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The connection between colonialism and genocide has been explored in academic research.^[1] According to historian Patrick Wolfe, "[t]he question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism."^[2] Historians have commented that although colonialism does not necessarily directly involve genocide, research suggests that the two share a connection.^[3]

Colonialism has been reinforced during various periods in history, even during progressive eras such as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, a period in the history of 17th and 18th Century Europe which was marked by dedication to progressive reform, natural social hierarchies were reinforced, Europeans who were educated, white, and native-born were considered high-class and less-educated, non-European people were considered low-class. These natural hierarchies were reinforced by progressives such as Marquis de Condorcet, a French mathematician, who believed that slaves were savages due to their lack of modern practices, despite the fact that he advocated the abolition of slavery. ^[4] First, the colonization process usually works to attack the homes of those who are being targeted. Typically, the people who are subjected to colonizing practices are portrayed as lacking modernity, because they and the colonialists do not have the same level of education or technology.^[4]

The term genocide was coined in the 20th century by Raphael Lemkin to describe the Armenian genocide, although genocides have been committed since ancient times. Years later, the term was unanimously accepted by the United Nations and it was defined as an internationally illegal practice as a part of Resolution 96 in 1946. Various definitions of genocide exist. However, the Convention of Genocide has defined genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group." All definitions of genocide involve ethnicity, race, or religion as a motivational factor.^[4] Genocide scholar Israel Charny has proposed a definition of genocide in the course of colonization.^[5]

The example of Tasmania is cited, where white settlers wiped out Aboriginal Tasmanians, an event which is genocide by definition as well as an event which is a result of settler colonialism.^[6] Additionally, instances of colonialism and genocide in California and Hispaniola are cited below. The instance of California references the colonization and genocide of indigenous tribes by European Americans during the gold rush period.^[7] The example in Hispaniola discusses the island's colonization by Columbus and other Spaniards and the genocide inflicted on the native Taíno people.^[8]

Researched examples of genocide linked to colonialism

Another example of colonialism and genocide is the genocide which was committed against the Taíno people on Hispaniola after the arrival of Christopher Columbus and other Spanish colonizers in December 1492. Initially leaving 39 Spaniards behind, Columbus left, and a year later, he returned with more Spaniards in order to complete his conquest of the Dominican Republic. There are no exact tallies of how many Taíno people inhabited Hispaniola when Columbus arrived on it. However, it is estimated that the number of Taíno people who lived on Hispaniola was at least hundreds of thousands and it may have been up to a million or more. However, during the 25 years when the Spanish colonized the islands of Hispaniola, the Taino people were murdered, subjected to slavery, and by the year 1514, only 32,000 Taíno people remained alive.^[8]
The Black War of Tasmania (1820s–1832) was a guerrilla war fought between British settlers and Aboriginal Tasmanians, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 900 Aboriginal locals and the near extinction of the island's Aboriginal population.^[6]
According to Jack Norton, a Hupa and Cherokee scholar, the colonization of California was attributed to Manifest Destiny, and the success of European colonizers in the West was attributed to the genocide of indigenous peoples.^[9] In a government-sponsored move to California, European colonizers emigrated west to further colonize the north American continent due to the discovery of gold in California. Upon arriving, Brendan Lindsay, an American behavioral scientist, notes that the euro-American group encountered nearly 150,000 indigenous tribes, and colonizers worked to drive them away, murder them, or have them collected by militiamen or vigilante forces. As the gold rush ended and as euro-American colonizers began to cultivate the land and create democracy in California, the treatment of indigenous tribes became much worse. The first California Governor, Peter H. Burnett, declared that a "war of extermination" should be waged against Indians, the war was recounted by numerous newspapers which were published at that time.^[7]
According to the Tibetan Government in Exile (TGIE), during the early years of the rule of the Chinese administration in Tibet, an estimated 1.2 million Tibetans died between 1951 and 1984. Tibet expert Barry Sautman considers this number highly "inaccurate," because there is "no credible evidence of ongoing mass killing, physically enforced birth control, or forced intermarriage in Tibet." Sautman also challenges the notion that Chinese practices in Tibet can be considered genocidal or colonial, stating that "Tibet's non-colonial nature can be derived from the nature of modern colonialism" and citing the political and legal equality of Tibetans under the current administration.^[10]
In Belgium, the atrocities in the Congo Free State are not in the public discourse, and the topic is not entirely addressed in education.^[11]^[12] The archive of the colony was destroyed.^[13] In 1999, Adam Hochschild published King Leopold's Ghost, an award-winning book (and a documentary) about the atrocities committed in the Congo Free State.^[12] The American Historical Association has awarded the book and claimed that Belgium has come to terms with this history because of the book.^[14]

Settler colonialism and genocide

There is a number of international scholars whose work established a relation between settler colonialism and genocide, as seen below.^[15]^[16] Settler colonialism is different from immigration because immigrants often assimilate into an existing society, not to destroy it to replace it.^[17]^[18]

Ann Curthoys is an Australian historian and academic who wrote about the view of genocide scholar Leo Kuper: "Nevertheless, the course of colonization of North and South America, the West Indies, and Australia and Tasmania, [Leo] Kuper observes, has certainly been marked all too often by genocide."^[19] Noam Chomsky has considered settler colonialism to be the most vicious form of imperialism, and describes the lack of self-awareness of the genocide by some Americans.^[20]^[21]^[22]^[23]

Pulitzer Prize winning historian Bernard Baylin has said that the Dutch and English conquests were just as brutal as those of the Spanish and Portuguese, in certain places and in certain times "genocidal".^[24] He says that this history, for example the Pequot War, is not erased but conveniently forgotten.^[25] The different European colonizing powers were all similarly cruel in their dealings with Indigenous peoples.^[26]

David Stannard historian and professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii analyzed the genocidal process in two cases of colonization. He said that the British did not need massive labor as the Spanish, but land: "And therein lies the central difference between the genocide committed by the Spanish and that of the Anglo-Americans: in British America extermination was the primary goal." Thus, in British America they would clear the land of Indigenous peoples, and put the few survivors in reserves.^[27] Almost a hundred million Native Americans perished as a result of Britain and other colonial powers.^[28]

Gregory D. Smithers, a lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Aberdeen, has weighed in as well: "Ward Churchill refers to settler colonialism in North America as 'the American holocaust', and David Stannard similarly portrayed the European colonization of the Americas as an example of 'human incineration and carnage'."^[29]

Mark Levene, a historian at University of Southampton, linked colonialism and genocide: "In this, of course, we come back to the fatal nexus between the Anglo-American drive to rapid state-building and genocide." Levene has said that the authorities are silent about genocide in the case of the colonization of Australia, even though the press reports described the events.^[30]

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an American historian, professor at California State University, describes settler colonialism as inherently genocidal from the perspective of the terms of the Genocide Convention. She pointed out that genocide does not have to be total to be genocide, as the most famous genocide (the Holocaust) of all was not total.^[31]

Stephen Howe, professor in the History and Cultures of Colonialism at the University of Bristol, UK, relates colonialism with genocide and says the case for colonialism causing genocide is very strong.^[32]

Martin Shaw has argued that in a colonial context: "each side shattered the opposing civilian population while pursuing military goals."^[33]

Historian Jacques Depelchin has said that the crimes of colonization have always been denied.^[34]

Christian P. Sherrer has argued that almost all European colonial powers used genocide as part of the colonization process.^[35] According to Elyse Semerdjian, settler colonial warfare is a slow genocidal process.^[36]

References

^ Kühne 2013; Moses & Stone 2013; Benvenuto, Hinton & Woolford 2014; Benvenuto & Woolford 2015; Docker 2015; Short 2016; Crook, Short & South 2018; Weber & Weber 2020.
^ Wolfe 2006.
^ Pappé, Ilan (2017-05-02). Ten Myths About Israel. Verso Books. p. 47. ISBN 978-1-78663-019-3. As a result of these twin logics, whole nations and civilizations were wiped out by the settler colonialist movement in the Americas. Native Americans, south and north, were massacred, converted by force to Christianity, and finally confined to reservations. A similar fate awaited the aboriginals in Australia and to a lesser extent the Maoris in New Zealand. In South Africa, such processes ended with the imposition of the apartheid system upon the local people, while a more complex system was imposed on the Algerians for about a century.
^ ^a ^b ^c Melber, Henning (2017-10-03). "Explorations into modernity, colonialism and genocide: Revisiting the past in the present". Acta Academica: Critical Views on Society, Culture and Politics. 49 (1): 39–52. doi:10.18820/24150479/aa49i1.3. hdl:2263/63265. ISSN 2415-0479.
^ Charny, Israel W. (1994). "Toward a generic definition of genocide". In Andropoulos, George J. (ed.). Genocide : conceptual and historical dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 76. ISBN 978-0-8122-3249-3 – via Internet Archive. Genocide in the Course of Colonization or Consolidation of Power: Genocide that is undertaken or even allowed in the course of or incidental to the purposes of achieving a goal of colonization or development of a territory belonging to an indigenous people, or any other consolidation of political or economic power through mass killing of those perceived to be standing in the way.
^ ^a ^b Moses & Stone 2013, pp. 71–78.
^ ^a ^b Lindsay, Brendan C. (January 2014). "Humor and Dissonance in California's Native American Genocide". American Behavioral Scientist. 58 (1): 97–123. doi:10.1177/0002764213495034. ISSN 0002-7642. S2CID 144420635.
^ ^a ^b "Hispaniola | Genocide Studies Program". Genocide Studies Program, Yale University. Archived from the original on 2022-03-23. Retrieved 2022-10-10.
^ Reed, Kaitlin (2020). "We Are a Part of the Land and the Land Is Us: Settler Colonialism, Genocide & Healing in California". Archived from the original on 2024-06-03.
^ Sautman 2006.
^ Gerdziunas, Benas (17 October 2017). "Belgium's genocidal colonial legacy haunts the country's future". The Independent. Archived from the original on 2024-04-06. Retrieved 2023-03-29.
^ ^a ^b Bates, Stephen (13 May 1999). "The hidden holocaust". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 1 June 2024. Retrieved 29 March 2023.
^ Hochschild, Adam (2002). King Leopold's ghost : a story of greed, terror, and heroism in colonial Africa. London: Pan. p. 294. ISBN 978-0-330-49233-1 – via Internet Archive.
^ "2008 Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award Recipient | AHA". www.historians.org. Archived from the original on 13 May 2024. Retrieved 29 April 2023.
^ Moses & Stone 2013.
^ Rose-Redwood, Reuben (2 July 2018). "Genocide hoax tests ethics of academic publishing". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 17 October 2023. Retrieved 30 July 2023.
^ Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. "The United States Is Not "a Nation of Immigrants"". Boston Review. Archived from the original on 9 January 2024. Retrieved 14 November 2023.
^ Cox, Alicia (2017). "Settler Colonialism". Oxford Bibliographies. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780190221911-0029. ISBN 978-0-19-022191-1. Retrieved 15 November 2023. Foundational theories in settler colonialism studies distinguish settler colonialism from classical colonialism through work that demonstrates that settler colonizers destroy indigenous peoples and cultures in order to replace them and establish themselves as the new rightful inhabitants. In other words, settler colonizers do not merely exploit indigenous peoples and lands for labor and economic interests; they displace them through settlements.
^ Curthoys, Ann (2008). "Defining Genocide". In Stone, Dan (ed.). The Historiography of Genocide. p. 26. doi:10.1057/9780230297784. ISBN 978-0-230-27955-1.
^ Chomsky, Noam (1 September 2010). "Monthly Review | Genocide Denial with a Vengeance: Old and New Imperial Norms". Monthly Review. p. 16. Archived from the original on 27 February 2024. Retrieved 30 March 2023. Settler colonialism, commonly the most vicious form of imperial conquest, provides striking illustrations. The English colonists in North America had no doubts about what they were doing. Revolutionary War hero General Henry Knox, the first Secretary of War in the newly liberated American colonies, described "the utter extirpation of all the Indians in most populous parts of the Union" by means "more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru", which would have been no small achievement. In his later years, President John Quincy Adams recognized the fate of "that hapless race of native Americans, which we are exterminating with such merciless and perfidious cruelty, [to be] among the heinous sins of this nation, for which I believe God will one day bring [it] to judgement".
^ Chomsky, Noam; Barsamian, David (1992). Chronicles of dissent: interviews with David Barsamian. Monroe, Me.; Stirling, Scotland: Common Courage Press; AK Press. p. 13. ISBN 978-0-9628838-8-0 – via Internet Archive. Take just north of the Rio Grande, where once there were maybe 10 or 12 million native Americans. By 1900 there were about 200,000. In the Andean region and Mexico there were very extensive Indian societies, and they're mostly gone. Many of them were just totally murdered or wiped out, others succumbed to European-brought diseases. This is massive genocide, long before the emergence of the twentieth century nation-state. It may be one of the most, if not the most extreme example from history, but far from the only one. These are facts that we don't recognize.
^ Jones, Adam (7 May 2020). "Chomsky and Genocide". Genocide Studies and Prevention. 14 (1): 76–104. doi:10.5038/1911-9933.14.1.1738. S2CID 218959996.
^ Chomsky, Noam (3 November 2011). "Noam Chomsky: can revolutionary pacificism deliver peace?". The Conversation. Archived from the original on 21 February 2024. Retrieved 26 October 2023. The calculation is off by tens of millions, and the "vastness" included advanced civilizations, facts well known to those who choose to know decades ago. No letters appeared reacting to this truly colossal case of genocide denial.
^ Bailyn, Bernard (2012). "Introduction". The barbarous years : the peopling of British North America : the conflict of civilizations, 1600-1675. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. pp. XV. ISBN 978-0-394-51570-0 – via Internet Archive.
^ Rosenbaum, Ron. "The Shocking Savagery of America's Early History". Smithsonian Magazine. Archived from the original on 2024-07-02. Retrieved 15 April 2023. It's a grand drama in which the glimmers of enlightenment barely survive the savagery, what Yeats called "the blood-dimmed tide," the brutal establishment of slavery, the race wars with the original inhabitants that Bailyn is not afraid to call "genocidal," the full, horrifying details of which have virtually been erased.
^ Sale, Kirkpatrick (1990). The conquest of paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbian legacy. New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House. p. 161. ISBN 978-0-394-57429-5 – via Internet Archive. It is important to realize that there is not a single European nation which, when the opportunity came, did not engage in practices as vicious and cruel as those of Spain—and in the case of England, worse—with very much the same sort of demographic consequences. The Spanish, for all their faults, at least thought it right to convert, and in many cases to marry, the Indians, regarding them on a plane of humanity, capable of receiving Christian precepts and European civilization, above that generally accorded by other colonizers.
^ Stannard, David E. (1994). American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. p. 221. ISBN 978-0-19-508557-0.
^ Bray, William. "Quantum Physics, Philosophy, Theological Anthropology, Commerce, and Extinction; a Seven Volume Set. Vol V: Religion and Theological Anthropology". Unpublished. Unpublished. doi:10.13140/RG.2.2.30693.78569. Retrieved 2024-11-20.
^ Smithers, Gregory D.; Moses, A. Dirk (15 April 2010). "Rethinking Genocide in North America". Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 330. ISBN 978-0-19-161361-6.
^ Levene, Mark (2005). Genocide in the age of the nation state. Vol. 2: the rise of the west and the coming of genocide. New York: I. B. Tauris. pp. 73, 84. ISBN 978-1-84511-057-4. What, however, does make these Australian moments of genocide particularly noteworthy – if not in themselves that unusual – is not only the bizarre disjuncture between their regular reportage in the local and national press and official denial, or more accurately silence on the matter on the part of the authorities, but the peculiar lengths to which the latter were prepared to go to give the appearance that such 'extra-judicial' killings would not be tolerated and that the pacification of hostile tribes would rather – somehow – proceed by due legal process.
^ Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne (2014). An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States. Beacon Press. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-8070-0041-0. Settler colonialism is inherently genocidal in terms of the genocide convention. In the case of the British North American colonies and the United States, not only extermination and removal were practiced but also the disappearing of the prior existence of Indigenous peoples, and this continues to be perpetuated in local histories.
^ Howe, Stephen (2010). "Colonising and Exterminating? Memories of Imperial Violence in Britain and France". Histoire@Politique. 11 (2): 12. doi:10.3917/hp.011.0012. The crucial relevance of this to debates over colonial violence lies in the argument, made in recent years in many different contexts and with unprecedented force, that settler colonialism is inherently bound up with extreme, pervasive, structural and even genocidal violence....And quite simply, since Britain (and, before a United Kingdom or a compound British identity were formed, England) founded more and more successful, 'explosive' settler colonies than anyone else, so probably more alleged or potential cases of pre-twentieth century genocide occurred in the British world than anywhere outside it...For British North America and for Australasia, however, the case for numerous genocidal episodes –by even restricted definitions, since large-scale deliberate killing was repeatedly involved– seems to me very strong.
^ Shaw, Martin (2024-01-03). "Inescapably Genocidal". Journal of Genocide Research: 1–5. doi:10.1080/14623528.2023.2300555. ISSN 1462-3528. S2CID 266778978.
^ Depelchin, Jacques. The history of mass violence since colonial times: trying to understand the roots of a mindset. In: Development Dialogue, Revisiting the heart of darkness, Explorations into genocide and other forms of mass violence. December 2008. n. 50, pp. 13-31. "The systematic denying of evil (during and following colonial rule) while singling out only one (Nazism) as the only certifiable one has contributed significantly to the denying of other effects of the same socio-economic and ideological mindset. The fear of those who have seen nothing wrong in the system except for occasional slips may stem from the perception that an admission of failure will lead to a sort of domino effect, forcing an acknowledgement of the magnitude of the crimes that have always been denied."
^ Scherrer, Christian P. (1999). "Towards a theory of modern genocide. Comparative genocide research: Definitions, criteria, typologies, cases, key elements, patterns and voids". Journal of Genocide Research. 1 (1): 13–23. doi:10.1080/14623529908413932. ISSN 1462-3528. One of the most important observations is that genocide and colonization were always closely linked. The largest ever genocide in modern history was committed by half a dozen European stales in what was later called the Third World. Large scale genocide was committed against American Indians, against Africans and against subjugated peoples in European colonies.
^ Semerdjian, Elyse (2024-01-24). "A World Without Civilians". Journal of Genocide Research: 1–6. doi:10.1080/14623528.2024.2306714. ISSN 1462-3528. The field of Genocide Studies also includes a group of scholars who have argued that settler colonial warfare is genocidal, often deploying "slow violence" or "slow genocide" to achieve its aims in infinitesimal acts of violence interspersed with larger genocidal episodes.