent critics never went so far as to evoke a holocaust, or its equivalent’ ( J. Stengers, ‘Entre le coup de poing et la caricature’, Le Soir, 13 October 1998, reproduced in La memoire du Congo: le temps colonial, ed. J.-L. Vellut (Tervuren: Editions Snoeck, 2005), p. 47). Despite his erudition, Stengers was mistaken. While activists clamouring for a change in the Congo system had used reports of many kinds of atrocities, they also included exterminationist rhetoric in their arguments, based on the reports of their informants, and perpetrators’ statements. The reformers, in fact, used the word ‘holocaust’, which was in common use, though not strictly tied to genocide. ‘Holocaust’ had long outgrown its biblical meaning of a ritual sacrifice to God during which an animal is killed and its body consumed by fire. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, ‘holocaust’ conveyed death or destruction by burning or other methods. See, for example, ‘A Yangtze holocaust’, The English Illustrated Magazine (January 1899), 377–82; ‘The holocaust at Colney Hatch’, Westminster Review 159 (April 1903), 383–93; ‘A Sati holocaust’, Calcutta Review 110 (January 1900), 80–2; ‘Grouse shooting’, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News 77 (24 August 1912), 1209; ‘Automobile Topics’, Bystander 19 (30 September 1908), 722, 724. It is not surprising that Congo reformers invoked the word. Casement, Morel 605

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and others used phrases such as ‘a holocaust of human victims’ – see E. D. Morel, Official Organ of the Congo Reform Association (August 1912), 746, 850; African Mail 5 (26 July 1912), 421; Ward to Morel, quoting Casement, 25 August 1903, Morel Papers, London School of Economics, F8/143 13. Their usage conveyed direct or indirect extermination. For example, discussing his charge that perhaps 7 million people had died, Morel wrote, What a holocaust; through massacre, privation, pulmonary diseases brought about by long exposure in the rubber forests, lack of nourishment owing to inability to sow and reap the crops as a result of incessant demands for rubber through compulsory migration, porterage, and military service; through the wholesale carrying off into captivity of women through sheer unmitigated physical and moral misery. (Morel, Organ (August 1912), 850)

Hochschild, like historian Michel Massoz in Le Congo (p. 576), explicitly used the term to remind readers of the Jewish Holocaust, opening the question of genocide. The usual term for genocidal activities at the time was ‘extermination’. This conforms to the legal understanding of extermination as a crime against humanity similar to genocide, but not necessarily targeting a specific ethnic or religious group as such. Extermination also comes under this volume’s coverage. Applying social Darwinism to competition among races and nations, imperialists often saw extinction as the natural result of the survival of the fittest. One prominent British Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Dilke, observed generally in 1872 in Greater Britain (London: Macmillan, 1972, p. 88) that ‘the gradual extinction of inferior races is not only a law of nature, but a blessing to mankind’. This was a common sentiment among whites in the British Empire and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as scholar of literature studies Patrick Brantlinger has shown in Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). However, Dilke became a leading parliamentary spokesman against the Congo Free State. He saw extermination there as the result of choices made by the authorities, rather than as a natural process. See D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 115. There are numerous references to extermination in Morel’s publications, in missionary reports, in the Belgian Chamber of Deputies, and in the comments by other observers – including the perpetrators. For examples in the Belgian Chamber, see E. D. Morel, ‘Forward’, in Verbatim Report of the Five Days Congo Debate in the Belgian House of Representatives (Liverpool: John Richardson, 1906), 35, 40, 112, 165. Morel reprinted a Congo mid-level official’s threat: ‘Inform the

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natives that if they cut another single vine [instead of tapping it], I will exterminate them to the last man’ (from a speech by Georges Lorand in the Belgian Chamber of Deputies, in ‘A regenerating circular’, WAM (16 March 1906), 1218–20) – see Morel ‘Forward’, 8. The Italian government’s official investigator, Captain Edouardo Baccari, reported on ‘extermination’ in the Kivu and Ruzizi regions (L. Ranieri, Les relations entre l’État Indépendant du Congo et l’Italie (Brussels: Académie royale des sciences coloniales, 1959), pp. 172–84). In Red Rubber (2nd ed. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), pp. 150, 157), Morel criticised the ‘partial extermination of the people of the Congo’. He told the British Foreign Office that abusive porterage was ‘threatening not only the “partial destruction” but the utter extermination of these people’. Elsewhere – in the pamphlets ‘Red rubber’ ((Liverpool: John Richardson, 1905), F13/1/4/10, 18) and ‘The Congo tragedy’ (Liverpool: John Richardson, 1906), F13/1/4/04, 3 – Morel described the ‘extermination’ of whole tribes. An appeal from fifty-two missionaries was a call to ‘save the Congo races from extermination’, indicating that he extended the scope of genocide to the entire Congo Free State –see Morel, ‘Introduction’ in Will Civilisation Harken? (Liverpool: John Richardson, 1906), F13/1/3/4, 2. Félicien Cattier, a Belgian professor and reform advocate, agreed with Morel that ‘extermination’ was the inevitable product of the Congo system (see Morel, untitled pamphlet, F13/1/3/6, 4). As Morel summarised in ‘Forward’ (p. 8), ‘the Congo natives are disappearing wherever the State-constructors make their influence felt. They are disappearing by slaughter, oppression, privation, misery, impoverishment, disease.’ Historians have avoided using the term genocide to describe the Congo Free State. Adam Hochschild (King Leopold’s Ghost, p. 225) called the killing ‘of genocidal proportions’, but argued ‘it was not, strictly speaking a genocide’. Despite his careful wording, some historians of the Congo Free State nonetheless took him to task for invoking genocide. Historians’ immediate reactions were hostile. Barbara Emerson, Leopold’s biographer, called Hochschild’s book ‘a very shoddy piece of work’, because of its invocation of genocide, adding, ‘Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control’ – a description consistent with Hochschild’s (Guardian, 12 May 1999, www .theguardian.com/theguardian/1999/may/13/features11.g22?CMP=share_btn_ link). Several Belgian historians have more recently made a version of this argument, contending that Leopold did not want the slaughter and gave instructions to end the atrocities, but that they were ignored because of the weak control he had over the men who carried out the killings. See, for 607

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example, P.-L. Plasman, Léopold II, potentat congolais (Brussels: Éditions Racine, 2017); M. Dumoulin, Léopold II, un roi génocidaire? (Brussels: Academie royale de Belgique, 2005); Vincent Dujardin, Valérie Rousoux and Tanguy de Wilde, eds., Léopold II: entre génie et gêne (Brussels: Éditions Racine, 2009). Jean Stengers similarly claimed, in ‘Entre le coup de poing’, that victims were not deliberately exterminated, discounting the rhetoric he must have seen in his research. More recently, Jean-Luc Vellut complained that Hochschild’s allusion to genocide encouraged less careful commentators to ascribe genocide and holocaust to the Congo Free State, often stating the number murdered was equal to or greater than Hochschild’s high estimates of deaths from all causes. Using the more restrictive definition of genocide that requires a targeting of groups of people for reasons having to do with their nationality, race, or religion, historians agree with Hochschild that the loss of life in the Congo Free State was not technically a genocide according to the UN Genocide Convention. However, using the broader definition put forward in this volume, the popular writers and internet bloggers are correct to call it a genocide, because it did qualify as extermination, then and now.

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The historiography of the violence inflicted upon the Armenians in the late Ottoman period tends to concentrate on the Armenian genocide of 1915–23. The academic literature on the two major phases of mass violence preceding that genocide, namely the Hamidian massacres (1894–6) and the Adana massacres of 1909, remains in its infancy. Most historians have embraced a continuity approach, which sees the Armenian genocide as the culmination of the two previous phases of massacres. Only a handful have argued that these earlier episodes of mass violence should be analysed and assessed as separate historical events, positioning them in their respective historical contexts.1 Pursuing the latter approach, this chapter analyses the Hamidian and Adana massacres on their own terms. Both had catastrophic impact on the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire. The death toll in the 1894–6 Hamidian massacres is generally estimated at 100,000–200,000, and it elicited, from American missionaries on the spot, the first modern use of the term ‘holocaust’.2 The mass violence at Adana in 1909 is estimated to have killed another 20,000 Armenians. In a legal sense, given the top-down direction and deliberate organisation of this twofold series of massacres, the concept of ‘extermination’, a crime against humanity, seems most appropriate. Before discussing these two cases, I would also like to examine the term ‘massacre’ because, in both cases of the mass violence inflicted upon Armenians and other Christians, the Ottoman state as well as Turkish revisionist historiography have employed what Edip Gölbas¸ı has called 1 For the continuity approach, see Vahakn N. Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide: Ethnic Conflict from the Balkans to Anatolia to the Caucasus (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004). Dadrian refers to the Adana massacres as a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Armenian genocide. See Vahakn N. Dadrian, ‘The circumstances surrounding the 1909 Adana holocaust’, Armenian Review 41:4 (Winter 1988), 1–16. 2 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (London: Verso, 2003), p. 186, n. 1.

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‘Ottoman linguistic camouflage’ – in other words, referring to these massacres as ‘riots’, ‘events’, ‘revolts’ and ‘uprisings’, and so denying them the category of massacres, let alone extermination.3 By doing so, they shift the blame for the violence on to the victims. Both the Ottoman and Turkish states have used what has been called ‘the provocation thesis’ in an attempt to justify the violence of the Ottoman state. They argue that the decision to attack the Armenians was a result of Armenian provocation.4 I shall show that this was not the case. Having said that, it is important to keep in mind that the Armenians were not passive objects who lacked any agency; on the contrary, they were active subjects in their own history, a fact usually sidelined in the Armenian genocide historiography. According to historian Mark Levene, a massacre occurs when ‘a group of animals or people lacking in self-defence, at least at that given moment, are killed, usually by another group who have the physical means, the power, with which to undertake the killing without physical danger to themselves. A massacre is unquestionably a one-sided affair and those slaughtered are usually thus perceived of as victims; even as innocents.’5 Despite the fact that there was some resistance from the victim group, the two phases of the mass violence examined in this chapter clearly fall into the category of political massacres. Political bodies are not only confined to a state and its agencies but may include non-state actors such as mobs, posses, factions, parties, paramilitary groups and communal groups. It is important here to distinguish between massacres and genocide. While the latter aims at exterminating a communal group from a social structure, the former seeks to change behaviour of the targeted group through intimidation.6 In addition, while genocides may consist of one or several massacres, massacres are not synonymous with genocide.7 3 See Edip Gölbas¸ı, ‘The official conceptualization of the anti-Armenian riots of 1895– 1897’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), 33–62. 4 The provocation thesis has been debunked by Robert Melson, who sees provocation by Armenian revolutionary groups as ‘merely one aspect of a more generalized threat that the government imputed to its Armenian population’. Melson also argued that the thesis falls short of ‘being a credible explanation for the massacres because it neither convincingly demonstrates that the revolutionary parties were a serious threat nor does it address itself to the question of why they were seen as a threat’. See Robert Melson, ‘A theoretical inquiry into the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 24:3 (July 1982), 486, 494. 5 Mark Levene and Penny Roberts, eds., The Massacre in History (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), p. 5. 6 Melson, ‘A theoretical inquiry into the Armenian massacres of 1894–1896’, 484. 7 Jacques Semelin, ‘In consideration of massacres’, Journal of Genocide Research 3:3 (2001), 379.

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According to Robert Melson, there are four types of political massacres: (1) massacres perpetrated by the state against domestic communal groups; (2) massacres perpetrated by the state against foreign communal groups; (3) massacres perpetrated by non-state actors against domestic communal groups; and (4) massacres perpetrated by non-state actors against foreign communal groups. What interests us here is the first category. As we are going to see in both phases of the anti-Armenian violence, massacres were perpetrated by central and local government against the Indigenous communal group. It is important to mention here that the aim of a massacre is not to eliminate a communal group from society but to reinstate the status quo, which has been challenged by the victimised group. It is also worthy to note here that the act of massacre is not a manifestation of power by the perpetrator group; on the contrary, it is an expression of weakness which obliges the perpetrator to resort to massacre. This is true in both these cases of massacres. Whatever the political aims of these massacres, it is worth pointing out that the motives behind them are not relevant to the legal concept of extermination – that is, conduct that ‘constituted, or took place as part of, a mass killing of members of a civilian population’ and was ‘committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population’.8 Extermination is a broader crime against humanity which includes massacres, as well as ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life . . . calculated to bring about the destruction of part of a population’.9 In the case of extermination, although the motive is not relevant, the intentionality of the crime is: the terms ‘widespread or systematic’, ‘intentional’ and ‘calculated’ make that clear. The legal definition of extermination and this description of its conduct fit the historical facts of what happened to Armenians in 1894–6 and 1909.

Roots of Mass Violence The origins of the hostility towards Armenians in the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be attributed to a single cause. A combination of 8 Official Records of the Assembly of States Parties to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, First Session, New York, 3–10 September 2002 (United Nations publication, Sales No. E.03.V.2 and corrigendum), part II.B; Article 7 (1)(b) Crime against humanity of extermination, www.icc-cpi.int/NR/rdonlyres/336923D8A6AD-40EC-AD7B-45BF9DE73D56/0/ElementsOfCrimesEng.pdf. 9 www.un.org/law/icc/index.html.

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factors led to the brutal violence which was unleashed on the Armenians of Anatolia. In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire initiated a series of reforms under the rubric of defensive developmentism. The aim of these reforms was to strengthen the political and military capabilities of the empire in order to put a halt to what was seen elsewhere as its ‘inevitable’ decline. Although these reforms proved counterproductive, leading to the empire’s fall into the clutches of western semi-colonialism, some of the ethno-religious groups of the Empire, such as the Armenians, benefitted from them. For example, the Gülhane Decree of 1839 gave non-Muslims a legal status equal to Muslims, the aim of which was to gain the loyalty of the traditionally autonomous non-Muslim communities to the state. The Hatti Humayun Decree of 1856 led to the promulgation of the Armenian National Constitution in 1863, and the establishment of the Armenian National Assembly (ANA). The ANA became the official body through which the affairs of the Armenian community were conducted in the capital, and to a lesser extent in the provinces. In tandem with these developments, the condition of the Armenians in the eastern provinces of the empire began to deteriorate as a result of a series of factors, some of which were the direct outcome of these reforms: centralisation policies of the Ottoman state in Anatolia through pacification of the tribes; administrative reforms; economic development of the Armenians which created envy among the Muslim population; resistance to the idea of equality between Muslims and nonMuslims; an influx of Muslim refugees from recently lost Ottoman territories in the Caucasus and the Balkans; land disputes and commodification of land; double taxation;10 changes in the equilibrium of power that had preserved the region of Anatolia for centuries; and the emergence of new political actors on the scene. All of these factors exacerbated the political plight of the Armenians of the eastern provinces. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Armenian leadership in the capital embraced the cause of the Armenians of the eastern provinces and raised it at the national level, and, when that failed, it resorted to attempted mobilisation of the international powers. Beginning in 1872, the Armenian Patriarchate sent reports to the Ottoman royal government (known as the Sublime Porte) in which it highlighted that many of the groups involved in oppressing the Armenian peasantry in the eastern provinces were composed of Muslim refugees who had been settled 10 In addition to paying taxes to the state, Armenians in the Anatolian provinces traditionally paid protection taxes imposed by the Kurdish aghas.

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in areas populated by Armenians, Kurdish Beys, and Avs¸ar tribes, among others. These attempts by the Armenian leadership to alleviate the suffering of their brothers in the east were futile. The Porte was reluctant to take serious measures. Yet some hope arose with the emergence of a constitutional movement within the empire. In 1876–8, the Ottoman Empire witnessed its first constitutional era. This short-lived constitutional period offered Armenians some hope of improving their condition under the Ottomans. However, the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, which led to a disastrous defeat of the Ottoman troops, put an end to this dream. It would take three decades for a reinstitution of the constitution. Sultan Abdülhamid II prorogued the constitution, suspended the parliament, and instituted an authoritarian regime that would last until the Young Turk Revolution of 1908. The Treaty of San Stefano, signed on 3 March 1878, ended the RussoTurkish War. Armenian hopes rose during this period, as Article 16 of the treaty stipulated that the Russian forces occupying the Armenian-populated provinces in the eastern Ottoman Empire would withdraw only with full implementation of reforms. Article 16 read: As the evacuation of the Russian troops of the territory they occupy in Armenia, and which is to be restored to Turkey, might give rise to conflicts and complications detrimental to the maintenance of good relations between the two countries, the Sublime Porte engages to carry into effect, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by the Armenians and to guarantee their security from Kurds and Circassians.11

However, as a result of Great Britain’s objections to the terms of this treaty, the Russians were forced to sign a new one, the Treaty of Berlin, on 13 July 1878. Article 16 was altered to Article 61, which also stipulated the removal of all Russian forces from the region and did not include an effective enforcement mechanism for the reforms. Article 61 read: ‘The Sublime Porte undertakes to carry out, without further delay, the improvements and reforms demanded by local requirements in the provinces inhabited by Armenians, and to guarantee their security against the Circassians and Kurds. It will periodically make known the steps taken to this effect to the powers, who will superintend their application.’12 Efforts by the Armenian 11 Gustave Rolin-Jaequemyns, Armenia, the Armenians, and the Treaties (London, Manchester: John Heywood, 1891), p. 34. 12 Jacob Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record 1535–1956, vol. I (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1956), p. 190.

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leadership to amend it proved futile. After the Treaty of Berlin, the ‘Armenian Question’ became internationalised. However, the condition of the Armenians did not improve, even with the stipulations of the Treaty’s Article 61. On the contrary, depredations by Kurdish and Circassian tribesmen multiplied in the eastern provinces.13 Thus, between 1878 and 1880, there was a major ideological shift within the Armenian communities of Anatolia. Only after 1880 did the revolutionary movement emerge in the provinces.14 By then, the nationalist uprisings of Balkan groups, beginning with the Serbian revolt of 1804 and culminating belatedly in the Bulgarian revolt of 1875, had had a tremendous impact on the Armenians living in Anatolia. Armenian revolutionaries, mostly from the Caucasus, who constituted only a small fraction of all Armenians, now believed that only by means of arms could they protect the rights of the Armenians in the provinces and resist the depredations. While many minor groups existed, the most prominent were the Armenakans, the Hnchaks and the Dashnaks. The Armenakan society was founded in Van in 1885 by Mkrtich Portoukalian. The platform of this party called for Armenian selfdetermination to be attained through organisation, propaganda and military training.15 The second most important party was the Hnchakian Revolutionary Party, founded in Geneva in 1887. The Hnchaks regarded European intervention as an important component in the emancipation process. The third party was the Dashnak party (Armenian Revolutionary Federation: ARF), founded in Tiflis in 1890. Its goal was the economic and political freedom of Western Armenia. The means to reach these goals were through raising revolutionary consciousness among the peasantry, training Armenians for self-defence, and organising armed units. While the Hnchaks used the tactic of mass demonstration, the Dashnaks relied on terrorist actions against individuals, following the model of the Russian Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) group. And while the Dashnaks believed in the autonomy of Western Armenia within the framework of the Ottoman Empire, the Hnchaks sought complete separation from the empire. These revolutionary 13 Richard G. Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914’ in Richard G. Hovanissian, ed., The Armenian People from Ancient to Modern Times, vol. I I (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 212. 14 On the social groups and nationalism in the Balkans, see Dimitrije Djordjevic, Révolutions nationales des peuples balkaniques, 1804–1914 (Belgrade: Istorijski Institut, 1965), p. 31. On the emergence of the Armenian revolutionary groups, see Louis Nalbandian, The Armenian Revolutionary Movement: The Development of Armenian Political Parties through the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963). 15 Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914’, 213.

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groups would become the most important pretext for the Ottoman regime to pursue punitive measures through collective punishment of the Armenians in the eastern provinces. When Sultan Abdülhamid II felt betrayed by the Christians of the Balkans, he resorted to pan-Islamism. Thus, the state used Islam as a mobilising force for solidarity, and for demographic reasons Muslim immigrants from the Balkans and the Caucasus were resettled in Asia Minor, particularly in Armenianpopulated areas. The resettlement of refugees in these areas played an important role in escalating Armeno-Turkish tensions. Furthermore, in 1891, the sultan created the irregular Hamidiye regiments, primarily from among the Kurds, supposedly to combat the Russians and to patrol the frontier, much like Russian Cossacks, but in reality aimed at keeping the Armenians at bay.16 These regiments were to play a dominant role in the 1894–6 massacres. Thus, any Armenian resistance to the depredation of these irregular forces was regarded as insubordination against the Ottoman state. At the same time, the oppression of the Armenian peasantry and expropriation of its property increased dramatically.17 As one scholar demonstrates, the properties confiscated during the Hamidian period were allocated to Muslim refugees from Crimea, the Caucasus and the Balkans. The sedentarisation of Kurdish tribes and their subsequent need for land was another reason for the expropriation of Armenian-owned land.18 In general, after the 1878 Treaty of Berlin, altering the demographic character of the eastern provinces by dispossessing Armenians became an important aspect of Abdülhamid’s centralisation and homogenisation policy.19 Thus, the last decade of the nineteenth century was characterised by minor revolutionary activities, punitive measures by the state against the Armenians in the eastern provinces, and futile European pressure on the sultan for reform.

The Sasun Massacres The Armenian revolutionary groups resorted to a variety of tactics, such as mass demonstrations and individual assassinations, in order to bring European attention to the plight of Armenians and put an end to the depredations and injustices 16 Janet Klein, The Margins of Empire: Kurdish Militias in the Ottoman Tribal Zone (Stanford University Press, 2011). 17 Stephan H. Astourian, ‘The silence of the land’ in A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny, Fatma Müge Göçek and Norman M. Naimar (Oxford University Press, 2011), 57, 62. 18 See Mehmet Polatel, ‘Armenians and the land question in the Ottoman Empire, 1870– 1914’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Boğ aziçi University, 2017). 19 Astourian, ‘The silence of the land’, 65.

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they suffered. For example, on 27 July 1890, the Hnchaks organised a mass demonstration in the Kump Kapu district of Istanbul, interrupted the Divine Liturgy at the Armenian Cathedral by reading their manifesto, and forced the patriarch to join the procession to the Yıldız Palace to present their grievances to the sultan and demand the implementation of the reforms required by Article 61 of the Berlin Treaty. On their way, the demonstrators were stopped by police and skirmishes took place, resulting in death on both sides. The first armed resistance against the Ottoman state came from Sasun, a mountainous region in the province of Bitlis. Unable to endure double taxation by the Ottoman state and the Kurdish lords of the region, and depredations by Kurdish Beys and government officials, the Armenians of Sasun, backed by a few Hnchak leaders, took up arms to defend themselves.20 Things became worse in the summer of 1894, when Kurdish tribes and government tax collectors appeared in the region in order to extract taxes.21 When they met with strong opposition from the Armenians of Sasun, they complained to the governor of Bitlis, who sent a military expedition to crush the ‘Armenian revolt’.22 Despite a brief standoff by the Armenians of Sasun, the Ottoman troops – mostly from the Fourth Army Corps under the command of Zeki Pas¸a, stationed in Erzincan, and in tandem with the Kurdish irregulars – brutalised the Armenian villages, killing, looting, raping and torturing their vulnerable populations.23 Historians estimate as many as 3,000 Armenians were massacred.24 When the news spread about these massacres, the British demanded to investigate them, but were 20 The two prominent Hnchak revolutionary leaders who encouraged the villagers to rise against the system by refusing to pay taxes were Hampartsum Boyadjian (Mourad) and Mihran Damadian. 21 Great Britain, Foreign Office, Blue Book: Turkey. 1895, No. 1 (Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey), Part I (Events at Sassoon and the Commission of Enquiry at Mush). (London: Harrison and Sons, 1895) (Great Britain, House of Commons, Sessional Papers, vol. 109, 1895, pp. 70–1). 22 Ibid., p. 70. See also Christopher J. Walker, Armenia: The Survival of a Nation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 121–76. See also Owen Miller, ‘Sasun 1894: mountains, missionaries and massacres at the end of the Ottoman Empire’ (unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2015); and Ronald Grigor Suny, guest ed., ‘The Sassoun massacres’, Armenian Review 47 (Summer 2001), Nos. 1–2. 23 For an eyewitness account of the massacres of Sasun, see Anonymous, La vérité sur les massacres d’Arménie, 1896 (Paris: Stock, 1896), pp. 23–7. On the Fourth Army units employed against the Armenians, see Vahakn Dadrian, ‘1894 Sassoun massacres: a juncture in the escalation of the Turko-Armenian conflict’, Armenian Review 47 (2001), 22–3. 24 See France, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes: projets de réformes dans l’empire ottoman 1839–1897, Documents Diplomatiques (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1897); Dadrian, ‘The 1894 Sassoun massacres’; and the two special issues of Études arméniennes aontemporaines on the Hamidian massacres: ‘Les massacres de l’époque hamidienne (I): récits globaux, approches locales’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018), and ‘Les massacres de l’époque hamidienne (I I): représentations et perspectives’, Études arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018).

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blocked by the Ottomans on the premise that the region was struck by a cholera epidemic and it was unsafe to travel there.25 As more details about the horrors of Sasun became available, the British, French and Russian ambassadors suggested the formation of a joint commission of inquiry. The Ottoman government rejected the idea at first. However, it compromised by allowing the Europeans to join an Ottoman commission of inquiry, as observers only.26 The direction of the investigation was dictated by the Ottoman commission and the European observers had no say in it whatsoever.27 The commissioners acted based on their instructions from the Porte to inquire only ‘into the criminal proceedings of the Armenian brigands denying that there has been any massacres’.28 On 20 July 1895, the British, French and Russian representatives signed a Joint Report which described the Ottoman methods of obstructing the investigation, and criticised its workings.29 After a lengthy and biased investigation in an atmosphere of intimidation, the Inquiry Commission accused Armenians of revolutionary activities, and claimed that the Ottoman forces took the necessary measures to quell the revolt.30 It is now understood that the Armenian massacre at Sasun set off a chain of massacres that took place under the nose of Sultan Abdülhamid II. This was a turning point in the Ottoman state’s relations with its Armenian subjects. The massacres were sanctioned by the central authorities and implemented by regular as well as irregular forces. The Sasun massacres once more brought the attention of the European powers to the Armenian Question, after a hiatus since the Treaty of Berlin. In May 1895, the British, French and Russian ambassadors sent a memorandum to the sultan, reminding him of his obligations to the Armenians under Article 61 of the treaty. Furthermore, they proposed a new programme of reforms, which came to be known as the May Memorandum.31 It called for the disarmament of the Hamidiye regiments and their attachment to the 25 Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1895, No. 1 (Part I ), pp. 13–16. 26 Ibid., p. 63. Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 26. On the activities of the delegation, see ibid., pp. 26–42. 27 The Commission of Inquiry was based in Moush near the district of Sasun. Its work extended from January to July of 1895. For a detailed study of the Commission of Inquiry and its report, see Rebecca Morris, ‘A critical examination of the Sassoun Commission of Inquiry report’, Armenian Review 47 (2001), 79–112. 28 Johannes Lepsius, Armenia and Europe: An Indictment (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1897), p. 2. 29 See Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 85–111, and Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1895, No. 1 (Part I ), pp. 203–8. 30 ‘Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1895, No. 1 (Part I ), pp. 76–7. 31 Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 43–56, and see also Great Britain, Foreign Office, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 1 (Correspondence Respecting the Introduction of Reforms in the Armenian Provinces of Asiatic Turkey) (London: Harrison and Sons, 1896), pp. 74–80.

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Figure 25.1 Massacre of Armenians in the streets of Istanbul. Drawing by Eduardo Ximenes (1852–1932), L’Illustrazione Italiana, 24 November 1895. (Getty Images)

regular army units.32 While the negotiations continued, the Sublime Porte tried to sabotage the programme. The Hnchaks, impatient with the situation, organised a major demonstration in the capital, which came to be known as the Bab Ali (Sublime Porte) demonstration. On 30 September 1895, some 2,000 Armenians headed from the Kum Kapu district towards the direction of the Bab Ali, carrying with them petitions for civil liberties, the right to bear arms, the rehabilitation of Sasun and an end to Kurdish migration, the recruitment of Armenians to the police and gendarmes, and the territorial reconfiguration of the six Armenian provinces.33 32 Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 54. 33 Great Britain, Foreign Office, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 2. (Correspondence Relative to the Armenian Question and Reports from Her Majesty’s Consular Officers in Asiatic Turkey) (London: Harrison and Sons, 1896) (Great Britain, Parliament, Sessional Papers, vol. 95, 1896), pp. 30–5.

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En route, the demonstrators were intercepted by the police, leading to skirmishes. Numerous Armenians were killed, while hundreds of others were wounded. Consequently, a wave of violence was unleashed on the Armenians of Istanbul. Religious students carrying blunt instruments massacred lower-class Armenians, who included porters and dockers, as well as migrant workers from the provinces.34 European ambassadors protested to the sultan. On 25 October, the Porte accepted a compromise with regard to the reform project proposed by the European powers.35 The version it agreed on was much less comprehensive than the May Reform programme presented by the Europeans.36 Despite this, European powers were willing to consider the new version and expressed their satisfaction.37 Nevertheless, the sultan continued his policy of mass violence against the Armenians of the eastern provinces. This raises important questions regarding the correlation between reform and violence. In the course of late Ottoman history, any time reforms were raised to alleviate the condition of Armenians in the eastern provinces, mass violence was inflicted upon them. This correlation between reform and mass violence is true in the case of all three phases of the violence inflicted upon them in the east.38

A Wave of Massacres in the East As soon as the Sublime Porte notified the European powers of its readiness to promulgate the compromise reform measures, a series of violent events broke out in the eastern provinces. The news about the disturbances in Istanbul had soon spread to the provinces. On 2 October 1895, an Armenian attacked Barhi Pas¸a, the former governor of Van in Trebizond. The nature of the attack was personal, as the Armenian was seeking vengeance for injustice done to his family in Van. The Turks interpreted the event as a larger plot by the Armenian revolutionaries of Trebizond. On Friday 4 October, a fight took place between a son of a leading Turk and an Armenian. The former was injured critically and died on Monday 7 October. His funeral stirred emotions and became a trigger for the violence that was unleashed on Armenians. On 8 October, attacks on Armenians began, targeting mainly the male population. This was followed by looting of Armenian businesses.39 According to estimates, more than 1,000 Ibid., p. 31. 35 Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 139–42. Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 1, p. 160. See Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 71–5, 153–61. For an excellent study of the reforms see Arman J. Kirakossian, British Diplomacy and the Armenian Question: From the 1830s to 1914 (Princeton: Gomidas Insitute, 2003). 39 Revd Edwin Munsell Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities (Philadelphia, PA: Hubbard Publishing Co., 1896), pp. 406–12; Ministère des Affaires étrangères,

34 36 37 38

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Figure 25.2 The Armenian massacres in Istanbul. Drawing by Dante Paolocci, L’Illustrazione Italiana, 13 September 1896. (Getty Images)

Armenians were killed.40 A wave of massacres then moved southward towards Erzincan. On 21 October, a second outbreak took the lives of 260 Armenians in the city, and 850 Armenian villagers.41 On 25 October, massacres continued in Bitlis and Gümüs¸hane. Around 800 people were killed in Bitlis and many of the surviving villagers were forcefully converted to Islam.42 In Gümüs¸hane, about 100 Armenians died in a massacre.43

40

41 42

43

Affaires arméniennes, p. 139; Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896. No. 2, pp. 48–9, 67–9, 265–6. For detailed coverage of the massacres, see Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages des victimes, preface by Georges Clémenceau (Paris: Édition du Mercure de France, 1896), pp. 21–32. See also Anonymous, La vérité sur les massacres, pp. 32–4. Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 139. Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 2., pp. 85–6; Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, pp. 4–5. Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 71–81. See also Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 139, and Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 2, pp. 147–8; Lepsius, Armenia and Europe, p. 7. See Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 139; Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 2, p. 181; Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, p. 412.

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Figure 25.3 Pillage of Trebizond, 8 October 1895. Carnage in Trebizond or Trabzon, Turkey. Scene from the Massacres of Armenia card series produced by the chocolate factory at the Monastery of Aiguebelle. (Photo by Art Media / Print Collector / Getty Images)

Massacres in Baiburt took place on 27 October, spreading inward from the outlying Armenian villages and leading to the death of hundreds of Armenians.44 From Baiburt, the wave of massacres continued to Urfa and lasted two days (27–28 October), resulting in the death of several hundred Armenians.45 The massacres then moved to Erzurum where Armenian revolutionaries were active.46 After an attempt by a Hnchak member on the life of the chief of police on 30 October, a mob in tandem with soldiers attacked and ransacked the bazaar, killing over 1,200 Armenians.47 It is important to note that these massacres targeted the regions where the reform programme was supposedly going to be implemented. Consequently, on 5 November, the British, French and Russian ambassadors complained to 44 Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 59–70, and Anonymous, La vérité sur les massacres, pp. 38–41. 45 Anonymous, La vérité sur les massacres, pp. 41–50. Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 40–50 46 Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, pp. 412–25. 47 Others put it at 2,000. See Anonymous, La vérité sur les massacres, p. 44. Edwin Bliss estimates the toll at 1,000–1,200. See Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, pp. 412, 553; Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 139, 162–5; Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. 1896, No. 2, pp. 149–50.

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the Sublime Porte about the massacres.48 While it proclaimed its innocence, the Sublime Porte did not shy away from putting the blame on Armenians. Meanwhile, the wave of massacres continued. From 1 to 3 November, about 1,000 Armenians were killed in Diyarbekir.49 The slaughter continued in Sasun, Malatya, Arabkir, Harput, Sivas, Marzifon, Kayseri, Maras¸ and Aintep, resulting in the death of thousands more Armenians.50 While this series of massacres was taking place, the European powers showed a passive attitude, limiting themselves to written protests.51 In two regions, the Armenians resisted: Zeitun and Van.52 The exact number of victims of these massacres is unknown. Historians estimate that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 Armenians perished in what came to be known as the Hamidian massacres.53 Seeing the passivity of European powers towards the massacres in the east, the Dashnaks planned to shock them into action. On 26 August 1896, members of the revolutionary party stormed the Ottoman Bank located in the Galata quarter in Istanbul, and threatened to blow up the bank if their demands were not met.54 They denounced the state-orchestrated massacres of Armenians in the eastern provinces and demanded the immediate implementation of the European-supervised reform measures for the six Armenian 48 Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 165–6, 139; Great Britain, Blue Book: Turkey. No. 2 (1896), pp. 115–16. 49 On the massacres of Diyarbekir, see Gustave Meyrie, Les massacres de Diarbékir: correspondance diplomatique du vice-consul de France, 1894–1896, presented and annotated by Claire Mouradian and Michel Durand-Meyrie (Paris: L’Inventaire, 2000); Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 168–9. 50 On Harput, see Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, pp. 427–46, and Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 123–40. On Urfa, Maras¸ and Aintep, see Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities, pp. 447–63, and Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 234–7. On Aintab, see F. D. Shepard, ‘Personal experience in Turkish massacres and relief work’, The Journal of Race Development 1 (January 1911), 316–39. For an in-depth coverage on these places, see Lepsius, Armenia and Europe. On Malatya, Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages, pp. 176–8. 51 On the non-intervention of the Europeans on behalf of the Armenians, see David Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914 (Princeton University Press, 2015), pp. 175–212. 52 Garabed Aghassi, Zeïtoun depuis les origines jusqu’à l’insurrection de 1895 (Paris: Édition du Mercure de France, 1897), pp. 261–307. On the situation in Zeitun, see Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, pp. 192–5. 53 Kévorkian puts the figure at 200,000. See Raymond Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013), p. 11; Hovannisian says approximately 100,000 Armenians were killed between 1895 and 1896. See Hovannisian, ‘The Armenian Question in the Ottoman Empire, 1876–1914’, 222. Dadrian concurs with the figures provided by the European diplomats at the time, which ranged between 200,000 and 250,000 Armenians. See Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, pp. 155–6. 54 Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Affaires arméniennes, p. 264.

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provinces. They insisted that a European high commissioner oversee the reforms. However, their efforts did not yield any results. With the mediation of the Russian ambassador and promises that their grievances were going to be met, the besiegers agreed to end the siege and were transferred via a French vessel to Marseille. Despite their intention to alarm the European powers about the plight of the Armenians, the move did not bring any resolution to the Armenian Question. On the contrary, it led to more bloodshed. While the siege of the Ottoman Bank was taking place, organised mobs, police agents and theological students with blunt instruments in hand attacked Armenian shops and innocent Armenians who got in their way.55 Between 26 and 27 August, Armenians were massacred in the quarters of Pera, Galata, Pangaltı, Tophane, Bes¸iktas¸, Kasım Pas¸a, Bebek, Rumelihisarı, Kandilli, Hasköy and in the villages of the Bosphorus, claiming the lives of more than 6,000.56 Following these massacres, thousands of Armenians emigrated. These killings had been organised and directed by the authorities in Istanbul, as is attested in the notes put forward by the European powers.57 In a letter sent to the Foreign Ministry of France on 3 September 1896, M. De La Boulinière, the chargé d’affaires of the French Embassy in Istanbul following the Bank Ottoman massacres, stated that: ‘I could not recount to Your Excellency the interminable series of facts which make it blatantly clear that it is the Sultan himself who armed these slaughterers and enjoins them to crush anyone who is Armenian.’58 A collective note to the Sublime Porte, presented on 27 August 1896 by the First Drogman of the Embassy of Austria– Hungary on behalf of the Representatives of the Great Powers, stated that: ‘The police, for their part, far from preventing the circulation of these gangs, were associated in several cases with their misdeeds. Zapties, armed soldiers and even officers were seen forcibly entering houses to look for Armenians and invading foreign establishments, many of which were completely sacked.’59 Through these massive waves of massacres, the sultan aimed at preserving the status quo in the eastern provinces and aborting any attempts by the European powers to alter the situation. The rivalries between the European powers also hampered any serious commitment to finding a solution to the Armenian Question. From the perspective of the ground-level participants, these massacres were largely motivated by material gain, fear, religion and competition over resources. According to one scholar, massacre is also ‘a 55 Ibid., p. 265. 59 Ibid., p. 279.

56 Ibid., p. 268.

57 Ibid., pp. 272–82, 290–1.

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58 Ibid., p. 275.

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privileged route towards claiming the riches of those it targets for itself. The radicality of the technique of massacre offers just such a possibility. It is a quick means of appropriating the riches of the massacred group and to take control of the territory on which it lived.’60 This ground-level perspective is, of course, quite separate from the largely political motive behind the exterminatory policy of the Ottoman state-level perpetrators. Following the Hamidian massacres, Armenian revolutionaries continued their activities in the provinces, albeit on a smaller scale. Represented generally by the Dashnaks, these revolutionaries mostly targeted Ottoman officials, Kurdish beys and Armenian informers.

The Adana Massacres The Hamidian authoritarian regime also led to the rise of Ottoman opposition groups, the most prominent of which were the Young Turks. This movement emerged in the Ottoman Empire and its expatriate communities at the end of the nineteenth century. Its main political party was the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which became the dominant force within the movement. After three decades of relentless efforts and political activism, this group staged the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, reinstating the Ottoman constitution and opening the parliament. Thus, they launched what came to be known as the Second Constitutional Period (1908– 18), which ended with the Ottoman defeat at the end of World War One. It was the inner clique of the CUP, using that war as a cover, who perpetrated the genocide against the Armenians. Among the Armenian revolutionary parties, the Dashnaks were the only ones who co-operated (cautiously) with the CUP for the realisation of the goals of the revolution. With the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, Armenians as well as other persecuted groups had high hopes of the new regime and its architects, the CUP. The Revolution, with its trilogy of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity, ushered in a new beginning in the history of the empire. However, the high hopes soon faded, as a result of the incongruities of the new political reality and the contradictions of the political path of the different groups. The political tensions in the capital culminated in a counter-revolution that took place on 13 April 1909. In conjunction with this event, two waves of massacres (14–17 April / 25–27 May) occurred in the province of Adana in the southeastern section of the empire. Known as the Adana massacres of 1909, these 60 Semelin, ‘In consideration of massacres’, 381.

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resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 Armenians and around 2,000 Muslims.61 These massacres also extended to the province of Aleppo. Their outbreak cannot be essentialised as a purely Muslim vs Christian conflict, but rather were the result of a host of factors that included historical, economic, political and social, as well as religious, reasons. The most important were: the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which shook the foundations of the ‘fragile equilibrium’ that had existed in the empire for decades; the emergence of public spheres after three decades of despotic rule with a very weak public sphere; and the counter-revolution of 13 April 1909. It is impossible to understand the development of Adana’s public sphere without understanding the impact of the revolution on the Anatolian provinces. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 led to drastic changes in the dynamics of power among the different regions of the empire, disrupting the balance that had existed for decades.62 A major factor in the deterioration of the intra-ethnic relations among the Muslims in Anatolia was the dismissal of local officials and their replacement with CUP members or people loyal to the CUP. This contributed immensely to the rising tension between the CUP and the agents of the ancien régime, mainly because a whole stratum of notables who had benefitted from the Hamidian order had lost power. The disruption in power dynamics and tensions among political forces within the empire led to a violent backlash by reactionary forces in the counter-revolution of 13 April 1909. The counter-revolution was quickly subdued in the capital by the Action Army, and other pockets of uprising in the provinces were brought to an end within a few days. In the province of Adana, however, the counter-revolution spun violently out of control, leading to the Adana massacres. Adana, a province on the Mediterranean coast in southeast Anatolia, was the hub of the Ottoman Empire’s cotton production and one of its most significant economic centres at the turn of the twentieth century. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Armenians of Cilicia made substantial strides in the economic field. Adana was also an important spiritual and historical centre for Armenians in Anatolia. Spiritually, it housed the Catholicosate of Sis (Kozan), and historically it had formed part of the last Armenian independent entity: the Cilician Kingdom (1198–1375). 61 Bedross Der Matossian, The Horrors of Adana: Revolution and Violence in the Early Twentieth Century (Stanford University Press, 2022); Bedross Der Matossian, ‘From bloodless revolution to bloody counterrevolution: the Adana massacres of 1909’, Genocide Studies and Prevention 6:2 (August 2011), 152–73. 62 Bedross Der Matossian, Shattered Dreams of Revolution: From Liberty to Violence in the Late Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2014).

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Prior to 1909, Adana’s population consisted of 62,250 Muslims, 30,000 Armenians, 5,000 Greeks, 8,000 Chaldeans, 1,250 Assyrians, 500 Christian Arabs and 200 foreign subjects.63 The Muslim population of Adana included Turks, Kurds, Fellahs, Circassians, Avshars, Cretans and nomads. In addition, every spring and fall, about 30,000–40,000 migratory workers would come to Adana from Aleppo, Harput, Sivas, Diyarbekir, Erzurum, Haçin, Bitlis and Bayburt to work as farmers, tilling, reaping and cultivating the cotton fields, or to work in factories. In addition, Adana also housed several large local and foreign establishments involved with ginning, spinning and weaving.64 When news of the 1908 revolution reached the city of Adana, a euphoric atmosphere erupted. People began decorating the streets and houses and visiting each other. Crowds shouted ‘Long live the sultan! Long live freedom!’ Prayers were held in honour of the sultan and the Ottoman nation across the city.65 But when these festivities subsided and the post-revolutionary political process got under way, the real test of the new era began. The revolution in Adana led to the rise of new figures and interest groups. For example, Ihsan Fikri, a self-proclaimed Young Turk, suddenly became a public figure, heading the CUP branch in Adana, and editor-in-chief of the local I·tidal newspaper. To counter the CUP’s influence, Abdülkadir Bağ dadizade, one of the most influential notables of Adana, formed his own group composed of Adana notables of the ancien régime. Under the pressure of the CUP, the governor of Adana, Bahri Pas¸a, resigned, and for some time the CUP branch administered the province until the arrival of the new governor, Cevad Bey. Unlike other provinces where new governors were appointed by the CUP or were under its influence, the new governor of Adana inclined towards the notables and ulema (religious leaders) of the ancien régime. As a result, Fikri, through his newspaper I·tidal, began attacking the new governor, claiming that the government was non-existent in Adana and that a few notables were truly running the affairs of the province.66 In this atmosphere of tension between Turkish Muslim groups, news of the counter-revolution reached Adana, further altering the power balance in the provinces. 63 Hagop Terzian, Atanayi Kiank‘eˇ (The Life of Adana) (Istanbul: Zareh Berberian Press, 1909), p. 7. 64 Among these, the most important factory was owned by the Greek Trypani Brothers, who had introduced the cotton industry to Cilicia. In addition, the Deutsche Levant Cotton Company, financed by German, Swiss and Austrian financiers, was also active in the region: Henry Charles Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe: Changes and Problems in the Near East (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911), p. 128. 65 The Levant Herald and Eastern Express, 13 August 1908, 2. 66 Terzian, Atanayi Kiank‘eˇ, p. 41.

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The Ottoman Massacres of Armenians

As in the other provinces, the Armenians of Adana were elated by the Young Turk Revolution. Their participations in the festivities were especially striking. The Armenian revolutionary groups such as the Hnchaks and the Dashnaks, who had been illegitimate groups during the Hamidian period, now became legitimate political parties promoting their ideas through propaganda. Adana became an important province for their activities. While the Hnchaks acted alone in the province, the Dashnaks joined with the CUP in promoting the ideas of the constitution to the masses. In this period, Armenians became indulged with an inflated romanticism of the past, especially a yearning for the medieval Cilician Kingdom. An Armenian cultural revival began. Poetry, odes and dramas about the Armenian national past began to be published and performed, causing anxiety among the local Muslim population. As rumours spread that Armenians were planning a large revolt to establish an independent Armenia, the Muslim population became more agitated. In addition, the relationship between the Armenian ecclesiastic leadership and the local Adana government deteriorated after the 1908 revolution. Seeing this, the Armenian Prelate of Adana, Bishop Moushegh Seropian, encouraged Armenians to buy arms.67 Thus, Bishop Seropian, in the eyes of the local Muslim population, became an agitator and the source of tensions for inciting the Armenians against the Turks and encouraging them to establish a Kingdom of Cilicia. They even went as far as claiming that Seropian was going to become the king of a purported independent Armenia. Another by-product of the revolution was the accelerated selling and buying of arms. In the post-revolutionary period, the buying of arms was no longer confined to the Muslims of the empire – Christians too were allowed to buy weapons. Given the tense situation in Adana, the purchase of weapons skyrocketed among both Turks and Armenians. Armenians resorted to this move in order to protect themselves from counterrevolutionaries who aimed at sabotaging the constitutional period. Muslims resorted to this in fear of an Armenian uprising which would culminate in the establishment of an Armenian independent state. In March 1909, ethnic tension began to rise dramatically, as manifested in a couple of sporadic attacks on Armenians. One of these attacks became the catalyst precipitating the first wave of the Adana massacres. At the end of March, an Armenian was attacked by a group of Turks. During the ensuing 67 Moushegh Seropian, Atanayi jardeˇ ew pataskhanatunereˇ: Nakhent`ats` paraganer (The Massacres of Adana and the Accountable People: Precedent Circumstances) (Gahire: Tparan Ararat-S. Darbinean. 1909), p. 32.

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fight, he killed one of the Turks, wounded some of the other attackers, and fled to the Armenian quarter in Adana. The Turk’s funeral became a medium for rapid mobilisation of the masses and prepared the ground for violence against the Armenians.68 As the situation intensified, the governor of Adana telegrammed Istanbul warning of an imminent threat in the city. Adil Bey, the advisor to the Minister of Internal Affairs, responded, ‘The financial institutions along with foreign buildings should be protected and peace should be preserved.’69 Many Armenians understood this telegram as an order to massacre them.70 With the arrival of news about the counterrevolution from Istanbul, the situation exploded.

The First Waves of Massacres (14, 15 and 16 April) The massacres began in Adana on 14 April 1909. Armenians opened their shops in the early morning, but soon saw groups of Turks, Kurds, Circassians, Bas¸ibozuks (irregular soldiers), Cretans and Muslim refugees, along with seasonal workers, carrying hatchets and blunt instruments and wearing white bandages around their fezzes, roaming in various quarters of the city.71 Fearing for their lives, Armenians immediately closed their shops.72 When Muslim shopkeepers saw this, they too became anxious and closed their businesses. Meanwhile, rumours spread that Armenians were going to attack them. Mobs roaming the streets immediately began looting and attacking the centre of the town. The police superintendent rallied his troops and besieged the Armenian quarter. Armenians took a defensive position and fortified themselves in their dwellings. On the first night, the mob began burning the quarter. The attacks and clashes intensified the next day. The majority of the Armenian population found shelter in Armenian churches and schools as well as foreign churches and missions. By the third day, the size of the mob had grown as bands arrived from Aleppo and Sivas to take part in the killing and pillage. The motive of material gain proved to be lucrative for poor peasants from the surrounding 68 Stephen R. Trowbridge to William Peet, 20 April 1909, The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) Archives, 1; Karebet Çalyan, Adana Vak’ası Hakkında Rapor (Report Pertaining to the Adana Incident) (Istanbul, 1911), p. 25. 69 Çalyan, Adana Vak’ası Hakkında Rapor, p. 47. 70 Raymond Kévorkian, ‘La Cilicie (1909–1921): des massacres d’Adana au mandat français’, Revue d’histoire arménienne contemporaine (1999), 139. 71 Lawson P. Chambers to William Peet, 4 May 1909, ABCFM Archives, 1. Lawson Chambers was the nephew of Nisbet Chambers, a Canadian–British subject, head of the American Mission in Adana. 72 Herbert Adam Gibbons to Doughty-Wylie, Mersina, 2 May 1909, ABCFM Archives, 1.

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villages. Since the Armenians were running short on ammunition, they asked the government for protection.73 In response, the governor organised a reconciliation meeting between Turkish and Armenian notables. By the fourth day, the situation had calmed. Hundreds of wounded Armenians were taken to the Armenian school which was turned into a hospital. Many Armenians escaped to Mersin and Cyprus. The carnage, looting and killing had lasted for three days (14, 15 and 16 April). Armenians were killed, as well as many of the Muslims attacking the Armenian quarter. Yet it seems that this first wave of massacres was minor compared to the coming second wave. Nevertheless, Armenian shops, businesses and institutions suffered immense damage. Most Armenian and European sources indicate that Ihsan Fikri, the leader of the CUP in Adana, and his newspaper I·tidal played an important role in inciting the masses before the initiation of the second wave of massacres. The public sphere was not restrained, nor did the local government take the necessary steps to suppress additional provocative statements by reactionary groups. On the contrary, the printed form of communication was used to incite the public against the vulnerable Armenian population. Hence, Ihsan Fikri, along with his colleagues, attacked the Armenians and convinced the Muslim population of Adana that the Armenians had initiated a failed revolt to restore the Kingdom of Cilicia. On 20 April 1909, thousands of free copies of I·tidal were distributed in the streets of Adana. In this issue, Fikri and his colleagues vehemently attacked the Armenians.74 This type of propaganda aimed at bringing the future victims into disrepute, in what Semelin calls ‘advance killing with words’.75 These articles in I·tidal inflamed public opinion in Adana after the first wave of massacres and clashes.

The Second Wave of the Massacres (25–27 April) When Armenians heard the news that additional troops were going to come to Adana from Mersin to help to preserve order, they were elated.76 On 25 April, troops from Dedeağ aç (Alexandropolis) arrived in Adana. After the regiments set up a camp in the city, shots were fired at their tents. A rumour immediately spread that the Armenians had opened fire on the troops from 73 74 75 76

Chambers to Peet, 4 May 1909, ABCFM Archives, 8. · Itidal, 20 April 1909 (7 Nissan 1325), no. 33. Semelin, ‘In consideration of massacres’, 384. Hagop Terzian, Kilikioy agheteˇ (K. Polis: Tpagr. H. Asaturean ew ordikʻ, 1912), p. 94.

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a church tower in town.77 The military commander of Adana, Mustafa Remzi Pas¸a, without verifying these rumours, ordered his soldiers to strike back at the Armenians. Under his orders, the battalion attacked the Armenian school that housed the injured from the first wave of massacres. Soldiers poured kerosene on the school and set it on fire with people inside.78 Regular soldiers, reserve soldiers and mobs, along with the Bas¸ibozuks, attacked the Armenian quarter. They burned down churches, and more schools. The conflagration in the city continued until Tuesday morning, 27 April. It destroyed the entire Armenian residential quarter and most of the houses in the outlying districts inhabited by Christians.79 The second wave of the massacres was larger in scale and more violent than the first. While the massacres in the city of Adana were taking place, rumours spread throughout the province that Armenians had revolted in Adana, killed all the Muslims, and were going out to destroy the villages. This caused extreme anxiety and provoked retaliatory attacks by Muslims on Armenian villages.

Courts-Martial After the second wave of massacres ended, a state of siege was declared in the province of Adana, and a local court-martial was formed under the presidency of Mehmed Ali Bey. The court acted on the suggestions of an inquiry commission, arresting both Armenians and Muslims. Among the members of this court was Abdülkadir Bağ dadizade, the Muslim notable complicit in the massacres. The court accused Armenians of buying an extraordinary amount of weaponry prior to the events, and scolded the Dashnak and Hnchak parties for inciting their people. It especially accused the prelate, Bishop Moushegh, as the main instigator.80 The heads of the Christian religious communities immediately complained that the decision of the court-martial was unjust.81 The Armenian Patriarch of Istanbul immediately demanded that the government nullify the findings of the preliminary examinations made by the local officials of Adana, some of whom were responsible for the events.82 This led the government of Hüssein Hilmi Pas¸a to form a new inquiry 77 See Doughty-Wylie to Sir G. Lowther, Adana, 7 May 1909, enclosure 3, no. 103. The vice-consul reports that some of the Roumeliot soldiers indicated that the shots that started the whole affair had been fired by the Turks, either with the wish to bring about a quarrel between the different groups of soldiers or in the hope that they would rush the hated Armenian quarter. See also Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe, p. 135. 78 Chambers to Peet, 4 May 1909, ABCFM Archives, 10. 79 Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe, p. 137. 80 See Azadamard, 17 July 1909, no. 22. 81 See Terzian, Kilikioy agheteˇ, pp. 393–9. 82 Azadamard, 6 July 1909, no. 12, p. 1.

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commission and dispatch it to Adana. The new court-martial did not, however, start a new investigation from scratch. Rather, it took custody of the prisoners, and took up the reports which had been made by the subcommittee of the inquiry commission formed by the ex-Vali of Adana, Cevad Bey. Hence, some of the decisions of the new court-martial in Adana were influenced by the opinion of the first court-martial. Besides the courtsmartial, two official bodies were sent to Adana on 12 May, in order to investigate the massacres. Faiz Bey and Harutyun Mosdichian were chosen on behalf of the government, and Hagop Babigian and Yusuf Kemal Bey were sent by the parliament. Babigian and Kemal Bey were accompanied by the mutasarrıf (governor) of Mersin. Both bodies conducted investigations in Adana and sent their official reports to their respective bodies. Babigian himself carried out another investigation, the results of which did not appear at the time, because he died on 1 August 1909, three days prior to his scheduled testimony to the parliament. His death raised suspicions in Armenian circles that he had been poisoned by the CUP because he was going to disclose secret information about the latter’s involvement in the massacres. However, more than a dozen doctors carried out the autopsy on Babigian and concluded that he had died from heart disease.83 While the first draft of his report appeared in French in 1913, the Armenian one appeared in 1919.84 In his conclusion, Babigian demanded that the members of the CUP who were involved in the massacres be brought to justice.85 The investigation commissions of the government submitted their findings to Hilmi Pas¸a’s Cabinet on 10 July 1909. The Cabinet took the decision to bring to trial Cevad Bey, Mustafa Remzi Pas¸a, Ihsan Firki, Abdülkadir Bağ dadizade and Assaf Bey, the mutasarrıf of Cebel-i Bereket. However, the new Vali (governor), Mustafa Zihni Pas¸a, refused to obey the Cabinet’s decision and the court-martial protested at the government interference. In July, the court-martial presented its own report, in which it blamed Armenians for the troubles in Adana. On 20 July, the Armenian Patriarchate protested to the government about the unjust way in which the court-martial had accused the Armenians. After nine days, the president of the court-martial was dismissed and replaced by Fazil Pas¸a, the military 83 Jamanag, 3 August 1909, no. 233, p. 3. 84 See Anonymous, La situation des Arméniens en Turquie exposée par des documents 1908– 1912, vol. I I I [Constantinople: n.p., c.1913], pp. 5–26. An Armenian translation of this version appeared in 1919. For the Armenian version, see Hagop Babigian, Atanayi egherneˇ (The Massacres of Adana) (Istanbul: Ardzagang Press, 1919). 85 Anonymous, La situation des Arméniens en Turquie exposée par des documents 1908–1912, I I I, p. 26.

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commandant of Smyrna. With the arrival of Fazil Pas¸a, a new (third) courtmartial was established, with two presidents. On 29 July, the real perpetrators of the massacres were arrested. On 12 August, the Ministerial Council officially declared the innocence of the Armenians in the Adana events, publishing its declaration.86 However, the culprits of the massacres received light sentences, and Armenians were extremely angry when the court decision arrived.87 Capital punishment was implemented in different phases. At first nine Muslims, as well as six Armenians, were subjected to capital punishment in the autumn of 1909. Later, twenty-five Muslims, some of them innocent peasants, were also subjected to capital punishment; most were hanged in December 1909. Armenians complained about the injustice and the innocence of the six Armenians hanged. The reaction of the central government and the CUP towards the perpetrators of the massacres was extremely lenient. It seems the CUP, having just recovered from the huge blow of the counter-revolution, was afraid to take drastic measures against the real culprits because of the consequences and wider effect on the region, which would threaten the government’s weakened position.

Conclusion The third wave of mass violence experienced by the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire was the Armenian genocide, which led to the destruction of its Armenian communities. During World War One, the radical clique of the CUP took the decision to solve once and for all the Armenian question that had been lingering over the empire since the Treaty of Berlin of 1878. The Armenian genocide should not be seen merely as the culmination of the last two phases of mass violence. Each phase of the violence had its own characteristics. As we saw, the Hamidian massacres aimed at restoring the previous balance in the Armenian provinces. The aim was not to restructure the society as happened during the Armenian genocide – rather, under the pretext of an ‘Armenian uprising’, the Ottoman state aimed to teach the Armenians a lesson for daring to try to change the existing order. The Adana massacres took place after a major event that shook the foundations of the empire and disrupted the fine-tuned equilibrium that had existed in the provinces for decades. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908 had brought 86 Z. Duckett Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana in Asia Minor, during April, 1909 (London: n.p., 1913), pp. 170–2. 87 Azadamard, 7 July 1909, no. 13, pp. 1–2.

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changes in the dynamics of power and ushered in a new era in the empire in which Muslims and Christians were equal. The colossal losses in status suffered by people identified with the ancien régime, and their inability to digest the gains obtained by the Armenians, provoked twin massacres in the regions of Adana and Aleppo. Although this chapter has argued for the lack of continuity between three phases of mass violence, one factor that connects them is impunity. Impunity set favourable ground that emboldened perpetrators not only to commit further offences, but to believe they could evade punishment once again, as they had done for their crime of genocide.

Bibliographic Note On the Hamidian massacres and the reform project in English, see the Blue Books published by the Foreign Office of Great Britain (Correspondence Relating to the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey) from 1895 to 1897. For a contemperaneous account, see Bliss, Turkey and the Armenian Atrocities. In French, see France, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Documents Diplomatiques, Affaires arméniennes. For a contemporaneous account, see Les massacres d’Arménie, témoignages des victimes. For the latest literature on the Hamidian massacres, see ‘Les massacres de l’époque hamidienne (I): récits globaux, approches locales’, special issue, Études arméniennes contemporaines 10 (2018); and ‘Les massacres de l’époque hamidienne (I I): représentations et perspectives’, special issue, Études arméniennes contemporaines 11 (2018). For contemporaneous accounts of the Adana massacres, see Duckett Ferriman, The Young Turks and the Truth about the Holocaust at Adana, and Woods, The Danger Zone of Europe. For the latest literature on the Adana massacres, see Der Matossian, The Horrors of Adana.

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‘Rivers of Blood and Rivers of Money’ The Herero and Nama Genocides in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1908 leonor faber-jonker

When the South African author, lawyer and naturalist Eugène Marais visited a small Herero refugee community in South Africa’s northernmost province of Transvaal, shortly before World War One, their stories shocked him.1 In 1904, Hereros had made a desperate trek across the Kalahari Desert, fleeing German soldiers and their homes in German Southwest Africa, now Namibia. Only the strongest men and women, aged 18–40, survived the flight. Almost all children and elders perished. Paramount Herero chief Samuel Maharero, and his preacher-teacher Julius Kauraisa, explained to Marais how the group had set off with 4,000 people, 700 wagons and ‘countless’ cattle, to arrive in Transvaal with ‘fourhundred souls’. Thousands lost their lives. Those who survived lost all of their possessions. Women showed Marais scars on their breasts where they had wounded themselves in attempts to give their babies enough to drink.2 The Hereros that Marais encountered were survivors of the twentieth century’s first genocide, a relentless military campaign that killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in German Southwest Africa from 1904 to 1908. The genocide took the lives of 40,000–80,000 Hereros (80 per cent of their population) and 10,000 Namas (half of their

1 J.-B. Gewald, ‘The road of the man called Love and the sack of Sero: the Herero– German War and the export of Herero labour to the South African Rand’, Journal of African History 40:1 (1999), 21–40, at 34; L. Rousseau, ‘Aantekeninge deur die redakteur’ in E. N. Marais, Versamelde Werke, ed. L. Rousseau (Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik, 1984), 1261– 94, at 1274. 2 E. Marais, ‘Die Mielies van Nooitgedacht: Die Woestynvlug van die Herero’s’ in Marais, Versamelde Werke, ed. Rousseau, 341–50, at 343–5.

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ANGOLA ene Kun

(Portugal)

R.

Okavango R

Caprivi Strip

.

O VA M B O L AN D K AO KO L A N D

N

Etosha Salt Pan

A

Tsumeb

M I B

W aterbe berrg Waterberg Plateau

D

T E R E S

N

Cape Cross

DA M AR MA ARALAND

Karibib

Okahandja Okahandja Tsaobis Windhoek Windhoek

150 mi

(Britain)

100

100

R ehoboth Rehoboth

Naukluft

T S E R D E

0

50

K A L A H A R I D ES ERT

BECHUANALAND

B M I N A

Walvis Bay (Britain) Hoornkrans

ATL ANTIC OCEAN

OMAHEK E DESERT

Omaruru

Swakopmund

0

Grootfontein

Otavi Otavi

Gibeon

GR EAT NAM AQUA L A N D

Lüderitzbucht

gras aalg Vaal Vaalgras B ethanie V Bethanie Keetmanshoop

200 km

Area of the German-Herero war Area of the German-Nama war Most important battle zones Mission stations Landing points for German troops Battle between Hereros or Namas and German troops Route taken by the Herero refugees through the Omaheke Desert Concentration camp Railway Railway planned or under construction

Orange R.

CAPE COLONY (Britain)

Map 26.1 The campaign against the Hereros and Namas, German Southwest Africa, 1904– 8. (Cartography by Bill Nelson)

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population), a total of some 75,000 men, women and children.3 These individuals were either killed directly by German soldiers, driven into the Omaheke Desert – a western extension of the Kalahari – to die of thirst and starvation, or worked to death in concentration camps and on forced labour gangs. In 1921, Marais described their plight in an account as harrowing as it was compassionate, detailing their thirst, suffering and despair. Writing about the desert flight, he noted, ‘this disaster has made little impression on the public in South Africa, undoubtedly because it concerned a black people’.4 This chapter will build on previous scholarship to argue that the Herero and Nama genocides were the culmination of years of racist violence and abuse in German Southwest Africa. Prior to 1904, fear and hatred of the racial Other had led to atrocities, including the genocidal massacre of Nama women and children at Hoornkrans in 1893 and the genocidal ‘total defeat’ of the KhauasKhoi in the 1896 Ovambanderu-Khauas Khoi War. Such atrocities happened in the context of systematic land dispossessions and wealth transfer to Germans, and an unequal colonial legal system that distinguished between Eingeborene (natives) and nicht -Eingebore (non-natives). Racist laws, beliefs and behaviours provided preconditions for a ‘final solution’, which would give Germans full control over the land and render local Africans powerless.

The Colonial Fold When Germans took control of Namibia in 1884, the area had been a ‘colonial frontier zone’ for decades. The Herero, Nama, Rehoboth Basters, Damara, Khoisan and Ovambo peoples there began to feel the effects of – and adapt to – colonial expansion in the mid nineteenth century. Rhenish Missionaries arrived in the 1840s, and their missions soon became commercial and diplomatic centres. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the pressures of Cape Colony expansion, from the south, generated unprecedented social, economic and political effects as Cape Khoisan communities, displaced by 3 T. Dedering, ‘The German–Herero war of 1904: revisionism of genocide or imaginary historiography?’ Journal of Southern African Studies 19:1 (1993), 80–8, at 82; B. Madley, ‘Patterns of frontier genocide 1803–1910: the Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California, and the Herero of Namibia’, Journal of Genocide Research 6:2 (2004), 181; J.B. Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence: the Herero of Namibia 1890–1933’ in People, Cattle and Land: Transformations of a Pastoral Society in Southwestern Africa, ed. J.B. Gewald and M. Bollig (Cologne: Köppe, 2000), 187–225, at 205; I. V. Hull, ‘The military campaign in German Southwest Africa, 1904–1907 and the genocide of the Herero and Nama’, Journal of Namibian Studies 4 (2008), 7–24, at 15. 4 Marais, ‘Mielies’, 342.

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colonists, settled north of the Orange River.5 By 9 September 1876, the pressure was significant enough for Herero paramount chief Maharero Tjamuaha (Kamaharero) to issue a declaration outlining Herero territory and forbidding the buying of or prospecting on land within its boundaries.6 In 1883, the ambitious tobacco merchant Adolf Lüderitz requested German government protection for his planned Atlantic outpost at present-day Lüderitz, Namibia. Chancellor Otto von Bismarck agreed to halt British expansion, and in 1884 officials raised the German flag in Southwest Africa. German colonists exploited strife between Hereros and Namas, who raided Herero cattle with increasing frequency during the 1880s, to get a foothold in the colony by signing so-called ‘protection treaties’ (Schutzverträge) with Herero and Nama leaders. These treaties were meaningless. The Nama were made up of a variety of clans under the increasing influence of Captain Hendrik Witbooi, who resisted the treaties and continued to raid Herero cattle.7 When Nama Captain Manasse of the Red Nation (Rooi Nasie) signed a treaty and accepted a German imperial flag, Witbooi confiscated it to taunt Reichskommissar Heinrich Göring.8 Against this background, colonisation was slow, and the economic benefits of the colony failed to materialise.9 Early prospecting yielded no valuable mines. Worse, prospectors had to ask Witbooi for permission to prospect on ‘his land’.10 The Deutsche Kolonialzeitung [German Colonial Newspaper] considered such powerlessness humiliating: ‘People are being told so many things about the might of the German Empire, but no one ever sees it applied . . . Either the German Empire makes a move to maintain its prestige or it will have to abandon the territories it has gained. The current situation is one of which Germany must feel ashamed.’11 With prospecting inhibited by weak German authority, colonists turned to a more visible source of wealth: land and cattle. This set 5 W. Hillebrecht, ‘Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero: The ambiguity of heroes’ in Re-Viewing Resistance in Namibian History, ed. J. Silvester (Windhoek: University of Namibia Press, 2015), 35–84, at 41. 6 Proclamation of Kamaharero, 9 September 1876, reproduced in L. Faber-Jonker, Le premier genocide du xxe siècle. Herero et Nama dans le Sud-Ouest africain allemande 1904–1908 (Paris: Éditions du Memorial de la Shoah, 2017), p. 7. 7 T. Leutwein, Elf Jahre Gouverneur in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1906), p. 13. 8 Hendrik Witbooi to Heinrich Göring, 11 April 1889, reprinted in The Hendrik Witbooi Papers, ed. A. Heywood and E. Maasdorp, 2nd rev. ed. (Windhoek: National Archives of Namibia, 1995), p. 33. 9 K. Graudenz and H.-M. Schindler, Die deutschen Kolonien. Geschichte der deutschen Schutzgebiete in Wort, Bild und Karte (Augsburg: Weltbild Verlag, 1988), p. 58. 10 H. Drechsler, ‘Let Us Die Fighting’: The Struggle of the Herero and Nama against German Imperialism (1884–1915) (London: Zed Press, 1980), pp. 33–4. 11 Ibid., p. 33.

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Germans on a collision course with Hereros, who owned the region’s best grazing land and huge cattle herds, their cultural and economic wealth. In the 1890s, German authorities expanded the colony with ‘diplomacy’ and violence. In 1889, Schutztruppe Captain Curt von François occupied a strategic waterhole in central Hereroland, Tsaobis, enabling him to control the import of arms and ammunition to the interior. This forced Hereros to sign treaties: they needed arms for their conflict with Witbooi.12 Von François established military posts and sought to subjugate Witbooi with military might. He was convinced that ‘the sword should not be put down, until the natives acknowledged German leadership and civilised conditions were reached through disarmament’.13 In 1892, his elder brother, Major A. Von François, who had spent half a year in German Southwest Africa, outlined how the colony was destined for ‘German cattle breeders’. Native landowners were to submit to foreign rule, as they had done in ‘the Cape colony and the United States’. Anticipating Herero and Nama resistance, he suggested using violence to ‘first bring the dangerous Witbooi tribe and then the Herero to compliance’, to avoid facing them both simultaneously.14 In April 1893, Curt von François led the Hoornkrans Massacre, an unprovoked attack on Witbooi’s camp. In 1890, the most powerful central Herero chief, Maharero Tjamuaha, died. In the political vacuum he left behind, his son Samuel Maharero persuaded the Germans to accept him as ‘paramount chief’, in contradiction with Herero inheritance rules. Theodor Leutwein, who succeeded Curt von François as Schutztruppe commander in 1894, now drew the Herero and Nama into the colonial fold. When other Hereros challenged Maharero’s position shortly after Leutwein’s 1894 appointment, Leutwein reinstalled Maharero with the help of German cannons. In turn, Leutwein received permission to build a German garrison in Okahandja.15 Meanwhile, after a fierce battle in the Naukluft Mountains, Leutwein concluded a treaty with Witbooi which obliged the latter to render the Germans military assistance.16 The so-called ‘ten-year peace’ that followed (1894–1903) was actually characterised by warfare and constant colonial expansion. The Nama became increasingly indebted to European traders and signed away more and more of their land 12 Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 189. 13 C. von François, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika, Geschichte der Kolonisation bis zum Ausbruch des Krieges mit Witbooi, April 1893 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1899), p. 168. 14 Von François, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika, p. 203. 15 Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 192–3. 16 Hillebrecht, ‘Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero’, 45.

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to colonists.17 Meanwhile, German firepower forced Herero chieftains opposed to Samuel Maharero to submit to him one by one. Germans seized the land of the defeated Herero communities. In 1896, Maharero’s opponent in the succession dispute, Nikodemus Kavikunua, in alliance with the Ovambanderu of Kahimemua and the Khauas-Khoi, attacked the German garrison at Gobabis in eastern Hereroland. In the ensuing Ovambanderu Khauas-Khoi War, Schutztruppen working with Herero and Witbooi allies mercilessly defeated the people of Kavikunua and Kahimemua, clearing their lands for German colonisation.18 As a result of Leutwein’s land dispossessions, remaining Herero lands became overcrowded. This had disastrous consequences when a rinderpest cattle epidemic reached Namibia in 1896, not long after the Ovambanderu Khauas-Khoi War ended. Within six months, rinderpest killed at least twothirds of all Herero cattle, bringing economic devastation while unravelling traditional Herero societal structures. By 1904, the once wealthy Herero society had effectively lost its independence.19

Escalating Violence The ruthless and forceful German dispossession of Herero and Nama land and property is crucial to understanding the 1904–1908 genocides. As the historian Benjamin Madley has shown, the invasion and subsequent struggle for resources and power between invaders and Indigenous people characterise the first phase of ‘frontier genocides’.20 During this phase, racism, dehumanisation, structural violence and disproportionate military force set the stage for genocide. The 1893 Hoornkrans Massacre and 1896 Ovambanderu Khauas-Khoi War, in particular, foreshadowed the mass murder to come. Germans attempted to justify these violent episodes with notions of German racial superiority, the same ideas that they deployed to rationalise the systematic transfer of land and cattle into German hands. In essence, racism normalised violence against Africans in the colony. The Hoornkrans Massacre was a turning point. Fearing an alliance between Maharero and Witbooi, as his brother had warned, Curt von François secured military reinforcements from Germany.21 On 12 April 1893, his fresh troops attacked Witbooi’s camp at Hoornkrans 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 194–5. 19 Ibid., 199–201. 20 Madley, ‘Patterns’, 167. 21 Hillebrecht, ‘Hendrik Witbooi and Samuel Maharero’, 45.

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without provocation, massacring seventy-five women and children and ten men, before burning down the settlement.22 Kurd Schwabe, an officer who participated in the massacre, described it in his 1899 book Mit Schwert und Pflug in Deutsch-Südwestafrika (With Sword and Plough in German Southwest Africa): On all sides terrible scenes were disclosed to us. Under overhanging rocks lay the corpses of seven Witbooi, who in their death agony, had crawled in the hollow, and their bodies lay pressed tightly together. In another place the body of a Bergdamara woman obstructed the footpath, while two three-tofour-year-old children sat quietly playing beside her corpse . . . The Stad itself was a fearful sight: burning huts, human bodies and dead animals, scattered furniture, destroyed and useless rifles, that was the picture that presented itself to the eyes.23

Despite the carnage, most of Witbooi’s soldiers escaped. The killing of noncombatants did not bother Von François. In his view, ‘the whole people, the entire tribe’ had to be punished, especially when that tribe possessed ‘state-ofthe-art reloading rifles’ as the Nama did.24 Schwabe, who graphically described the Hoornkrans Massacre, later took part in the campaign against the Ovambanderu. Historian Jan-Bart Gewald has described how German military actions during the Ovambanderu Khauas-Khoi War were nothing short of genocidal. Germans ‘annihilated’ forces led by Nikodemus Kavikunua, executed leaders Kavikunua and Kahimemua for treason, and erased the Khauas-Khoi as a separate political entity. Germans captured all Khauas-Khoi survivors – men, women and children – and imprisoned them in a Windhoek concentration camp, where colonial authorities used them as forced labourers.25 In a diary, the Schutztruppe officer Victor Franke dehumanised these prisoners of war: ‘The prisoners (Khauas u. Buschmänner) present an image that inspires revulsion. Outrageously thin creatures (entsetzlich dürre Gestalten) with unseemly stomachs and chimpanzee-like long limbs.’26 22 J.-B. Gewald, ‘The Herero genocide: German unity, settlers, soldiers and ideas’ in Die (koloniale) Begegnung: Afrikanerlnnen in Deutschland (1880–1945), Deutsche in Afrika (1880– 1918), ed. M. Bechhaus-Gerst and R. Klein-Arendt (Frankfurt am Main [etc.]: Peter Lang, 2003), 118. 23 K. Schwabe, Mit Schwert und Pflug in Deutsch -Südwestafrika (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1899), cited in Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany, ed. Administrator’s Office, Windhuk (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1918), p. 27. 24 Von François, Deutsch-Südwest-Afrika, p. 167. 25 Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 195. 26 Franke in Gewald, ‘The Herero genocide’, 119.

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Racism made maltreatment possible. From the early days of German Southwest Africa, European traders, colonists and soldiers deemed themselves racially superior to Africans. In fact, racial stereotypes of Hereros, Namas and other Southern Africans had been in the making since the onset of European encroachment. Missionaries aimed to ‘civilise’ locals. Their detailed descriptions of the customs, physical characteristics and traits (‘pretentious, vain, and arrogant . . . ungrateful and faithless’) of the Africans they hoped to convert divided the population into neat ethnic categories that laid the groundwork for colonial knowledge.27 As early as the 1860s, German scientists described the physical characteristics of Southern Africans, classifying them in a hierarchical order stretching from Bantu-speaking Africans such as the Herero, down to the ‘khoikhoin’ (including the Nama).28 Colonists who began trickling into the colony in the 1880s were duly convinced that they were superior to Africans and behaved accordingly. They generally adopted a paternalistic attitude and considered domestic violence a ‘legitimate instrument of control’ when disciplining African employees.29 Abuse and rape were common, the latter exacerbated by the colony’s European gender imbalance. Franke, who found the Khauas-Khoi prisoners so appalling, is still remembered by descendants of the African women he violated as a ‘callous’, ‘casual’ rapist.30 German men used the notion of ‘going native’ as the excuse for abusive actions.31 As Germans gained power, their violence against Hereros and Namas increased. Leutwein, appointed as governor in 1898, acknowledged that freshly arrived Europeans were inclined, ‘with their inborn feeling of belonging to a superior race’, to behave as ‘members of a conquering army’.32 From the late 1890s, abuse increased, as ‘a succession of junior Schutztruppe officers were implicated in murders, rapes, and beatings of Africans’.33 European 27 F. Schulze, ‘Missionaries, race, and othering: entanglements and comparisons between German Southwest Africa, Indonesia, and Brazil’, Itinerario 37:1 (2013), 13–27, at 18–19. 28 A. Bank and K. Dietrich, An Eloquent Picture Gallery: The South African Portrait Photographs of Gustav Theodor Fritsch, 1863–1865 (Auckland Park: Jacana Media, 2008), pp. 141–2. 29 A. Lubotzky, ‘“Ja, es musste sein!” German settler perceptions of violence during the Herero and Nama war (1904–1907)’, Journal of Namibian Studies 24 (2018), 7–31, at 21. 30 Gewald, ‘The Herero genocide’, 119. 31 L. Wildenthal, ‘Race, gender, and citizenship in the German colonial empire’ in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. F. Cooper and A. L. Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 263–84, at 280. 32 Leutwein in Madley, ‘Patterns’, 184. 33 D. Olusoga and C. W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 120.

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employers made use of the väterliche Züchtigungsrecht (paternal right of correction) to beat and flog African employees.34 Germans attempted to justify such violence by reasoning that Africans had different values and were less sensitive to pain.35 The colonial legal system, imposed upon the territory after the land dispossessions under Leutwein, distinguished between whites and Africans: murders of Europeans by ‘natives’ invariably resulted in death sentences, while the few whites who stood trial for killing ‘natives’ were acquitted or served only short prison terms.36 German policies thus set the stage for the second phase leading to this frontier genocide: a desperate Herero attack on colonists in an attempt to reclaim lost land and cattle, regain political independence, and exact revenge. On 12 January 1904, Maharero commanded his people to fight, but to ‘refrain from laying their hands on’ European women and children.37 Because colonial troops were tied up in the south by the Bondelswarts Nama uprising, Herero attacks were unexpectedly successful. Within a few days, Hereros occupied the whole of central Namibia, with the exception of German military posts. They plundered businesses, farms and towns, killing 123 Germans.38

From Guerrilla War to Genocide Fear and hatred of Africans played a huge part in the events that unfolded. Initial attacks provoked ‘war fever’.39 Rumours of the murder and mutilation of hundreds of European men, women and children spread ‘like wildfire’, contributing to radicalisation.40 In the first days of the uprising, Germans found captured Hereros who had stolen cattle guilty of plundering and shot them immediately. German settlers, however, called for a more ‘dishonoring’ death. From February onwards, Germans lynched captured ‘rebels’, leaving their naked bodies to hang.41 Meanwhile, panicked authorities pre-emptively imprisoned many Hereros. They incarcerated all Hereros in Swakopmund: women on land, Madley, ‘Patterns’, 184. 35 Lubotzky, ‘Settler perceptions’, 23. Leutwein, Elf Jahre, p. 244; Administrator’s Office, ed., Report, pp. 53–4. Maharero in Madley, ‘Patterns’, 185. 38 Leutwein, Elf Jahre, p. 466. Madley, ‘Patterns’, 185. J. Zimmerer, ‘War, concentration camps and genocide in South-West Africa: the first German genocide’ in Genocide in German South-West Africa: The Colonial War (1904–1908) in Namibia and Its Aftermath, ed. J. Zimmerer and J. Zeller (Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2008), 41–63, at 42. 41 Rust, Krieg, pp. 195–6. 34 36 37 39 40

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Figure 26.1 Hereros tried and hanged, February 1904. (C. Rust, Krieg und Frieden im Hererolande. Auszeichnungen aus dem Kriegsjahre 1904 (Berlin- Großlichterfelde: E. T. Förster, 1905))

approximately 550 men on two steamships destined for Cape Town. Shortly afterwards, Swakopmund authorities sold a shipload of male prisoners to a labour recruiter for the Cape Colony mines. On 20 January 1904, the SS Eduard Bohlen sailed with 282 prisoners, these Hereros effectively condemned to a life of de facto slavery.42 Meanwhile, the ruthlessness of the German counter-insurgency drew more and more Hereros into guerrilla warfare. For Germans, the war was a ‘welcome opportunity to settle questions of land and property in their own favor’. The dominant sentiment was that Hereros had to be punished, by complete disarmament and dispossession, or even by ‘striking them down to the very last man’. Even Governor Leutwein, who had warned against such radical viewpoints, believed that the Hereros (like the Witbooi Nama and Khauas-Khoi before them) had to be collectively punished by rendering them ‘politically dead’. Their future would be in reserves ‘just sufficient for their needs’.43 In a striking role reversal, Germans claimed that the Herero fought an indiscriminate race war, fabricating stories of rape and the butchery of white women.44 In this context, colonists had no faith in Leutwein’s attempts to solve matters diplomatically, and demanded military action.45 Within two 42 Gewald, ‘The road of the man called Love’, 26–7. 43 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 44–5. 44 Missionary Irle, cited in Drechsler, Struggle, p. 146. 45 Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 205.

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days of the outbreak of the Herero uprising, the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft (German Colonial Society) lobbied for large-scale military intervention.46 The Kolonialgesellschaft insisted: Anyone familiar with the life of the African and other less civilized non-white peoples knows that Europeans can assert themselves only by maintaining the supremacy of their race at all costs . . . the swifter and harsher the reprisals taken . . . the better the chances of restoring authority.47

This punishment would conveniently entail the confiscation of all Herero land and cattle, completing Leutwein’s systematic wealth transfer.48 In February 1904, the Generalstab (General Staff) in Berlin took control of the war. They replaced Leutwein with General Lothar von Trotha, who had forged a reputation for ruthlessness as a commander in German East Africa and as commander of a German unit that attacked Chinese villages following the 1901 Boxer Rebellion. His appointment has often been described as a turning point towards genocide. Indeed, as he prepared to take control, Kaiser Wilhelm II commanded him to ‘crush the rebellion by all means necessary’.49 Von Trotha’s frequently quoted and paraphrased letters expressed clear views on the future of Africans in the colony. On 5 November 1904, he alluded to his experiences elsewhere in Africa: I know enough tribes in Africa. They all have the same mentality insofar as they yield only to force. It was and remains my policy to apply this force by unmitigated terrorism and even cruelty. I shall destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money. Only thus will it be possible to sow the seeds of something new that will endure.50

When Von Trotha arrived in the colony on 11 June 1904, most Hereros had retreated to the Waterberg, a plateau bordering the Omaheke Desert. Von Trotha encircled them – some 60,000 men, women and children led by Maharero, as well as their cattle – intent on a ‘decisive battle’.51 In the early morning of 11 August 1904, he attacked from six directions.52 A majority of 46 Drechsler, Struggle, p. 142. 47 Quoted in B. Madley, ‘From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa incubated ideas and methods adopted and developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe’, European History Quarterly 35:3 (2005), 429–64, at 440. 48 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 44. 49 Quoted in Madley, ‘Africa to Auschwitz’, 442. 50 Von Trotha to Leutwein, 5 November 1904, quoted in Drechsler, Struggle, p. 154. 51 Kriegsgeschichtlichen Abteilung des Großen Generalstabes, Die Kämpfe der deutschen Truppen in Südwestafrika I: Der Feldzug gegen die Hereros (Berlin: E. S. Mittler und Sohn, 1906), p. 137. 52 Madley, ‘Patterns’, 187.

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Hereros broke through a lightly held eastern section in the German ring, fleeing with families, wagons and cattle towards the Omaheke and British Bechuanaland (now Botswana). The section of the encirclement bordering the desert was intentionally left weak. The Generalstab later reflected: A retreat of the Herero in a southeasterly direction was not considered likely, because such a move would lead them into the thirst area (Durstgebiet) of the Omaheke. Therefore, only weaker forces would have to be deployed here. If the Hereros were to attempt to break through here, however, then such an outcome would be only the more desirable for the German command, as the enemy would voluntarily run towards his destruction. For in the waterless Sandveld he would certainly die of thirst.53

Von Trotha ordered troops to pursue the Herero deep into the desert, knowing the disastrous consequences this would have. Moreover, soldiers shot any Hereros they encountered.54 Worried about Hereros regrouping and inspiring further uprisings, Von Trotha cordoned off huge stretches of the Omaheke, blocking escape routes and cutting off waterholes.55 On 2 October 1904, Von Trotha issued his infamous Vernichtungsbefehl (Annihilation Order). With state-sanctioned mass killing in full swing, the order confirmed that genocide was official policy and an acceptable outcome. Fear and hatred for the enemy shine through in its words, quoted below in full: Osombo-Windembe, 2 October 1904. I, the great general of the German soldiers send this letter to the Herero people. – Herero are no longer German subjects. They have murdered, stolen, have cut off ears and noses and other body-parts of wounded soldiers and now out of cowardice no longer want to fight. I say to the people: Anyone, who delivers one of the captains as prisoner to one of my stations, receives 1000 marks; who brings Samuel Maharero, 5000 marks. The Herero people must all leave the land. If the people do not do this, then I shall force them to do so with the groot Rohr [big gun]. Within the German borders any Herero with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer take in women and children, [but] drive them back to their people or let them be shot at. Those are my words to the Herero people. The great general of the mighty German emperor. v. Trotha.56 53 Generalstab, Kämpfe I, p. 132 (author’s emphasis). 54 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 47–8. 55 Generalstab, Kämpfe I, p. 208. 56 Author’s translation of Von Trotha’s proclamation in Rust, Krieg, p. 385.

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Hereros had been so demonised that shooting at women and children had become official policy. Chasing Hereros into the desert meant riding for weeks in unknown, dangerous terrain, plagued by disease and exhaustion. One division operated in ‘an outstretched, virtually waterless sand world’, far from any military posts.57 In these circumstances, rumours ran rife. Mutilated German corpses found on the battlefield, alluded to in the Vernichtungsbefehl, fuelled fear of Herero cruelty. Historian Gerhardus Pool described how Hereros beat wounded German soldiers to death with ‘knopkieries’ (traditional wooden clubs) and ‘heavily’ or ‘horribly mutilated’ them.58 Germans used such acts to further dehumanise Hereros, and in attempts to justify genocidal violence. The Generalstab considered mass death in the Omaheke as justice served: ‘The shutting off of the Sandveld, which was carried on for months with iron firmness, completed the work of destruction . . . The court had now completed its work of punishment. The Hereros had ceased to exist as an independent people.’59 Meanwhile, another uprising erupted to the south. In September of 1904, as Germans were chasing Hereros, Witbooi declared war. At the Waterberg, Namas had fought alongside Germans. Perhaps the experiences of Witbooi’s men in the brutal campaign against the Herero contributed to Witbooi’s war. Namas may also have considered war inevitable. They must have been aware of colonists’ calls to disarm and subjugate all Africans.60 In response to Nama attacks, Germans began a lethal strategy of occupying watering places and ‘cleansing the country by mass internment’, targeting men, women and children. On 22 April 1905, Von Trotha issued a second Vernichtungsbefehl, threatening Namas with the same fate as the Herero.61 Yet the Nama did not surrender, and the guerrilla war dragged on for years, even after Witbooi died of a bullet wound on 29 October 1905.62 Other Nama captains, most notably Cornelius Fredericks of the Bethanie Nama, Simon Kopper and Jakob Marengo, a charismatic captain of dual Herero and Nama descent, continued the fight.63 57 G. Pool, Die Herero-opstand 1904–1907 (Cape Town: Hollandsch Afrikaansche Uitgevers Maatschappij, 1979), p. 161. 58 Ibid., pp. 180, 217. 59 Generalstab, Kämpfe I, p. 214. 60 W. Hillebrecht, ‘The Nama and the war in the south’ in Genocide in German South-West Africa, ed. Zimmerer and Zeller, 143–58, at 147–9. 61 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 51–2. 62 Hillebrecht, ‘Nama’, 152–3. 63 J. R. Masson, ‘A fragment of colonial history: the killing of Jakob Marengo’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21:2 (1995), 247–56, at 249–50.

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As with the Herero, Germans deployed reinforcements; at the peak of the war, the Nama held down 14,000 German troops with some 2,000 men.64 Hendrik Campbell, commander of the Rehoboth Baster contingent that served under the Germans, described the German troops’ ruthless approach: At Pakriver, in the district of Gibeon, we captured eight Hottentots of whom only one was armed. Seven were immediately shot dead. The eighth was promised his life if he showed the locality of their camp at Korob. After he had pointed out the locality he was shot by Lieutenant [Thilo] von Trotha personally with a revolver, this I saw with my own eyes.65

Echoing the first reports of Herero attacks, gruesome stories of Nama raids on European households appeared in colonial and European newspapers.66 Again, tensions rose when it proved hard to subjugate the enemy. To the frustration of German troops, Namas used their knowledge of the terrain to elude detection and to lure German troops into narrow gorges and ambushes. Again, these conditions led to atrocities. As the image of the Nama shifted from allies to enemies, the Germans embarked on a campaign to exterminate them.

Concentration Camps Fear and hatred of Africans continued to shape the genocide as its locus shifted to concentration camps. Late in December 1904, the German government rescinded the Vernichtungsbefehl and missionaries installed temporary collecting camps for Herero survivors. From there, officials sent ‘prisoners of war’ – men, women and children who were weak and emaciated from their ordeal in the desert – to concentration camps in or near settlements often hundreds of kilometres away, including Windhoek, Swakopmund and Lüderitz. There, companies and construction works used them as forced labourers, while others stole their land. Hereros in these camps received inadequate food, shelter and clothing, suffered from diseases, and endured rape and abuse. In 1905, missionary Heinrich Vedder described how the Hereros in the main concentration camp at Swakopmund ‘were driven to death like cattle and like cattle they were buried’.67 64 Hillebrecht, ‘Nama’, 151. 65 Administrator’s Office, ed., Report, p. 99. 66 ‘Eerste Blad’, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 20 December 1904. 67 Vedder in J. Zeller, ‘“Wie Vieh wurden hunderte zu Tode getrieben und wie Vieh begraben”: Fotodokumente aus dem deutschen Konzentrationslager in Swakopmund/ Namibia 1904-1908’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 49:3 (2001), 226–43, at 227.

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Figure 26.2 Herero women working as forced labourers in Swakopmund concentration camp, c.1905–7. (National Archives of Namibia)

Herero forced labourers built key elements of the colony’s infrastructure, including railways and quays, while colonial policies reduced Hereros to a landless proletariat. In the view of Friedrich von Lindequist, who succeeded Von Trotha in 1905, forced labour disciplined Hereros and Namas, taught them to work, and prepared them for their new roles as workers.68 Yet the camp system was genocidal. The lethal conditions were known and maintained. Again, Germans’ desire to punish Hereros and Namas (and the fear of future uprisings) determined their fate. Many Germans revelled in the horrible conditions that had befallen their enemy. Vedder described how both German soldiers and civilians displayed a remorseless brutishness (‘rücksichtlose Rohheit’), randy sensuality (‘geile Sinnlichkeit’) and brutal overlordship (‘brutales Herrentum’) that could ‘hardly be exaggerated’.69 He attributed the barbaric treatment, in part, to overseers who considered ‘each and every Herero’ a ‘murderer’ and ‘cannibal’: the result of years of Othering and war propaganda.70 Authorities welcomed their suffering as a 68 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 53. 69 J.-B. Gewald, ‘Coming through slaughter: the Herero of Namibia, 1904–1940’ in The Practice of War: Production, Reproduction, and Communication of Armed Violence, ed. A. Rao, M. Bollig and M. Böck (Oxford, New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 89–110, at 92. 70 Zeller, ‘Wie Vieh’, 227.

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warning and punishment. On 3 July 1905, Deputy Governor Hans Tecklenburg wrote, ‘the more the Herero people now feel physically the consequences of the uprising, the less they will yearn for a repetition of the experience for generations to come’.71 When these consequences turned out to be deadly, authorities continued to send prisoners to the camps in the full knowledge that they were sending people to their deaths. Shark Island concentration camp, just off the coast of Lüderitz, was the twentieth century’s first death camp.72 Linked to the mainland by a small causeway, it was exposed to gale-force winds and surrounded by icy waters. Herero had been imprisoned there since 1905.73 Lack of shelter, nourishment and warm clothes, together with forced labour, rape and abuse, caused prisoners to die in droves. When Nama people led by Captain Cornelius Fredericks surrendered in March 1906, Germans interned them on Shark Island. On arrival, Lindequist personally informed them that they would suffer the same fate as the Herero as a punishment for their crimes. He deemed them traitors, who had broken their pact with the Kaiser.74 Within weeks, they began dying. Emaciated and sick, they served as forced labourers in the construction of a new quay in Lüderitz harbour. By February 1907, the construction project had to be abandoned because most of the 2,000 Nama on Shark Island had died, and, of the survivors, only 20 could work.75 Fredericks himself died on 26 February 1907. At least 2,000 people, but probably more, died on Shark Island.76 It was no coincidence that German authorities sent the Namas led by Fredericks to the concentration camp with the highest death rates. The German image of Namas differed slightly from that of Hereros. Where they generally considered Hereros useful labourers, they considered Namas to be dangerous guerrilla fighters. Colonists emphasised their low economic value and ‘laziness’, and believed that the Nama would eventually become extinct.77 They used such reasoning in attempts to justify an extermination policy. Concern about another potential Nama uprising was so great that they remained imprisoned years after the war had ended. As late as 1910, ninety-three Nama men, women and children, including Witbooi’s son and 71 Ibid., 242. 72 Madley, ‘Africa to Auschwitz’, 446. 73 C. W. Erichsen, ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently among Them’: Concentration Camps and Prisoners-of-War in Namibia, 1904–1908 (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2005, Research Report 79), pp. 71–3. 74 Windhuker Nachrichten, 22 March 1906, quoted in Olusoga and Erichsen, Kaiser’s Holocaust, p. 203. 75 Erichsen, Angel of Death, pp. 115, 117–18. 76 Madley, ‘Africa to Auschwitz’, 447. 77 Lubotzky, ‘Settler perceptions’, 14–15.

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successor Klein Hendrik, were sent north to the West African German colony of Cameroon, where the majority of them perished from hard labour and tropical diseases.78 Photographs of dead, dying and suffering prisoners underscored German disregard for Herero and Nama lives. From 1904 onwards, postcards of beatings, executions and imprisoned ‘rebels’ became increasingly popular.79 Similar images found their way into private photo albums. For men like Hauptmann Friedrich Stahl, who photographed the death and dying in Swakopmund in 1905, such photographs were ‘trophy pictures’, to take home and gloat over.80 The photographs taken on Shark Island by German officer Arbogast von Düring epitomise such power photography. In one of his photographs, an officer stands tall amid seated, subdued prisoners.81 The dehumanisation of prisoners continued even in death. Under the guise of science, skulls and preserved body parts of Herero and Nama concentration camp victims arrived in Berlin. Scientists used these remains to ‘prove’ racial theories about Herero and Nama inferiority, further justifying the cruel and boundless punishment meted out in German Southwest Africa.82

Lasting Consequences According to the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention definition, the crimes committed by Germany against the Nama and Herero between 1904 and 1908 constitute genocide. Following the Battle of the Waterberg, German soldiers chased tens of thousands Herero men, women and children into the Omaheke and away from waterholes, knowing that this would result in death and destruction. During the campaigns of 1904–7, German soldiers slaughtered unarmed men, women and children without trial. In concentration camps, conditions killed most prisoners. The exact number of Herero and Nama victims of the 1904–8 genocides can only be estimated. Records mention 60,000 to 100,000 Hereros before the war, and approximately 16,000 survivors.83 Census takers in 1911 enumerated 78 Administrator’s Office, ed., Report, pp. 99–100. 79 W. Hartmann, Hues between Black and White: Historical Photography from Colonial Namibia 1860s to 1915 (Windhoek: Out of Africa Publishers, 2004), p. 13. 80 Zeller, ‘Wie Vieh’, 232–3. 81 Erichsen, Angel of Death, p. 90. 82 For an analysis of this practice, see L. Faber-Jonker, ‘Anthropological specimens or war trophies? The practice of collecting and studying human remains of victims of the Herero and Nama genocide in German South West Africa, 1904–1908’, Monde(s) 17:1 (2020), 33–56. 83 Dedering, ‘The German–Herero war of 1904’, 82; Madley, ‘Patterns’, 181; Gewald, ‘Colonization, genocide and resurgence’, 205.

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only 15,130 Herero survivors.84 By this accounting, some 44,000 to 84,870 Hereros perished in the genocide. Observers estimated the Nama population at 20,000 in 1904. Half of them are thought to have perished.85 The 1911 census counted some 9,800 Nama survivors.86 Whatever the precise numbers, the consequences of the genocide were disastrous. Breaking down the numbers according to causes of death is even harder. Tens of thousands of Herero died of thirst in the desert. An estimated 50,000– 60,000 had gathered on the Waterberg Plateau.87 The majority managed to escape towards the Omaheke.88 Some made it to British Bechuanaland, but these numbers are small. Take the Herero interviewed by Marais: only 10 per cent of this group made it across. The majority – 3,600 men, women and children – perished. When missionaries installed collecting camps, 11,624 Hereros surrendered.89 German soldiers directly killed an unknown number of Herero and Nama people. They often had difficulty counting casualties because Hereros frequently carried away their fallen soldiers.90 By contrast, Germans documented concentration camp deaths. They recorded some 3,000 deaths in Lüderitz and on Shark Island between 1905 and 1908.91 The Swakopmund death register enumerated 1,811 prisoners of war and forced labourer deaths until March 1906. An undated German document added up the numbers: from October 1904 to March 1907, of 15,000 Herero and 2,000 Nama prisoners, 7,682 died, or 45.2 per cent of all prisoners.92 The genocide not only killed tens of thousands of individuals, it also facilitated mass theft. While Germans incarcerated the Herero and Nama, they confiscated their remaining lands. From 1908, authorities worked to turn German Southwest Africa into an agricultural colony suited to the needs of German cattle breeders. Although authorities formally closed the concentration camps in 1908, most surviving Herero and Nama people remained unfree. From 1907 onwards, policy-makers required all Africans to wear numbered brass tokens allocating them to certain work areas, a system that 84 A. D. Cooper, ‘Reparations for the Herero genocide: defining the limits of international litigation’, African Affairs 106:422 (2006), 113–26, at 114. 85 Hull, ‘Military campaign’, 15. 86 I. N. Chimee, ‘Discussing German genocide in Africa: the case of the Herero and Nama of German South-West Africa’, Annals of the Ovidius University of Constanta – Political Science Series 5 (2016), 95–110, at 106. 87 Dedering, ‘The German–Herero war of 1904’, 82. 88 Zimmerer, ‘War’, 47. 89 Erichsen, Angel of Death, p. 40. 90 Pool, Herero-opstand, p. 121. 91 Erichsen, Angel of Death, p. 133. 92 J. Zeller, ‘“Ombepera i Koza – the cold is killing me”: a history of the concentration camp in Swakopmund (1904–1908)’ in Genocide in German South-West Africa, ed. Zimmerer and Zeller, 64–83, at 76–8.

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foreshadowed later apartheid regulations in Southwest Africa.93 The Herero and Nama never regained their lands. In 21st-century Namibia, Herero and Nama people remain marginalised.94

Conclusion The ‘rivers of blood and rivers of money’ of the Herero and Nama genocides did not begin to flow in German Southwest Africa when Lothar von Trotha arrived in 1904. They swelled, but the source of these rivers is located further back in time. From the beginning of the colonial project, Germans aimed to brutally subjugate the Herero and Nama peoples. By stressing supposed differences, Germans dehumanised both peoples. Many Germans attributed inferior racial characteristics to Hereros and Namas, considering themselves superior. The colonial legal system fortified such imagined differences by distinguishing between whites and ‘natives’ in juridical matters. As in other colonial situations, colonists used such racist notions to excuse abuse, rape, massacres and the systematic transfer of Indigenous lands into colonists’ hands. This pattern of invasion and racism was not unique to German Southwest Africa. So why did it become genocidal? The Herero and Nama genocides were not preconceived plans. The reality was much more complex. The notions of racial superiority that attempted to justify taking Indigenous land and acts of violence against the colonised had always been balanced by a fear of anti-colonial uprising. Even prior to the genocide, this fear led to ever greater atrocities, including the genocidal Hoornkrans Massacre and the incarceration of the Khauas-Khoi in concentration camps. German authorities punished the Nama and Khauas-Khoi for standing up to the supposedly superior Germans and their colonial project. The same racist-inspired tendency to punish resulted in German farmers beating African workers to death. When the Herero finally rose up, as Germans had long feared, the reaction predictably was one of brute physical punishment. This time, the racist violence turned genocidal. When German soldiers failed to subjugate the Herero and Nama quickly, as in the case of the 93 J. Zimmerer, ‘The model colony? Racial segregation, forced labour and total control in German South-West Africa’ in Genocide in German South-West Africa, ed. Zimmerer and Zeller, 19–37, at 28. 94 J.-B. Gewald, ‘Imperial Germany and the Herero of Southern Africa: genocide and the quest for recompense’ in Genocide, War Crimes and the West: History and Complicity, ed. A. Jones (London: Zed Books, 2004), 59–77, at 72.

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Khauas-Khoi, fear and hatred flowed together with a desire for revenge born of military frustration. The latent desire to ‘solve’ the Herero and Nama issue – by taking all of their lands and cattle and ensuring that future generations would not attempt to ‘rebel’ – determined what happened next. Soldiers chased tens of thousands of Herero into the Omaheke to die. Meanwhile, colonial authorities worked thousands of Hereros and Namas to death in concentration camps. Like the Khauas-Khoi before them, the Herero and Nama people received punishment for perceived ‘insolence’ and for upsetting the colonial order. To eliminate the chances of future uprisings and to make way for more colonists, German policy-makers intentionally killed many thousands of people. The Herero and Nama societies were to disappear. Despite the odds, they did not, and managed to maintain and reinvent their identity. Today, Herero and Nama people campaign for German apologies for the genocide, and monetary recompense.95

Bibliographic Note For decades, Europeans wilfully forgot the 1904–8 Herero and Nama genocide. It entered history books as a colonial war, glorified in soldiers’ and colonists’ memoirs and celebrated by statues. Eugène Marais’ 1921 essay is a rare and precious account. Not only is it an early, uncensored report of the hardships endured by Herero refugees during their flight, it also incorporates victims’ voices. The vast majority of the sources that help us to understand the background, phases and consequences of the genocide were written by perpetrators, with the important exception of The Report on the Natives of South-West Africa and their Treatment by Germany, better known as the ‘Blue Book’. This British report shed light on atrocities committed in the colony before and during military conflict, as well as the lack of legal protection and disproportionate punishment of Africans, based on eyewitness statements under oath. In 1926, Southwest African authorities banned it in the interest of white unity (Gewald, ‘Recompense’, 64–5). Nevertheless, there remained copious evidence of genocide. The Generalstab’s official account of the German military campaigns against the Herero and Nama gloated over their suffering and contained statements of intent to destroy both peoples. German correspondence, contracts, treaties 95 N. Sprenger, R. G. Rodriguez and N. A. Kamatuka, ‘The Ovaherero/Nama genocide: a case for apology and reparations’, European Scientific Journal 13:15 (2017), 120–46, at 139.

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and reports detail everything from inventories of prisoners to scientists’ requests for Herero skulls. In addition, German Southwest African colonial newspapers provided insight into colonists’ racist attitudes and unscrupulous views during the genocide (Lubotzky, ‘Settler perceptions’, 7–31). Soldiers’ and colonists’ memoirs likewise provide evidence of racist attitudes and genocidal crimes. See, for example, Rust, Krieg; and M. Bayer, Mit dem Hauptquartier in Südwestafrika (Berlin: W. Weicher, 1909). It is striking that no attempts were made to conceal mass murder. See T. te Wierik, ‘“Ein Endgültige Lösung der Eingeborenenfrage”: debating slavery and extermination in the Deutsch-Südwestafrikanische Zeitung (1901–1905)’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2018), 75. In light of such evidence, scholarly debate has focused on intent. It was not until the 1960s that German historians Horst Drechsler and Helmut Bley published the first scholarly works detailing German crimes in the colony, based on German archival sources. In 1980, in Struggle (pp. 210–11), Drechsler was the first to define the German atrocities of 1904–8 as a genocide (Völkermord). He considered it the culmination of a policy to exterminate the Herero and Nama and argued that it was German government policy to destroy the Nama by sending them to Shark Island. Bley likewise argued that both the conduct of the war and the treatment of prisoners were ‘intended by government and settlers alike’ to eradicate ‘unproductive elements’. See Bley, South West Africa under German Rule, 1894–1914 (London: Heinemann, 1971), p. 198. Bley, however, held Von Trotha personally responsible for the destruction of the Herero (p. 169). After Namibia’s independence in 1990, pioneering research in the Namibian archives by, among others, Werner Hillebrecht, Jan-Bart Gewald and Dag Henrichsen provided further insight into the background, phases and consequences of the genocide. In the 1990s, the debate focused on statements of genocidal intent, genocidal crimes and demographic consequences. Criticising Drechsler, Brigitte Lau (in Dedering, ‘The German– Herero war of 1904’, 81–2) argued that Von Trotha’s Vernichtungsbefehl was merely ‘psychological warfare’. At the time, there was no academic consensus on the nature of the ‘Herero–German war’ and sceptics questioned the authenticity of the text, first quoted in 1905. Historian Jan-Bart Gewald silenced those sceptics with a discovery in the Botswana National Archives: a worn and folded copy of the declaration, written in Otjiherero. See J.B. Gewald, ‘The great general of the Kaiser’, Botswana Notes and Records 26 (1994), 67–76, at 68–9. Often translated as ‘destruction’ or ‘extermination order’, the document is crucial evidence of a conscious German policy to annihilate the Herero. 654

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The scholarly debate gained momentum in the early 2000s, when several historians suggested links between the Herero and Nama genocide and the Holocaust. In analysing these parallels, scholars pointed to racism and dehumanisation in German Southwest Africa as an underlying cause of the genocide. Benjamin Madley, in ‘Africa to Auschwitz’ (p. 436), described how colonists pioneered a worldview later embraced by the Nazis, ‘in which superior Germans ruled over sub-human non-Germans with brutality and slavery’. Jürgen Zimmerer likewise argued that the genocide differed from other colonial conflicts because Von Trotha viewed it as a race war, stressing similarities with the Nazi conquest of Poland. See Zimmerer, ‘Annihilation in Africa: the “race war” in German Southwest Africa (1904– 1908) and its significance for a global history of genocide’, GHI Bulletin 37 (2005), 51–7, at 52, 54. Such parallels have political power. Hereros and Namas campaigning for reparations frequently compare their case to that of Jewish Holocaust survivors. Historians Joachim Zeller (in ‘Wie Vieh’) and Casper W. Erichsen (in Angel of Death) wrote detailed accounts of the concentration camp system, unlocking vital evidence of atrocities. David Olusoga’s 2004 BBC documentary Namibia: Genocide and the Second Reich (2004) and Olusoga and Erichsen’s 2010 book The Kaiser’s Holocaust brought the continuity thesis to a wider audience. Meanwhile, several historians focused on military conduct in imperial Germany. Isabel V. Hull argued in ‘Military campaign’ (p. 16) that it was the German ‘logic of military practice more than the logic of ideology’ that led Von Trotha to destroy the Herero. In her view, he embodied the culture of ‘aggressive actionism’ that guided German imperial military practice: his desire to deal the Herero a decisive blow and achieve ‘total victory’ guided his actions during and beyond the Battle of the Waterberg, following German military doctrine. Hull argued that the genocide was not planned but, rather, developed out of ‘standard military practices and assumptions’. Thus, the Herero escape into the desert was an embarrassment, the deadly pursuit an improvised response, and the ‘destruction order’ an affirmation of what was already happening. In Hull’s view, racism helped him to justify his actions after the fact (‘Military campaign’, 7, 10–13). Building on Hull’s approach, Matthias Häußler argued that the ‘original intentions’ of commanders in Berlin and Windhoek were ‘not . . . genocidal’ but that the genocide resulted from ‘gradually escalating violence’. See Häußler, ‘From destruction to extermination: genocidal escalation in Germany’s war against the Herero, 1904’, Journal of Namibian Studies 10 (2011), 55–81, at 55–6. In this regard, it is important to note that, although 655

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Von Trotha’s strategy adhered to German military practice, it was not a European war. The Herero and Nama genocides took place in a context of deeply rooted fear and hatred of Africans. Von Trotha’s intention to ‘destroy the rebellious tribes by shedding rivers of blood and money’ is a case in point. Genocide was possible because the Herero and Nama had been suppressed and dehumanised for decades. The chasing of the Herero into the desert and the Vernichtungsbefehl were indeed genocidal, but were also rooted in the racism that excused land theft, rape, ‘correctional violence’ and even massacres, long before Von Trotha set foot in the colony. Since the beginning of this century, Hereros and Namas have been campaigning for an apology from the German state and monetary reparations. In 2001, Herero representatives took to court two German companies who had profited from forced labour during the genocide. Three years later, at the genocide’s centennial, German Minister for Economic Co-operation and Development Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul apologised with careful words, stating: ‘The atrocities, the murders, the crimes committed at that time are today termed genocide . . . We accept our historical, political, ethical and moral responsibility for the wrongs committed by our ancestors.’ See L. Jamfa, ‘Germany faces colonial history in Namibia: a very ambiguous “I am sorry”’ in The Age of Apology: Facing Up to the Past, ed. M. Gibney, R. E. Howard-Hassmann, J.-M. Coicaud and N. Steiner (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 202–15, at 210–11. Much has happened since. In 2007, the Von Trotha family apologised. See ‘General’s descendants apologize for “Germany’s first genocide”’, Spiegel International, 8 October 2007. Colonial statues have been removed, German and Namibian streets renamed, human remains repatriated. Today, the German and Namibian states are discussing the terms of a public apology. Scholars are seeking to fill in the gaps of our knowledge with new perspectives and micro-histories. Meanwhile, the German treatment of San and Damara in colonial Namibia still demands further exploration.

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Representations of the Poison Gas War on the Eastern Front, 1915–1917 nicole jordan

It is a commonplace in the historiography of the World War One that the practical strategic consequences of the poison gas war were ‘zero, its tactical consequences limited, and its human consequences weaker than long believed’.1 Presented almost entirely from the vantage point of the western front, treatment of the poison gas war can be summed up in the words: Ypres, chlorine and mustard gas. In reality, the poison gas attack at Ypres in April 1915 was a strategic side show for the German General Staff, which by then regarded as primary the eastern front, where the experimental gas war had begun several months earlier.2 As it unfolded, the realities and legacy of the eastern gas war in Russia and on the Balkan front – or southeastern front as it was known to the Germans – were radically different from those in the west. While relatively light on the western front where gas masks soon protected British and French soldiers, casualties were massive in the east where peasant armies and civilians went unprotected in the face of advanced poison gas warfare in 1915–17. Until American entry into the war, the Kaiserreich enjoyed an incomparable advantage in the large-scale manufacture of poison gases. Its pre-war global monopoly in dyes lent itself to the development of lethal gases, easily and plentifully produced from dye intermediates.3 German military field trials with unambiguously poisonous gases (cyanide compounds and phosgene, gases to be deployed on the eastern front from 1915) 1 G.-H. Soutou, ‘Grande Guerre, année 1916 (Préface)’, Revue historique des Armées 2 (1996), 2. 2 L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud: Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 36–7. 3 J. J. Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1959); D. Stoltzenberg, ‘Scientist and industrial manager: Emil Fischer and Carl Duisberg’ in The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Lesch (Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 78–80.

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predated the war.4 The exclusive historiographical focus on the western front and attendant distortions have been justified on the grounds that it is impossible to speak about the eastern gas war about which nothing can be known. Since the east was the terrain of German poison gas experimentation in both world wars, the omission has been considerable. Uncovering in conventional archives the history of the experimental poison gas war is well-nigh impossible. The belligerents heavily censored the topic during the war, while archives related to the Kaiserreich’s chemical war were deliberately destroyed in its immediate aftermath – and, later, attempts were made before and during the Shoah to eradicate traces of the earlier German poison gas war. This chapter moves beyond conventional archives to recover this complex history. It interweaves cultural artefacts with sparse archival material to represent two distinct episodes of genocidal massacre in the experimental poison gas war in the east.5 The first occurred in summer 1915, when the Germans deployed the most lethal gases then known against the Russian army during the campaign for Warsaw. The second took place in 1917, when the Germans and their Bulgarian allies targeted civilians in the open town of Monástir in Macedonia. Prussic acid or HCN – by 1917, the chemical base for an early form of Zyklon – provided the constant in the two episodes. From a reconfigured archive of testimonial, political and literary writings, photographs and paintings, these artefacts map the gas war’s escalation, from the 1915 exterminatory tactics against Russian peasant soldiers without knowledge of modernity to its systematisation of genocidal violence in 1917, targeting women and children in precocious forms of industrialised extermination.

Bolimów, 1915: The Radicalisation of Warfare The immediate impetus for poison gas warfare came from the period of atrocities against civilians inspired by fears of counter-insurgency during the opening German offensives in the east and west. Max Bauer, the artillery expert on the Prussian General Staff, summoned Walther Nernst, the discoverer of the Third Law of Thermodynamics and the prime mover in German poison gas warfare, along with the industrialist Carl Duisberg, to retest lethal gases for combat in which francs-tireurs sheltered in houses. In October 1914, Duisberg acknowledged: ‘Nernst and I consider ourselves barbarians in 4 J. Johnson, ‘La mobilisation de la recherche industrielle allemande au service de la guerre chimique’, 14–18 Aujourd’hui – Today – Heute 6 (March 2003), 93. 5 Helen Fein, ‘Genocide: a sociological perspective,’ Current Sociology 38 (1990), 17–19.

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applying science to destructive ends. But in our view the Fatherland requires such work . . . Not tactics, but technology will decide the war.’6 At Bolimów, an obscure town situated on a tributary of the Vistula, the Germans made massive use of an enhanced tear gas in January 1915, but it had had no effect due to the cold.7 After Ypres in April 1915, the Germans rapidly escalated their eastern war by testing shells filled with lethal poison gases. Bolimów became the epicentre of the struggle for the Vistula front. In May, June and July 1915, the Germans experimented with gases more lethal than the chlorine used at Ypres: phosgene, and – in all likelihood in June 1915 – prussic acid or HCN. Several eyewitness accounts of the German gas attack near Bolimów on 12 June 1915 furnished the climactic scene in André Malraux’s Les noyers de l’Altenburg, a novel he published in Switzerland in 1943 before it appeared in France after the Liberation. Malraux’s novel fragment depicts the historical Bolimów as the battle of ‘Bolgako’, in which a battalion of ordinary German soldiers refused to continue a gas attack, and ‘in an assault of pity’ carried stricken Russians to ambulances behind the German lines.8 Alternately described as a wall, a fog, a mist, a war machine and, in its effects on a line of trees, a Japanese print, poison gas becomes the antagonist in the scene.9 The apolitical polyphony of soldierly voices in the German dug-out dies away as the gas attack approaches; henceforth, the predominant expression is one of revolt. Vincent Berger, the character whose experiences are recounted in the Bolimóv–Bolgako scene, watches with astonishment as German soldiers spontaneously desist from their charge of the Russian trenches and, with frantic expressions of pity, throw away rifles set for a bayonet charge in order to shoulder stricken Russians. Berger registers the Germans’ terrified flight, anguished questioning and sometimes verbally inarticulate protest. He, too, joins in the spontaneous revolt. Malraux renders the incongruous, surreal apparitions of German soldiers carrying gassed enemies in a series of perceptual rectifications, like frames in a film: ‘All over-tall, tottering like fair-ground giants with over-tall heads that were tottering too . . . Several fair-ground 6 Bayer-Archiv, Leverkusen, 201/005/003, Duisberg and Nernst, ‘Bericht über Sprengund Schießversuchen auf dem Schießplatz Wahn’, 23 October 1914, and 087/001/013, vol. 2, letter from Duisberg to Oskar von Miller, 25 November 1914. 7 N. Stone, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (New York: Charles Scribner, 1975), p. 112; John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999), p. 197; P. Rozdz·estwien´ski and J. Wojewoda, Bzura Rawka 1914–1915: Wielka Wojna na terenie powiatu sochaczewskiego (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo ZP, 2013), p. 17. 8 A. Malraux, Oeuvres complètes (henceforth ‘OC’) (Paris: Éditions de la Pléiade, 1996), I I, p. 737. 9 Ibid., pp. 720–4.

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giants fell apart. The half of the body in shirt-sleeves dropped off, the other, the lower half of the body, went on walking. They were made up of two men, one carrying the other.’10 In descriptions of ‘nature’s text brought to a standstill’, changes of metaphor and perspective render the aestival battlescape ‘blackened by a definitive autumn’: skies without birds, a swarm of dead bees ‘glued together like the grains on a head of corn’.11 Bolgako recalls Dante’s Inferno in its tension between the ‘magnetic storm’ of the historical event and the ‘trembling hand of the compass’ pointing in the tragic, Greek sense to radical refusal and fraternity.12 A mythomane, Malraux was irresistibly drawn to the historic event of the men’s refusal and the sudden reversal of fortune at Bolimów despite the sheer technical success of the gas attack: ‘As if the scene that I was in the midst of describing had filled the room, I was possessed by an extraordinary tension . . . The struggle against poison gas inhabited me. I was inhabited by the Germans and the Russians in the forest near the Vistula.’13 A strange case of fraternisation in contrast to the bonhomie of the celebrated Christmas truces, Malraux’s Bolgako was a complex construct, representing an unimaginable escalation of violence. In a shift which complicated the novel’s message of redemption and offset the radical humanism of its thesis of fraternity, Malraux depicted the preparedness for the gas charge of the next German unit brought forward at Bolimów.14 Arguably, the ‘assault of pity’ by German troops on 12 June 1915 could only happen once, before men became hardened to the irreversible transformation of the conflict by poison gas. Its mythological qualities notwithstanding, the historicity of Bolimów mattered greatly to Malraux.15 His dramatisation of Bolimów as Bolgako drew heavily on an eyewitness memoir by the German intelligence operative Max Wild, who accompanied the German gas warrior, Fritz Haber, at Bolimów.16 Malraux had been prompted to read Wild’s memoir published in 1931 by conversations in the 1920s with the Alsatian-born intellectual Ernst Robert Curtius, who had been wounded in the throat during the campaign for Warsaw in 1915. Curtius’ bifurcated Alsatian identity, his combat 10 Ibid., p. 726. 11 Ibid., pp. 729, 731–2, 735, 737, 42. 12 O. Mandelstam, ‘Conversation about Dante’, trans. C. Brown and R. Hughes in Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 110, 144. 13 Malraux, OC, I I I, pp. 817, 841, 870. 14 Malraux, OC, I I, p. 741, and I I I, p. 788; Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet (henceforth ‘BLJD’), Fonds Malraux, ‘Lazare/Vistule’, 2.312–2.317. 15 C. Pillet, Le sens ou la mort. Essai sur Le Miroir des limbes d’André Malraux (Berne: Peter Lang, 2010), p. 389. 16 M. Wild, Secret Service on the Russian Front, trans. A. Haigh (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1932), pp. 115–21; BLJD, Fonds Malraux, doss. 50, p. 734.

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experience in Russian Poland and his post-war concerns with European humanism made him a primary source for Malraux’s Bolgako, as well as a model for its main character.17 Malraux’s debt to Curtius, and other German intellectuals associated with the gatherings of European thinkers held at Pontigny in Burgundy, included a depiction of Fritz Haber so accurate that Haber’s younger son wondered in print who Malraux’s informant could have been, as well as snatches of Haber’s technical discourse on poison gas for which Malraux could not have relied on Wild’s memoir alone.18 Wild’s outraged protest at the gassing of the Russians – ‘Now we are poisoning simple people, who have been taught to fight with bayonets, with a poison of which they can’t have the slightest conception’ – met Haber’s rejoinder – ‘In this war in which the whole world is fighting against us, we have to set aside all moral considerations. We can’t do anything else, if we want to protect our own people’, a response which carried the signature logic of the Kaiserreich’s war.19 Haber’s technological romanticism and pride at German technical prowess are depicted, as is his elation at the heavy concentration of experimental poison gases deployed in the east in 1915. The historical Haber boasted, ‘The total mass of gas that we have sent towards the enemy . . . has sufficed to make unbreathable a mass of air which would cover the totality of the surface of the German empire to a height of two metres.’20 While Wild’s memoir did not name the gases at Bolimów, Wild’s descriptions of their effects were, for complex technical reasons, more compatible with a combination of HCN and phosgene than phosgene alone. The huge overall number of Russian gas casualties in the war – which exceeded those of the French, British and Germans combined – strongly suggests that the Germans experimented by mixing lethal gases including HCN in the east.21 17 L. Thormaehlen, Erinnerungen an Stefan George (Hamburg: Hauswedel, 1962), pp. 144–5; C. Jacquemard-De Geneaux, Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956): origines et cheminements d’un esprit européen (Berne: Peter Lang, 1998), p. 60; OC, I I I, p. 788. 18 Haber, Poisonous Cloud, p. 368, n. 75; Malraux, OC, I I, pp. 706–7; BLJD, Fonds Malraux, BMLX GMS 28, I I I, p. 793. 19 Wild, Secret Service, p. 116; OC, I I, p. 707. 20 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Dahlem, V I, HA, NI Valentini, 6, Haber letter to Rudolf Valentini, 2 January 1916. 21 The main English-language text on World War One poison gas warfare, by Haber’s son Lutz, lists German wartime production of HCN as zero. Claiming that published Russian figures are unreliable, it also gives no number for Russian gas casualties. Germany devoted 25 per cent of its shell-making capacity to gas shells, a vector for such casualties. Deaths attributed to conventional explosives were often due to gas, given combined use: Haber, Poisonous Cloud, pp. 239–47, 261; Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 214.

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While Malraux evoked evidence of phosgene exposure, such as the peculiar taste it gave to cigarettes, he took up Wild’s observations of cyanosis clinically to describe the effects of HCN. In a passage from the novel’s first typescript, German soldiers discuss the telltale warning sign of HCN: the smell of bitter almonds. The arrival at Bolimów in June of Otto Hahn, a member of Haber’s gas troop and specialist in prussic acid, makes June 1915 a credible moment for initial German combat use of HCN, as does the fact that, soon after its alleged use in German asphyxiating shells on 12 June at Bolimów, prussic acid / HCN emerged with phosgene in the French field studies of lethal gases prompted by the German gas attacks at Bolimów.22 The French hastened to field test the gases – phosgene and HCN – identified by Malraux’s German sources. Literary scholars draw attention to the resemblance between descriptions of corpses removed from the gas chambers in World War Two extermination camps and the novel’s description of the bodies of gassed Russians in their primitive World War One trenches.23 After 1945, Malraux reflected on the extermination camps in light of his reconstruction of the revolt of ordinary German soldiers at Bolimów as a moment of radical innocence.24 Archival material to which Malraux did not have access in composing his novel in 1941–2 corroborates important elements of his Vistula scene. Among these is a rare surviving report from Haber in early 1916 to the Kaiser’s civil secretary.25 It dwelled on the effect in Russian Poland of the massive use of chemical weaponry, and underscored the heavy Russian casualties at Bolimów. It sidestepped the hatred which the use of poison gas generated not only in Germany’s enemies, but in German officers disgusted by the mission of ‘poisoning the enemy as one poisons rats’.26 Haber made no allusion to the collapse of the gas attack on 12 June, or to another disaster a few weeks later, in which no fewer than 1,200 German soldiers were killed by blowbacks of gas. The General Staff had expected a breakthrough at Bolimów on 12 June, massing troops in numbers not present at Ypres to exploit the anticipated collapse of the Russian lines. In an indirect confirmation of the eyewitness accounts by Wild and Curtius, Haber conceded that technical success at Bolimów had not corresponded to a gain in terrain or in spoils. However, he fell back on pressing for recourse to gas in areas in which 22 O. Hahn, My Life (London: Herder and Herder, 1970), pp. 118–24; www .guerredesgaz.fr. 23 Malraux, OC, I I, p. 736. 24 BLJD, Fonds Malraux, ‘Lazare’, 2.196–7. 25 Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Haber–Valentini letter, 2 January 1916. 26 B. von Deimling, Aus der alten in die neue Zeit (Berlin: Ullstein, 1930), pp. 201–2.

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it could cause substantial casualties without breakthrough. The combination of the failure of German troops to break through the Russian line with the technical success of the poison gas attack on 12 June made Bolimów the moment in the war in which chemical weaponry ceased to be about the classic aim of warfare, conquest of territory, and was designated instead as a means of mass destruction to annihilate the enemy – an enemy to be increasingly loosely defined. The eastern gas war, by following ‘technical [or instrumental] rationality’ without substantive rational goals, supplied the substratum of an apocalyptic, radicalised warfare.27 Haber well knew that his claims that gas was more humane than high explosives because it caused few casualties held least in the east. In January 1916, he drily commented on the fact that the Russians died in large numbers due to their complete lack of protection against lethal gases. The future of gas warfare against vulnerable populations such as insurrectionary colonial peoples starkly emerges from his comment. In the short term, poison gas was critical in the Russian military collapse. Many of the huge Russian losses at Lake Narach and in the Brusilov offensive were gas casualties.28 Hindenburg’s memoir is eloquent on the exponential Russian losses: In the great war ledger the page on which the Russian losses were written has been torn out. No one knows the figures. Five or eight millions? We, too, have no idea. All we know is that sometimes in our battles with the Russians we had to remove the mounds of enemy corpses from before our trenches in order to get a clear field of fire against fresh assaulting waves.29

This was not attrition as in the west, but extermination. While casualties in the east were exponential, the sequelae of poison gas resembled the longterm effects of later generations of weapons of mass destruction. Marie Curie’s physician brother, Józef Sklodowski, director of a Polish Red Cross hospital near Bolimów, observed that many who survived gassing would develop tuberculosis.30 Calculated, lingering environmental damage was a further gauge of the lethal efficacy of German chemical attacks, as it would be later in the aerial gas bombing of colonial insurrectionists. 27 M. Geyer, ‘German strategy in the age of machine warfare, 1914–1945’ in Makers of Modern Strategy, ed. P. Paret (Princeton University Press, 1986), 541–53. 28 J. Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 425–8; Grigoryan and Yegorov, ‘How Russia countered Germany’s chemical weapons in WWI’, Russia Beyond (August 2018). 29 P. von Hindenburg, Aus meinem Leben (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920), p. 249. 30 R. S. Liddell, On the Russian Front (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1916), p. 55.

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The colonial precedents and sequelae to Bolimów were key. In 1915, the chemicals necessary for pursuit of poison gas warfare in Russia were imported from the Kaiserreich. Russian ‘economic, industrial and scientific dependence on Germany . . . bordered on the colonial’.31 Without gas masks or substantial means of retaliation, Russian troops suffered casualty levels approaching those in colonial wars. Malraux’s novel depicted gassed Russians with no idea of what had befallen them, as in colonial wars.32 In the next world war, which blurred the targeted populations of the past – partisan and civilian – in the ‘thin occupation’ of an eastern continental imperium, poison gas became a means of domination over a defenceless, deported civilian population, restoring fantasies of the one-sided technological superiority of colonial warfare.

Monástir, 1917: The Genocidal Systematisation of Violence Two small photographs of civilian victims of the Germano-Bulgarian shelling of Monástir in Macedonia with asphyxiating gases, taken by the German-Jewish criminologist R. A. Reiss, provide the centrepiece of this chapter. The shelling of Monástir occurred at the end of the long twilight of the Ottoman Empire, infamous for the unfolding of the Armenian genocide in camps in the Syrian desert. The Ottoman twilight also occasioned lesserknown episodes involving Macedonia, the blood-stained terrain formerly colonised by the Ottomans and contested between various Ottoman successor states from 1912 to 1913. In parts of Macedonia, the depopulation figure (70 per cent) reached colonial levels during the Greater Balkan War, a period of almost continual conflict from the Balkan Wars until after World War One.33 During World War One itself, Macedonia and Serbia were treated as ‘barbaric’ semi-colonial areas by the Central Powers, who deployed disproportionate force, including colonial-style Strafsexpeditionen 31 I. Hull, ‘The measure of atrocity: the German war against the Hereros’, German Historical Institute Bulletin 37 (2005),39–44; A. Kojevnikov, ‘The Great War, the Russian civil war, and the invention of Big Science’, Science in Context 15:2 (2002), 239– 47, 250–2. 32 Malraux, for whom World War One was a crisis of civilisations in the plural, reversed the binary of civilised Europe versus the savagery of the colonised. This reflected his anti-imperialist agitation in Asia in the 1920s, and awareness of post-war poison gas warfare by European powers and Japan against unprotected colonial populations: ‘S.O. S.’ in OC, V I, pp. 243–53; BLJD, Fonds Malraux, ‘Les noyers de l’Altenburg V I’, doss. 52, p. 2.822; P. Simon-Nahum, André Malraux: l’engagement politique au XXe siècle (Paris, 2010); N. Chiaromonte, ‘Malraux and the demons of action’ in Malraux: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. R. W. B. Lewis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1964), 96–116. 33 P. D. White, ‘Public health in eastern Macedonia’, American Journal of Public Health 10:1 (January 1920), 16.

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and, in 1917, poison gas to repress the only major insurrection against German and Austrian occupation in the war. Occupied Serbia and its Macedonian hinterland then became the site of an insurrection against forced enlistment, such as also took place roughly simultaneously in the Islamic lands of central Asia colonised by Russia and in French North Africa.34 After the Armenian genocide, conducted by traditional means – shootings, deportations and disease – that had occasioned use of the phrase ‘crime against humanity’, Reiss was immediately attentive to the introduction of poison gas in the repression of the Serbian insurrection.35 An expert in forensic photography and Professor of Criminology in Lausanne, Reiss had joined a Swiss medical team to investigate allegations of Austrian use of dum-dum bullets during the invasion of Serbia in 1914. Devised by the British to control Indian insurrections, dum-dum bullets were used mainly to hunt big game. The Hague Conferences failed definitively to outlaw either this highly destructive munition or poison gas. Opponents of their interdiction earmarked both for future use against so-called ‘savage tribes’.36 In a pamphlet published under the aegis of Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, Reiss demonstrated the prompt appearance of dum-dum bullets in the European war.37 Numerous commentators since, including Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Ashis Nandy and Sven Lindqvist, have drawn attention to the process by which, during the world wars, Europeans applied to Europe itself forms of the ‘industrialized, scienticized, technological violence’ first tried outside of Europe.38 These modes of warfare included total war against civilians, as well as new, force-magnifying technologies such as poison gas, 34 Alan Kramer, ‘Combatants and noncombatants: atrocities, massacres, and war crimes’ in A Companion to World War I, ed. John Horne (Chichester, 2010), 193; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, pp. 486–8; Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 69–70. 35 US Department of State to American Embassy, Constantinople, 29 May 1915, transmitting the Anglo-Franco-Russian declaration of 24 May 1915, www.armeniangenocide.org. 36 Hull, Absolute Destruction, pp. 192–3, 214; R. Price, The Chemical Weapons Taboo (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 14–69, 167–8; M. Vec, ‘Challenging the laws of war by technology, blazing nationalism, and militarism: debating chemical warfare before and after Ypres, 1899–1925’ in One Hundred Years of Chemical Warfare: Research, Deployment, Consequences, ed. B. Friedrich et al. (Cham: Springer, 2017). 105–13. 37 R. A. Reiss, ‘Les balles explosives autrichiennes’, Revue militaire suisse 2 (1915), 70–84; R. A. Reiss, Comment les Austro-Hongrois ont fait la Guerre en Serbie, in the series Études et Documents sur la Guerre (Paris: Armand Colin, 1915). 38 S. Weil, ‘À propos de la question coloniale’ in S. Weil, Oeuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 430–1; H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973), pp. 125–6, 151, 185, 458–9; A. Nandy, ‘The defiance of defiance and liberation for the victims of history’ in Dissenting Knowledges, Open Futures, ed. V. Lal (Oxford University Press, 2000), 57; S. Lindqvist, Exterminate All the Brutes (New York: New Press, 1996).

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introduced by the Central Powers from 1915. Poison gas then made the return journey to its original colonial destination, via the suppression of insurrections on the Balkan periphery, to its pan-European use against insurrectionists in the Middle East, Africa and Asia in the interwar period. Reiss’ journey to Monástir was unusual.39 He was the eighth of ten children in a prosperous German family, born to a Jewish father converted to Evangelical Lutheranism and a Protestant aristocratic mother from a military line. One of his brothers who followed in the maternal military tradition had died in the Herero war in Southwest Africa. The family rebel, Reiss left Germany for francophone Switzerland in youthful protest against the illiberalism and conformity of the Wilhelmine Reich. Like Einstein, he took Swiss citizenship, along with a higher scientific diploma. Reiss’ consuming interest in photography dated from his time as a chemistry student at the head of his Swiss cohort. He co-founded the radiology service at the cantonal hospital, applying photography to medicine and taking out many patents in the process. Photography led Reiss to criminology, rather than the reverse.40 But, while forensic photography made his reputation, the camera’s cultural significance transcended technology for Reiss. He won awards for his artistry with the camera, and photographed poverty in the streets of Paris and Marseille at a time when it was exceptional to portray daily misery. Reiss’ wartime statements show intense identification with his paternal Jewish origins.41 An admiration for French humanism tempered by the Dreyfus Affair was apparent in his professional writings, which rejected the paradigm of the born criminal. Reiss sought to prevent ‘judicial error’, in the phrase of Bernard Lazare during the Dreyfus Affair, by the most modern means: evidence from and photography of crime scenes. Hailed by the New York Times on the eve of the war as ‘the greatest criminal expert in Europe,’ Reiss advocated the scientific study of criminals, not in the sterilised world of the crime laboratory, but in their habitat in the streets (and, later, he would have said, on the battlefield or at mass graves).42 39 For Reiss’ life, J. Mathyer, Rodolphe A. Reiss: Pionnier de la criminalistique (Lausanne: Payot, 2000), and Z. Levental, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss: Criminaliste et moraliste de la Grande Guerre (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1992). 40 Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, Le théâtre du crime: Rodolphe A. Reiss 1875–1929 (Lausanne: Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2009). 41 ‘Mauvaise polémique’, La Gazette de Lausanne, 28 October 1915. 42 ‘Swiss plan for police?’ New York Times, 23 February 1913.

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Reiss arrived at the front in 1914 as part of a Swiss medical expedition, an engagement he expected to last only a few weeks.43 While his initial role of neutral observer came into question when he realised that, as he declared to a packed crowd at the Sorbonne in March 1915, there could be no real neutrality in the face of crime, a scrupulous methodology remained the bedrock of his ability to testify.44 ‘I was not content simply to question hundreds of Austrian prisoners and hundreds of eye-witnesses. I was on the spot . . . to note everything possible to certify. I opened graves, I examined bodies and the wounded. I visited shelled towns.’45 Among the shelled towns he visited in the course of the war, there is no doubt which one marked Reiss the most. Before the Greater Balkan War, the most prosperous town in Macedonia, Monástir, fell in late 1916 to the Serbs, who declared it an open city. The shelling of the town began when the German generals in control of the southeastern or Balkan theatre declared it the site from which the French and British forces in Salonika orchestrated the Serb insurrection. Piecing together evidence on the insurrection’s causation, Reiss stressed not conspiracy theories, but local resistance to forced conscription followed by deportations, and the hanging of women and children in the Austrian and Bulgarian zones.46 The Bulgarians and their German technical advisors fired the first shells containing asphyxiating gas into the Turkish and Jewish quarters of the town in March 1917. Photographed by Reiss, the Jewish quarter located in the west of the city was home to some 6,000 Sephardi Jews, a figure much reduced from its pre-war size. By war’s end, the population fell to 3,000. In 1943, the Bulgarians would hand over the remnant, some 2,000 souls, to the Nazis for deportation to Treblinka. During the 1917 shelling, Reiss made some twenty trips to Monástir. After shells destroyed his lodgings, he accepted the hospitality of Dr van Dijk of the Dutch Red Cross, one of a relay of Dutch and Swiss physicians with whom he worked to obtain data from neutral physicians to authenticate atrocity. Established in a religious school, van Dijk’s hospital became the vantage for Reiss’ collection of testimonies of victims, material evidence – such as shell casings – and 43 Reiss, Comment les Austro-Hongrois, pp. 3–4. 44 Levental, Reiss, p. 70. 45 Reiss, Comment les Austro-Hongrois, pp. 3–4. 46 Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amt, Berlin, Großes Hauptquartier, 37 Serbien, Allgemeine Lage (R22331), Freytag (Belgrade), 15 January 1917; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, pp. 428–9; for execution of children, Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staats-Archiv, Vienna, Austria (henceforth ‘HHStA’) PA I, Liasse Krieg 13 C (‘Reiss’), Greueltaten 1914–1918, ‘Die Lügen über die Osterreichisch-Ungarische Kriegführung in Serbien’, Vienna, 1916.

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photographs taken with an early Kodak pocket camera which did not require a darkroom. Between March and October 1917, much of Monástir was reduced to rubble by almost daily bombardments of fire and gas. People who sheltered in cellars from incendiary shells were killed by gas. Those who fled the cellars to escape gas fell victim to high explosives. Such synergistic attacks combining gas and incendiary shells were later deemed by the German Red Cross to be the most dangerous form of warfare for civilians then existing.47 They have proven a durable form of asymmetric warfare, as the recent Syrian conflict demonstrates. For Reiss, the slow-motion destruction of the town, the haemorrhages of twenty women and children killed on a single day made his status as a neutral observer untenable: ‘I shed my neutrality and became a Swiss volunteer in the Serb Army . . . And yet, this new state never made me abandon my professional objectivity as an investigator who had taken an oath . . . to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.’ His plight resembled that of an ethnographer who advocates for those threatened with extinction – as, not without reason, he believed the Serbs to be.48 The rain of fire and gas killed many hundreds in the town. Exact numbers are unknown.49 The British nurse Lucia Creighton, whose diary in the Imperial War Museum in London corroborates important elements of Reiss’ account, believed that many more were killed than indicated in official reports, which set the toll just below 1,000.50 These were artisanal levels by the yardstick of future atrocity, but the gas used, prussic acid or HCN, allowed a far greater scale of extermination. Reiss’ chemical training was conspicuous in his identification of the classic indicators of HCN: the blue faces of victims in van Dijk’s hospital and their reports that the gas smelled of bitter almonds.51 Lacking equipment for definitive identification, Reiss puzzled over how long it had taken the gas to kill – 30 to 47 ‘Report of the German Red Cross to the XIII International Red Cross Conference on the protection of civilian populations against chemical warfare’, January 1928, cited in D. Stoltzenberg, Fritz Haber: Chemist, Nobel Laureate, German, Jew (Philadelphia, 2004), p. 169. 48 According to the Austrian War Ministry, population in the Austrian-occupied zone of Serbia in 1914–17 dropped by 50 per cent, a figure attributed to the severity of Austrian military courts as well as deaths from diseases caused by malnutrition, notably typhus: J. Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Hapsburg Serbia, 1914–1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 119–20. 49 R. A. Reiss, Les infractions aux règles et lois de la guerre (Paris: Payot, 1918), p. 101. 50 Imperial War Museum, London, ‘The First World War diary of Miss L. Creighton’, 92/ 22/1, 6, 17–19 March 1917. 51 R. A. Reiss, Le martyre de la ville de Monastir-Bitolj (Salonika: Hachette, 1917), p. 12, and Infractions aux règles, p. 21.

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45 minutes. The likely explanation, found in the Bulgarian archives, is that HCN was adulterated by the arsenical Blaukreuz, a compound coupled with HCN in Bulgarian and German conceptions of poison gas warfare in 1917.52 Pertinent to the accuracy of Reiss’ tentative identification of HCN / prussic acid is the fact that, during the shelling of Monástir, German gas technicians – including the future Nobelist Otto Hahn – advised the Austrians on gassing with HCN shells 1,500 Italian officers sheltering in caves at Caporetto.53 HCN, as used at Bolimów in 1915, served as the chemical basis for an early form of Zyklon, Zyklon A, developed at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Physical Chemistry in Dahlem. By 1917, it was dispatched in quantity to the southeastern front for medicalised use in delousing, as well as for combat. The Bulgarians, who called it the ‘American gas’ after its use as a pesticide in American fruit orchards, explicitly sought HCN/Zyklon to suppress the insurrection. Infatuated with mustard gas, German gas warriors considered HCN obsolescent, if ideal for allied use in basements and caves as at Monástir and Caporetto. Reiss’ forensic investigations provoked a campaign of calumny by the Austrian Foreign Ministry. Stung by his public indictment of German antisemitism, the Austrians alleged that the traitorous Reiss was in Serbian pay.54 The Austrian charges of venality were false. From a background of considerable wealth, Reiss self-financed his wartime investigations. Significantly, the Austrian commander on the Balkan front conceded in internal correspondence early in Reiss’ investigations that his findings were correct, but the Serbs were ‘such beasts in human form’ that only draconian means would protect against them. Such language functioned as a code for extermination.55 Reiss’ documentation of atrocities by the Central Powers only intensified the Austrian Foreign Ministry’s propaganda campaign on the ambiguous Russian deportations of 1915, the despoliation of Russian Jews, and the pogroms carried out by the Russian army after the fall of Warsaw.56 The 52 Central State Archive, Sofia, Bulgaria, 316K, Op. 1, Ae. 39, letter fragment from the Secretary of the Bulgarian Legation, Berlin, to the Ministry of Defence, Sofia, n.d., from internal evidence, before American entry into the war. 53 ‘“Gite del Professore” al Sacrario di Caporetto’, 23 July 2012, www.Castelbolognesenews .eu. 54 HHStA, PA I, Liasse Krieg 13 C, Greueltaten 1914–1918, ‘Die Lügen,’ 42. 55 HHStA PA I, Liasse Krieg 13 C, Greueltaten 1914–1918, Kommando der k.u.k. Balkanstreitkräfte, Feldpostamt Nr. 305, to Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Vienna, 6 March 1915; C. Gerlach, The Extermination of the European Jews (Cambridge, 2016), p. 228. 56 A product of the traditional Russian policy of scorched earth which affected other groups, such as the Baltic Germans, the 1915 deportations by no means ensured death. In the virtually simultaneous case, on trains run by the Germans, deportation of the Armenians did. Photographs in the Austrian archives of the Russian deportations show

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Figure 27.1 Women and children gassed at Monástir, March 1917. (Photo: R. A. Reiss in The Kingdom of Serbia (London: Allen & Unwin, 1919))

tenets of the Austrian campaign – portraying Russian violence as more dangerous than that of the Central Powers – served to deflect attention from Reiss’ photographs of Monástir and from Austrian use of Zyklon at Caporetto. Austro-German enmity and determination to erase his evidence on their use of poison gas outlived Reiss. When France fell in 1940, his personal effects, bequeathed to his French godson at his death in 1929, were raided by the Gestapo.57 The originals of Reiss’ photographs of gassed victims in Monástir have never been recovered, though previously published copies survived and are reproduced in Figures 27.1 and 27.2. A parallel case in the same time frame is helpful in understanding the propagandistic Austrian use of Russian violence. Confronted in World War One by the dichotomy that would be formative of Hitlerian antisemitism – the mentality of the traditional pogrom versus a new logic of ‘reasoned’ or effects of massive pillaging but no human casualties: Kramer, ‘Atrocities, massacres and war crimes’, 193; Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, p. 358; HHStA PA I, Liasse Krieg 13 B (‘Greueltaten am serbischen Kriegsschauplatze’). 57 Cultural erasure in the Hitlerszeit included successful pressures in the 1930s to cover murals depicting the Wilhelmine poison gas war by the Harvard social activist Lewis Rubenstein; the Wehrmacht’s 1941 dynamiting of a French statue near Ypres commemorating victims of asphyxiating gas; and the 1940 seizure of Reiss’ personal effects in Paris.

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Figure 27.2 Victims of asphyxiating gases, Monástir, June 1917. (Photo: Reiss in The Kingdom of Serbia)

‘scientific’ antisemitism – S. Ansky, the immortal playwright of the Yiddish theatre, juxtaposed aimless, unstructured Russian violence – his example was Jews made to strip, dance and ride on pigs before every tenth man in a shtetl was shot – with purposeful German violence. Ansky’s German example – a typhus hospital filled with sick Jews that was torched for fear that the contagion would spread to German troops – alluded to a murderous reasoning derived from the abuses of colonial medicine and based on racialised medical paradigms for the transmission of typhus. Under the heading of medical military necessity, this thinking became institutionalised in German military medicine by the close of World War One. In an ethnographical text, The Enemy at His Pleasure (1925), Ansky declared his preference for German reasoned antisemitism over Russian pogroms.58 Ansky’s face remained turned to the horrors of the past, while his text revealed the depth of illusion about the future threat to European

58 Framed as a debate about the past and future of antisemitic violence, Ansky’s misreading suggests an answer to a question by Yehuda Bauer, ‘Why did the Holocaust not happen in Russia?’ Eliminationist antisemitism was much more in evidence in Russia than Germany in the nineteenth century: Y. Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 106.

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Jewry, an illusion on which the Austrian campaign to discredit Reiss capitalised. The tenets of the Austrian campaign have had a long shelf life in the historiography which argues that atrocities in the war after 1914 were exclusively Russian, and even that the origins of the Shoah are traceable to the aimless violence of the Russian pogroms and deportations.59 Reiss’ early identification of Zyklon suggests an alternative pre-history of the Shoah in the radically foreshortened poison gas war on the southeastern front, including other 1917 episodes involving Zyklon – of which Reiss was unaware – in the context, obsessively feared by the German military, of Völkerkampf (racial war).60 Isabel Hull’s sense of ‘uncoordinated instances of the movement towards extremes which . . . strongly resembled one another’ is critical to an analysis of the episodes involving poison gas on the southeastern front in 1917. Justified by military necessity, the means ‘overwhelmed the ends, indeed became the ends’, so that military extremism pursued a logic of ‘final solutions’ (in small caps) traced by Hull to imperialist practice.61 Allied to racial paradigms of typhus (perceived as a mortal threat in the east to German troops unimmunised by childhood exposure to the disease) derived from colonial praxis, and institutionalised in German military medicine by the war’s end, poison gas emerged as a means of eradicating civilian populations perceived as racially inferior and ethnically disloyal. This structure of violence, which elsewhere on the southeastern front prefigured Auschwitz-Birkenau in a more linear relationship, is striking in light of Hitler’s ‘scientific anti-semitism’. Indeed, the use of poison gas against Balkan civilians was understood in governmental circles in Berlin in late 1917 to be ‘the shape of the next war’, while a continuity of personnel across the world wars ensured dissemination of this knowledge.62 It can, therefore, be argued that the means used to suppress the 1917 insurrection began 59 A. Watson, ‘“Unheard-of brutality”: Russian atrocities against civilians in East Prussia, 1914–15’, Journal of Modern History 86:4 (2014), 812, 823–4. 60 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, pp. 21–5, 44, 59, 146; ‘Notes by Major von Hahnke on Graf Schlieffen’s memorandum of Dec. 28, 1912’ in G. Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth (London: O. Wolff, 1958), p. 181; and I. Hull, ‘Military culture and the production of final solutions in the colonies: the example of Wilhelmine Germany’ in The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, ed. R. Gellately and B. Kiernan (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 147. 61 Hull, Absolute Destruction, pp. 2, 207. 62 The author’s forthcoming On the Origins of Medicalized Killing in Auschwitz-Birkenau explores the underlying conceptual unity in these complex linkages. Its focus is the operation in 1917 on the southeastern front of murderous delousing chambers built on a prefab colonial model and using Zyklon, with a script similar to that in AuschwitzBirkenau – an operation which preceded the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War.

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a ‘genocidal systematization of violence’.63 Such violence was inextricable from poison gas. The arrival in the Warsaw ghetto of the first news of gassings at Chelmno alone convinced Emanuel Ringelblum, the chronicler of the Warsaw ghetto, and his circle that Polish Jewry was to be subjected to systematic extermination. The previous Einsatzgruppen shootings in the east had seemed to Ringelblum and his circle only another – if particularly dramatic – form of pogrom, one which they might hope to survive.64 Not until the Great War did combat become the subject of photography. Yet, in so far as they conveyed terror and devastation, photographs of the 1914–18 war were usually of an aftermath, as in Reiss’ photographs of Monástir after its synergistic bombardment. Photography of the heat of battle awaited the Spanish Civil War and radically upgraded equipment: lightweight cameras; viewfinders and lenses which permitted close shots from a distance; and 35 mm film which could be exposed thirty-six times before being reloaded. By the end of World War Two, Allied military orders went out for photographs less about combat than about atrocity.65 In the process of these changes, photography acquired immediacy and authority in ‘conveying the horror of mass-produced death’. Atrocity photographs before and since have been measured against images of the liberation of the Nazi camps in 1945, images which attested to ‘the photogenic aura of the burial pit’, in which the victims defied numbering. These photographs were disseminated in unprecedented abundance, and, in the pedagogy by horror in place, ‘photoshock’ carried the day against documentation, deemed superfluous in 1945. Mass death was depicted as it had not been in the era of pan-European imperialism or in the episodes reported by Reiss during the Great War when atrocity photographs consisted of countable individuals. On the eve of the 1914 war, atrocity photographs had been privately viewed but not published in the mass media, and only sparingly in official documents such as the Carnegie Report on the Balkan wars.66 In Reiss’ day, as still in that of Virginia Woolf, whose remarks on atrocity photographs from the Spanish War open Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, such 63 Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, p. 858. 64 Annette Wieviorka’s commentary on Emanuel Ringelblum and Oyneg Shabbos, in W. Karel and B. Finger’s 2014 film Jusqu’au dernier, reel 5. Cf. Hannah Arendt, The Last Interview and Other Conversations (New York, 2013), p. 23. 65 Christian Delage, ‘1945: The Nuremberg Trials: confronting the Nazis with the images of their crimes’ in Images of Conviction: The Construction of Visual Evidence, ed. D. Dufour (Paris: Le Bal, 2015), 131–49. 66 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington, DC, 1914), pp. 11–12.

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photographs represented a kind of clandestine, almost pornographic, knowledge. In the case of poison gas warfare, subject to rigorous censorship by both Entente and Central Powers, atrocity photographs circulated halfcovertly in postcard form.67 Figure 27.2, of gassed victims with mourners, came from a photograph taken by Reiss in June 1917. Meant to restore dignity to the victims, it self-consciously rivalled the postcards of Serbs and Italians dangling from gibbets circulated by Austrian and German soldiers on the southeastern front. Austrian postcards made by perpetrators and depicting the hilarity of the executioners recall lynching postcards from the American South which people sent as greeting cards, sometimes marking themselves as members of the jocular crowd. The genre rested on a racism that, by defining one people as less human than another, legitimated torture and murder. The discovery of postcards of lynched Serbs on the body of a dead German officer during the siege of Monástir led Reiss mockingly to denounce the murderous Austrian occupation in the Swiss press.68 His commentary on the Austrian cards underscored the exterminatory impulse in such violence, as well as its transformation of ethnic tension into racial war, or, as it was called in Berlin in 1917, Völkerkampf, a predecessor to the Hitlerszeit’s more visceral Volkstumskampf. The Austrian cards prompted Reiss to interrogate the ‘Ordinary Men’ phenomenon, thus anticipating Christopher Browning’s study of a Hamburg police battalion on the eastern front in 1942. Reiss’ more historically accurate conclusions stressed prior indoctrination and orders from superiors.69 George Mosse has argued that the German experience of the world wars was closely linked to the visual, and so to the camera, a linkage extolled in the writings of the German aesthete of war, Ernst Jünger: ‘The same intelligence whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy to the exact second and meter labors to preserve the great historical event in fine detail.’ Reiss, whose photographs were made from such a radically different intention, reported from Macedonia in 1917: ‘The Bulgarians burned the villages and the 67 O. Lepick, ‘Des Gaz et des hommes’ in Historial de la Grande Guerre: Gaz! Gaz! Gaz! (Milan, 2010), 35, 39, 41, 52, n. 32; Friedrich et al., eds., One Hundred Years, p. 220. 68 HHStA, PA I, Liasse Krieg 13, Greueltaten 1914–1918, Belgrade to the Military Government, 17 June 1917; R. A. Reiss, ‘Un document accusateur’, 27 December 1916, ‘Les Austro-Bulgaro-Allemands en Serbie envahie’, 20 February 1917, and ‘La manie de la carte postale de pendus’, 15 March 1917, in Infractions aux règles, pp. 60–8. 69 Reiss, Rapport sur les atrocités commises par les troupes austro-hongroises, pp. 128–9, 161–2; Comment les Austro-hongrois, pp. 15–16, 44–7; C. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992).

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Germans photographed the spectacle.’ There are similar accounts of Germans photographing pogroms carried out by local auxiliaries in 1941 scripted in their work of atrocity (as Jews in Lodz and Warsaw were scripted for Goebbels’ propaganda films).70 Reiss’ two photographs of gassed victims in Monástir were published in London after the war alongside selections from his letters from the front.71 Sontag has described the ‘negative epiphany’ of such photographs: ‘the very notion of atrocity, of war crime, is associated with the expectation of photographic evidence. Such evidence is, usually, of something posthumous . . . And this posthumous reality is often the keenest of summations . . . Photographs of atrocity illustrate as well as corroborate. Bypassing disputes about how many were killed . . . the photograph gives the indelible sample.’72 The necessity of corroboration and the aspiration to provide an indelible sample were also Reiss’ frames of reference. He was not motivated to document the success of a mission, as when British air squadron leaders in the 1920s photographed a campaign with mustard gas to crush rebellious Iraqi tribesmen. Nor did Reiss celebrate the hilarity of executioners, as in the Austrian postcards which he deplored before Karl Kraus chose one as the frontispiece to The Last Days of Mankind, accompanying it with a commentary on the ‘petty tyranny’ of Austrian officers who forced Serbs to dig their own graves before being executed.73 In one of Reiss’ two published photographs of gassed victims in Monástir, twelve women and children are laid out in group formation. His photography attests to the fact, recalled after the war by a British nursing sister, that women and children suffered most during the gas attacks. In the second, an almost naïve version of the holy family features a woman and man, mouths open as if gasping for air, and a child, whose body seems to float above them, as if offered as a sign of truth. It, too, is wide-mouthed. Reiss knew that the eye must be guided to have emotional impact, and a triangle is the strongest shape, holy or not. The bodies are clothed, almost swaddled, in the dust-covered garments in which they were found. The 70 G. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 59; E. Jünger quoted in Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), pp. 66–7; Rapport et documents relatifs aux violations des conventions de la Haye et du Droit international en général, commises de 1915– 1918 par les Bulgares en Serbie occupée (Paris, 1919), I, p. 88; J. Gross, Neighbors (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), pp. 47–8, 162, n. 2. 71 R. A. Reiss, The Kingdom of Serbia (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1919). 72 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 83–4. 73 E. Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 330–3.

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seasons are conspicuous: snow in the background of the March 1917 group photograph taken soon after the attacks began; a profusion of plants in the family photograph of June. The pictures are constructed, staged in the sense that the categories of dead (women and children, the small family) have been chosen for maximum impact. ‘Objective’ photographs are always more or less staged, a view standard among students of photography since enunciated by E. H. Gombrich. In a contrasting image, Reiss photographed rough coffins and the bodies of children strewn pell-mell about the courtyard of the hospital as if after a natural, rather than man-made, disaster. An unpublished version of the triangulated family photograph, via a heightened negative, adds mourning women in traditional garb reminiscent of Rogier van der Weyden canvases. The photograph is a late sample of Reiss’ artistic work, long thought lost, in which a forensic view of photography as evidence is overlaid by a sense of photography as an artistic moment in which to confront a new crime still in process of definition – the crime against humanity. Its referentiality to Flemish religious art was meant to function as a visual text to move the Vatican from its studied neutrality. Typical of colonial and post-colonial settings, its cultural syncretism is striking: Christian iconography, a Jewish photographer and, from their garb, Muslim victims and mourners. Atypically for Reiss, we do not know the names of the victims, but their iconographic status is clear. All are civilians, innocents. In some of the faces, there is an expression of struggle but no physical mutilation. In depicting victims of asphyxiating gas, the challenge, familiar to Reiss from faint traces of evidence at crime scenes, was to depict the invisible.74 The photographer hovers just outside the frame of photographs taken without a telephoto lens, his photographs, an indictment, made in a state of shock and rage. Photographs, Sontag observes, are both objective record and personal testimony, ‘a faithful copy or transcription of an actual moment in reality, and an interpretation of that reality – a feat literature had long aspired to, but could never attain in this literal sense’.75 Taken before the conflict’s outcome was known, the photographs are rimmed with fear, with the sense of worse possibly yet to come. Like Reiss’ texts, they convey uncertainty as to the extent, the finitude of the events chronicled. Their novelty is in what they 74 L. Lebart, ‘1903: Rodolphe A. Reiss: revealing details invisible to the naked eye’ in Images of Conviction, ed. Dufour, 37–59. 75 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, p. 26.

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endeavour to make visible: in the language of a later age, not the war’s collateral damage, but the first targeted gas attacks on civilians. Transcriptions of reality, the photographs embody with a terrible, almost sculpted, literalness the accompanying texts which insistently question: who caused what the picture shows? Was it inevitable? Is there some state of affairs, accepted up to now, that ought to be challenged? The voice in the texts resembles the expressionistic, handwritten captions to Goya’s etchings of the Peninsular War in Spain, another peripheral conflict against civilians: While the image, like every image, is an invitation to look, [Goya’s] caption, more often than not, insists on the difficulty of doing just that . . . A voice, presumably the artist’s, badgers the viewer: can you bear to look at this? One caption declares: One can’t look . . . Another says: This is bad . . . Another retorts: This is worse . . . Another shouts: This is the worst! . . . Another declaims: Barbarians! . . . What madness! . . . cries another. And another: This is too much! . . . And another: Why? . . . beneath one image: I saw this . . . And beneath another: This is the truth.76

Attached to older artistic traditions, Reiss fulfilled their injunctions for representation of carnage in war, such as Leonardo’s suggestion that the artist’s gaze should be pitiless, so that the viewer’s pity mingled with fear and terror. In obedience to Leonardo, Reiss’ photographs of Monástir have a sombre terribilità alongside their role as documentation of a new form of moral depravity. By the Great War, photography was thought to have an advantage over the work of Bosch, Bruegel or Goya in the power and level of trauma which it brought to such scenes. As ‘episodes of horror fixed by light’, Reiss’ forensic photographs attested to the reality of scenes depicted and facts represented. On a remote front characterised by ‘ethnic reordering’77 and flooded with poison gas, the full range of uses of which he could not know, Reiss was a transitional figure. His work obeyed the dictates of the past. But he also anticipated later war photographers such as Robert Capa, celebrated for disturbing, unforgettable photographs of victimhood and war taken from the vantage of peripheral conflicts, but invested with the meaning of larger struggles. Are such photographs reliable historical documents? The theoretician of photography Siegfried Kracauer reflected that the nineteenth century invented photography and modern history, which gave new forms to reality 76 Ibid., pp. 45–6. 77 The quotation is from Hitler’s 6 October 1939 Reichstag address: R. Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman: The Life of Heydrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), p. 150.

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by capturing ‘fleeting shadows of the present’. The specialist on Japanese war photography, Julia Thomas, comments: ‘A photograph . . . never represents an even, universal temporal flow, but a jarring cataract of currents . . . neither photography nor history can grasp the whole structure of this elusive, fractured reality. Instead, Kracauer insists, both history and photography are inherently provisional, redeeming transient phenomena from oblivion.’78 Like Kracauer, Reiss understood photography as a reservoir of cultural memory. But, for all that we interrogate images of cultural memory, what we see is sometimes little in comparison to what we know, or ought to know. Photographs, in particular, are provisional instalments of complex realities. And yet Reiss’ fragmentary, incomplete images force us to represent the unrepresentable. His photography becomes the eye of history, but it is also in the eye of history. After the initial gas attacks in Monástir, Reiss imagined a future for his photographs. In prose excoriating the perpetrators, he called attention to the dead, in hopes of constructing a framework in international law to protect civilians against poison gas. But such photographs make their own careers, ‘blown by the whims and loyalties of diverse communities’, which find or do not find use for them. Atrocities ‘not secured in our minds by well-known photographic images, or of which we simply have had very few images seem more remote. These are the memories that few have cared to claim’, Sontag wrote. Neither as unused items in a photographic archive awaiting war crimes trials, nor in Reiss’ volume The Kingdom of Serbia did the two small photographs inspire any known, direct commentary. The oblivion they met dictated that they were not recognised as having any special historical significance. But, as Sontag reminds us, ‘the posthumous shocks engineered by the circulation of hitherto unknown photographs may construct and revise our sense of the past’.79As signs, as visual thresholds of evils presaged, Reiss’ two small photographs of Monástir constitute ‘le possible d’Auschwitz’, in the phrase of Georges Bataille.80 In historical perspective, Reiss documented on the southeastern front in 1915–17 all of the means – poison gas, shootings, deportations, and a system of bestial and lethal camps for POWs and interned civilians – later found on a far vaster scale among Nazi modalities. Reiss’ wartime investigations 78 J. Thomas, ‘History and anti-history: photography exhibitions and Japan’s national identity’, AHR 103:5 (December 1998), 1500. 79 Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, pp. 84–5. 80 G. Bataille, ‘Réflexions sur le bourreau et la victime’ in Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1988), X I, 267.

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revealed no monocausality, no exclusive choice of means, much as, in the Hitlerszeit, shootings by mobile SS and pogroms by local auxiliaries held sway in some regions (in part because of divergent railroad gauges), while in others, fixed centres for industrialised murder predominated. In the east in both world wars, the Wilhelmine colonial order structure prevailed: to kill by all possible means (‘mit allen möglichen Methoden’). However, in the Nazi hierarchy of modalities, poison gas – and, among gases, Zyklon – emerged as supreme, a future which underscored the importance of Reiss’ precocious identification of Zyklon. The ambitious global scale of Nazi projects for extermination relied on the rapidity and efficiency of Zyklon, which exemplified the ethos of scientific violence of the Nazi elites. The triage which led Heydrich and Eichmann to choose it as the agent of destruction for a population dispersed on a global scale gruesomely reflected the ontological nature of the crime. Unlike carbon monoxide in the inefficient Operation Reinhard camps and gas vans, Zyklon killed even the unborn industrially. The experimental poison gas war in the east of 1915–17 alters our understanding of the ultimate crisis of representations in the Hitlerszeit. The current historiography of the Shoah rests on the assumption that Heydrich and Himmler could not have conceived of the use of poison gas in ethnic killing before late 1941 because they could not have represented it.81 Since it was understood in German governing circles from late 1917 that the future of racial struggle lay in the weaponisation of poison gas, and since a continuity of personnel between the world wars disseminated knowledge of precedents for its use, high-ranking SS functionaries and physicians could and did represent its use against civilians from the outbreak of World War Two.82 81 Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman, p. 95; Edouard Husson, Heydrich et la solution finale (Paris, 2008), pp. 217, 273; Leon Poliakov, Bréviare de la haine (Paris, 2017), p. 55; C. Browning and J. Matthäus, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Lincoln, NE, 2004), pp. 214, 316–17, 352–73; P. Longerich, Heinrich Himmler (Oxford, 2012), pp. 489, 512; Jusqu’au dernier, reels 4 and 5. Hitler’s rhetorical aside in Mein Kampf on the preventable ‘sacrifice of millions at the front’ during World War One, had only ‘twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people been held under poison gas’, raises the possibility that he learned of the murderous 1917 Entlausungsanstalten through military contacts at the war’s end, or soon thereafter. A. Hitler, Mein Kampf (London, 1969), p. 620. Talk of using poison gas against the Jews circulated soon after Hitler’s advent, as evidenced by a May 1934 SD memorandum (‘One does not fight rats with guns but with poison and gas.’): Gerwarth, Hitler’s Hangman, p. 95. 82 Evidence long detained in the Soviet archives, on the 1940 gassing with Zyklon of Polish intellectuals, supports this point: N. Jordan, ‘Révélations sur les Prémices de la Shoah’, Historia (January–February 2017), 34–9.

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Bibliographic Note On the period, see Leonhard, Pandora’s Box, and Hull, Absolute Destruction. André Malraux’s novel fragment, originally published as La lutte avec l’ange (Geneva: Éditions du Haut-Pays, 1943), appeared in France after the Liberation as Les noyers de l’Altenburg (Paris: NRF, 1948), and in translation by A. W. Fielding: The Walnut Trees of Altenburg (New York: Fertig, 1989). The literary scholar Victor Brombert (‘Remembering Malraux: on violence and the image of man’ in André Malraux, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1988)) has written powerfully on Malraux’s representation of the German gas offensive at Bolimów. I am deeply indebted to the late Florence Malraux for insight into her father’s sources. R. A. Reiss’ writings on the southeastern front run to many volumes. The most important are in French: Le martyre de la ville de Monástir-Bitolj; Infractions aux règles. Reiss published one English-language text, The Kingdom of Serbia. There is no important English-language biography, although there is a fine French one by Z. Leventhal (Rodolphe Archibald Reiss: criminaliste and moraliste de la Grande Guerre). My discussion of Reiss’ photographs owes much to the work of Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, and Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). For the definition of genocidal massacre which informs this chapter: Fein, ‘Genocide: a sociological perspective’; Jacques Sémelin, ‘From massacre to the genocidal process’, International Social Science Journal 54:174 (2002), 433–42; and ‘Towards a vocabulary of massacre and genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 5:2 (2003), 193–210. The range of Reiss’ work makes plain exterminatory intent, as do the Russian gas losses.

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Index

Introductory Note References such as ‘178–9’ indicate (not necessarily continuous) discussion of a topic across a range of pages. Wherever possible in the case of topics with many references, either these have been divided into sub-topics or only the most significant discussions of the topic are listed. Because the entire work is about ‘genocide’, the use of this term (and certain others which occur constantly throughout the book) as entry points has been restricted. Information will be found under the corresponding detailed topics. Aborigines Protection Board, 551 Aborigines Protection Society, 52, 66, 553 abuse, 441, 445–6, 590, 636, 641, 647, 649, 652 emotional, 441, 490 mental, 435, 445, 458, 552 sexual, 390, 442, 538, 551–2 accidents, 202, 204–5, 377, 444–5, 602 Act of Kingship, 148 Adana, 609, 624–33 governor, 626, 628 province, 624–5, 630 adaptability, 42, 47 adaptation, 23, 60, 598 Adelaide, 510, 519 administration, 35, 156, 167, 297, 494, 504, 569 British, 84–5, 486 Dublin, 156, 160, 166, 167–8, 180 administrators, 85, 317, 441, 448–9, 453, 559, 587 British, 84–5 adolescents, 204, 257 adults, 93, 252, 543, 545, 550–1, 556 young, 435, 438, 454, 458 Adventurers Act, 178 Aenon, 252, 254 Africa, 2, 6, 335, 371, 372, 586–7, 589, 644 Central, 586, 602

A Problem from Hell, 33–4, 43 abductions, 417, 426, 490, 538, 552, 555, 589 child, 484, 552 Abdülhamid II, Sultan, 613, 615, 617 Abdülkadir Bağ dadizade, 626, 630–1 Aboriginal campsites, 463, 478 Aboriginal children, 19, 40, 436, 537–9, 544, 546–7, 549–55, 559 forcible removal, 537, 538–9 Aboriginal communities, 90, 479, 480, 487 Aboriginal culture, 503, 531, 538 Aboriginal families, 17, 542, 546–7, 555, 559 Aboriginal institutions, 543, 551 Aboriginal land, 9, 48, 477, 491, 503, 513, 515 Aboriginal populations/peoples, 10, 47, 50, 54, 465, 467, 470, 554 Aboriginal resistance, 51, 53, 465, 478–9, 527–8 Aboriginal societies, 46, 93, 505, 514, 537–9 Aboriginal troopers, 523, 524 Aboriginal women, 40, 467, 493, 517, 544, 551 Aboriginal workers, 15, 514, 524, 529, 544, 550 Aborigines, 49–50, 52–5, 491–4, 495–8, 503–4, 515–19, 520–1, 554–5 Protectors of, 51–2, 558 Tasmanian, 463, 465–6, 468, 471–2, 485–7, 500–1, 504, 546

681

Index Africa (cont.) East, 589, 592 German Southwest, 17, 26, 32, 92, 634–6, 638, 640–1, 650–2 North, 362, 368, 370 Southern, 10, 11, 69–71, 93–4, 350 Southwest, 652 Africans, 335–7, 339, 350–3, 596, 597–9, 601, 641–4, 646–7 Natal, 338, 339, 350–3 Age of Atrocity, 142–3, 144, 162 agents, 77, 155, 480, 588–9, 591–2, 597–8, 599–600, 625 state, 591–2, 596, 599 aggression, 215, 274, 317, 407, 481 agreements, 151, 196, 198–9, 484, 497, 500 agriculture, 60, 66, 261, 364, 564 Ahmed, Bey of Constantine, 376–8 Ai, 186, 194–8, 210–11, 299 Aintep, 622 Akayesu decision, 4–5 Aklavik, 440, 446 Alabama, 402 Alaska, 448 Albany, 549 Fort, 441 alcohol, 60, 66, 466, 570 Aleppo, 625, 626, 628, 633 Algeria, 13, 361–80 archival knowledge and elite direction of systematic forms of violence, 368–76 assessing toll of colonial violence, 378–80 definitional problems, 362–4 historical context, 364–8 indigenous accounts of colonial violence, 376–8 Algerians, 361–4, 367, 369, 371, 376–9 Algiers, 368, 378 Alice Springs, 508, 512, 524 alliances, 252, 256, 258, 262, 270, 273, 281, 639 allies, 18, 169, 238–9, 262, 343, 568, 591, 647 close, 258, 298 indigenous, 227–8, 232, 236–8, 249, 260, 287, 289–90, 395 Altay mountains, 294–6 amaMbata, 341, 348 amaNtshali, 341, 348 ambassadors, 108, 333, 619 British, French and Russian, 617, 621–3 ambitions, 12, 147–8, 154, 181, 249, 252, 370, 487 colonial, 288, 587–8 territorial, 114, 579 Amboina, 189, 195, 198, 199, 208

ambushes, 204, 326, 493, 526, 647 American Indians, 2 see Native Americans American Revolution, 45, 261, 269, 272, 394–5, 397–400 Americas, 9, 12–13, 32–3, 268, 270, 361, 364–6, 431 Amherst, Field Marshal Jeffery, 269, 290 ammunition, 73, 85, 248, 254, 420–1, 524, 629, 638 amnesties, 210, 307, 323, 566 Amursana, 298–301, 305, 309 Anatolia, 612, 614, 625 ancestors, 155, 191, 235, 485, 541, 563 ancien régime, 328, 625–6, 633 anger, 124, 125, 129, 137, 143, 317, 324, 327 calculated, 121–2 anggi, 296, 300, 307 Anglo-Powhatan War, First, 273, 281, 283 Anglo-Zulu War, 351–2 animals, imported, 53, 66 annihilation, 163, 165, 169, 174, 376–7, 401, 405, 494 annuities, 36, 455, 459 Ansky, S., 671 antisemitism German, 669–71 Hitlerian, 670 scientific, 671–2 Apache, 387, 407, 445 Apess, William, 234, 389, 394, 408 apologists, 159, 328 Appalachian Mountains, 394, 398 Apple Village, 290 Arabkir, 622 arable land, 485, 490 Arabs, 367, 371, 375, 593 Christian, 626 Swahili, 593–4 Arakhie, 251–2 archives, 105, 113, 304, 339, 370, 407, 601, 658 official, 14, 566 Vatican, 102, 104 written, 268–9 Arizona, 443, 457 armed resistance, 396, 586, 616 Armenia, 32, 609–10, 613, 621, 632, 665 Western, 614 Armenian communities, 612, 614, 632 Armenian leadership, 612–13 Armenian Patriarchate, 612, 630–1 Armenian Question, 614, 617, 623, 632 Armenian resistance, 615 Armenian revolutionaries, 614, 619–21, 624

682

Index authorities, 77–8, 120–1, 156, 168–9, 175–9, 317–18, 648–9, 651 colonial, 63, 364, 490, 544, 640, 653 federal, 416, 418–19 German, 638, 649, 652 autonomy, 44, 77, 190, 614 auxiliaries, local, 425, 427, 675, 679 Axtell, James, 216, 271

Armenian schools, 629–30 Armenians, 2, 17, 30, 32–3, 609–33 armies, 151, 153, 159, 160, 179–81, 372, 404–7, 566 arms, 155, 157, 321, 374, 400, 441–2, 627, 638 army officers, 83, 330, 388, 401, 416, 422 arquebusiers, 191, 249–50 arrests, 456–7, 465, 474, 524 Arthur George, 51–2, 490–8, 499, 503, 504–5, 541, 544 Mary Ann, 545 Walter, 545 artisans, 28, 152, 318, 324 Aru Islands, 208–9, 211, 213 Asia, 189–90, 193, 195, 197–8, 586, 666 Central, 6–7, 11, 18, 665 asphyxiating gases, 664, 667, 676 assaults, 258, 261, 374, 392, 397, 413, 419, 530 assimilation, 28, 84, 442, 458, 551, 558, 580 biological, 18 forced, 23, 34, 434 assurances, 151, 161, 176, 198 asymmetrical violence, 14, 385, 405 atrocities, 104–8, 142–3, 144, 146–7, 156–7, 331–3, 668–9, 675 attacks, 78–9, 123–7, 129–30, 200, 203–4, 208–9, 405–7, 627–8 gas, 659–60, 662, 675–7, 678 Herero, 642, 647 systematic, 363, 510, 611 unprovoked, 268, 275, 284, 638 attrition, 84, 90, 401, 663 Auschwitz, 678 Australia, 6, 7–11, 12–17, 46–7, 461, 462, 463, 464, 469, 475–6, 479–81, 550–2 see also names of places, provinces, tribe names and individuals Central, 54, 530–1 Eastern, 467, 478 forcible removal of Aboriginal children, 537–60 frontier, 466, 475, 478, 485, 502, 508 frontier massacres, 461–80 Northern, 479, 508–32, 550 South, 54–5, 476–9, 513, 523–4 southern, 47, 476 Western, 17, 54–5, 463–4, 476–80, 508, 511–12, 553–4, 556–9 ‘Australia Felix’, 48, 53 Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, 502, 538 Australians, 39–40, 52, 58, 470, 502, 529–30, 531 Austrian campaign, 670–2 Austrian postcards, 674–5

babies, 421, 520, 555, 634 Babigian, Hagop, 631 bacteria, 392–3 Baiburt, 621 Balkans, 612, 615, 657, 664, 673 Banda Archipelago, 7, 186–99, 201, 202–13 Banda Besar, 186, 191, 205 Bandanese, 188–213 civilisation, 187–91, 210–12 free, 209, 210 society, 191–2, 210 bandits, 302, 576 banishment, 164, 174, 181 Bantu-speakers, 90–1 baptism, 264, 489, 574 Barbados, 143, 177 barbarians, 170, 297, 308, 576, 580, 658, 677 Barköl, 303 Barrow, John, 83 Barta, Tony, 9, 461, 466, 503, 522 Bas¸ibozuks, 628, 630 Bass Strait, 51, 482, 492, 497, 499, 541, 544, 545 Batavia, 195, 197, 204 Bathurst, Lord, 49, 548 Batman, John, 52, 493, 544 Battle Creek, 418 Batu Kapal, 186 bayonets, 322, 374, 376, 659–61 beans, 261, 400 beatings, 201, 205, 426, 441–2, 597, 641, 650 Bechuanaland, 93–4, 645, 651 beheadings, 232, 415, 567 Behrendt, Larissa, 559 Beijing, 294, 297–8, 306, 308, 575–6 Belgian Congo, 2, 603 (see also Congo: Free State) Belgians, 585, 601, 603 Belgium, 585, 587–8, 592, 595, 599, 601, 602–4 Belich, James, 59 beliefs, 144, 150, 383, 386, 464, 466, 570, 576 bendi neighbours, 564, 577 benevolence, 67, 88, 309, 369, 376, 404, 539, 546 Beni Menasser, 372, 373 Beni Sala, 368

683

Index Beothuk, 495 Bey of Constantine, Ahmed, 376–8 Billy, Charles, 447 biological reproduction, 417, 538–9, 543 births, 1, 5, 391, 393–4, 426, 452–3, 509, 512 bishops, 103, 149, 316–17 Catholic, 164–5 Bitlis, 616, 620, 626 Black Line, 496, 541 Black War, 466, 468, 471, 474–5, 481, 485, 505, 526 Blackfeet, 405–6 Bladensburg, 518 bloody ground, the, 14, 383, 384–5, 393–5, 407 Blount, Charles, 157 blunt instruments, 619, 623, 628 boarding schools, 40, 64, 434–59 Boers, 94, 337, 350 Bogaert, Harmen Meyndertsz van den, 249 Bolgako, 659–60 Bolimów, 658–64, 669 Boma, 591, 594, 599, 600 bondage, 232, 235, 388–9, 417 Bonwick, James, 463, 472–3, 486 booty, 100, 103, 367, 377, 542 Bosnia, 331, 474 Boston, 221–3, 231 Botswana, 93, 645 Boulogne, 12, 151–5, 162 bounties, 232, 235, 241, 396, 495 head, 225, 228, 230 bourgeois, 314, 324–5 local, 314, 316–17 Bowen, 519, 527 Bowman, Joseph, 267–70, 291 Boxer Rebellion, 579, 644 Boyce, James, 16, 52, 499, 504 Bradshaw, Brendan, 148 bread, 60, 321, 325, 442, 548 Breckenridge, Thomas E., 413 Brisbane, 54, 510, 513, 519 Britain, 48, 50, 54, 537, 540, 550, 553 civilising mission, 56 Colonial Office, 46, 51, 53, 55–8, 63, 498, 516–17 British administration, 84–5, 486 British administrators, 84–5 British Columbia, 441, 445, 450 British Empire, 395, 479, 489, 499 British rule, 48, 63, 84, 85, 86, 90, 351, 395 British subjects, 55–6, 523 British troops, 15, 268, 477 Brittany, 153, 323, 327

Broome, Richard, 465–6, 468, 514 Broughton, Bishop, 49 brutality, 33, 143, 174, 371, 383, 394, 399, 593 Bryant, A.T., 338–9 Buddhism, 134, 292, 309, 570, 572, 575 Buddhist monks, 134, 572 Bugeaud, Maréchal, 367, 370–4, 380 Bulgarians, 667–9, 674 bullets, 82, 521, 597–8 dum-dum, 665 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 234 Burgundy, 315, 661 Burnett, Peter, 419, 420 Burnett district, 526 burning, 226–8, 283, 320, 321–2, 371, 374, 592, 597 Busby, James, 61 bushcraft, 59, 494, 527 Bushmanland, 85, 86–8 Bushmen, 69, 82–3, 90 Cadillac, Antoine de la Mothe, 288–9 Calais, 152, 155 California, 10, 412–31 governors, 419, 426–7 Indians, 10, 412–29 Northwestern, 38, 417, 420, 424 reservations, 418, 422–3 state legislators, 419, 420–2, 427 Volunteers, 424–5, 427 Cambodia, 3, 271, 329 Camdeboo district, 81 campaigns, 152–3, 174, 266–8, 298–301, 304, 308–9, 396–7, 528–9 camps, 99, 205, 375, 400–1, 405, 629, 647–9, 664 concentration, 36, 402, 636, 640, 647, 649–53 campsites, Aboriginal, 463, 478 Canada, 13–14, 434, 436, 441, 445, 448, 451, 454–5, 458 government, 434–5, 452 lessons from, 434–59 TRC, 439–40, 458–9 candlestick base, 109 cannibalism, 158, 302, 518, 648 capacity, 59, 81, 91, 162, 372, 380, 446, 452 Cape Colony, 69, 70, 77, 84, 87–9, 638, 643 see also San expansion, 70–5 Cape Grim, 492, 502 Cape Town, 69–70, 73, 75–7, 88, 643 Cape York, 514, 526 captives, 76, 78, 244–6, 256–7, 261–2, 263, 496, 498

684

Index captivity, 19, 80, 254, 258, 259, 541, 544, 571 careers, 177, 333, 370, 491, 495, 524, 678 Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 442, 444–6, 447, 456–7 Carnarvon, 552–3 Carson, Kit, 413 case studies, 167, 273, 293–4, 464, 562, 581 casks, 472–3 Catholic bishops, 164–5 Catholic elite, 168, 169, 178, 181 Catholic landowners, 167, 178, 181 Catholic schools, 441, 446 Catholicism, 140, 157, 160, 167, 264, 403 Catholics, Irish, 163–5, 168, 169–71, 172–4, 178, 180–2, 462 cattle, 90–1, 326, 340–1, 345, 346, 348, 642–5, 647 farmers, 464, 480 stations, 465, 513, 525 Caucasus, 612, 614–15 Cave, Alfred A., 45 caves, 79–80, 218, 374, 425, 669 cellars, 441, 668 cemeteries, 252, 450–1, 501 censuses, 176, 424, 464, 487, 554, 602, 651 Central Africa, 586, 602 Central Asia, 6–7, 11, 18, 665 Central Australia, 54, 530–1 Central Powers, 664–6, 669–70, 674 centrality of dispossession, 24, 27, 41 Ceram, 208–9, 211–13 ceremonies, 134, 248, 254, 256, 346, 352–3, 480 tax collection, 353 Cetshwayo, 337, 352 Chahar Mongols, 304 chains, 153, 249, 389, 603, 617 neck, 531, 554 Chalk, Frank, 38, 216, 331 Champlain, Samuel de, 247–51, 258 Chanzeaux, 328 chaos, 84, 122, 130, 157, 177, 302, 579 character assassination, 104, 335 Charette, François de, 321–3 Charles I, 160, 167, 171, 181 Charles II, 181 Chaunu, Pierre, 328–30 Chemawa, 440, 445, 448, 451 Cherokees, 38, 267, 272, 288, 384, 393–5, 400–2 Chesapeake, 276–8 Chicago, 408–10 Chickasaws, 288, 290, 393 Chief Protector of Aborigines, 555 chiefdoms, 269, 278–9, 336–7, 341–2, 344–6, 348–50, 355, 592

Chiksan, 132–3 child abductions, 484, 552 child removals, 18–20, 23, 33, 39, 458–9, 537–9, 552, 556 children, 167–70, 226–30, 395–7, 447–54, 455–9, 537–53, 554–9, 644–7 deaths, 259, 537, 538 Indian, 391, 418, 425, 443, 447, 450, 455 indigenous, 18–19, 39–40, 361, 436–40, 454–5, 458, 537 Islander, 6, 502, 538, 544 Palawa, 481, 488, 489, 493, 500, 541–2, 544–5 removals, 18 see child removals school-age, 436, 437 transfer, 1, 6, 426, 454, 458, 459, 538, 541 China, 123, 563, 567, 568–9, 571, 575–7, 580, 581–2 Ming, 123, 125, 128 Peoples’ Republic, 310, 567, 569, 577 South, 563, 568 Taiping, 562 see Taiping Chinese, 201, 302, 304, 329, 562, 563–4, 573, 580 culture, 571, 580–1 troops, 123, 129–30, 132, 304, 308, 574 Chinju, 124, 125–8 fort, 123, 126, 137 magistrate, 126–7 Chinju Mokuso, 123, 127 Choctaws, 288, 290, 393, 401 Cho˘ kchinp’o, 122 Cholet, 314, 318, 319–20, 321, 323, 332 Cho˘ lla, 122–4, 126, 129–33 Cho˘ ng Munbu, 124 Cho˘ nju, 130, 131 Choso˘ n Korea, 118–23, 126, 130, 136–7 Christ, Jesus, 167, 325, 573, 575 Christian Arabs, 626 Christianity, 66, 86, 191, 250, 549, 567–8, 571, 580–1 Taiping, 571, 582 Christians, 56, 67, 228, 609, 615, 627, 630, 633 chroniclers, 108–12, 232, 244, 538, 673 Ch’ungch’o˘ ng, 129, 132 church property, 314, 317 churches, 228, 232, 309, 314–17, 320, 328, 529–30, 628–30 Churchill, Ward, 38 Cilicia, 625, 627, 629 Circassians, 613, 626, 628 cities, 108–9, 112, 114–15, 574, 576, 578, 626, 629–30 civil wars, 10, 35, 171, 312, 319–21, 323, 332–3, 567 civilians, 181–2, 238 civilisation, 11, 58, 62, 66, 190, 192, 212–13, 549

685

Index civilising mission, 56, 371 civility, 149, 151, 326 clans, 246–8, 251, 257, 264, 483, 497, 501, 637 Clark, George Rogers, 268 Clark, Ian D., 467 Clark, Jonathan, 267, 291, 470, 474 class, 111, 114, 402, 449, 455, 567, 569–70 ultra-exploitable, 19, 80 clergy, 114, 178, 314, 315–17 non-juring, 316–17, 319–20 parish, 314, 316 clerical recruitment, 315, 317 clientship, 90, 94 cliffs, 76, 200–1, 213, 492 cloves, 187, 189 coastal Queensland, 515, 526 Cody, William ‘Buffalo Bill’, 408–9 Coen, Jan Pieterszoon, 186, 194–201, 202–13 coercion, 12, 166, 342–3, 435, 567, 589, 592 Coetzee, Johannes, 90 collective punishment, 309, 368, 615 collisions, 50, 54, 517, 638 colonial ambitions, 288, 587–8 colonial authorities, 63, 364, 490, 544, 640, 653 colonial expansion, 73, 144, 288, 513, 636, 638 colonial frontiers, 15, 72, 462, 464, 466, 467, 475, 480 colonial genocide, 42–3, 362, 508 colonial governments, 53, 86, 87, 91, 351–2, 497, 499 colonial markets, 73, 89 colonial militias, 270, 286–8 colonial Natal, 90–2 Colonial Office, 46, 51, 53, 55–8, 63, 498, 516–17 colonial officials, 233, 282, 352–3, 504, 506, 539 colonial policies, 40, 67, 86, 88, 648 colonial violence, 249, 265, 362, 368, 376, 378, 384, 395 colonialism, 23–4, 28, 247, 253, 257, 260, 269–71, 274 European, 12, 23, 391 global, 24, 27, 29 settler, 6–12, 15, 16, 19, 23–95, 508–9 colonies, 9–11, 276–7, 477, 495–6, 546–7, 550, 586–7, 637–9 Australian, 6 see Australia eastern, 514, 529, 553 colonisation, 7, 10, 13–15, 20, 38–9, 43–5, 48, 52, 56, 64–6, 366, 466, 481, 487, 510 European, 6, 7, 11, 13, 69, 90, 394 colonisers, 7–9, 63, 66, 267–70, 273, 276, 283–6, 362

colonists, 18–20, 70–3, 224–6, 232–7, 239–40, 285–90, 394–6, 538–43 combatants, 166, 340, 374–5, 485, 528 male, 395, 399 Combir, 189, 192, 200 commanders, 122, 126, 129, 152, 157, 173, 644, 647 military, 166, 177, 201, 329, 333, 367, 569, 630 commanding officers, 304, 488, 541 commandos, 77–84, 85, 87, 88–9 informal, 78, 86–7, 91 official, 78–9, 85, 91 commissioners, 149, 176, 435, 438–41, 447, 450, 455, 617 commodities, 91, 149, 190, 593 common law, English, 156, 159 communal concubinage, 571 communal granaries, 567, 570 communities, 18–20, 191, 210, 232–3, 259–60, 314–15, 326, 458 Aboriginal, 90, 479, 480, 487 Armenian, 612, 614, 632 farming, 95, 152 foreign, 575–6 Indigenous, 19–23, 282, 284–5, 388–91, 393–5, 398–9, 400–2, 404–5 rural, 314–16, 317–18 settler, 172, 464, 480 compensation, 154, 283, 435, 514, 528 competition, 31, 75, 87, 89, 190, 247, 623 complicity, 2, 16, 24, 81, 427, 509, 515, 522 concentration camps, 36, 402, 636, 640, 647, 649–53 concession companies, 589, 592, 595, 597, 598–9 conciliation, 12, 166, 170, 491 conciliatory measures, 491, 505 concubines, 44, 80, 575, 581 Confederacy, Iroquois, 244, 246–9, 251, 257, 260, 262–3, 264–6, 284 confessions, 204, 300, 510, 517 confinement, 271, 276, 290, 406, 442 confiscation, 60, 141, 172, 178, 376, 567, 644 Confucianism, 569–70, 572, 575, 580 Congo, 585–6, 587–8, 591, 593, 595–6, 599–600, 601, 604 basin, 585, 588, 592 Free State, 585–604 Congolese, 593, 598, 600–1 Congress, 10, 35, 399, 400, 418, 421, 428, 455 Coniston, 16, 464, 467, 470, 530–1 Connacht, 154–5, 161, 163, 179, 181 Connecticut, 216, 224–5, 229, 231, 233–6, 241, 284, 287

686

Index Northeastern, 231, 237 Pequots, 16, 215–16, 221 River, 221, 224, 233, 236–7 consciousness, 14, 31, 82, 112–13, 383–4, 389, 461, 480 conscription, 318, 594, 667 ballot, 318–19 conscripts, 312, 317, 566, 567, 570, 574, 589 consensus, 38, 142, 182, 190, 198, 204, 211, 215 consent, 48, 223, 399, 499 conspiracy, 2, 319, 427, 509, 516, 522 continuity, 406, 609, 633, 672, 679 contrition, 8, 28 convicts, 55, 489, 491, 495–6, 504, 513, 543, 544–5 Cook, Captain James, 48 Coote, Charles, 169 corn, 261–2, 281, 283, 400, 660 corpses, 100, 108, 124, 127, 320, 345, 401, 640 correspondence, 104, 150, 208, 267–8, 369, 370–1, 444, 601 costs, 78, 155–6, 178, 182, 212, 351, 591, 593 Council of State, 172, 178 counter-revolutionaries, 319, 320, 627 counter-revolutions, 332, 624–6, 628, 632 courage, 257, 330, 341, 467, 549 courts, 3–4, 101, 294, 465, 467, 553, 554, 630 courts-martial, 630–2 Cree, 441, 454 Creek Troubles, 399 Creeks, 288, 393, 402, 404 Cretans, 626, 628 crime scenes, 666, 676 crises, 168, 169–70, 258, 260, 300, 302, 310, 313 Cromwell, Oliver, 12, 140–1, 143, 161, 164–5, 172–8, 181 Cromwellian Ireland, 163–82 crops, 76, 151, 281, 283, 287, 290, 395–6, 403 cruelties, 55, 122, 170–1, 287, 318, 322, 344, 553 cultural genocide, 18, 32, 216–17, 434, 436–9, 538, 559, 576 cultural knowledge, 545, 558 cultural memory, 678 cultural resistance, 582 cultural superiority, 7, 11, 180, 512 culture, 19–20, 62–4, 66–7, 362, 377–8, 481–4, 501, 557–8 Aboriginal, 503, 531, 538 Chinese, 571, 580–1 Ma¯ori, 58, 63 Curr, Edward, 53, 465, 492 Curthoys, Ann, 503 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 660–1, 662 Cusack, Sir Thomas, 148–50

customs, 6, 66, 346, 570, 578, 641 native, 165, 180 daimyo, 118–20, 125, 128, 131, 133 generals, 118, 123, 125, 131, 132–3, 137 Dakota, 14, 35–7, 259, 387 Damara, 636 Daoist temples, 570, 572 Darwin, Charles, 51, 61, 499 Darwinism, Social, 61 Dashnaks, 614, 622–4, 627 Dashwood, Judge Charles, 519 Davenport, Lieutenant Richard, 229, 231 Davies, Sir John, 158–9, 166, 180 Davis, Jefferson, 421 de Grandpré, Louis, 83 de Klerk, Jacob, 80 death tolls, 226, 231, 236–9, 413, 419, 585–6, 599, 601 deception, 131, 497 Declaration of Independence, 43, 397 deeds, 114, 154, 439 definitions of genocide, 1–6, 12, 216, 219, 246, 269, 391 Convention, 19, 217, 426 DEIC, 69 see Dutch East India Company demographics, 30, 60, 250, 258, 294, 377, 379, 391 demoralisation, 49–50 depopulation, 159, 203, 205, 585 deportations, 93, 665, 667, 669, 672, 678 depressed fecundity, 423, 452 deprivation, 364, 380, 407, 442, 510, 559, 585 Derwent, 485, 488, 489 descendants, 235, 308, 354–5, 429, 484, 601, 641 De-shu, 305–6 despair, 260, 466, 636 desperation, 255, 537, 570, 590 Devereux, Robert, 157 Devereux, Walter, 156, 157 diaries, 89, 107, 122, 127, 130, 320, 542, 570 diasporas, 36, 244, 258 Dingane, 335–8, 339–40, 345, 347–50, 355 Dingiswayo, 340–1, 346, 348–9 Dinuzulu, 337–8, 352–3 diplomacy, 124, 126, 248, 275–6, 278, 284, 638 disappearance, 10, 23, 66, 305 disassociation, 28, 31, 246 disease, 60–1, 124–5, 176, 243, 250–3, 392–3, 602–3, 646–7 venereal, 392, 487, 538 dispersals, 233, 235, 272, 282, 288, 366, 518–19, 527

687

Index dispossession, 23–47, 392–3, 521, 525, 530 centrality of, 24, 27, 41 disputes, 55, 56, 87, 189, 191, 341, 343 disruptions, 48, 66, 88, 180, 247, 265, 402, 625 economic, 407, 575 district commissioners, 592, 595, 596–7, 601 district magistrates, 16, 492, 494 divergence, 317, 361, 571 Diyarbekir, 622, 626 doctors, 347, 448, 449, 631 dogs, 82–3, 121, 269, 290, 341, 349, 420, 440 domination, state, 11–13, 99 doomed race, 63, 392, 512 dormitories, 449, 455, 545, 557 Dragging Canoe, 14, 384, 395 Drakensberg, 90–1 Dreyfus Affair, 666 Drinnon, Richard, 216 Drogheda, 140–1, 143, 164, 174, 177 drought, 86, 87, 92, 273, 281, 552 Dublin, 146, 150, 154, 164, 167–71, 173–6, 177, 181 administration, 156, 160, 166, 167–8, 180 Lords Justices, 170–1 Dubrovskij, I. V., 104–5 Dudley, Ambrose, 153 dum-dum bullets, 665 Durban, 337, 339 Dutch, 186, 188–90, 193–9, 200–9, 210–13, 249–50, 253, 263 fleet, 193–4, 199, 200, 203, 210 traders, 240, 244, 248, 249 troops, 201, 204, 206, 212 Dutch East India Company (DEIC), 69–75, 199–206, 212 and Banda Archipelago, 186–213 encroachment of Dutch power on Banda Islands, 192–9 frontier conflict under DEIC/VOC, 75–84 genocide on Banda, 199–213 dynamics of power, 625, 633 dysentery, 163, 392, 402 earls of Essex, 153, 156, 157 earls of Kildare, 145 East Africa, 589, 592 Eastern Australia, 467, 478 eastern colonies, 514, 529, 553 eastern front, 17, 657–79 eastern North America, 243–4, 247, 250, 258, 272, 279 economic disruptions, 407, 575 economic exploitation, 94, 589–90, 594, 600, 603

economic interests, 65, 89, 267 economic power, 221, 464, 480 economic systems, 515, 591–2, 595 economics, 28, 62, 563 economies, 48, 61, 91, 180, 262, 503, 513, 563 political, 260, 301, 364 education, 5, 64, 66, 436, 443–4, 449, 459, 500 Edwards, David, 145–7, 152, 164, 165 eighteenth century, 69, 72–5, 76–8, 81, 84, 268–9, 294, 297 eland, 76, 82 elders, 190, 284, 383, 395–6, 405, 461, 480, 557–8 elimination, 24–5, 27, 29, 36, 38–9, 41, 45, 581–2 indigenous, 11, 32, 458 logic of, 503, 512 elites, 182, 525, 569 Catholic, 168, 169, 178, 181 local, 343, 377 political, 165, 364, 368 Elizabeth, Queen, 141, 144–5, 154–5, 157–8, 162 emotional abuse, 441, 490 emperors, 103, 106, 292, 296, 300, 303, 305, 307 German, 102, 104, 107, 645 Kangxi, 295 Ming, 125, 128 Qianlong, 292–3, 296–7, 298–300, 304, 309 Wanli, 124 Yongzheng, 295 empire-building, 11–13, 99–356, 362, 604 empires, 103–4, 106, 112, 292–4, 586–7, 612–13, 624–5, 632–3 French, 373, 379 German, 102–4, 637, 661 Ottoman, 609–10, 612, 613, 614–17, 624, 625, 632, 664 Qing, 11, 294, 296, 308, 580 empirical evidence, 10, 509 employers, 525, 547, 550, 553–4, 642 employment, 18, 159, 373, 529, 539, 544, 551, 554 encirclement, 240, 576, 645 Endecott, John, 221–3 England, 141–6, 149–53, 160–1, 165, 166, 171–4, 177, 179–81 English language, 9, 58, 159, 166, 234, 292, 462 English Protestants, 140, 148, 160, 161, 167, 462 English soldiers, 145, 283, 287 English troops, 145, 151–2, 155 Englishmen, 216–17, 221, 223, 225, 236, 239, 275–6, 284–7 enslavement, 224, 233, 278, 378, 427, 514 environment, 73, 103, 367, 375, 532, 558, 586 natural, 70, 84 political, 278

688

Index epidemics, 250, 252, 257, 448, 497–8, 499, 550, 552 smallpox, 236, 252, 254, 301 equality, 40, 344, 469–70, 491, 571, 581, 612, 624 Erasmus, 148 Erzincan, 616, 620 Erzurum, 621, 626 escalation, 194, 256, 615 Essex, earls of, 153, 156, 157 see earls of Essex ethnic groups, 1, 66, 182, 233, 235, 337, 505 ethnic tensions, 563, 627, 674 ethnicity, 112–13, 114, 304, 354, 570, 579–80, 581 ethnocide, 29, 511, 531–2 European colonialism, 12, 23, 391 European colonisation, 6, 7, 11, 13, 69, 90, 394 European settlements, 8, 48, 63, 249, 364 European traders, 190, 196, 638, 641 evasions, 44, 373, 396, 532 evidence, 235–6, 362–3, 439–40, 458–9, 470–2, 474, 539, 675–6 clear, 16, 435, 539 empirical, 10, 509 reliable, 467, 470 smoking gun, 4, 62 written, 13, 272 evil, 51, 55, 112, 133, 150, 303, 531, 542 excesses, 164, 174, 320, 333, 349, 519, 594, 601 executions, 162–3, 171, 176, 303, 306, 312, 570, 573 mass, 36, 213, 235 exile, 139, 140, 159–61, 245, 259, 341, 344, 352 expansion, 41, 43, 70–2, 146, 264, 268, 399, 408 colonial, 73, 144, 288, 513, 636, 638 imperial, 7, 65, 484, 491, 505–6, 586 pastoral, 75, 479, 481, 491 expeditions, 83, 157, 206, 210, 253, 282, 300, 419 military, 124, 298, 616 militia, 420, 422, 424, 427 punitive, 77, 221, 301, 303, 305–6, 310, 464, 529 expenses, 61, 70, 78, 154, 210, 283, 449, 595 experts, 470, 484, 487, 665 exploitation, economic, 94, 589–90, 594, 600, 603 exposure, 167, 170, 176, 392, 395, 426, 662, 672 expulsions, 30, 150, 155, 161, 401, 403, 596 forced, 402–3, 594 extermination, 37, 215–16, 303, 332–3, 344–6, 420–1, 517–19, 609–11 complete/total, 12, 14, 164, 168, 246, 332, 366, 481 wars of, 141, 415, 420–1, 520, 527 exterminatory violence, 11, 69, 89, 94, 274, 284 extinction, 8, 46, 50, 58, 482–4, 485–6, 494–5, 502 final, 14, 61, 387

extirpation, 46, 163–4, 168, 171–2, 290, 396, 398, 399–400 extreme violence, 81, 215, 259, 262, 400, 407 eyewitnesses, 32–3, 107–8, 111, 191, 226, 659, 660, 662 Fairfield Swamp attacks, 237 families, 416–18, 499–500, 541–4, 545–7, 548–50, 551–3, 555–6, 559–60 Aboriginal, 17, 542, 546–7, 555, 559 family members, 36, 256–7, 264, 307, 598, 603 famine, 67, 139, 158–9, 161, 174–6, 245, 259, 301 fanaticism, 317, 320, 325–6 farmers, 73–6, 77–8, 80–3, 84–5, 87, 92–3, 94, 326 cattle, 464, 480 frontier, 73–5, 77–8, 84, 87 German, 20, 92, 652 stock, 72, 87 farming communities, 95, 152 farms, 78, 86, 87, 91, 93, 489, 496, 500 Fazil Pas¸a, 631–2 fecundity, depressed, 423, 452 federal authorities, 416, 418–19 federal government, 383, 403, 406, 418–19, 420, 428–9 federal officials, 400, 419, 426–8, 452, 456–8 fertile lands, 163, 485, 587 fertility, 426, 452, 602 rates, 84, 453 feudalism, 315 Fiester, Charles, 440 Fikri, Ihsan, 626, 629 First Anglo-Powhatan War, 273, 281, 283 First Nations, 20, 24, 64, 66, 441, 443, 445, 525–6 First Opium War, 564 Flanders, 153, 171, 177 Fleetwood, Charles, 176, 179 Flinders Island, 497–500, 541, 543 food, 86, 87–8, 207, 403, 404–5, 446–7, 494, 496 foraging, 70, 85, 87, 94–5 Force Publique, 589, 592–4, 596 forced assimilation, 23, 34, 434 forced expulsions, 402–3, 594 forced labour, 77, 435, 443, 550, 552, 585, 587, 647–9 forced removals, 16, 18, 422, 426, 429, 537–60 forced students, 435, 441, 445–6 forced transfers, 5, 391, 426, 539, 552 forests, 250, 321, 389, 496, 532, 597–8, 660 formative events, 39, 41, 215, 412 Fort Saybrook, 223–4, 230, 238 Fort Snelling, 36 fortresses, 126–7, 130, 135, 189, 194–7, 201, 206–7

689

Index founding fathers, 290, 398 France, 11–12, 151–3, 155, 157, 264–5, 315–16, 365, 366 conquest of Algeria, 13, 361–80 western, 327–8, 331–2 Franklin–Chickamauga War, 399 Fredericks, Cornelius, 646, 649 free settlers, 489–90, 539 Free State, 587, 591, 593–5, 598–600, 601–2 freedom, 190, 204, 224, 323, 330, 500, 545, 549 Freeman, Michael, 216, 218 freemasonry of silence, 516, 521 Frémont, Captain John C., 412–13 French Empire, 373, 379 French leaders, 14, 248, 254–6, 258, 264–5, 289, 290 French missionaries, 252 French officials, 244, 289–90 French Revolution, 312–33, 583 French settlements, 245, 247, 253–4, 258–9, 260–1, 263, 265 French soldiers, 266, 363–4, 373, 375–6, 657 French traders, 244 frontier farmers, 73–5, 77–8, 84, 87 frontier genocides/massacres, 13, 15–16, 461–3, 464–5, 466–9, 470–1, 474–80, 639 frontier violence, 15, 16, 84, 408, 487, 516, 527, 531 frontiers, 53, 77–8, 80, 83–6, 267–8, 465–6, 477–8, 521 Australia, 466, 475, 478, 485, 502, 508 colonial, 15, 72, 462, 464, 466, 467, 475, 480 northeastern, 69, 80, 86, 92 northern, 87, 248, 478, 496, 551 Froude, James Anthony, 139–42 fur trade, 247, 249, 253, 260–1, 388 furs, 249–50, 253, 260–2, 263 futurity, 369, 371 Fynn, Henry Francis, 338–40 Gaelic, 146, 155, 159 lords, 148, 150, 154 Galdan Tsering, 295–6, 297 gamekeepers, 318, 325 Gardiner, Lion, 223–5, 230–1 Gardiner, S. R., 174 Gardner, Peter D. 468, 470, 474 garrisons, 77, 91, 140, 151, 154, 174, 212, 477 gas attacks, 657, 659–60, 662–3, 675–7, 678 gas masks, 657, 664 gases, 17, 657–79 asphyxiating, 664, 667, 676 lethal, 657–9, 661–2, 663

mustard, 657, 669, 675 gassed victims, 670, 674–5 Gates, Sir Thomas, 281–2 gender, 40, 114, 396, 405, 548, 569, 579, 581 generals, 127, 202, 303, 367 daimyo, 118, 123, 125, 131, 132–3, 137 geography, 14, 33, 41, 265, 591 Georgian Bay, 254, 261 German authorities, 638, 649, 652 German emperors, 102, 104, 107, 645 German Empire, 102–4, 637, 661 German farmers, 20, 92, 652 German pamphlets, 102, 105, 107–9 German soldiers, 634–6, 645–6, 650–2, 659, 662, 674 German Southwest Africa, 17, 26, 32, 92–3, 634–6, 638, 640–1, 650–2 German troops, 647, 660, 663, 671–2 Germans, 93, 106, 636, 638–45, 646–9, 651–2, 657–60, 661 Ghanziland, 94 gifts, 48, 85, 346 girls, 313, 321, 390, 455, 542–3, 551, 553, 558 global colonialism, 24, 27, 29 Gnadenhutten massacre, 397 gold rushes, 46, 60, 388, 416, 461, 514 gold-seekers, 60, 525 Gookin, Vincent, 180 governance, 377, 385 humane, 495, 505–6 government forces, 139, 167, 570, 573, 576 government officials, 86, 168, 550, 601, 604, 616 government troops, 139, 141, 144 governors, 83–4, 146–8, 153–5, 247–9, 255–6, 412, 420–1, 427 governors general, 206, 370, 374, 377 Goya, 677 granaries, communal, 567, 570 Grand Prince of Muscovy, 101, 103, 108–11, 112–15 grazing land, 73, 638 Great Britain, 14 see Britain Great Lakes, 244–5, 254, 258–61, 262–4, 265–6, 408 Greeks, 112, 626, 660 Greer, Allan, 42 Grey de Wilton, Arthur Lord, 157 Gribble, J. E., 470, 530, 552–3 Griqua, 76, 87, 89–90 Grumbach, 103 Guagnini, Alexander, 105–6, 107, 111, 113–14 Guangdong, 563, 569, 571, 572–3, 577 Guangxi, 563, 571, 572–4

690

Index Hnchaks, 614–16, 618, 627 Hobart, 482, 485–6, 489, 496, 500, 541, 542, 544 Hobsbawm, Eric, 30–1 Hoff, Georg vom, 107, 111, 114 Holocaust, 8, 17, 29–31, 292, 330, 470, 502, 609 homelands, 32, 282, 285, 394, 397, 398–402, 403, 467 Hong, 567, 569, 573–5, 580–1 Hong Kong, 564, 582 Hong Rengan, 575, 582 Hong Xiuquan, 563, 567, 569, 573, 576, 582 honour, 35, 209, 291, 399, 626 Hoornkrans, 636, 638–40 Hopi, resistance, 456 horses, 77, 78–9, 82, 89, 91, 405, 478, 514 hospitals, 66, 442, 447–8, 545, 629, 676 hostages, 18, 128, 131, 203–4, 222, 456, 597 hostility, 49, 86, 170, 264, 290, 317, 326, 349 hot pursuit, 77, 79, 91 Hottentots, 72, 81, 647 House of Commons, 46, 49, 54–5, 65, 169 Huadu, 569, 577 Hudson, 244, 249, 253 humane governance, 495, 505–6 humanitarianism, 372, 481, 487, 490–1, 506, 515, 529, 540 Hunan, 568, 577 hunger, 167, 176, 207, 209, 211, 259–60, 436, 443–7 hunter-gatherers, 69, 72–3, 81, 87, 88–9, 94 Hurons, 251–2, 256, 258, 262–4, 289 hygiene, 449, 558, 566

Guangzhou, 563–4 guardians, 48, 457, 542, 555 guards, 130, 194, 200, 208 Guatemala, 33–4 guerrilla warfare, 375, 466, 642–3, 646 guilt, 51, 67, 168, 386, 471, 510 Gümüs¸hane, 620 Gunung Api, 186, 190 Guwa, 518 Haber, Fritz, 660–1, 662–3 habits, 28, 149, 319, 548, 570, 603 Hachiman Dai-Bosatsu, 121 Hahn, Otto, 662, 669 ‘Hakkas’, 563–4, 573, 576, 581 Hamdan Khodja, 376–7 Hamidian massacres, 609, 622, 624, 632 Hamilton, Carolyn, 342–4 Hangzhou, 576, 578 Hanso˘ ng, 122, 125 hapu, 59 hard labour, 444, 453, 650 Harney, Lieutenant Colonel William S., 401 Harper, Stephen, 436 Harput, 622, 626 Hartford, Connecticut, 224, 231–2, 235 harvests, 190, 261, 325, 353 Haskell, 448, 451 hatchets, 396, 628 Hatta Island, 186 Haudenosaunee, 288, 395–7, 403 Hauptman, Laurence M., 216–18 Hawtry, Reverend Montague, 58 Hayes, Robert, 199, 202 HCN (prussic acid), 658–9, 661–2, 668–9 head bounties, 225, 228, 230 headwaters, 261, 288, 425 health, 218, 449, 459, 545, 555–6 heaven, 233, 455, 569, 571–2, 573 Heavenly Kingdom, 574, 581, 582 heavy snow, 405, 575 hegemony, 260, 345 Henry VIII, 141, 145, 148, 151–2, 154, 161–2, 165 Hereros, 2, 11, 17, 26, 92, 634–53 attacks, 642, 647 lands, 639, 644 survivors, 647, 651 Heydon, Charles, 516 Hideyoshi, Toyotomi, 118–26, 127–9, 130–1, 134–7 historical memory, 159, 162, 529, 583 historiographies, 25, 28–9, 31, 338, 521, 562, 672, 679

IAC (International Association of the Congo), 588–9 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda), 3–4 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia), 3–5 identities, 8, 18, 66, 257, 263, 294, 361–3, 373 ideologies, 33, 48, 58, 62–3, 66, 567–8, 569, 574 religious, 568–9 Ieyasu, Tokugawa, 123, 136 ignorance, 66, 178, 325, 374, 604 Ihsan Fikri, 626, 629 ikki, 124, 137 Ili, 296, 298–301, 307 Illinois, 267–8, 289 illnesses, 306, 391–3, 402, 490, 498, 529, 538, 573 illusions, 123, 297, 344, 389, 671–2 Imjin War, 119, 122, 134 immune systems, 423, 435 immunities, 250, 393, 487

691

Index imperial expansion, 7, 65, 484, 491, 505–6, 586 imported animals, 53, 66 impunity, 82, 93, 417, 477, 572, 633 incarceration, 19, 497, 502, 652 incendiary shells, 668 incorporation, 58, 86, 232, 246, 257, 260, 264, 296–7 independence, 40, 43, 59, 90, 193, 355, 397, 549–50 political, 302, 642 Indian Affairs Commissioner, 442, 449, 456 Indian children, 391, 418, 425, 443, 447, 450, 455 Indian lands, 399 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), 434–5, 442, 453 Indian Wars, 14, 385–6 Indians, 231–2, 268–71, 386–90, 394–6, 397–400, 403–5, 413–19, 420–2 Indigenocide, 511, 527, 532 Indigenous allies, 227–8, 232, 236–8, 249, 260, 287, 289–90, 395 Indigenous children, 18–19, 39–40, 361, 436–40, 454–5, 458, 537 Indigenous communities, 19–23, 249–50, 269–70, 289–90, 388–91, 392–5, 398–9, 400–2 indigenous elimination, 11, 32, 458 Indigenous warriors, 270, 283, 287, 502 Indonesian archipelago, 187, 197, 198 industrial schools, 437, 544, 551 inflammatory rhetoric, 171, 182 informal commandos, 78, 86–7, 91 informants, 340–1, 344–6, 348–52 injustice, 55, 67, 107, 146, 335, 355, 615, 619 Inkatha, 354–5 Inner Mongolia, 297, 304, 308 instability, 92, 243, 297, 301 institutionalised malnutrition, 422, 443–4, 459 institutions, 66, 434–5, 442, 539, 547–8, 550, 555–6, 557 Aboriginal, 543, 551 social, 218, 576, 582 instructions, 48, 77, 179, 194, 302–4, 591, 596, 600 insurgents, 167, 170, 312–13, 318, 321–5, 332, 573, 575 insurrection, 312–13, 314, 319, 321–2, 326–8, 330, 333, 665–6 integration, 101, 344 cultural, 165 intent, 4–5, 62–3, 216–17, 246, 386, 426, 503–4, 505 specific, 4, 9–10, 439, 484, 505

to destroy, 1, 270, 504 intentional infliction, 364, 380, 510, 611 intentionality, 261, 599, 611 interests, 62–3, 65–6, 77–8, 193, 197, 365, 371, 586–8 economic, 65, 89, 267 interference, 24, 33, 489, 631 international law, 2–3, 6, 218, 276, 335, 439, 559, 562 interpreters, 252, 408 intimidation, 5, 592, 610, 617 Inuit, 434, 437, 446, 448 Inuvialuit, 434, 437, 446 invaders, 121, 281, 385, 527, 528, 639 Ireland Cromwellian, 163–82 English conquest, 139–62 provinces, 157, 161 Provincial presidencies, 154–5, 156 Irish, 139–41, 143, 159–60, 162, 165, 166–8, 171–3, 180 Catholics, 163–5, 168, 169–71, 172–4, 178, 180–2, 462 lords, 149–51, 154, 156 population, 12, 158, 163, 181 rebellion, 12, 160, 180 Iroquoia, 247, 254, 256, 258, 259–61, 264–6 Iroquois, 18, 245, 246–8, 250–1, 254–6, 258–66, 289 assaults on Wendake, 258–62 communities, 250, 263 Confederacy, 244, 246–9, 251, 257, 260, 262–3, 264–6, 284 demography and disease, 250–3 expansion and captive-raiding, 253–7 raiders, 18, 244–5, 253, 258–60, 261–2, 264 society, 254, 256, 263 technologies of violence, 247–50 villages, 253, 257, 261, 264 warriors, 246, 254–5, 258, 262, 265 Iroquois–Wendat Wars, 244–6, 247 IRSSA (Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement), 434–5, 442, 453 Isaacs, Nathaniel, 338–40 Isdell, James, 556 Islam, 188, 190–1, 615, 620 Islander children, 6, 502, 538, 544 Isle d’Orléans, 245, 251, 263, 265 Istanbul, 616, 618–19, 622–3, 628, 630 Italy, 140 Northern, 102, 105–6, 113 · Itidal, 626, 629 Itomot’ ahpi Pikun’i, 14, 405

692

Index Ivan III, 101, 103, 114 Ivan IV, 99–102, 104, 108, 113–14 Ivan the Terrible, 12, 99–101, 104–5, 109–10, 111–12 ivory, 591–2, 595 iwi, 59, 63 izwekufa, 349 Jaarsveld, Adriaan van, 80 Jacobs, Margaret, 19, 39–40 James I, 158–60, 167, 198 James River, 273, 281, 283 Jamestown, 275, 279–81 Jandamarra, 528 Japan, 10, 578 invasion of Korea, 118–37 Warring States, 118–20 Japanese, 120–2, 123–4, 126, 130, 201–2, 659 invaders, 132, 136 troops/forces, 118–21, 123–5, 126, 128, 130–3, 135–6 Java, 187–90, 195, 197, 587 Javanese, 189, 193, 199, 203 Jefferson, Thomas, 267, 398 Jen Yu-wen, 567, 569 Jesuit missionaries, 244, 250–1 Jews, 17, 367, 671, 675 Sephardi, 667 Jiangnan, 562–83 Jonassohn, Kurt, 38, 216, 218, 331 Jones, Dean Henry, 169 judicial power, 3, 219 Jungharia, 292, 295, 296–302, 304–7, 308–9 juries, 329, 417, 425, 457 jurisdiction, 105, 142–4, 404, 418, 479 jurors, 316, 417 justice, 50, 171, 178, 291, 330–1, 371, 495, 532 system, 591, 599 Juusten, Bishop Paul, 107–8 Kabyles, 367–8 Kabylie, 375, 380 Kahimemua, 639 Kalahari Desert, 89, 634 Kalmyks, 294, 308 kangaroos, 48, 488–9, 520 Karaka, 186 Kasongo, 593–4 Kato¯ Kiyomasa, 122, 124, 131, 133, 135 Katz, Steven, 216–19 Kavikunua, Nikodemus, 639–40 Kayseri, 622 Kazakhs, 292, 301, 304, 306–8

Keinen, 130 Kentucky, 13–14, 267, 384–5 Khalkha Mongols, 295, 298, 304 khans, 295, 298 Khauas-Khoi, 636, 639–41, 643, 652–3 Khoikhoi, 70–2, 76, 78, 80–1, 89 Khoisan, 72, 77–8, 79, 80, 636 Khoshud Mongols, 308 Kibbe, Adjutant General William C., 421 Kiernan, Ben, 68, 137, 165, 182–3, 215, 217–18, 233, 242, 272, 276, 291, 349, 433–4, 505–6, 533 Kikkawa Hiroie, 132–3 Kikotan, 13, 269, 273–7, 277–9, 281–3 Kildare County, 146 earls of, 145 rebellion, 146, 152 Kilkenny, 170 Kimberley, 508, 512, 514, 517–20, 525, 527, 528, 530–1 King Philip’s War, 269, 285–7 Kiswas, 225 Klamath, 417, 440 knowledge, 38, 43–4, 47, 151, 200, 362–3, 647–9, 658 cultural, 545, 558 Kobayakawa Hideaki, 130 Koe, Frederick Ernest, 440 Koerikei, 76 Ko˘ je island, 122, 124, 129 Konishi Yukinaga, 118–21, 123–4, 127, 129–30, 135 Kopper, Simon, 646 Korana, 76, 88 Korea, 2, 6–7, 11 Choso˘ n, 118–23, 126, 130, 136–7 Japanese invasion, 118–37 Koreans, 120–2, 124, 125–7, 129, 131, 134–7 Kumagai Naomori, 132 Kurdish Beys, 613, 616, 624 Kurds, 613, 615, 626, 628 Kuroda Nagamasa, 131–3 Kuroda troops, 131–2 KwaZulu-Natal, 337 as post-genocidal society, 354–6 Kyo˘ nggi province, 132 Kyo˘ ngsang province, 130, 131, 133 Kyoto, 120, 127, 134 Kyushu, 122, 124 La Roche-Bernard, 318, 332 La Trobe, Charles Joseph, 54

693

Index labour, 9, 18, 392, 416, 444–5, 575, 595 forced, 18, 435, 443, 552, 585, 587, 648–9 hard, 444, 453, 650 unpaid, 553–4 labourers, 263, 566, 649 disposable, 417, 423 unfree, 415 Lakotas, leaders, 14, 385, 387, 401, 404, 406 land Aboriginal, 9, 48, 477, 491, 503, 513, 515 arable, 485, 490 grazing, 73, 638 policies, 58–9, 399 land reforms, 182, 566 landowners, 156, 179, 315, 324, 377 Catholic, 167, 178, 181 Langa, 341, 344, 347–8 language, 65, 67, 70, 372–3, 379, 384, 480–4, 669 English, 9, 58, 159, 166, 234, 292, 462 new, 6, 18 Lanne, William, 486, 501 Launceston, 485, 489, 492, 543 lawyers, 417, 443, 510, 594, 634 leaders, 223, 224, 245, 261, 265, 456, 582, 589 French, 14, 248, 254–6, 258, 264–5, 289, 290 Lakota, 14, 385, 387, 404 military, 37, 178, 230, 240 Onondaga, 250, 396 political, 190, 228, 241, 490 religious, 232, 626 San, 83, 91 Seneca, 265, 397, 398 leadership, 39, 125, 279, 285, 316, 319, 346, 569 Armenian, 612–13 Lecky, W. E. H., 140–2 legal systems, 66, 417, 427, 467, 636, 642, 652 legislation, 331, 540, 551, 555, 559 legislators, state, 417, 420, 427 legitimacy, 342–4, 347, 470, 480 Lemkin, Raphael, 1–2, 20, 25, 62, 65–7, 270, 471–2, 502 Lenape, 395–8 Leopold, King, 585, 587–92, 593, 594–5, 597, 599, 600, 602–4 Lepore, Jill, 43–4 Les noyers de l’Altenburg, 659 lethal gases, 657–9, 661–2, 663 lethality, 403, 451–2 letters, 102, 104, 106, 171, 172, 209, 368–9, 371–2 Leutwein, Theodor, 638–9, 641–3 levées en masse, 496 Levene, Mark, 217, 610 leverage, 128, 193

Lhasa, 294–5 Li Gui, 570, 573, 579 Li Rusong, 124–5 liberty, 218, 321, 325, 329, 332, 399 Libya, 361, 368 Lincoln, Abraham, 10, 34–6 livestock, 36, 85, 88, 301–2, 307, 367, 463, 464 trading, 72, 326 LMS (London Missionary Society), 85, 86 local auxiliaries, 425, 427, 675, 679 local elites, 343, 377 local officials, 318, 578, 625, 630 logic, 13, 24–5, 27, 41–3, 254, 272–4, 276, 290 London, 52, 54, 56, 145–6, 498, 499, 668, 670 London Missionary Society (LMS), 85, 86 Long Depression, 586, 591 Long Island, 221, 230–2, 238, 240, 263, 284 Sound, 221, 230, 263 Lonthor, 189, 191–3, 195, 198–206, 208, 210, 211 Lonthorese, 200, 203–5 looting, 108, 132, 525, 597, 616, 619, 628–9 Louis XIV, 247, 265–6 Louis XVI, 312, 314 Lower Mississippi River, 269, 288–90 loyalties, 171, 178, 224, 266, 298, 312, 318, 353 Ludlow, Lieutenant-General Edmund, 177 MacDonald, David, 63, 436 mace, 186–9, 193, 199, 211 Macedonia, 658, 664, 667, 674 Machecoul, 318, 332 Macquarie, Lachlan, 49, 547–8 Macquarie Harbour, 497–8 madness, 136–7, 677 Maghreb, 363, 365, 367 magistrates, 49, 123–4, 126, 159, 224, 233 district, 16, 492, 494 magnanimity, 374, 581 mahachin, 294, 301–7, 310 Maharero, Samuel, 638–9, 642, 644–5 Mahicans, 249–50, 253 Maine, 253, 258, 315 malaria, 392 Malatya, 622 malnutrition, 363, 391, 422–3, 426, 452–3, 458 institutionalised, 422, 443–4, 459 Malraux, André, 659–64 Manchuria, 298, 304 Manchus, 304, 563, 570, 572, 574, 578–80, 583 Manitoba, 442–3, 446 Manukang, 186 manuscripts, 2, 105, 106–7, 110 Ma¯ori, 46, 58–64, 67

694

Index chiefs, 46, 56 culture, 58, 63 resistance, 56, 63–4 Marais, Eugène, 634–6, 651 Maras¸, 622 maritime trade, 563–4 markets, 73, 92, 94, 188, 380, 575, 592 colonial, 73, 89 marriages, 5, 61, 324, 453, 546, 559 Marshall, James, 415 martial law, 144, 146, 156, 159, 162, 166, 477, 493–6 Marzifon, 622 Mason, Captain John, 224–30, 231, 235 mass executions, 36, 213, 235 mass killings, 15–16, 139–41, 228–9, 283–4, 294, 324–6, 492–3, 503–4 one-sided, 218, 238, 331–2 Massachusetts, 223, 229, 232, 237, 239, 284–5 measles, 60, 392, 447–8 meat, 60, 73, 302, 423, 425, 447, 489, 513 medical care, 5, 446–50, 459 medical treatment, 422, 446–7 medicine, 353, 364, 380, 666 Melbourne, 52, 313, 529 Melville Island, 513, 526 memoirs, 33, 53, 201, 204, 389, 564, 570, 579 memories, 14, 28, 67, 282, 310, 326–8, 355–6, 579 cultural, 678 historical, 159, 162, 529, 583 mental abuse, 435, 445, 458, 552 mental harm, 1, 5, 235, 440, 443, 445–6, 538–9, 552 mercenaries, 102, 106–7, 201, 209, 589 merchants, 113, 161, 193, 324, 326, 377 mercy, 51, 150, 171, 178, 213, 228, 541, 547 Mersin, 629–31 Metacom, 284–8 metals, 248–9, 253–4 Métis, 434 Mexico, 243, 393, 412 Miantonomo, 223–4, 231–2 middlemen, 188–90, 314 military campaigns, 37 see campaigns military commanders, 166, 177, 201, 329, 333, 367, 569, 630 military expeditions, 124, 298, 616 military leaders, 37, 178, 230, 240 military resources, 148, 162 militia, expeditions, 420, 422, 424, 427 militiamen, 229, 238–9, 389, 396, 419, 421, 425–6, 428 volunteer, 419 militias, 77, 287, 427–8, 566, 567

colonial, 270, 286–8 local, 574 operations, 419–20, 422 millers, 324, 452, 457 ‘Mimizuka’, 134–5 mines, 93, 415, 637 Ming, 123–5, 128, 130, 136, 294, 564, 574, 580 emperor, 125, 128 troops, 124, 126, 130, 135 Minnesota, 36, 387 miscarriages, 423, 426 mischief, 90, 474, 488 misery, 207, 245, 260, 317, 666 mission homes, 546–7, 549 mission schools, 436, 549–50 missionaries, 85, 86, 89, 251, 546–7, 582, 597–601, 603 French, 252 Jesuit, 244, 250–1 missions, 259, 265, 537, 546–52, 583, 588, 628, 636 small, 546, 547, 556 Mississippi, 393, 400–2, 403 Lower, 269, 288–90 Mitchell, Thomas, 53 mobs, 36, 79, 123, 461, 488, 610, 621–3, 628–30 modernisation, 581–2 modernity, 24, 30–1, 580, 581–2, 658 Modoc War, 405, 425 Mohawks, 230–1, 238, 240, 247–50, 253, 256–8, 263, 265 Mohegans, 223, 224–6, 229, 231–2, 238, 284, 287 Mokuso, 124, 125, 127 Moluccas, 186–8, 190, 194, 195–6, 198, 213 Momonotuck Samm, 232, 238 monasteries, 100, 103, 109–11, 114, 621 Monástir, 658, 664–6, 667–70, 673–5, 677–8 Mongolia, 295 Inner, 297, 304, 308 Outer, 297 Western, 294, 297, 298 Mongols, 113, 297, 298, 308, 563, 580 Chahar, 304 Khalkha, 295, 298, 304 Khoshud, 308 Oirat, 292 see Oirat Monguia, Anna, 215–16 monks, 111, 295 Buddhist, 134, 572 Moomairremener (mumirimina), 488 Moore, Lieutenant William, 472–4 moral obligations, 140, 369

695

Index morality, 370, 371, 374 Morel, E. D., 599, 601 Morenga, Jakob, 646 Moreton Bay, 477, 513 Morrill, John, 143, 182 mortality, 236, 392, 403, 450, 455, 539, 543 infant, 423, 543 rates, 174, 396, 405 Moscow, 100–1, 103, 108, 112 Moses, A. Dirk, 68, 432, 475, 533, 561 mothers, 257, 321–2, 325, 341, 420–2, 552, 555–6, 558 motives, 2, 296, 319, 484, 505, 586, 611, 628 political, 495, 624 mounted police, 53, 454–5, 478, 479 Mountgarret, Jacob, 472–3, 488 Moushegh Seropian, Bishop, 627, 630 Mpande, 337, 350 Mthethwa, 340, 341–2, 344, 346–7 mumps, 392, 447 Munro, James, 544 Munster, 154–5, 157–8, 162, 180 murderers, 67, 221, 302, 474, 648 Murphy, Neil, 151–3 Murray, Sir George, 50, 54, 56, 495 Murray, Constable William, 530 Muscovites, 101, 108, 112–14 Muscovy, 101–2, 104, 106–10, 113–14 description of, 104, 106, 108 Grand Prince of, 101, 103, 108–11, 112–15 Muslims, 298, 305, 308, 378, 578, 612, 625–7, 629–33 refugees, 612, 615, 628 mustard gas, 657, 669, 675 mutilation, 5, 132, 134, 137, 567, 598, 603, 642 Myall Creek, 50, 464–5, 470, 480 Myo˘ ngnyang, 133 Mystic, 225, 228, 230, 235, 237, 240, 269 myths, 10, 120, 233, 328, 332 Nabeshima Katsushige, 132–3 Nabeshima Naoshige, 131 Nagoya, 122, 123, 126 Nailaka, 186, 197, 203 Nama, 2, 11, 17, 26, 92, 634–8, 640–53 Namaqualand, 72, 88 Namibia, 17, 634–7, 639, 642, 648 Namwo˘ n, 130–1 Nanjing, 563, 574–9 Nansemond, 273, 278 Nantes, 317, 319–20, 323–4, 333 Narragansetts, 222–3, 224–7, 230–2, 238–9, 284–6

narratives, 108, 110, 139, 147, 407, 466, 508, 539 Natal, 90–1, 337, 339, 345, 350–1, 352 Africans, 338, 339, 350–3 National Convention, 312, 319–20, 329, 332–3 Native Americans, 23–45, 215–16, 268–71, 274, 383–5, 407–9, 436–9 boarding schools for, 434, 439, 442–3, 445 Native Assistants, 524, 528, 530–1 Native communities, 10 see Indigenous communities Native Police, 479, 518, 523, 526–7, 529 natural environment, 70, 84 natural resources, 72, 188, 273, 500 Navajo, 443, 456 neck chains, 531, 554 negotiations, 1, 125, 128, 191, 194–5, 295, 384, 425 Neira, 186, 189–90, 192–5, 196–7, 200–2, 209 Netherlands, 153, 194–5, 197, 207–9, 312, 586–7 Indies, 186, 197 neutral observers, 667, 668 Neville, A. O., 20, 558 New Amsterdam, 239–40, 247 New England, 12–13, 28, 215, 219–21, 225, 227, 284–5, 287 New France, 244, 247, 250–1, 260–2, 264–6, 289 New Haven, 229, 233, 237 New Holland, 51, 54, 244 New South Wales (NSW), 15, 19, 48–54, 464–5, 477–9, 523 New South Wales, northern, 466, 480 New York, 229, 231, 241, 270, 403 New Zealand, 10–11, 46–7, 56–64, 499 newcomers, 18, 91, 92, 166, 415–16, 429, 563 Newsom, Gavin, 412 Newton-King, Susan, 81 Ngidi, 346, 349 Nieuweveld, 73, 80 Nine Years’ War, 153, 158, 166 nineteenth century, 13–17, 26, 34, 37, 186, 361, 537 Nipmucs, 231, 286–7 nobles, 314, 317, 319, 324–5, 328 non-combatants, 131, 163, 166, 182, 313, 341, 405, 640 non-juring clergy, 316–17, 319–20 North Africa, 362, 368, 370 North America, 2, 6, 13–14, 18–19, 37–9, 247–8, 268–9, 274–5, 393–4 see also Canada early colonial, 267–91 eastern, 243–4, 247, 250, 258, 272, 279 North Queensland, 516, 554 Northeastern Connecticut, 231, 237

696

Index northeastern frontiers, 69, 80, 86, 92 Northern Australia, 479, 508–32, 550 northern frontiers, 87, 248, 478, 496, 551 Northern Italy, 102, 105–6, 113 Northern Paiute, 389–90, 424 Northern Territory, 15–16, 464, 477–80, 508, 510–13, 519 Northwest Ordinance, 399, 404 Northwestern California, 38, 417, 420, 424 noses, 129, 131–4, 137, 369, 617, 645 Novgorod, 12, 99–115 Chronicles, 110–12 perpetrators and victims, 112–15 sources, 102–12 Novgorodians, 99–101, 103, 113–14 Nqetho, Chief, 345–7 Nsapu Nsapu, 593 numeracy, 539, 546 nutmeg, 186–91, 193–4, 196, 211, 212 nutrition, 447–8, 450 Nyangwe, 593–4 Nyungar, 554, 556–8 obedience, 151, 677 observers, 62, 405, 415, 487, 602, 617, 651 neutral, 667, 668 Oelilima, 191 Oelisiba, 191 officers, 144–5, 153, 203, 205–6, 416, 598, 600, 640 commanding, 304, 488, 541 official commandos, 78–9, 85, 91 officials, 303–5, 307, 320, 422–3, 455–7, 545–6, 559, 597–8 federal, 400, 419, 426–8, 452, 456–8 government, 86, 168, 550, 601, 604, 616 local, 318, 578, 625, 630 Qing, 300–1, 304, 306, 572, 575–6 Ohio country, 396–7, 399–400 Ohio Indian War, 399 Ohio River, 244, 263, 265, 398 Oirat, 292–4, 297, 298–303, 304–8, 310 aristocrats, 298–300, 303 refugees, 302, 306, 307 uprisings, 300, 302 Ojibwes, 23, 28, 259, 437 Oklahoma, 408, 429 Okp’o, 122 Old Protestants, 179–81, 182 Oldham, John, 221 Omaheke, 636, 644–6, 650–1, 653 O’Neill, Hugh, 150–1, 157 Onondaga, leaders, 250, 396

Ontario, 261, 441, 445 southern, 244, 246, 251, 254, 259 Onuma Takahiro, 300, 302 oppression, 343, 351, 378, 615 oral histories, 244, 601 oral traditions, 338, 342–3, 344 orang kaya, 190, 196, 198–9, 203–4, 208–9, 213 Orange River, 76, 85, 87–9, 637 Oregon, 388, 415, 425, 429 Oregonians, 415, 455 Osaka, 123, 128, 136 Ostler, Jeffrey, 45, 272, 383 ¯ ta Kazuyoshi, 130–1 O otogs, 296, 300, 305, 310 Ottawa River, 254, 261 Ottoman Empire, 367, 609–33, 664 see also Armenians British, French, and Russian ambassadors, 617, 621–3 Ouled Riah, 374 Outer Mongolia, 297 outsiders, 294, 328, 394, 572, 580, 601 Ovambanderu, 639–40 Ovambanderu Khauas-Khoi War, 639–40 Ovambo, 92, 636 overcrowding, 435, 450, 473 overgrazing, 75, 532 owners, 9, 54 traditional, 9, 15, 489, 503 Oyster Bay, 488, 545 Oyster Cove, 500–1, 545 pacification, 296, 301, 563, 593, 601, 612 pagans, 170–1, 531 Pa¯keha¯, 59–61 Palawa, 8, 16, 481–90, 491–501, 505, 541 children, 481, 488, 489, 493, 500, 541–2, 544–5 deaths, 488, 501 survivors, 495, 542 women, 482, 500, 544 pamphlets, 102–4, 107, 113–14, 169, 170, 409, 601, 665 German, 102, 105, 107–9 pandemics, 250, 260, 602–3 papacy, 157, 160 parents, 441, 448, 455, 456–7, 544, 546, 548–50, 556 Paris, 312, 315, 319, 325, 330, 333, 398, 462 parish clergy, 314, 316 parlay, 230, 387, 402 Parramatta, 547–8 pastoral expansion, 75, 479, 481, 491 pastoral stations, 479, 514, 515, 518, 526, 531

697

Index pastoralism, 14–15, 70, 73, 75, 84, 513–14 pastoralists, 48, 70, 73, 87, 485, 515, 524–5, 527 Patriarchate, Armenian, 612, 630–1 patriots, 314, 317–18, 323–4, 328, 333 patrols, 92–3, 307, 524, 615 patronage, 93, 350, 588 peace, 104, 134, 201, 202–3, 246–8, 349, 351, 404 peace, initiatives, 83, 264 Peace of Mabilais, 323 peace treaties, 194–5, 296 peasants, 314, 318–19, 324, 328, 567, 572, 628 Pedder, Chief Justice John Lewes, 497–8, 543 Peerapper, 492 penal settlements, 14, 49, 55 Pennsylvania, 247, 396, 442 Peoples’ Republic of China, 310, 567, 569, 577 Pequot, prisoners, 225, 229, 232 Pequot genocide, 12–13, 215–18, 219–20, 239, 240–1, 288 Pequot War, 215–17, 219, 226, 237, 263, 287, 389 Pequots, 12–13, 215–18, 221–6, 228–39, 284–5 Connecticut, 16, 215–41 perceptions, 47, 120, 268 perpetrators, 1–2, 273, 354–5, 465, 467, 474–5, 504, 510 personal testimony, 539, 676 Perth, 510, 519, 525, 549–50, 553, 557 Peskeompskut, 287 petitions, 283, 400, 500, 545, 618 Petty, William, 174 Philippines, 587–8 Phillip, Captain Arthur, 48 phosgene, 657, 659, 661–2 photography, 368, 650, 658, 664, 666–8, 673–8 forensic, 665–6, 677 physical destruction, 1, 5, 380, 391, 446–7, 452, 539, 543 physicians, 104, 130, 448, 667, 679 Piegans, 14, 405–6 pigs, 60, 169, 314, 671 Pine Ridge, 406 Pinjarra, 54, 463–4, 470, 477 piracy, 289, 564 pistols, 79, 225, 413, 419–20 pity, 198, 321, 325, 659 plantations, 12, 146, 152–3, 189, 278, 283, 587 sugar, 163, 177 plunder, 49, 79, 99, 123, 129, 137, 225, 462 Plymouth Colony, 228, 286–7 pogroms, 669–73, 675, 679 poison gas, 657 see gasses poison gas attacks, 17 see gas attacks Pokagon, Simon, 408–10

Pol Pot, 3 Poland, 104, 113, 661, 662 police, 455–6, 464, 467, 478–9, 524, 553–4, 618–19, 621–3 mounted, 53, 454–5, 478, 479 Native, 479, 518, 523, 526–7, 529 Polish, 105–6, 110 Jewry, 673 kings, 102, 104–5 nobility, 105 political economies, 260, 301, 364 political elites, 165, 364, 368 political entities, 113, 297, 308–9, 640 political environment, 278 political goals, 121, 137, 189 political leaders, 190, 228, 241, 490 political power, 28, 514, 525 political rhetoric, 16 politicians, 267, 273, 364, 365, 370, 530, 540, 585 politics, 43, 112, 272, 279, 313, 324, 328, 352 Pondoland, 345 Pontchartrain, 288–9 Pope, General John, 36–7 Popes, 102, 104, 115, 316 popularity, 105, 152, 329, 344, 347 population, 200, 379–80, 385, 393–4, 428–9, 508–10, 600, 602 estimates, 236, 239, 487, 602 Port Phillip, 52, 54, 485, 500, 525, 544 porters, 570, 594, 619 Portuguese, 188–9, 193–4, 512 posses, 2, 77, 610 possessions, 48, 73, 155, 158, 176, 208, 398, 405 postcards, 368, 650, 674 Austrian, 674–5 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 440, 446, 458 Potawatomis, 402, 408–9 Pound Ridge, 241, 270 poverty, 60, 407, 552, 555, 666 powder, 77, 225 power, 28–9, 33–5, 65, 156–7, 260–2, 278–9, 492–3, 574–5 balance of, 197–8, 626 dynamics of, 625, 633 economic, 221, 464, 480 judicial, 3, 219 political, 28, 514, 525 Powhatan, 219, 275–83, 287 warriors, 273, 279 pre-emptory violence, 275 premonitions, 17, 537 pre-Shakan warfare, 340–1

698

Index presidents, 154, 156, 331, 421, 631–2 Price, Paul, 443 prices, 188–90, 326, 347, 586 priests, 170, 258, 259–61, 314–17, 319, 320, 324, 328 good, 319, 325 primary sources, 75, 99, 102, 204, 211, 219, 239, 304 primitives, 8, 53, 486 Prince-electors, 106 prisoners, 84, 85, 88, 207, 211–12, 319–21, 643, 649–51 prisoners of war, 36, 341, 640, 647, 651 private companies, 588, 595 private property, 66–7, 569 privileges, 155, 191, 344, 442 proclamations, 48, 84, 86, 93, 168, 394–5, 571–2, 576 profits, 73, 193, 195–6, 372–3, 380, 585, 590–1, 595 proof, 4, 12, 38, 43–4, 146, 397, 404, 508 propaganda, 59, 369, 571, 604, 614, 627, 629 property, 51, 53, 65, 154, 283, 317, 399, 615 church, 314, 317 private, 66–7, 569 prosecution, 50, 93, 474 prosperity, 58, 265, 371, 545, 555 protectionism, 586, 591 Protectors of Aborigines, 51–2, 558 Protestantism, 140–1, 403 Protestants, 160–1, 165, 167–70, 174, 666 English, 140, 148, 160, 161, 167, 462 Old, 179–81, 182 provincial presidencies, 154–5, 156 prussic acid, 658–9, 662, 668 Pskov, 100–1, 108–10, 112, 113 PTSD, 440, 446, 458 see post-traumatic stress disorder punishment, 121, 124, 137, 373–4, 440–1, 562, 597–8, 649 collective, 309, 368, 615 physical, 552, 652 punitive expeditions, 77, 221, 301, 303, 305–6, 310, 464, 529 Puritans, 171, 174, 216 Pusan, 121–4, 125, 136 Pusanp’o, 119–21 Pyongyang, 123, 124–5 Qianlong campaigns, 306, 309 emperor, 292–3, 296–7, 298–300, 304, 309 Qing, 292–5, 297–8, 305–10, 563, 566, 572–3, 574–6, 578

campaigns, 301–2, 306, 308 court, 293, 296–7, 300, 304, 307 empire, 11, 294, 296, 308, 580 extermination of Zünghars, 292–310 forces, 305, 566, 575–6 officials, 300–1, 304, 306, 572, 575–6 policy, 292–4, 297, 308 territory, 297, 308 Qing–Zünghar rivalry, 294–6 Québec, 247, 255, 263, 265 Québec City, 245, 251, 255, 259, 265 Quechans, 419 Queen Victoria, 351, 500, 545 Queensland, 16–17, 479, 508, 510–13, 517–19, 520–3, 524–5, 550–2 central, 518, 525 coastal, 515, 526 North, 516, 554 southern, 514, 517 Queenslanders, 519–20, 529 quotas, 551, 553, 580, 594, 595, 597 Qwabe, 344–8, 352 chiefdom, 344, 348 race, 50–1, 113, 114, 420, 542–3, 579, 581, 591 doomed, 63, 392, 512 native, 39, 50, 364 racism, 81, 335, 485, 552, 554, 639, 641, 652 Radcliffe, Thomas, 153, 155 Radisson, Pierre-Esprit, 256–7 Raffles Bay, 477, 513 rage, 128, 320, 527, 676 raiders, 79, 245, 417, 426 raids, 86, 92, 110, 113, 244, 253–4, 258–9, 367 rape, 5, 597, 598, 603, 641–3, 647, 649, 652 razzias, 77, 367, 371, 373, 375, 376 rebels, 145, 168, 170, 298–300, 319–23, 325, 326, 353–4 reconstruction, 393, 436, 578, 662 recruitment, 315, 618 clerical, 315, 317 redemption, 330, 660 Reece, R. H. W., 465 reforms, 145, 147–8, 315, 317, 612–13, 615–16, 617–19, 623 land, 182, 566 refugees, 89, 191, 259, 262, 304, 306–8, 338, 345 Muslim, 612, 615, 628 Oirat, 302, 306, 307 Wendat, 244–5, 259, 264 Rehoboth Basters, 636, 647 Reiss, R. A., 664–78

699

Index religion, 112–13, 114, 139, 141, 568–9, 571, 579–80, 582 religious groups, 1, 235, 331, 348, 363, 386, 426, 562 religious ideology, 568–9 religious leaders, 232, 626 religious radicals, 179–81 relocation, 391–2, 402, 549 removal, 19, 391, 400–3, 436, 497–8, 499–500, 537–8, 539 forced, 16, 18, 422, 426, 429, 537–60 rents, 315, 326, 378 representatives, 44, 149, 251, 373, 623 repression, 309, 312–13, 320, 328–31, 333, 665 reprisals, 326, 330, 372, 464, 467, 468, 474–5, 478 reproduction, 452, 550 biological, 417, 538–9, 543 decreased, 391 republican troops, 313, 318, 319–21, 324–5, 326–7 republicans, 313, 319, 323, 325–7, 332 reputation, 495, 519, 644, 666 resentments, 318, 347, 353, 563–4, 591 reservations, 36, 284, 403–7, 418, 422–3, 426, 428, 453 reserves, 15, 64, 85, 234, 251, 419, 494, 551 resettlement, 182, 391, 615 residential schools, 434–42, 444, 446, 450–4, 458–9 resistance, 65, 122, 391–2, 526, 528, 530, 610, 612 Aboriginal, 51, 53, 465, 478–9, 527–8 armed, 396, 586, 616 Armenian, 615 cultural, 582 Metacom, 284–8 San, 75, 83–4, 87, 92 resources, 73–6, 91, 150–1, 156, 160, 162, 261, 263 military, 148, 162 natural, 72, 188, 273, 500 scarce, 90, 391 water, 73, 86 responsibility, 10, 29, 34–5, 62–3, 65, 370, 373–4, 588–9 shared, 369, 374 restraint, 163, 396, 510, 529, 590, 595, 596 retaliation, 49, 77, 80, 86, 139, 160, 167, 468 retreat, 75, 79, 125, 196–7, 199, 230, 326, 492 revenge, 125–6, 137, 145, 319, 325, 352, 642, 653 revenues, 177, 190, 316, 578, 589–90, 597, 600 revolution, 313–15, 318–19, 328, 331, 395–6, 400, 624–5, 626–7 American, 45, 261, 272, 394–5, 397–400 Young Turk, 613, 624–5, 627, 632 revolutionaries, Armenian, 614, 619–21, 624

Revolutionary War, 267, 269, 321 Reynolds, Henry, 53, 465–6, 468, 471, 474, 486, 502–3 rhetoric, 128, 134, 144, 300, 333 inflammatory, 171, 182 political, 16 Rhode Island, 221, 231, 284 Rhun, 186, 195, 197–8, 201–2, 206–7, 209, 211 rifles, 321, 413, 420, 514, 528, 640, 645 righteousness, 7, 570, 572 Ripon, Elie, 201, 204 Risdon Cove, 16, 463, 471–4, 488, 500–2, 504, 541 Robinson, George Augustus, 68, 495–500, 542–4 Robinson, Sir William, 496, 497–501, 543–4, 553 rock paintings, 82 Roggeveld region, 79 Rome, 104–5, 149, 155, 158, 167 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 3, 363, 379, 510–11 Rottnest, 54 Rowley, Charles, 464, 467–8, 474, 480 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 454–5 rubber, 586, 591, 593–8, 602, 603 collection, 589, 596–7 zones, 595, 598 ruination, 14, 162, 320, 377 rumours, 347, 352, 627–8, 629–30, 642, 646 rural communities, 314–16, 317–18 Rus, 112–13, 114 Russia, 99, 102, 109, 113–15, 292, 294–5, 304, 305 Russian Orthodox Church, 101, 112 Russian sources, 101–2, 108, 110, 114–15 Russians, 99–101, 296, 306, 613, 615, 660–1, 662–4, 672 ruthlessness, 523, 589, 643–4 Rwanda, 271, 331, 335 sabotage, 77, 618 economic, 526 Sachem’s Head, 229, 237 Sacramento River, 412–13 sacrifice, 56, 128, 312, 365, 369, 375, 408, 498 sadism, 597–8, 600 safety, 121, 124, 208, 268, 287, 290, 496 Saint-Aubin-de-Baubigné, 316 San, 11, 19, 69–95 attacks, 72, 76–7, 81, 92 attrition under British rule, 84–9 bands, 72, 75–6, 79, 88, 90 Bechuanaland, 93–4 belief systems, 76

700

Index French, 245, 247, 253–4, 258–9, 260–1, 263, 265 penal, 14, 49, 55 settler colonialism, 6–12, 15, 16, 19, 23–95, 508–9 and Native American genocide, 23–45 Australia and New Zealand, 46–67 settler communities, 172, 464, 480 settlers, 13–14, 91–2, 387–8, 394–5, 464–6, 473, 477–81, 492 free, 489–90, 539 Seven Years’ War, 267, 269, 290 seventeenth century, 99, 102, 110, 112, 189–91, 193, 294, 297 sexual abuse, 390, 442, 538, 551–2 sexual violence, 390, 396, 401, 407, 442–3, 459 Shaka, 335–8, 339–42, 343–52, 355 shared responsibility, 369, 374 Shark Island, 649–51 Shawnees, 267, 395 sheep, 52–3, 60, 85, 87, 367, 464, 480, 513–14 Shelley, William and Elizabeth, 547–8 shelter, 5, 163, 392, 446, 628, 647, 649 Sheridan, Lieutenant General Philip, 404 Sherman Institute, 444–5, 449, 451, 458 Shimazu, 131, 132 ships, 131, 188, 195–7, 202, 204, 206–7, 208, 320 supply, 264, 500 Shoah, 658, 672, 679 Sidney, Sir Henry, 153, 155, 157 Sidney, Sir Philip, 153 sieges, 79, 126, 130, 151, 223, 248, 623, 630 silence, 16, 464, 468, 474, 522, 529, 539, 552–3 freemasonry of, 516, 521 Simin, Kim, 123–4, 125, 127 Sinkyone, 420 sites, 52, 54, 436–9, 466, 467–8, 480, 541, 665 Sivas, 622, 626, 628 Siwanoys, 241, 270 sixteenth century, 100–2, 105, 111–12, 115, 118, 120, 144, 189–92 slave labour, 443, 531 slave raiding, 416, 593 slave trade, 50, 585, 593 slavers, 427, 593, 602 slavery, 204, 210, 232, 235, 409, 551, 552–4, 593–4 de facto, 643 slaves, 20, 209, 210–12, 303, 307, 542–3, 552–3, 592–3 smallpox, 236, 250, 602 epidemics, 236, 252, 254, 301 Smith, Fanny Cochrane, 501, 545 Smith, John, 276, 281

Colonial Natal, 90–2 communities, 11, 75–6, 83, 89–90, 92 frontier conflict under DEIC, 75–84 German Southwest Africa, 92–3 leaders, 83, 91 raids, 81, 91 resistance, 75, 83–4, 87, 92 society, 70, 72, 84, 86, 88, 90–2, 93 Transorangia, 89–90 Sandveld, 79, 645–6 sanitation, 5, 446 Saskatchewan, 441, 443, 451, 454 Sasun, 615–18, 622 savages, 52–3, 269, 274–6, 281–2, 287, 398, 399–400, 401 Savenay, 320–1, 326 scarlet fever, 392, 545 schepselen, 81 Schlichting, Albert, 104–7, 111, 113 school-age children, 436, 437 schools, 64, 159, 403, 434–41, 443–5, 447–50, 453–9, 628–30 Armenian, 629–30 Catholic, 441, 446 mission, 436, 549–50 residential, 434–42, 444, 446, 450–4, 458–9 scientists, 8, 448, 641, 650 amateur, 501 scorched earth approach, 283, 288 Scotland, 142–3, 152, 160–1, 166, 171, 174 sealers, 60, 488 Secher, Reynald, 323, 324, 329–32 Second Anglo-Powhatan War, 283 Second Cavalry, 405 Second Opium War, 575–6 security, 267, 290, 351, 368, 613 Seisho¯ Jo¯tai, 134 Seitz, Theodor, 92 Selamon, 191–2, 203–5, 207 Select Committee, 10, 52, 54–6, 65, 66 self-defence, 85, 137, 274, 610, 614 Semelin, Jacques, 273, 474, 629 Seminole Wars, 399, 401 Seminoles, 268, 393, 401–2 Seneca, 247, 251, 263, 266, 396 leaders, 265, 397, 398 Serbia, 664–5, 670, 678 Serbs, 667–9, 674 servants, 77, 78, 80, 155, 158, 316, 542, 544 Settled Districts, 485, 492–3, 495–7, 504, 541 settlements, 49–50, 55, 56, 199–201, 473, 488–90, 497–8, 558 European, 8, 48, 63, 249, 364

701

Index Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, 26 Smith, Philippa Mein, 60 Smith, Sir Thomas, 155, 157 smoking gun evidence, 4, 62 Sneeuberg region, 80 snow, 307, 389, 423, 676 heavy, 405, 575 So¯ Yoshitoshi, 120, 121–2 social change, 487, 490 Social Darwinism, 61 social institutions, 218, 576, 582 social order, 84, 344, 575 societies, Aboriginal, 46, 93, 505, 514, 537–9 soldiers, 36, 121, 133–4, 179, 365, 370, 455, 598 English, 145, 283, 287 French, 266, 363–4, 373, 375–6, 657 German, 634–6, 645–6, 650–2, 659, 662, 674 Sonck, Martinus, 206–8, 210 Song Yingchang, 124, 126 So˘ njo, King, 122, 124, 129 Sontag, Susan, 675, 676, 678 Soult, Nicolas, 370–2, 374, 380 sources, 94, 99–104, 107–11, 113–15, 210, 308, 309 foreign, 111–12 Novgorod, 102–12 primary, 75, 99, 102, 204, 211, 219, 239, 304 Russian, 101–2, 108, 110, 114–15 Western, 109–11, 113 Zulu, 336–9 Sousea, James, 445 South Africa, 336–7, 376, 634–6 South Australia, 54–5, 476–9, 513, 523–4 South China, 563, 568 southern Africa, 10, 11, 69–95, 350 southern Ontario, 244, 246, 251, 254, 259 southern Queensland, 514, 517 Southwest Africa, 652 sovereignty, 9, 56, 234, 540, 589 universal, 125, 128 Spain, 67, 140, 157, 182, 193–4, 312, 677 Sparrman, Anders, 82 specific intent, 4, 9–10, 439, 484, 505 Spenser, Edmund, 157–60, 166 Spice Islands, 186–213 spice trade, 188, 195, 198, 212 spices, 187, 190, 193–6, 199 squatters, 46, 48, 53, 59, 517, 525 squaws, 224, 232, 402, 417–19 Srebrenica, 331, 474 St Bartholomew’s Day, 462, 467 St Lawrence, 244–5, 247–8, 254, 261, 264–5 St Leger, Sir Anthony, 148–50 St Leger, William, 169

Staden, Heinrich von, 106–7 starvation, 84, 207–8, 281, 283, 423, 597–8, 599, 602 state agents, 591–2, 596, 599 state domination, 11–13, 99–355 state legislators, 417, 420, 427 state militia expeditions, 419, 428 stations, 129, 514, 553, 558, 597, 645 pastoral, 479, 514, 515, 518, 526, 531 statistics, 31, 51, 467–8, 475, 478–80 Stephen, James, 53, 56 steppe, 292, 294–5, 300–1, 306, 309 stereotypes, 276, 290, 325, 335, 641 sterilisations, 5, 34, 407, 452 stillbirths, 423, 426, 453 Stirling, James, 54, 463 stock, 75, 81, 86, 91, 92, 515, 519, 526 farmers, 72, 87 raids, 72, 80 stockmen, 50, 73, 463, 465, 491 Stolen Generations, 40, 537, 547 strangers, 60, 65, 210, 409, 513, 547, 588 structural violence, 378, 509, 639 Stuart, James, 339, 340, 341, 344–6, 348–51, 352 students, 436, 440–58, 459, 548, 575, 676 forced, 435, 441, 445–6 Native American, 447, 449, 455 subjugation, 72, 126, 128, 146, 462, 646–7, 652 Sublime Porte, 612–13, 618–23 subsistence, 5, 70, 91, 406, 549, 597 polyculture, 323, 326 sugar plantations, 163, 177 suicides, 208, 213, 363, 445–6, 576–7 Sullivan, Major General John, 396 Sullivan–Clinton campaign, 395–8, 399 superiority cultural, 7, 11, 180, 512 moral, 367 supplies, 123, 154, 163, 194, 207, 303, 305, 402–3 supply ships, 264, 500 surrenders, 148–50, 204, 205, 207, 398, 492, 596, 599 survivors, 159–62, 276, 288, 417, 440–2, 474–5, 551, 649–50 suspicions, 274, 303, 312, 361, 387, 597, 631 Suzhou, 303–4 Swahili Arabs, 593–4 Swakopmund, 92, 642–3, 647–8, 650 swamps, 222, 229–30, 286, 321 Swan River Colony, 54 Switzerland, 484, 599, 659, 665–7 swords, 67, 186, 191, 225–6, 230, 235, 314, 321 Syahrir Island, 186

702

Index tidewater region, 278–9 Tilly, Charles, 323–4, 326 timber-cutters, 488–9 Timofeev, Ivan, 108 To¯do¯ Takatora, 130, 132–3 Tongnae, 121–2 Top End and Central Australian Native Police forces, 523 Torres Strait Islanders, 463–4, 475, 502, 511 torture, 5, 113, 170, 204, 597, 598, 602, 603 legitimated, 674 total war, 95, 347, 349, 567, 582, 665 trade, 101, 188–90, 193, 196–7, 248–9, 253–6, 281, 594–5 fur, 247, 249, 253, 260–1, 388 maritime, 563–4 spice, 188, 195, 198, 212 traders, 190, 191, 260–1, 278, 289, 378, 596 Arab, 188 Arab-Swahili, 589 Dutch, 240, 244, 248, 249 European, 190, 196, 638, 641 French, 244 trading livestock, 72, 326 posts, 199, 412 traditions, 53, 310, 328, 361, 435, 525, 571, 583 oral, 338, 342–3, 344 traitors, 151, 649 transfers, 232, 361, 384, 421 forced, 5, 391, 426, 539, 552 systematic, 639, 652 Transorangia, 89–90 transplantation, 161, 179, 181 Transvaal, 634 trauma, 18, 39–40, 250, 445, 537–8, 677 TRCs, 434–40, 442, 444, 447, 449–50, 452–3, 458 Canadian, 439, 458–9 treason, 99–102, 104, 113, 312, 640 treaties, 36, 191–5, 198, 232, 398, 588–9, 613, 637–8 Treaty of Berlin, 613–16, 617, 632 Treaty of Fort Pitt, 398 Treaty of Hartford, 232, 235 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, 384, 394 Treaty of Waitangi, 56, 60 Trebizond, 619–21 trekboers, 70–9, 81–3, 84–5, 86, 87, 89 economy, 73, 80 society, 75, 77, 80 trials, 50, 178, 323, 351, 465, 599, 642, 650 tribes, 50, 341, 348–9, 367–8, 372–3, 375–6, 517, 640 troopers, Aboriginal, 523, 524

Sycamore Shoals, 384, 394 Sydney, 46, 48, 51–2, 56, 470, 472–3, 477, 547–8 symbols, 124, 128, 354, 578, 598 sympathy, 37, 321 syphilis, 392, 422 systematic attacks, 363, 510, 611 systems, economic, 515, 591–2, 595 tactics, 128, 219, 249, 290, 395–6, 421, 614, 615 Taiping, 562–83 Christianity, 571, 582 fighters/forces/armies, 567, 568, 572, 574–6 movement, 563–4, 568–9, 575, 579, 582–3 religion, 570, 575, 578 Taiping China, 575 tallow, 73, 113, 513 Tamar River, 485, 488, 489 Tankitekes, 241, 270 Tarim Basin, 295–6, 298, 301–2, 305, 308 Tasmania, 16, 463–4, 471–2, 476–8, 481–506, 539–41 Black War, 466, 468, 471, 474–5, 481, 485, 505, 526 Settled Districts, 485, 492–3, 495–7, 504, 541 Tasmanian Aborigines, 463, 465–6, 468, 471–2, 485–7, 500–1, 504, 546 tax collection, ceremonies, 353 taxation, 318, 351, 353 double, 612, 616 Te Rangi Hiroa, 64 Teanaostaiaé, 258 technologies, 31, 88, 247, 258, 369, 462, 582, 659 of violence, 247–50 Tembu, 346 Tennessee, 14, 267, 384 tensions, 181, 205, 309, 399, 492, 625–7, 647, 660 ethnic, 563, 627, 674 terra nullius, 52, 463, 470 territorial ambition, 114, 579 terror, 5, 327–8, 495, 504, 596, 597, 673, 677 terrorism, 600, 614, 644 testimony, 90, 201–2, 301, 435, 472, 479, 496, 501 personal, 539, 676 texts, 39, 44, 99, 102, 104–7, 373–5, 376, 677 historical, 462, 471 Schlichting, 104–6 thirteenth century, 112, 294 threats, 64, 77, 78, 85, 87, 90, 455, 459 Three Bears, 405 Thukela River, 337, 355 Thunberg, Carl, 79 Tianshan, 294, 305 Tibet, 295, 297

703

Index troops, 121–2, 125–8, 133–6, 199–201, 319–20, 399, 401–2, 628–9 British, 15, 268, 477 Dutch, 201, 204, 206, 212 English, 145, 151–2, 155 government, 139, 141, 144 Japanese, 118–21, 123–5, 126, 128, 130–3, 135–6 republican, 313, 318, 319–21, 324–5, 326–7 tropical regions, 479, 508, 511, 513 Trotha, Lothar von, 644–8, 652 Trukanini, 482, 486, 501 truths, 43, 206, 291, 388, 459, 668, 675–7 tsars, 100–1, 104, 109, 112, 114, 305 Tshaka, 335 see Shaka Tsushima, 118–20 Tudors, 143, 144, 164–5, 180 (see also Elizabeth, Queen) tümen, 294, 300 Tunisia, 361, 368 Turkey, 30, 613 (see also Ottoman Empire) Turks, 32, 104, 170–1, 619, 627–8 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 287, 408–10 Turreau, General, 321, 326, 333 Tustin, William Isaac, 413 twentieth century, 7, 17–18, 19, 29–34, 37–8, 484, 486, 538–9 typhus, 392, 671–2 Ulster, 146, 157–8, 160–2, 166–7, 169, 181 ultra-exploitable class, 19, 80 Uncas, 224, 232 Underhill, John, 222, 225–8, 230, 240 United Nations Genocide Convention (UNGC), 1–3, 5, 29, 38, 426, 428–31, 434, 439 United States, 10, 13, 32–3, 45, 383, 385, 412–13, 418, 427–31 see also North America Army, 412, 415–16, 419, 423–5, 427–8 boarding schools, 434–59 nineteenth-century frontier genocides, 383–410 unity, 164, 247, 292, 296, 310, 355 unpaid labour, 553–4 unprovoked attacks, 268, 275, 284, 638 untold numbers, 256, 260, 423, 458, 577 uprisings, 303, 352–4, 594, 610, 642, 645–6, 648–9, 653 Urtatang, 191–2, 200

Van der Chijs, 200, 204, 209–10 Van Diemen’s Land (VDL), 16, 50–1, 476, 481–506, 508 Vannes, 318, 323 Vatican, 676 archives, 102, 104 VDL, 16 see Tasmania; Van Diemen’s Land veldwachtmeesters, 77–8, 85 Vendéan rebels, 323, 330, 333 Vendée, 12, 312–14, 319–33 venereal diseases, 392, 487, 538 Verhoeff, Admiral, 194–5, 205 Vernichtungsbefehl, 645–7 victims, 4, 354–5, 426–7, 466–7, 610, 667–8, 673–4, 676 gassed, 670, 674–5 Victoria, 46–7, 52, 54, 465, 467, 478, 485, 539 vigilantes, 77, 415, 418, 419–20, 422, 424, 426, 428 Vincennes, 268, 368, 370 violence, 85–7, 144–5, 247–9, 272–9, 371–2, 385–6, 599–600, 619 asymmetrical, 14, 385, 405 colonial, 249, 265, 362, 368, 376, 378, 384, 395 exterminatory, 11, 69, 89, 94, 274, 284 extreme, 81, 215, 259, 262, 400, 407 frontier, 15, 16, 84, 408, 487, 516, 527, 531 genocidal, 15, 218, 273–6, 284, 288, 290, 362, 398–9 mass, 6, 69, 115, 215, 362, 412, 609–11, 619, 632–3 pre-emptory, 275 sexual, 390, 396, 401, 407, 442–3, 459 structural, 378, 509, 639 technologies of, 247–50 Virginia, 219, 267–9, 271–3, 275–6, 281, 282–4, 288 viruses, 392–3 Vistula, 659–60, 662 Vogan, Arthur, 529 volleys, 79, 249 volunteer militiamen, 419 volunteers, 53, 312, 324, 421–3, 441 vulnerability, 80, 259, 269, 428, 555 wagons, 73, 78, 634, 645 Wahis, Théophile, 591–2, 601 Wahunsenacawh, 275, 278–9 Waitangi, Treaty of, 56, 60 Wales, 142–3 Wampanoags, 284–6 Wanli emperor, 124

vagrants, 88, 177 Valck, Jan, 79

704

Index Aboriginal, 40, 467, 493, 517, 544, 551 Palawa, 482, 500, 544 Wo˘ n Kyun, 129 Wool, Major General John, 418 workers, Aboriginal, 15, 514, 524, 529, 544, 550 World War One, 30, 602–4, 634 eastern front, 17, 657–79 World War Two, 559, 673 Wounded Knee, 406 Wyandanch, 231, 238 Wybalenna, 499–501, 505, 542–5, 551

war, 125, 128–9, 216–17, 283–7, 312, 592–4, 657–9, 672–5 war crimes, 12, 182, 218, 333, 675 War of 1812, 387, 393, 399 Ward, Alan, 58 warfare, 243–5, 246–7, 258–9, 278, 288, 502–3, 589, 592 asymmetric, 527, 668 frontier, 11, 15, 47, 487 Warlpiri, 467, 530 Warring States, 118–20 warriors, 18, 36, 59, 63, 158, 238, 254, 261 Indigenous, 270, 283, 287, 502 wars of extermination, 141, 415, 420–1, 520, 527 Washington, 281, 397, 418, 420, 425 George, 394, 397 water, 70–5, 87, 88, 222, 442, 446, 500–1, 574, 577 resources, 73, 86 Waterloo Creek, 468–71 Wedge, John Helder, 489 Wendake, 6, 18, 243–66 Wendat, 244–6, 250–3, 256, 258–61, 262–4 allies, 244, 259, 264 captives, 18, 263–5 dispersal, 263, 265 refugees, 244–5, 259, 264 Wentworth, Thomas Viscount, 160 Western Armenia, 614 Western Australia, 17, 54–5, 463–4, 476–80, 508, 511–12, 553–4, 556–9 western France, 327–8, 331–2 Western Mongolia, 294, 297, 298 Western sources, 109–11, 113 whalers, 60, 488 Wichakasotapi, 14, 406–8 Wild, Max, 660 Windeyer, Richard, 52 Windschuttle, Keith, 470–4, 487 Winnemucca, Sarah, 389–90, 408 Winthrop, Governor John, 222–3, 224, 228–32, 236 Wintu, 412 Wolfe, Patrick, 9, 24, 26–7, 29, 32, 39–40, 365, 377 women, 223–4, 226, 395–7, 571, 597, 634–6, 642–4, 649–50

Xinjiang, 295, 304–5, 307–10, 578 Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 292, 295 Yangzi River, 564, 574 yellow fever, 392, 402 Yi Sunsin, 122–3, 129–30, 133, 136 young adults, 435, 438, 454, 458 Young Turk Revolution, 613, 624–5, 627, 632 zaisangs, 296, 301 Zanzibar, 589, 593 Zeng Guofan, 576 Zu Chengxun, 123 Zululand, 336–7, 340, 345, 347, 350–1, 352 Zulus changing memories of violence, 349–54 chiefdoms, 90, 337, 341, 344, 354 history, 336–9 Kingdom, 6, 335–56 kings, 337–8, 343, 350–1, 354–5 see also individual names ruling class, 342–3, 344, 345 society, 335 state violence under Shaka and Dingane, 340–7 Zünghars Civil War, 296–301 Qing extermination, 292–310 society, 292, 302 Zyklon, 658, 669–70, 672, 679

705