This meticulously researched and voluminous book represents a first of sorts. It is the first synthetic, single-authored global history to connect state power and formation to violence through the willful extermination and attempted extermination of peoples. Its reach is not only global, it is also temporal, as the book examines violence through time as well as geographies. Kiernan periodizes this breadth and depth of range in the following organization of this book: “Early Imperial Expansion,” “Settler Colonialism,” and “Twentieth-Century Genocides”—chapters that form the historical and conceptual spine of the book. These periodizations (which are thematics) may well come to characterize mainstream understandings of these historical eras as the book becomes the scholarly reference that it is shortly about to be: the most comprehensive and synthetic account of willful (political and bodily) genocide to date.
Ranging through ancient Greece, medieval Ireland, Native North America, indigenous Australia, Japan's occupation of China, Mao's China, Rwanda, and Baghdad, this work will be essential not only to genocide scholars, but also to historians and regional specialists. Political theorists who are interested in state power, sovereignty, and force will also find much of interest in this book, as the cases explored by Kiernan offer ideational and material forms of evidence that feed into contemporary questions on sacrifice and bare life in different renderings of Agamben's “camp”—so far, a space of neglect and violence that is generated and stops, it seems, within European histories. It is because Kiernan narrativizes so much data for his readers that this book should be read along with these theorizations on violence in order to work theoretical questions on the value of life and state form into these staggering historical (and more contemporary) cases of social devaluement—devaluement that has served to justify attempted annihilation. This book will also stimulate further works on other forms of genocide—legal, philosophical, and hermeneutic—as Kiernan has done the groundwork for further synthetic and comparative works on state violence and sovereignty.
Kiernan's study is largely governed by the definitional premise adopted in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, but it moves into four very concrete indices for defining the violence he is interested in documenting, comparing, and, ultimately, preventing. The definitional premise that he is perhaps most interested in is that set out by the UN Convention, which defines genocide as an “attempt at extermination, whether partial or complete” and “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, racial, ethnical, or religious group, as such” (p. 10). This definition is applied by Kiernan retrospectively as he moves through historical periods and incidences of state-sanctioned and religiously sanctioned violence. Following the 1948 Convention, Kiernan also emphasizes Article 2- (sections a–e) specified “categories of acts” of biological genocide, threats of physically removing children from their parents, and other nuances of the Convention that are derived from the legal decisions brought before the courts. Things do become muddled a bit in the early pages of his study as Kiernan discusses the definitional axis of the book and then gestures toward these other “categories of acts” that take up much discussion and litigation as well as moral redress in contemporary settler societies such as Canada and Australia. I will discuss an example of these “acts” shortly. But Kiernan distills for us four ideological “preoccupations” for political orders that commit genocide: “racism,” “expansionism,” “agrarianism,” and “antiquity” (p. 38). Where he can, Kiernan illustrates with ample references the ways in which these preoccupations become justificatory frameworks and indices of social and political value—so, for example, the Irish were subject in many ways to the histories of Roman scholars such as Cato and Livy, and, when read in Britain, their ideas made manifest a sudden, Irish savagery. In this, the British imagined themselves new Romans and so looked to the imperium and its thinkers for instruction on how to acquire, and then how to govern and disappear, a later Carthage (and later Carthaginians such as Indians or Irish).
Kiernan absolutely shines in some ways as a historian of ideas as he moves antiquities forward and backward and does simultaneous genealogies of the (mostly) men who read the early historians to find justification for what they were to do. Anthony Pagden has done deeper genealogizing work for intellectual and political history, but Kiernan does an exemplary job of tracing the justificatory texts and their arguments for us without sacrificing his comparativist frame of analysis. Thus, one will see how, for example, Jefferson echoed Spenser's view of the Irish (as noble and savage but with a capacity for civilization), and how these different ideational frameworks then governed actions toward those who were made subject to settler rule. Similarly, Germans encountering the “heathen but virtuous Hottentots” in southeastern Africa (p. 375) called on American ethnological descriptions of indigenous peoples in North America to explain the difference that they saw before them, not only to explain difference, but then to deal with it, by force or by fiat.
Kiernan's synthesis of this material is most impressive, but his attempts to stay within the boundaries of his conceptual and empirical definition will leave some specialists and mainstream readers wanting more. Here it is toward the muddiness mentioned earlier that I want to move briefly. In the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth in Canada and Australia (and the United States, although less uniformly), indigenous children were in fact forcibly removed from their families, lands, and homes in order to assimilate them into the white settler body politic through residential boarding schools and adoption. This force and the racist logic, law, and violence that underpinned it have been explicitly linked to genocide by scholars in the Australian case. This suggests a refashioning of the category of group murder, as this was to some a cultural death so profound that it is understood as genocidal in intent. In 2008, the governments of both Canada and Australia formally apologized to the indigenous peoples for their role in these terrorizing, state-sanctioned assimilation projects.
Perhaps it is the postenlightenment ascent of the biopolitical noncitizen that demands a “tweaking” of our understanding of genocidal form, as the attempt “to breed out the Indian” (U.S. language) makes for a less obvious form of genocide for comparativists. When one reads this book, there will be conceptual and empirical quarrels, but they do not overshadow the success and tremendous value of this book. What Kiernan wants to argue for is a stable definition of genocide that he can apply retrospectively to his study (and thus uphold this definition of genocide), but he also seems to want a more conceptual frame for analysis, one that would, for example, include cultural forms of genocide (even where the 1948 Convention does not). What is suggested by this is that a stretching of the term might be in order, as there were “acts” that were intended, in fact, to destroy, but not immediately, and not the corporeal body but the political body. Readers within these contexts will be aware of these attempts, and will wonder why this different form of attempted annihilation would only be gestured toward early in Kiernan's study (Canada is not even mentioned) and then left behind. Such empirical and conceptual lacunae in the work may be attributable to the emphasis on history, sociology, and philosophies that governed those histories rather than the theory that these acts generated—and then techniques of justifiable forms of disappearing. Perhaps this is Kiernan's second book, or approaches and studies that will be taken up by others in this critical project to understand why it is that some may become targeted for death and others for life.
