is ‘genocide’ an anachronistic concept for the study of early modern mass killing?

Is ‘Genocide’ an Anachronistic Concept forthe Study of Early Modern Mass Killing?

BEN KIERNANYale University

AbstractIs it anachronistic to apply the term ‘genocide’, coined in 1943, to ancient or earlymodern mass killings, even to those that might fit the mid-twentieth- century definition?Historians must analyse actions and events of the pre-modern era in the context ofcultural stipulations discussed at the time, and of knowledge paradigms then available.To assess people’s actions by standards understood in that era, it is important todetermine whether a pre-modern understanding of the concept of genocide existed.Long before that term, earlier terms such as ‘general massacre’ conveyed similar mean-ings, along with four much older, related terms – holocaust, extermination, crimesagainst humanity, and war crimes – which also conveyed pre-modern concepts of thecrimes involved. This essay traces the historical lineage and usage of those terms inEuropean and transnational contexts, and argues that conceptions of genocide longpre-dated the coining of the term. Genocide did occur in early modern times, though itwas neither normal practice nor universally permitted and often provoked dissent. Theessay concludes that a grasp of the concept and its moral implications long precededboth our word for it and its 1950 legal codification as an international crime. The essaythen critiques common misunderstandings of that legal definition: that it refers to thecrime’s effect rather than the perpetrator’s intent; that it is too broad for historians touse; that only a state can commit genocide; that it must involve the participation of anentire ethnic group; and that it must be complete, not partial.

Not so long ago, it was ‘the crime without a name’.1 The term‘genocide’ was coined only in 1943–4; the UN Genocide Con-vention became international law in 1950. For this reason some

have considered it anachronistic to apply the term to ancient or earlymodern mass killings even when they fit the mid-twentieth-century defi-nition. But the novelty of the word is not the key issue. A more signifi-cant point is whether any understanding of the concept of genocide

1 Winston Churchill, 24 Aug. 1941, referring to the Nazi attack on the Soviet Union: ‘wholedistricts are being exterminated. Scores of thousands – literally scores of thousands – of executionsin cold blood are being perpetrated by the German Police-troops upon the Russian patriots whodefend their native soil. Since the Mongol invasions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century, there hasnever been methodical, merciless butchery on such a scale . . . We are in the presence of a crimewithout a name’. Quoted in James T. Fussell, ‘A crime without a name’, http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/crimewithoutaname.htm (accessed 31 Aug. 2012).

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© 2014 The Author. History © 2014 The Historical Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

existed in pre-modern times. The importance of assessing people’sactions by standards understood at the time is clear.

Much older than the word ‘genocide’ are four related terms – holo-caust, extermination, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Thecurrent usages of the first two of those terms are recorded as beginningbefore or during the early modern era; for instance, before 1943 eachhad been applied by at least one historian to the sixteenth-centuryEnglish conquest of Ireland. For the latter two concepts, early modernterms and understandings of the crimes also existed, long pre-dating themodern legal codification of each phrase. As we shall see, that is alsotrue of the concept of genocide.

I

In his 1497 description of ‘an holocaust’ of ‘martyrdom made toCryste’, Bishop John Alcock may have coined the modern English usageof ‘holocaust’ as a metaphor for violence inspired by religion or hatredof a religious group. The Spanish missionary Bartolomé de Las Casasemployed the word in his sixteenth-century exposé of conquistadorbrutality, The Devastation of the Indies. In their ‘butchery’ in Guatemalain 1524–30, Las Casas wrote, ‘[w]henever the Spaniards captured animportant noble or chieftain, they did him the honor of burning him atthe stake. . . . You can judge what would be the number of victims thatwere swallowed up in the holocaust.’ Bishop George Berkeley had inmind violent cultural suppression when he wrote in 1732: ‘Druids wouldhave sacrificed many a holocaust of free-thinkers’. American mission-aries in Turkey in 1896 denounced Ottoman massacres of ArmenianChristians as a ‘holocaust’. And writing in 1941 about some of thehistorical issues discussed in this collection, Sean O’Faolain used thesame term for the violent English devastation and depopulation ofMunster in the 1580s.2 These citations all pre-date the contemporaryusage of the word Holocaust to describe the Nazi genocide of Jewsduring the Second World War.

II

The term ‘extermination’ also goes back to antiquity, but its meaninghas changed over the millennia. Appian’s Roman History, written inGreek in the second century ce, used the term �φανιζειν (aphanízein,‘to make unseen, remove from sight, obliterate’) to include expulsion; it

2 John Alcock, Mons Perfeccionis (Westmestre, 1497); Bartolomé de Las Casas, The Devastation ofthe Indies: A Brief Account [1552] (Baltimore, 1992), p. 70; Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy:Reflecting on Genocide (London, 2003), p. 186 n. 1; Sean O’Faolain, The Great O’Neill (New York,1942), p. 101.

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and other terms for ‘destroy’ did not necessarily mean physical destruc-tion. Appian quoted a senator of the third century bce saying that theSamnites,

after betraying friendship and agreements . . . , were not destroyed(�νισταμαι; anístamai, ‘compelled to migrate, transplanted’) . . . Nor didwe destroy (διαφθειρω; diaphtheιro, ‘to ruin, waste through and through,devastate’) [other Italian enemies] . . . considering it at once righteous andexpedient to our prosperity not to exterminate (�φανιζειν) whole races(�νθρωπων γενη; anthropon géne), but to bring them into a better state ofmind.3

The context suggests that even the term �φανιζειν (translated as ‘exter-minate’) could well imply forcible expulsion. Similarly, the classicalLatin verb exterminare and Middle English exterminen both meant ‘todrive out, expel, or banish’. Then, from late antiquity to the medievalera, exterminare took on the additional sense of ‘abolish, extirpate,destroy’. In twelfth-century Britain, exterminium meant ‘destruction’and exterminator, ‘destroyer’. From mid-fifteenth-century Latin thisbecame the early modern English meaning.4

Mid-sixteenth-century Spanish apologists for a divinely ordaineddestruction of Indians in the New World also used the term ‘extermi-nation’. They did not mean mere expulsion, but destruction by excessiveviolence. Early modern authors could employ the word with eitherapproval or disapproval of that violence. For instance, GonzaloFernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557) wrote that ‘there is neithertime nor paper enough fully to describe all these captains did to anni-hilate (asolar) the natives’, adding that ‘there had been two millionIndians . . . So many perished’. One group of conquistadors had set out‘to murder and to destroy the land in many ways, robbing and exter-minating (acabando) the indigenous population’.5 Elsewhere, however,Oviedo asserted that the Indians ‘had fallen into such evil ways that He[God] consented to their extermination’.6 Agreeing with this latter state-ment, and citing the books of Joshua and Deuteronomy, Juan Ginés deSepúlveda added in 1547: ‘We can see where God gave the clearest

3 Appian’s Roman History 8.9.58, trans. Horace White, I (London, 1982), pp. 492–3. For thespecific terms, Dimitri Gutas kindly provided the glosses and transliterations used here.4 Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1968); Old French–English Dictionary (Cambridge, 2000);Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor, 1954); C. T. Lewis and C. Short, A Latin Dictionary(Oxford, 1962); J. F. Niermeyer and C. Van De Kieft, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus (Leiden,2002); R. E. Latham, Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources (London,1965).5 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia General y Natural de las Indias [1535, 1851–5],book 29, chs. 8, 15, quoted in Kathleen Ann Myers, Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America:A New History for a New World (Austin, TX, 2007), pp. 56–7.6 Oviedo, Historia General y Natural de las Indias, quoted in Lewis Hanke, All Mankind is One (DeKalb, IL, 1974), p. 41.

532 IS ‘GENOCIDE’ AN ANACHRONISTIC CONCEPT?


indications for the extermination of these barbarians as witnessed byGod giving the people of Israel the authority to exterminate the idola-trous Canaanites and Amorites.’7

Several years later, during the famous debate at Valladolid,Bartolomé de Las Casas presented his critique of Sepúlveda, entitled InDefence of the Indians (1550). Las Casas employed ‘extermination’ andsimilar terminology to describe cases where ‘Spaniards were roving farand wide with massacres’, which showed that the two sides shared thesame concept while debating the justice of subjecting the Indians to suchacts. He made clear that Sepúlveda understood it too:

It remains for us to answer what Sepúlveda cites from the sacred books,specifically Deuteronomy, chapter 7, and Joshua, where we read that Goddestroyed the seven nations that dwelt in the Promised Land because ofcertain crimes. Now he argues that this can be done to the Indians, andhe also cites Saint Cyprian, . . . and uses this authority to urge theSpanish nation to annihilate the Indians.8

In his response, Las Casas argued that ‘the foregoing passages com-manding the massacre of idolaters must be admitted only in reference tothose who lived in the Promised Land’. He agreed that ‘the Lord gavea particular command to the Hebrews to massacre those nations’ and‘exterminate those peoples’. However it was illogical, Las Casas con-cluded, ‘to try to prove from those passages that in general all unbe-lievers or idolaters should be destroyed by the arms of war’. Sepúlveda,he asserted, had ‘distorted’ religious texts in order to teach Spain ‘thatwhen it sheds the blood of that people it consecrates its hands to God’.9

Las Casas, for his part, condemned

these brutal men who are hardened to seeing fields bathed in humanblood, who make no distinction of sex or age, who do not spare infantsat their mothers’ breasts, pregnant women, the great, the lowly, or evenmen of feeble and gray old age, . . . when they crush the Indians withmassacres, pillaging, and tyranny.

Moreover, he argued, if Sepúlveda’s views were to be accepted and ‘theIndians are being brought to extermination, if as many peoples arebeing destroyed as widespread kingdoms are being overthrown, whatsane man would doubt that the most flourishing Empire in the NewWorld, once its native inhabitants have been destroyed, will become awilderness’.10

7 Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrates alter, sive de Justis Belli Causus apud Indios (1547), quotedin Ramón Menéndez Pidal, El Padre Las Casas, su doble personalidad (Madrid, 1963), pp. 207–8;trans. Lawrence A. Clayton, Bartolomé de Las Casas: A Biography (Cambridge, 2012), p. 351.Bartolomé de Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians [1550], trans. Stafford Poole (De Kalb, IL,1992), p. 104.8 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, pp. 7, 104, 113.9 Ibid., pp. 108–9, 112–13.10 Ibid., p. 19.

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This meaning of ‘extermination’ as mass physical destruction firstappeared in English-language writings in the seventeenth century.Hobbes wrote in The Leviathan in 1651: ‘A People coming into posses-sion of a Land by warre, do not always exterminate the antient Inhab-itants.’ The primary meaning of ‘extermination’ had become ‘totalextirpation, utter destruction’, although the secondary, obsolescent clas-sical sense, ‘driving out by force’, remained in use in the eighteenthcentury.11

That ‘extermination’ meant mass killing or destruction is also explicitin an American observation about Vietnam, recorded in 1820, that thatcountry’s Catholic minority might be about to suffer either ‘expulsion’or ‘extermination’ under the future monarch Minh Ma·ng (r. 1820–41).As Minh Ma·ng’s father grew old and it was clear that he would succeed,the American visitor John White wrote that ‘towards Christians andforeigners, it is to be feared, that a system of expulsion from thekingdom, or of extermination, will be adopted’. White then reported: ‘Afew days previous to our quitting Saigon, Father Joseph . . . informedus, that . . . an extermination of Christians was feared’. Worse thanexpulsion, the priest foresaw ‘their last extremity’.12

During the Irish Famine of 1845–51, both Catholic Irish and Britishleaders used the term ‘extermination’ to describe the massive death tollas a result of human deliberation. The bishop of Derry, in a letterof 9 April 1847, denounced the famine as ‘wholesale systems ofextermination’. The earl of Clarendon, lord lieutenant of Ireland(1847–52), blamed London more directly. He wrote Prime MinisterRussell in 1849 to denounce Westminster’s refusal of aid: ‘I don’t thinkthere is another legislature in Europe that would disregard suchsufferings as now exist in the west of Ireland or coldly persist in apolicy of extermination’.13

Writing in 1896, the historian W. E. H. Lecky used the term ‘war ofextermination’ to describe the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland in thesixteenth century, when ‘the slaughter of Irishmen was looked upon asliterally the slaughter of wild beasts’, and English forces ‘deliberatelyand systematically butchered . . . even the women and children’.14

Since the Nazi Holocaust, the crime of ‘extermination’ has become acrime against humanity, and its legal definition includes not only mas-sacres but also ‘the intentional infliction of conditions of life, inter aliathe deprivation of access to food and medicine, calculated to bring

11 John Hobbes, Leviathan, II.xxiv, p. 128; Oxford English Dictionary Online (Oxford, 2000);Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1771); Alan Atkinson, The Europeans in Australia, II (Mel-bourne, 2004), pp. 157–8.12 John White, A Voyage to Cochin China (London, 1824), pp. 266–7, 346. See also Choi ByungWook, Southern Vietnam under the Reign of Minh Mang (1820–1841) (Ithaca, NY, 2004), p. 61.13 George Villiers, earl of Clarendon, letter to Prime Minister Russell, 26 April 1849.14 W. E. H. Lecky, A History of Ireland in the XVIIIth Century (London, 1896), I, pp. 5–6, citing‘e.g. Holinshed, vi, 427–30’.



about the destruction of part of a population’.15 This twentieth-centurydefinition seems quite close to the early modern meaning.

III

The precise phrase ‘crimes against humanity’ also first appeared in theearly modern era. But it, too, had a much longer history. The notion ofa perpetrator of such crimes may date as far back as the first centurybce, when Cicero described tyrants as ‘the common enemy of everyone’(communis hostis omnium), ‘wild and savage monsters in human form’,who therefore ‘should be removed from the common body of humanity’(a communi tamquam humanitatis corpore segregenda est).16 Pliny thennamed the emperor Nero an ‘enemy of mankind’ (hostis humanigeneris), a term Eutropius also deployed against Commodus.17 Catholicrites later applied it to the devil. In the medieval era, the term hostishumani generis slowly developed into a criminal category. In athirteenth-century oration Jacobus de Arena applied it to hypocrites,against whom any and all could legitimately wage war, a point cited bythe fifteenth-century Italian legal scholar Alexander de Imola. Then,discussing pirates in a 1563 treatise on the laws of war, Pierino Belliwrote that ‘people whose hand is against every man should expect a likereturn from all men’, and therefore ‘any one . . . even persons in privatelife’ may attack or kill those ‘whom the Pope or Emperor has brandedas public enemies, for such are wholly outside the pale of the laws’.18

Meanwhile in 1550, Las Casas applied the term to the conquistadorsin the New World. He called them ‘enemies of the human race’ who hadcommitted ‘inhuman crimes’ against Indians. He added that their intel-lectual apologist Oviedo was not just a ‘deadly enemy of the Indians’but ‘a deadly enemy of mankind’, and that Sepúlveda ‘falsely defamesthe larger part of the human race’.19 Like the notion of ‘extermination’,this concept of an injustice perpetrated against humanity became widelyshared. Just two decades later, in 1569, the Calvinist revolutionaryGeorge Buchanan described a tyrant as someone who was ‘an enemy ofthe whole human race’ (totius hostis humani generis), therefore a ‘publicenemy’ lawfully punishable by ‘any individual from the whole mass ofthe human race’. John Milton reiterated in 1654 that ‘a tyrant is not

15 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (1998): www.un.org/icc, article 7, 1–2; ChérifBassiouni, ‘Crimes against humanity’, Crimes of War Project: http://www.crimesofwar.org/thebook/crimes-against-humanity.html (accessed 23 Sept. 2006).16 Cicero, De officiis, III.32, 107, quoted in Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the regicide’, in PaulHammond and Blair Worden (eds), John Milton: Life, Writing, Reputation (Oxford, 2010), pp.91–105, at p. 104. Dzelzainis quotes the translations by Miller, pp. 298, 384. Thanks to ananonymous reviewer for this citation.17 Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the regicide’, p. 101.18 Ibid., pp. 102–3.19 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, pp. 20, 8; Hanke, All Mankind is One, pp. 34, 86.

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simply our enemy, but the public enemy as it were of the whole humanrace’, and therefore, ‘by the same right as he might be attacked witharms, may he likewise be put to death’.20

A near-contemporary citation suggests the spread of a related termfor the nature of the specific crime committed by such a perpetrator. In1673, R. Baxter wrote in the Christian Directory that ‘falseness to afriend, is a crime against humanity, and all society’.21 Other writers weresoon applying the term in contexts of colonial injustice. In 1759, MiguelVenegas wrote in A Natural and Civil History of California: ‘the peoplelikewise were dying apace; and if they remained there all would perish,to the great prejudice of his majesty’s service, and be a crime againsthumanity itself’.22 And in 1783, Abbé Raynal, denouncing embezzle-ment from asylums for the poor, wrote in his Philosophical and PoliticalHistory of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East andWest Indies: ‘May the ignominy, may the punishments reserved for thevilest malefactors fall upon the proscribed head of villains, who arecapable of so enormous a crime against humanity.’ He urged that in theabsence of punishment, those ‘who have been ignorant of such an excessof corruption, or who have tolerated it, become an object of execrationamong all nations’.23 In 1836 Thomas Upham, a professor at BowdoinCollege, included ‘the slave trade, and other crimes’ under the category‘Crimes against humanity’.24 The historian Dean Pavlakis has found‘hundreds of citations’ for that term from the 1840s to the 1880s. Forinstance Richard Cobden, in an 1849 speech at the Peace Congress inParis, levelled the charge: ‘It is you who give strength to the arm whichmurders innocent women and helpless old age; it is you who supply thetorch which reduces to ashes peaceful and inoffensive villages, and onyour souls will rest the burden of these crimes against humanity’.25

Again, all these citations show that the concept long predated thetwentieth-century legal codification of such crimes.

20 Quoted in Dzelzainis, ‘Milton and the Regicide’, pp. 99–101.21 R. Baxter, Christian Directory (1673), iv.xxv.166, quoted in OED online, under ‘Crime: phrases:crimes against humanity’. I am grateful to Dean Pavlakis for this reference and those in the nextfour notes. See Pavlakis, ‘The development of British overseas humanitarianism and the CongoReform Campaign’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 11 (2010), and ‘King Leopold’sNemesis’, PhD thesis, University of Buffalo (SUNY), 2012.22 Miguel Venegas, A Natural and Civil History of California, II (London, 1759), p. 295: http://www.books.google.com/books?id=TXpNAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA295 (accessed 30 July 2012).23 Abbé Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settle-ments and Trade of the Europeans in the East And West Indies, bk XIII, vol. VI, Settlement of theFrench in the American Islands (London, 1783), p. 170: http://www.books.google.com/books?id=YB9JAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA170 (accessed 30 July 2012).24 Thomas C. Upham, ‘Essay on a Congress of Nations’, in W. Ladd, et al., Prize Essays on aCongress of Nations, for the Adjustment of International Disputes, and for the Promotion of UniversalPeace Without Resort to Arms (Boston, 1840), p. 361: http://www.books.google.com/books?id=CqsMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA361 (accessed 30 July 2012).25 Cobden quoted in The Living Age, XXIII, 90: http://www.books.google.com/books?id=dMMCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA90 (accessed 30 July 2012).



IV

Notions of excessive military violence, moral objections, and legalaction to curtail it, also emerged long before the coining of the term‘war crimes’. Looking back on the wars waged by ancient Rome, medi-eval theorists used the term bellum Romanum to describe warfare sosavage that it ‘permitted the indiscriminate slaughter or enslavement ofentire populations’ and was now legitimate only in wars againstpagans.26 Even Europe’s endemic violence became subject to legal andmoral restraints, including ‘a spontaneous effort for the organization ofthe peace and order which were so much desired’.27

New laws restricting the use of violence won widespread popularsupport. In the tenth century, Carolingian administration had collapsedin southern France. Only commanders of local strongholds retainedenforceable authority, while their knights ‘raided and looted the coun-tryside’. Most victims were ‘the unarmed’ – ‘monks, clerks, women,children, and peasants’. This social violence and endemic warfare pro-voked church authorities to action. Bishops and abbots assembled largecrowds in popular councils which enacted ecclesiastical legislation ‘toprotect entire categories of persons, such as the poor’, as well as churchproperty. To enforce their new laws in the name of the Peace of God,bishops mustered ‘common people to oppose those milites who did notrespect the Pax Dei’.28 In the eleventh and twelfth centuries Peace ofGod (and Truce of God) movements appeared elsewhere in westernEurope.29 Through them, the episcopate moved to control ‘the socialthreat posed by the growing power of the knightly class’ throughenforcement of the knights’ compliance with oaths not to violate thepeace. In some cases, ‘military force was employed to outlaw militaryforce’. The movements were not always successful and sometimes per-petrated their own atrocities.30 But in one twelfth-century charter, alocal lord had to guarantee that the land would remain free of anydemands for ‘all those things which by violence knights are wont toextort from the poor’.31 One historian terms the Peace of God, at least

26 Robert C. Stacey, ‘The age of chivalry’, in Michael Howard, George J. Andreopoulos and MarkR. Shulman (eds), The Laws of War: Constraints on Warfare in the Western World (New Haven,CT, 1994), pp. 27–39, at p. 28.27 Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. L. A. Manyon, II: Social Classes and Political Organization(Chicago, 1964), pp. 410–16.28 Bernard S. Bachrach, ‘The northern origins of the peace movement at Le Puy in 975’, in ThomasHead and Richard Landes (eds), Essays on the Peace of God: The Church and the People in EleventhCentury France, special issue of Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 14 (1987), pp. 405–21,at p. 405.29 Frederick S. Paxton, ‘The peace of God in modern historiography’, in Head and Landes (eds),Essays on the Peace of God, pp. 385–404, at p. 397.30 Thomas Head, ‘Andrew of Fleury and the peace league of Bourges’, in Head and Landes (eds),Essays on the Peace of God, pp. 513–29, at pp. 513, 515–19.31 Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. Manyon, II: Social Classes and Political Organization, p. 411.

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in part, ‘an interlude of peasant agency’ against seigneurial violence.32

Another asserts that its more lasting legacy, which included ‘a new idealof Christian knighthood, the popularization of lay piety, [and] increas-ingly vocal demands for a purified clergy’, also ensured that ‘the idealsannounced in the great councils became part of the vernacular of every-day life’.33

The early modern era saw similar problems, in a different context.New monarchical authorities had partially displaced ecclesiasticalpower.34 And armies now ranged further afield. Writing in 1550 aboutthe Spanish conquest of the Indies, Las Casas lamented that ‘so manylaws already issued . . . have been ineffective in preventing so manythousands of innocent men from perishing by sword, hunger, and all themisfortunes of total war’. He also accused Sepúlveda of writing ‘booksapproving those criminal wars’ and teaching ‘that war can be wagedunconditionally and indiscriminately against those peoples’. In responseLas Casas set out to detail ‘the magnitude of the crime committed bythose who have maltreated the Indians by robberies, massacres, andother incredible misfortunes of war, and continue to do so’.35

Nor was Las Casas a lone voice against wartime atrocities. Thehistorian of early modern European warfare, Geoffrey Parker, writesthat ‘almost every excess, from the sixteenth century onward, has beensubjected by contemporaries to detailed scrutiny’. Criteria for judge-ment included whether the offending troops had been provoked, orstarved of pay, or whether their victims had broken a previous oath notto fight again, and ‘if no excuses were available, moral condemnationand then legal sanction ensued’. While enforcement of the laws of warhas since increased, Parker comments, ‘Most of the actions today out-lawed by the Geneva Conventions have been condemned in the West forat least four centuries.’36 Parker suggests four reasons for the risingrestraints on warfare in early modern Europe. Governments displacedprivate military contractors in recruiting, paying and supplying armies,reducing their reliance on plunder. The dissemination of weaponrycreated a capacity to retaliate and a closer early modern balance offorces, decreasing the incidence of unequal conflicts between heavilyarmed knights and unarmed peasants. And by the mid-seventeenthcentury, a steady ‘deconfessionalization’ had brought an end to‘dynamic providentialism’, so that ‘atrocities still occurred’ but ‘thechorus of condemnation was all but universal’; and a ‘general feeling’had arisen that brutal warfare had brought Europe ‘perilously close toself-destruction’. At the end of the English Civil War, John Locke

32 Paul Freedman, Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford, 1999), pp. 182–3.33 Geoffrey G. Koziol, ‘Monks, feuds, and the making of peace in eleventh-century Flanders’, inHead and Landes (eds), Essays on the Peace of God, pp. 531–49, at pp. 545, 549.34 Bloch, Feudal Society, trans. Manyon, II: Social Classes and Political Organization, pp. 417–20.35 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, pp. 18, 22.36 Geoffrey Parker, ‘Early modern Europe’, in The Laws of War, pp. 40–58, at p. 58.



lamented ‘all those flames that have made such havoc and desolation inEurope and have not been quenched but with the blood of so manymillions’.37

Even before the outbreak of the English Civil Wars of the 1640s,according to historian Barbara Donagan, the codes of war already‘comprehended both crimes against humanity and crimes that infringedthe laws of war’. The result was ‘outrage at breaches of the protections(which were admittedly not absolute) due to women, children, ministers,the old, the sick, and the dead’.38 Donagan adds, however, that ‘Fornearly every “crime” against enemies and civilians, there was a situationin which otherwise prohibited behavior became permissible or excessesbecame excusable’. Even killing the civilians of a besieged town that hadrefused to surrender was considered ‘legitimate if not admirable’. Yetthere was also ‘a strong sense of when actions that might in theory beallowable were in practice cruel and excessive’, especially when commit-ted in cold blood. As the Italian Protestant Alberico Gentili, who heldthe chair of civil law at Oxford University, noted in De iure belli (On theLaw of War, 1612), ‘Not everything which is lawful is honourable’. Ingeneral, Donagan writes, ‘Traditional sources of the codes of war suf-ficed to provide impressive regulations of cruelty and violence designedto protect civilians and soldiers alike’.39 Will Coster adds that: ‘the codesof conduct remained important even when breached. Those writing onthe side of the perpetrators of these massacres were often careful tojustify such atrocities by indicating how the rules did not apply.’40

In 1783 Benjamin Franklin came up with a definition of war crimesthat also antedated the coining of the term. He communicated what hecalled ‘a proposition for improving the Law of Nations by prohibitingthe plundering of unarmed and usefully employed people’.41 Later thesame year, he attempted to include this provision in the Treaty ofParis:

All Fishermen, all Cultivators of the Earth, and all Artizans, or manu-facturers unarmed and inhabiting unfortified Towns, Villages or Places,who labour for the common Subsistence and Benefit of Mankind, andpeaceably follow their respective Employments, shall be allowed to con-tinue the same, and shall not be molested by the Armed Forces of theEnemy.

37 Ibid., pp. 53–5.38 Barbara Donagan, ‘Atrocity, war crime, and treason in the English Civil War’, AmericanHistorical Review, 99 (1994), pp. 1137–66, at pp. 1141–2.39 Ibid., p. 1144.40 Will Coster, ‘Massacres and codes of conduct in the English Civil War’, in Mark Levene andPenny Roberts (eds), The Massacre in History (New York, 1999), pp. 89–105, at p. 101.41 Franklin to Oswald, 14 Jan. 1783, quoted in Jesse S. Reeves, ‘The Prussian–American treaties’,American Journal of International Law, 11 (1917), pp. 475–510, at p. 486, citing Franklin, Works,IX, pp. 3, 4.

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Britain declined to include this suggested prohibition in the treaty.42 Butin 1785, America’s pact with Prussia did include wartime protections forlabouring people:

And all Women and Children − Scholars of every faculty, Cultivateurs ofthe earth, Artizans, Manufacturers, and fishermen, unarmed and inhab-iting unfortified towns, villages or places, & in general all others, whoseoccupations are for the common subsistance and benefit of mankind,shall be allowed to continue their respective employments and shall notbe molested in their persons, nor shall their houses or goods be burnt orotherwise destroyed, nor their fields wasted by the armed force of theenemy.43

Three years later Franklin wrote: ‘I should be happy if I could seebefore I die, the proposed Improvement of the Law of Nations estab-lished. The Miseries of Mankind would be diminished by it; and theHappiness of Millions secured and promoted’. His proposal, he said,had ‘Humanity only for its Motive’. Like the earlier emergence of theconcept of crimes against humanity, Franklin’s notion of what wewould call war crimes grew in part from an objection to ‘piratical’ actsas crimes considered to be perpetrated against all people. ‘I do not wishto see a New Barbary rising in America, and our long extended Coastoccupied by Piratical States’. And just as their victims were universal,no perpetrator should enjoy impunity. Thus Franklin aimed to con-strain American forces as well as their enemies:

I fear lest our Privateering Success in the two last Wars should alreadyhave given our People too strong a relish for that most mischievous Kindof Gaming mixed with Blood[.] And that if a stop is not now put to thePractice, Mankind may be more plagued with American Corsairs thanthey have been and are with the Turkish.44

However the specific term ‘war crimes’, which emerged in the nine-teenth century, was legally codified, like crimes against humanity, onlyat the time of the 1907 Hague Convention, which drew upon what itcalled ‘the laws of humanity’.45 Article 1 of that Convention obligedsignatories to conduct their military operations ‘in accordance with thelaws and customs of war’, and Article 23 made it a crime to ‘kill orwound treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation orarmy’.46

42 ‘No more raping and pillaging’, Yale Alumni Magazine, Nov.–Dec. (2011), p. 34.43 Article 23, Prussian-American Treaty of Amity and Commerce, 9 July 1785: http://www.rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/FOEA-03-01-02-0110 (accessed 31 July 2012).44 Benjamin Franklin to David Hartley, from Passy, 8 May 1788, http://www.franklinpapers.org/franklin/framedVolumes.jsp (accessed 30 July 2012).45 Chérif Bassiouni, ‘Crimes against humanity’, http://www.crimesofwar.org/a-z-guide/crimes-against-humanity/ (accessed 29 Aug. 2012).46 Hague Convention (1V), 19 Oct. 1907: http://www.avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hague04.asp (accessed 29 Aug. 2012).



Thus in early modern English, the terms ‘holocaust’, ‘extermination’and ‘crimes against humanity’ were already in use in something liketheir modern meanings. Clear conceptions of war crimes also existedbefore and during the early modern era. The application to earlymodern events of these terms and certainly of the concepts they reflectcannot be considered anachronistic. On the contrary, it can only beinstructive to assess such events in the cultural context of their time.

V

Given its more recent coinage, the term ‘genocide’ is often considered toapply only to twentieth-century events like the Armenian Genocide inthe First World War and the Holocaust. Yet this colloquial temporallimit was not the intention of Raphael Lemkin when he invented theterm during the Second World War. He meant it to apply much morebroadly, including to pre-1900 colonial genocides, of which he wrote insome detail.47 He knew that prosecution of individuals for those long-past deeds would be legally improper as well as physically impossible,but he regarded comparative historical use of the concept as not onlyvalid but useful. Lemkin’s word ‘genocide’ and most elements of hisconception of it are enshrined in the 1948 Genocide Convention(excluding the targeting of political parties and cultural destruction).The main components of the international law prohibiting genocide arethreefold: the perpetrator’s ‘intent to destroy’ a group ‘in whole or inpart’, the nature of that victim group (‘national, ethnical, racial orreligious’), and the acts committed, such as ‘killing members of thegroup’.

During the 1980s Leo Kuper, the pioneering sociologist of genocide,also identified a broader phenomenon that he labelled ‘genocidal mas-sacres’. This category, not necessarily covered by the 1948 Convention,comprises shorter, limited episodes of killing directed at a specific localor regional community, targeted because of its membership in a largergroup but at the hands of perpetrators who may not (or cannot beproven to) harbour an intent to destroy the group ‘as such’ (which theConvention requires). Genocidal massacres often serve as object lessonsfor other members of the group.48 They may be state-organized, or morespontaneous, such as outbreaks of deadly communal violence.

Despite this recent coining of the term ‘genocide’, once again theconcept it describes is not at all new. Las Casas clearly understood it in1550 when he asserted that his opponent Sepúlveda, who proclaimed‘that God destroyed the seven nations that dwelt in the Promised Land’,

47 Steven L. Jacobs (ed.), Lemkin on Genocide (Lanham, MD, 2012), e.g. pp. 17–19; Ann Curthoys,‘Raphael Lemkin’s Tasmania: an introduction’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39 (2005), pp. 162–96.48 Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT, 1981), pp.59ff.; Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven, CT,1990), p. 26.

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had used that authority ‘to urge the Spanish nation to annihilate theIndians’.49 In France Michel de Montaigne, a one-time student ofGeorge Buchanan, shared a similar understanding of what had hap-pened in the New World when he lamented in 1588: ‘so many nationsdestroyed and made desolate, so infinite millions of harmless peoples ofall sexes, states, and ages massacred’.50 In 1631 the leading EnglishPuritan minister William Gouge, too, demonstrated an understandingof the notion of genocide while objecting to its practice. He rejected thepurported justification that the Israelites had sometimes annihilated alltheir enemies, including women and the elderly, by responding that thelatter ‘were by God devoted to utter destruction’, but that ‘Extraordi-nary cases are not exemplary’.51

In December 1641, seven Catholic Irish lords of the Pale charged thatthe English military governor of Dublin, Sir Charles Coote, had pro-posed ‘to performe . . . a generall massacre upon all of our religion’.52

This formulation suggests their familiarity at that time with a concept ofthe ‘intent to destroy’ that, with the concomitant acts, we would nowterm genocide or genocidal massacre. And the counter-allegation widelypublicized in England in the later 1640s, that the Irish rebellion of 1641had involved a ‘general massacre’ of Protestants in Ireland, also sug-gests that the same concept was equally comprehensible to seventeenth-century English.53 From early in the English Civil War, parliamentaryarmies engaged in ‘reciprocal but unsystematic atrocities’ against Irishtroops serving with royalist forces in England. In July 1644, the thirdearl of Essex decided the fate of six captured prisoners by writing that ifthey proved not to be ‘English Irish’ but rather ‘absolute Irish’, then‘you may cause them to be executed, for I would not have quarterallowed to those’. Upon a victory soon afterwards, quarter ‘was grantedto all but Irish rebels’. Then parliament adopted a more systematicpolicy. On 24 October 1644, it passed an ordinance requiring that ‘noQuarter shall be given hereafter to any Irishmen, nor to any Papistswhatsoever born in Ireland’, who were captured in battle by parliamen-tary forces. They were to be ‘forthwith put . . . to death’. Barbara

49 Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, pp. 104, 113.50 Michel de Montaigne, 1588, quoted in John Merriman, A History of Modern Europe (2 vols;New York, 1996), I, 45.51 William Gouge, The Churches Conquest over the Sword, in Gods Three Arrows: Plague, Famine,Sword, 2nd edn (London, 1631), p. 295, quoted in Donagan, ‘Atrocity, war crime, and treason inthe English Civil War’, p. 1142 n. 17.52 Letter to the Lords Justices from the Hill of Taragh, 7 Dec. 1641, signed by Fingal and six otherPale lords; and, Confederate Peers to Nobility and Gentry of Galway, 29 Dec. 1641; texts repro-duced in Richard Bellings (d. 1677), ‘The Irish confederation and war, 1641–1642’ [c.1670], in JohnT. Gilbert (ed.), History of the Irish Confederation and The War in Ireland, 1641–1643 (7 vols;Dublin, 1882), I, 38–9, 244–5.53 Aidan Clarke, ‘The “1641 Massacres” ’, and Ben Kiernan, ‘Settler colonies, ethnoreligiousviolence, and historical documentation: comparative reflections on Southeast Asia and Ireland’, inJane Ohlmeyer and Micheál Ó Siochrú (eds), Ireland 1641: Contexts and Reactions (Manchester,2013), pp. 37–51, 254–73.



Donagan comments that parliament had ‘legislated to override the lawsof war on ethnic grounds’. A puritan preacher at the time lauded thedecision as the ‘Golden Ordinance, for giving no quarter to the Irish’. Itwas not uniformly implemented.54 Charles Carlton writes that ‘someofficers such as the earl of Denbigh were reluctant to obey this infamousorder’, while ‘most were not’.55 It is difficult to argue that in this caseparliament lacked an intent to single out for slaughter members of anethnic or religious group as such, which would meet the modern require-ments of the Genocide Convention, let alone that parliament possessedno conception of what we would call genocide. And it is equally clearthat some contemporaries objected.

Fifty years later, during the English conquest of the Scottish High-lands in 1691, London’s secretary of state for Scotland, Sir JohnDalrymple, wrote of the MacDonald clan of Glencoe: ‘[T]here is noreckoning with them; delenda est Carthago’. In directly quoting theclassical incitement ‘Carthage Must Be Destroyed’, repeatedly utteredby Marcus Porcius Cato (the Censor) during the 150s bce, Dalrymplemade clear that he intended a similar kind of action and outcome, onethat today we would call genocide. This concept and intent are evidenteven though the lack of a term for them required the use of a range ofother vocabulary to provide practical descriptions of what was to bedone. Dalrymple described the Catholic MacDonalds as ‘the onlypopish clan in the kingdom, and it will be popular to take a severecourse with them’. He instructed the authorities in Scotland to use ‘fireand sword and all manner of hostility; to burn their houses, . . . and tocut off [kill] the men’. Dalrymple termed this action ‘rooting out thedamnable sept [clan]’. King William signed orders to attack the clanleader MacIain of Glencoe ‘and that tribe’ and ‘to extirpate that band ofthieves’. Dalrymple urged ‘that the thieving tribe in Glencoe may berooted out in earnest’. These genocidal orders passed down the chain ofcommand. When they reached Scotland, the commander in chief there,Sir Thomas Livingstone, knew that MacIain had surrendered two weeksearlier and sworn an oath of loyalty. Yet Livingstone told LieutenantColonel James Hamilton that ‘the orders are so positive from Court tome not to spare any of them that have not timely come in’, that heshould ‘begin with Glencoe, and spare nothing which belongs to him,but do not trouble the Government with prisoners’. Dalrymple insistedthat, despite its surrender, the ‘thieving tribe’ must be ‘rooted out andcut off. It must be quietly done’. Hamilton informed Major RobertDuncanson: ‘The orders are that none be spared’. Duncanson instructedCaptain Robert Campbell ‘to put to the sword all under seventy’. It was‘the King’s special command’ that ‘these miscreants be cut off root andbranch’. Attacking Glencoe in a snowstorm, troops killed MacIain and

54 Barbara Donagan, War in England, 1642–1649 (Oxford, 2008), pp. 206–7.55 Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars 1638–1651(London, 1992), pp. 261–2.

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thirty-seven of his men in their homes, and some women and children,but most of the clan escaped. Days later, when Hamilton reportedtaking prisoners, Livingstone ruled it ‘a mistake that these villains werenot shot’, and he ordered all prisoners ‘dispatched . . . where they arefound’. Dalrymple wrote: ‘All I regret is, that any of the sept gotaway’.56 The detailed documentation reveals that the concept and theintent were both clear to all involved.

Benjamin Franklin (again) was one of those who knew a genocidalmassacre when he saw it, even though he too lacked a word for it. InPennsylvania in 1763, he denounced one case in unmistakably clearterms:

If an Indian injures me, does it follow that I may revenge that Injury onall Indians? It is well known, that Indians are of different Tribes, Nationsand Languages, as well as the White People. In Europe, if the French, whoare White People, should injure the Dutch, are they to revenge it on theEnglish, because they too are White People? The only Crime of these poorWretches seems to have been, that they had a reddish-brown Skin, andblack Hair; and some People of that Sort, it seems, had murdered some ofour Relations. If it be right to kill Men for such a Reason, then, shouldany Man, with a freckled Face and red Hair, kill a Wife or Child of mine,it would be right for me to revenge it, by killing all the freckled red-hairedMen, Women and Children.

Franklin concluded that the group of Indians recently slaughtered byhis countrymen from Paxton, Pennsylvania, would have been safer ifthey had lived among ‘the ancient Heathens’, the ‘cruel Turks’, Moors,‘Popish Spaniards’, or ‘Negroes of Africa’. And yet ‘our Frontier Peoplecall themselves Christians!’ Their victims ‘would have been safe in anypart of the known World, except in the Neighbourhood of the Christianwhite savages’ of Paxton.57

In 1750, just thirteen years before Franklin wrote these words, on theother side of the world the king of Cambodia, Ang Snguon (r. 1749–55),conducted a campaign of genocidal killing that French missionariesthere described in detail as a ‘general . . . massacre’, the same term usedby both sides in the conflicts in Ireland in the 1640s. The missionary M.Piguel described the context in Cambodia when he wrote to his superiorin April 1751: ‘It is war inside [the country] every day’. The king hadlaunched his campaign the previous year, in the midst of both civil warand conflict with the Vietnamese kingdom of Dàng Trong, known toEuropeans as Cochinchina:

There have been great cruelties on both sides. The Cambodians havemassacred all the Cochinchinese that they could find in the country,

56 John Prebble, Glencoe: The Story of the Massacre (London, 1968), pp. 153, 177–84, 202–3,214–19, 230–1.57 Benjamin Franklin, A Narrative of the Late Massacres, in Lancaster County, of a Number ofIndians, Friends of This Province . . . (Philadelphia, 1764), excerpted in Wilcomb E. Washburn (ed.),The Indian and the White Man (New York, 1964), pp. 253–6.



including three mandarins; several Christians were caught up in thismurder. . . . At first they took no prisoners, but killed all those they couldfind. Now they are sent as slaves to the king of Siam, to repay him for thehelp he has given to the king of Cambodia.58

Another missionary, M. d’Azema, specified that it was at the end of July1750 that the Cambodian king had launched these attacks on everyVietnamese residing in Cambodian territory:

he gave orders or permission to massacre all the Cochinchinese who couldbe found, and this order was executed very precisely and very cruelly; thismassacre lasted a month and a half; only about twenty women andchildren were spared; no one knows the number of deaths, and it wouldbe very difficult to find out, for the massacre was general from Cahon toHa-tien, with the exception of a few who were able to escape through theforest or fled by sea to Ha-tien.

Of Cambodia’s ‘numerous’ Vietnamese residents, d’Azema reportedfinding no survivors, ‘pagan or Christian’.59 This was a description of agenocide two centuries before that term was coined.

A century later, another French observer used the term ‘generalmassacre’, this time to describe Siamese violence in 1839 against the‘numerous’ Vietnamese who had taken up residence in Cambodia in theearly nineteenth century. A missionary confirmed that the slaughter wascountrywide; the Siamese ‘fell upon Cambodia, rallied the whole popu-lation around them, and massacred the Annamites [Vietnamese] dis-persed in the country’.60

There was indeed, then, an early modern conception of genocide. Thephenomenon was not unthinkable. Genocide did occur in early moderntimes, but it was neither normal practice nor universally permitted. Itoften provoked dissent. This grasp of the concept and its moral impli-cations long preceded the mid-twentieth-century coining of our word forit.

By contrast, the twentieth-century assumption that pre-modernpeople had either no concept of genocide or no objection to it, and thatit could only be anachronistic to employ it to analyse or assess theiractions, often obstructs current discussions of ancient or early modernmass killing. The problem is not the retrospective nature of the 1940sterm. Given that the concept of genocide was understood and employed

58 M. Piguel à Mgr. Lefebvre, 8 avril 1751, in Adrien Launay, Histoire de la Mission deCochinchine 1658–1823, Documents Historiques, II: 1728–1771 (Paris, 1924), p. 368.59 M. d’Azema à M. de Noëlène (n.d.), quoted in M. J.-B. Maigrot à Mgr. de Martiliat, 16septembre 1751, and d’Azema aux Directeurs du Séminaire des M.-E., Cambodge, 20 juin 1757, inLaunay, Histoire de la Mission de Cochinchine 1658–1823, II, 365–73, at pp. 366, 370; Khin Sok, LeCambodge entre le Siam et le Vietnam (de 1775 à 1860) (Paris, 1991), p. 37.60 Auguste Pavie, ‘Excursion dans le Cambodge et le Royaume de Siam’, Excursions et Reconnais-sances, 7, no. 18 (1884), p. 405; C.-E. Bouillevaux, Voyage dans l’Indochine, 1848–1856 (Paris,1858), p. 181. See Nola Cooke and Li Tana, Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in theLower Mekong Region, 1750–1880 (New York, 2004), p. 155 n. 42.

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at the time, it would rather be anachronistic not to hold contemporaryactors to standards proclaimed and critiques levelled in their day.

Before doing so, we should note several current misunderstandings ofthe 1948 UN legal definition of genocide. An imprecise colloquialunderstanding of it is often used to indicate an effect or an outcome,rather than an act or a crime. That confuses genocide with extinction.Even some scholarly discussion betrays the misapprehension that ‘geno-cide’ indicates the outcome for the victim group, rather than the intentand acts of the perpetrator. This mistake allows some scholars to applythe term to all other factors facilitating a people’s complete destruction,including, say, even the inadvertent spread of epidemic diseases, ratherthan just to deliberate violence by criminal perpetrators. Conversely,such broad overuse and misuse of ‘genocide’ allows other scholars onthe opposite side of a debate to counter by dismissing the notion itselfas simply far too broad to be usable, since genocide supposedly requiresno human intent or even action. The legal definition requires both intentand action. More precise and coherent, it is quite usable for historians.Especially when, as we have seen, a similar concept existed in pre-modern times, historians should not ignore it. In each possible case thekey question is whether the facts fit that concept.

A different misapprehension is that only a government or state cancommit genocide. The 1948 UN Convention makes no mention of anysuch requirement. It clearly allows for the possibility of subordinate orprivate groups perpetrating the crime. Recognizing this, some scholarshave proposed amending the UN definition to specify that genocide is acrime specifically committed by ‘a state or other authority’.61 That too isnot the existing legal definition.

Nor does genocide require, as some insist, a race war, a massivetwo-sided conflict pitting entire peoples against one another. A full-fledged race war bears little relationship to real outbreaks of genocide,which are not the work of a whole ‘race’ or even of a community. Arelated but more scholarly illusion holds that if some members of theperpetrator’s race or community decline to commit genocidal acts, orsuffer from them, then no genocide has occurred. Both these perspec-tives are misleading. Genocide can be and usually is ordered, andpossibly even conducted, by just a very small, conspiratorial, but well-armed group, who can be and often are just as cruel to dissentingmembers of their own ethnic group as they are to their primary targetsand victims. For both historical and prevention purposes, it is impor-tant to study why some members of a community might refrain fromparticipation in a genocide. But their specific restraint is no proof of theabsence of genocide. Rather, it only highlights those crimes committedby demonstrating the possibility of alternative courses of action.

61 Chalk and Jonassohn, History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 23.



Some scholars argue further that genocide is not a phenomenon thatcan be studied for its own sake, either because it is unimportant in itselfor because it is partial or incomplete, and they assert that its study needsto be ‘balanced’ by study of its absence. On this view, evidence ofgenocide occurring in a region can be contradicted by adducing evi-dence that it failed to occur at certain levels, locations or times, sup-posedly demonstrating that the phenomenon itself was not present. Butunder the international law definition, the crime of genocide does notneed to be practiced universally across a society. For instance, perpe-trators may target a group either ‘in whole or in part’. Just as somemembers of the perpetrators’ ethnic group may be uninvolved in agenocide, or targeted in it, some members of a victim group may bespared.

To recapitulate, there are at least six common scholarly misunder-standings of the phenomenon of genocide. First, that it is anachronisticto apply not only the term but even the concept to pre-twentieth-centuryevents. Second, that the legal definition refers to the crime’s effect, notthe perpetrator’s intent. Third, that its drafters deliberately cast thedefinition too wide for historians to use. Fourth, that only a state cancommit genocide, and fifth, that it must also involve the participation ofan entire ethnic group. Finally, that a genocide can be disproved bydocumentation of specific times or places where it did not occur.62

Yet we cannot dismiss the possibility of early modern ‘genocide’simply because of the term’s retrospectivity. Like war crimes, theconcept has long existed and been discussed, as have the terms holo-caust, extermination, and crimes against humanity. Applying any or allof them to early modern England or Ireland is certainly not anachro-nistic in principle. Long before the coining of the word genocide, thecurrency of similar terms and phrases shows that people were familiarwith the concept.

Walter Devereux, the first earl of Essex (1541–76), was aware of theconcept. And he found a word for it. Essex used the verb ‘unpeople’ to

62 As an illustration of the currency of these misunderstandings, all six of them are found in arecent essay pertinent to the theme of this collection: Rory Rapple, ‘Writing about violence in theTudor kingdoms’, The Historical Journal, 54 (2011), pp. 829–54 (in part a critique of my chapter‘The English conquest of Ireland, 1565–1603’, in Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History ofGenocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (New Haven, CT, 2007), pp. 169–212). Forinstance, Rapple not only incorrectly asserts that under the UN definition of genocide merely ‘theeffect of the actions provide sufficient proof – a crucial point’, but equally falsely, he attributes thatview to me. No such assertion is found in my work, certainly not in the pages he cites (Blood andSoil, ‘pp. 9–20’; Rapple, ‘Writing’, p. 850 n. 62). He also rejects what he calls my ‘repeated assertionthat genocide, extermination, and colonization were the manifest aims of official crown policy inIreland’ (p. 853). I neither made nor repeated any such assertion (e.g. pp. 197–208). For his part,Vincent P. Carey makes a cogent case for attributing to ‘state terror’ a key role in ‘the genocidalfury’ that raged in Elizabethan Ireland: Carey, ‘Elizabeth I and state terror in sixteenth-centuryIreland’, in Donald Stump et al. (eds), Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’: Essays in Literature,History and Culture (Tempe, AZ, 2011), pp. 201–16. But whether genocide occurred by no meansdepends on ‘official crown policy’ alone.

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describe his troops’ mass murder in 1574 of hundreds of unarmedmembers of the Clandeboy O’Neill clan, who had assembled with apromise of protection for a Christmas feast near Belfast. Essex’s forcessurprised and slaughtered them. He knew precisely what he might beaccused of. In a letter to the Privy Council in London, Essex wrote thatthat he had planned for his ‘ordinarie soldiours’ to be able to masterand ‘utterlie to unpeople or unweapon all the yrissherie’ in Clandeboye,and he even added that ‘I wish the inhabitanntes to be all Englishe’. Butin a revealing acknowledgement that he knew the weight of the conceptin the minds of his audience, Essex also quickly tried to absolve himselfof responsibility for the massacre. He protested, ‘I never mente tounpeople the Cuntrie Clandeboy of their naturall inhabitanntes’.63 Instraightforwardly denying any such intent on his part, as well as in someof his other activities in Ireland, Essex betrayed little cognitive difficultyin identifying and comprehending the notion of ‘unpeopling’ a region bymass killing.64

Historians must analyse actions and events of the pre-modern era inthe context of intellectual and cultural stipulations discussed at the time,and of knowledge paradigms available to people of that era. Suchconcepts included not only holocaust, extermination, crimes againsthumanity and war crimes, but also more precise notions of ‘generalmassacre’ or ‘unpeopling’ that prefigure the modern term ‘genocide’. Todismiss past episodes of mass killing by explaining them as merely partof a very different society would be to grant historiographical immunityto an entire era or dominant community. That is an ahistorical choice.It dehumanizes individual actors, ignores their decisions, obfuscates theworkings of power, distances us from the past, and comes dangerouslyclose to reifying a natural order of things that denies human agency overtime.

63 ‘The annsweare of the Earle of Essex to the doubtes, conceaved uppon his Platt for thereformation of Ulster’, British Library, Add. MS 48015, fos 323r–332v, pp. 4–6.64 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 197–200 (on Essex). Historian Valerie M. Bary recently describedEssex as ‘a heavy-handed soldier, who believed in the complete annihilation of the Irish people,with war followed by the inevitable famine and fevers which would clear the lands for Englishsettlers’: Bary, ‘The earl of Essex’s descent into Munster’, Journal of the Kerry Archaeological andHistorical Society, ser. 2, 11 (2011), pp. 62–78, at p. 63.

