Massacre in the old and new worlds, c.1780–1820

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement We would like to thank both the editors of the Journal of Genocide Research for allowing us the opportunity to publish this work collectively, and the anonymous referees of the journal for their remarks, criticisms and comments. Notes See the discussion in Paul Boghossian, ‘The concept of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2010, pp. 69–80. The term was first used by Leo Kuper, Genocide: its political use in the twentieth century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), and reprised by Ben Kiernan, Blood and soil: a world history of genocide and extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). For a similar approach, see the special issue entitled ‘Les massacres aux temps des Révolutions’, in La Révolution française: Cahiers de l'Institut d'Histoire de la Révolution française, 3 (2011). Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan, ‘The massacre and history’, in Philip Dwyer and Lyndall Ryan (eds.), Theatres of violence: massacre, mass killing and atrocity throughout history (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), pp. xiii. Most indigenous perspectives are either North or South American. See, for example, Karl Jacoby, ‘“The broad platform of extermination”: nature and violence in the nineteenth-century American Borderlands’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2008, pp. 249–267. Jacques Semelin, Purify and destroy: the political uses of massacre and genocide, trans. Cynthia Schoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Semelin, ‘Du crime de masse’, in Thomas Ferenczi (ed.), Faut-il s'accommoder de la violence? (Paris: Complexe, 2000), pp. 375–391. Mark Levene and Penny Roberts (eds), The massacre in history (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999), pp. 1, 4, 5. See Keith Windschuttle, ‘The myth of frontier massacres in Australian history, Part II: the fabrication of the Aboriginal death toll’, Quadrant, November 2000, p. 18; and Ben Kiernan, ‘Australia's Aboriginal genocide’, Yale Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 1, No. 1, (2000), p. 52. See, for example, Alain Corbin, The village of cannibals: rage and murder in France, 1870, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). As would argue Howard G. Brown, ‘Domestic state violence: repression from the croquants to the commune,’ Historical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3, 1999, pp. 597–622. David A. Bell, The first total war: Napoleon's Europe and the birth of modern warfare (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 168. The association between the ‘genocide’ in the Vendée and later twentieth-century totalitarian genocides reached its climax during the Bicentenary of the Revolution with the publication of Reynald Secher's Le génocide franco-français: la Vendée-Vengé (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1988). For a discussion of this debate see, Jean-Clément Martin, La Vendée et la Révolution. Accepter la mémoire pour écrire l'histoire (Paris: Perrin, 2007), pp. 61–85. Roger Chickering, ‘A tale of two tales: grand narratives of war in the age of revolution’, in Roger Chickering and Stig Förster (eds.), War in an age of revolution, 1775–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 1–17. Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: violence and terror in the French and Russian revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). On the Australian connection see Christine Wright, Wellington's men in Australia: Peninsular War veterans and the making of empire c.1820–40 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). See, for example, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison, Coloniser, Exterminer: Sur la guerre et l'Etat colonial (Paris: Fayard, 2005). Kiernan, Blood and soil. A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, colony, genocide: conquest, occupation, and subaltern resistance in world history (New York: Berghahn, 2008).