Colonialism and Genocide

Dirk Moses, Dan Stone, Dirk Moses, Dan Stone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317997528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Previously published as a special issue of Patterns of Prejudice, this is the first book to link colonialism and genocide in a systematic way in the context of world history. It fills a significant gap in the current understanding on genocide and the Holocaust, which sees them overwhelmingly as twentieth century phenomena.

This book publishes Lemkin's account of the genocide of the Aboriginal Tasmanians for the first time and chapters cover:

• the exterminatory rhetoric of racist discourses before the 'scientific racism' of the mid-nineteenth century
• Charles Darwin's preoccupation with the extinction of peoples in the face of European colonialism,
• a reconstruction of a virtually unknown case of 'subaltern genocide'
• global perspective on the links between modernity and the Holocaust

Social theorists and historians alike will find this a must-read.

‘It is scarcely possible to conceive that human beings could be so hideous and loathsome’: discourses of genocide in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Australia¹

NORBERT FINZSCH

Et on tuera tous les affreux²

Exterminate all the brutes³

In the discussion about European colonialisms, it has become a commonplace to assume that modern racism emerged with Darwinism and with the modern nation-state in the second half of the nineteenth century. Through Darwinian thinking, racism acquired both a biological and a scientific basis, and 'culture' ceased to be a decisive factor in the presumed difference between human 'races'. Stephen Jay Gould expressed the conventional wisdom when he remarked that, following the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859,⁴ 'subsequent arguments for slavery, colonialism, racial differences, class structures, and sex roles would go forth primarily under the banner of science'.⁵ Nationalism, so this account continues, was racialized, just as racism was nationalized.⁶ For this reason, the 'age of scientific racism' witnessed major genocides, such as the annihilation of the Hereros by German troops in South-west Africa in 1904-5, the slaughter of Armenians in Turkey in 1915, and the mass murder of Jews and other groups during the Holocaust in Europe.⁷

There are good reasons, however, not to limit the concept of genocide to the application of racial theories in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. After all, the period before 1860 witnessed genocidal wars in both North America and Australia.⁸ Then there is the fact that immigrants from various parts of the world settled in places like North America and Australia, where they drove the indigenous peoples from their lands by high and low intensity wars, infectious diseases, ecological shifts, government policies and in a process of more or less peaceful expansion of settlers and squatters that Carl Schmitt has called the ‘taking of the land’.⁹ White/indigenous interaction and subsequent white settlement are virtually simultaneous with processes of invasion and displacement of indigenous populations, notwithstanding that in both societies the relations between indigenous and settler societies went through periods of peaceful interaction, cultural accommodation and mutual adjustment.

The question is how killings and dispossession of the Native Americans and Aborigines before the 1860s was possible and legitimizable, given that the ‘age of Enlightenment’ is usually perceived as a relatively benign period for the interaction of western and indigenous populations. In this article, I argue that Darwinian thinking was preceded by and overlapped with an archaic racism with genocidal potential, constituted by the visual othering of indigenous populations in America and Australia. This contention does not exclude the possible co-existence of scientific racism and archaic racism after 1859 or early forms of scientific racism before 1859. My assertion rather tries to establish the existence of a racism based on the body, aesthetic categories and culture.¹⁰ This visual ideology constructed a racialized and gendered abject Other on the basis of aesthetics and an assessment of the Other’s economic, societal and linguistic achievements.¹¹ By placing the indigenous Other at the very bottom rung of humanity, this discourse justified the Other’s expulsion from native lands, economic exploitation, destruction of the indigenous ecosphere and even eventual genocide.¹² A racism emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, then, but a racism not defined by scientific definitions of ‘race’, as in the case of post-Darwinian biology. Accordingly, this analysis focuses on the years between 1788 and the 1850s, the crucial period of early colonialism before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.¹³

Eighteenth-century colonial projects had their own historic pattern and, although specific colonialisms differ in time, place and agents, they share certain attributes.¹⁴ These commonalities constitute the basis for a comparison of British expansionism in North America and Australia.¹⁵ English language, customs and British laws and institutions influenced the underlying cultural and political structures for the first decades, if not centuries, after settlement. And both settler societies were influenced deeply by the existence of peoples of non-European descent that had settled the country a long time before Europeans arrived. To be sure, primitivism was one of many colonial ideologies, and it does not necessarily entail a genocidal potential. Montaigne’s ‘On Cannibals’ or Tacitus’ ‘Germania’ do not constitute genocidal discourse, for instance. But, in the primitivism in both these settler societies, the Europeans perceived the indigenes as savage, barbaric, wild and uncivilized.¹⁶ I draw on primary sources by white people who actually went to Australia, saw indigenous people with their own eyes and came to conclusions about the ‘character’ of ‘savages’.

Why focus on such perceptions? Since a nation-state and a war machine capable of carrying out secret genocides did not exist before 1850, the early colonial genocides had to be brought about by ‘people on the ground’, meaning the discoverers, soldiers, settlers and squatters that filled the ‘wilderness’ by conquering, surveying, buying and ploughing native lands. ‘Settler imperialism’ was at the very core of premodern genocide.¹⁷

This is not just a story of parallels. Whereas colonial expansion in North America started as early as the seventeenth century, in Australia it began only in 1788 after the American colonies had gained their independence from England and at the height of ‘the age of Enlightenment’.¹⁸ Whereas in North America settlers were looking for political and religious freedom, in Australia the first colonizers were convicts accompanied by a detachment of British marines. Yet both military men and convicts had some previous knowledge about indigenous peoples without ever having actually seen Aborigines before their ships anchored in Port Jackson: British soldiers and officers had been fighting in the French and Indian Wars of North America (1755-63) as well as during the American Revolution and, in both colonial conflicts, native troops had played a major part, both as allies and as enemies of the British soldiers. The British in Australia, having the American experience in their heads, were ready to perceive the Aborigines as just another variety of North American Indian; in fact, they used the very same words to describe them.¹⁹

Discourses and dispositives

Any policy of genocide, extermination, colonialism or expansion rests on two pillars. It needs agents and perpetrators who serve as carriers of the policy, and it needs a discourse that endows these agents with the knowledge/power, justification and rationale for their practices. Mind-management necessarily complements military and economic domination in the repertoire of colonialism and imperialism. This article addresses the discourses of legitimization, namely, the ‘discourses of genocide’.²⁰ I will not deal with the way British colonials, bureaucrats, officers and settlers treated Native Americans and Australian Aborigines realiter, but focus instead on the discourses of primitivism and exclusion that abounded in the Anglo-sphere after 1788. These discourses are part of colonialism in the form of a dispositive, that is, an apparatus of power relations that backs up types of knowledge and that is in turn supported by them. This apparatus consists of a network of various and heterogeneous elements, such as discourses, laws, prescriptions, buildings and institutions.²¹

Before the impact of scientific racism in the 1860s, these discourses helped to define not only the superiority of western explorers, colonialists and imperialists over the colonized, but lay the ground for the latter’s exploitation, enslavement and eventual genocide. When I use the concept of genocide in a c olonial context, I refer to the international legal definition of the crime of genocide as found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. Article II describes the two elements of the crime of genocide: the mental element, meaning the ‘intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’, and the physical element, which includes a range of five acts, namely, killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. According to this definition, a crime must include both elements to be called ‘genocide’.²² Since the intent, defined as ‘anticipated outcome’, precedes actual acts of killing or harming, it is safe to say that any form of genocide requires anticipation and discursive preparation.

Such preparation was laid by early travellers, observers, ethnographers and amateur anthropologists who provided ‘evidence’ for a classification of human groups and their subsequent subjection to a hierarchy of qualities. Thus Darwin’s mentor John Stevens Henslow could write in 1837:

To obtain a knowledge of a science of observation, like botany, we need make very little more exertion at first than is required for adapting a chosen set of terms to certain appearances of which the eye takes cognizance, and when this has been attained, all the rest is very much like reading a book after we have learned to spell, where every page affords a fresh field of intellectual enjoyment.²³

Observation was a way not only to reify the objects of the visible world but also to bestow on the colonial gaze the character of scientific truth.

Visual abjection

Central to the definition of genocide is the concept of intent, the paramount wish that the other group should cease to exist, be it as a consequence of adverse economic and ecological conditions or the kidnapping of children. Before acts of violence and dispossession could be committed in the period before the 1860s, perpetrators and silent witnesses had to agree on a taxonomy of primitivism that would allow perpetrators and witnesses to view Native Americans and Aborigines as less than equal, less than civilized and less than human. These discursive entities coalesce into an image of a ‘creature’ that is utterly rejected and excluded from humanity.²⁴ This position of abjection is analysed by Giorgio Agamben, who shows how political power is most effective when it does not deal with politics per se, but with human existence as an object of bio-power.²⁵ Bio-power constitutes a form of power/knowledge that is inscribed on bodies and that becomes visible on the body, especially through a panoptic gaze. Groups and individuals that remain outside of the desired effects of bio-power are ‘unliveable’, and are defined as unworthy of life.²⁶

Two basic models for describing the indigenous had been developed during the seventeenth cen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. 'It is scarcely possible to conceive that human beings could be so hideous and loathsome': discourses of genocide in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America and Australia
• 2. Mr Darwin's shooters: on natural selection and the naturalizing of genocide
• 3. Caribbean genocide: racial war in Haiti, 1802-4
• 4. Raphaël Lemkin's 'Tasmania': an introduction
• 5. Tasmania
• 6. The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination
• 7. The concentration camp and development: the pasts and future of genocide
• 8. Conceptual blockages and definitional dilemmas in the 'racial century': genocides of indigenous peoples and the Holocaust
• 9. White men with low moral standards? German anthropology and the Herero genocide
• Index