Genocides in history (before World War I)

Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group's conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
The preamble to the CPPCG states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations and condemned by the civilized world", and it also states that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Genocide is widely considered to be the epitome of human evil, and has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence.
The debate continues over what legally constitutes genocide. One definition is any conflict that the International Criminal Court has so designated. Mohammed Hassan Kakar argues that the definition should include political groups or any group so defined by the perpetrator. He prefers the definition from Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, which defines genocide as "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by the perpetrator."
In literature, some scholars have popularly emphasized the role that the Soviet Union played in excluding political groups from the international definition of genocide, which is contained in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in particular they have written that Joseph Stalin may have feared greater international scrutiny of the political killings that occurred in the country, such as the Great Purge; however, this claim is not supported by evidence. The Soviet view was shared and supported by many diverse countries, and they were also in line with Raphael Lemkin's original conception, and it was originally promoted by the World Jewish Congress.
According to Canadian scholar Adam Jones, if a dominant group of people had little in common with a marginalised group of people, it was easy for the dominant group to define the other as subhuman. As a result, the marginalised group might be labeled as a threat that must be eliminated. Jones continues: "The difficulty, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn pointed out in their early study, is that such historical records as exist are ambiguous and undependable. While history today is generally written with some fealty to 'objective' facts, most previous accounts aimed rather to praise the writer's patron (normally the leader) and to emphasise the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs."
Chalk and Jonassohn wrote that: "Historically and anthropologically peoples have always had a name for themselves. In a great many cases, that name meant 'the people' to set the owners of that name off against all other people who were considered of lesser quality in some way. If the differences between the people and some other society were particularly large in terms of religion, language, manners, customs, and so on, then such others were seen as less than fully human: pagans, savages, or even animals."
Yarin Eski, a criminologist at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, argues that "genocidal violence and mass exploitation are perhaps the defining characteristics of being human," and he also describes how our talent for murder put an end to the Neanderthals, and it has also colored all subsequent human history. Similarly, Kwang Hyun Ho stresses the fact that modern humans possess a mutated gene which is related to aggression and combined with fossil evidence, the possession of it by early modern humans proves that the Neanderthals were killed in acts of violence which were committed by early modern humans. The first person to publish an analysis of a Neanderthal, French paleontologist Marcellin Boule, was also the first to suppose (in 1912) that early humans violently replaced Neanderthals. In particular, larger tribal groupings and projectile weapons were supposed to give modern humans an edge in violent conflicts with Neanderthals and other indigenous populations of archaic humans that allowed early modern humans to wipe out other hominin species as they spread out of Africa. This view is at odds with the more supported views that Neanderthal extinction occurred due to events such as interbreeding, inbreeding, disease, and climate change. Archaeologist Helle Vandkilde highlights how trauma that is indicative of interpersonal violence is only present in approximately 20 cases of Neanderthal and Homo sapiens skeletal remains in the Palaeolithic.
Historian Max Ostrovsky concludes that chiefdoms performed the most genocidal warfare in human history and practiced this kind of warfare all over the world, wherever culture reached the level of chiefdom. He based his conclusion on anthropological researches and notes that Thomas Malthus collected many reports on genocidal wars by chiefdoms.
Malthus regards chiefdoms as an intermediate stage between independent tribes and states. By contrast to independent tribes, chiefdoms cumulated power after their decisive military victories but they did not learn to enslave their defeated enemies yet. Hence, according to Malthus, chiefdoms simply slaughtered them: "Their object of war is not conquest but destruction... Among the Iroquois, the phrase by which they express their resolution to make war against an enemy is 'let us go and eat that nation.'" The verb "eat" has a literal meaning. The cannibalism of chiefdoms appears in the military genocidal context which is referred to as "post-battle rage" rather than hunger. Immanuel Kant supposed that slavery and imperialism appeared at a later, albeit equally savage, stage, when peoples learned "how to make better use of their conquered enemies than to dine off them." Jared Diamond offered a similar explanation, arguing that enslavement of defeated groups could only be introduced at an advanced stage because it required feeding, guarding, and organising slaves for work, and tribal societies could not do these things and hence opted to kill all of the defeated.
Ostrovsky found that the hypothesis of chiefdom genocide applies to the Israelites of the Judges period (c. 1150–1025 BCE) when they formed a chiefdom (of twelve tribes): When Israel defeats the Canaanite nations, the tradition commands, "you must devote them to complete destruction. You shall make no covenant with them and show no mercy to them" (Deuteronomy 7:1–2). Similarly to the chiefdoms which are described in the Age of Discovery, the genocide of the Hebrew ban was total which means that it extended to women, children and domestic animals (1 Samuel 15:3). "[You] must not leave anything that breathes" (Deuteronomy 20:16). The Bible exaggerates when it claims that the genocide of the Canaanite peoples (Joshua 10:40–41, 11:21–23, 6:18–19) was total, but, according to Ostrovsky, "whenever the Israelite chiefdom won, the vanquished did not survive." Given the vast data on chiefdom-level warfare, he finds the historicity of the Canaanite genocide credible.
Scholars devoted much of their attention to the Canaanite genocide and scholars of theology struggled to explain why Moses commanded the Israelites to wage a "genocidal" conquest of Canaan and the secular scholar Richard Dawkins characterises Yahweh as a "genocidal" and "blood thirsty ethnic cleanser." The genocides which were committed during the Judges period were partial genocides, such as the destruction of the Midianites by the Israelites (Numbers 31:7–18). Adam Jones notes that this massacre is an example of the partial destruction and the partial incorporation of an enemy ethnicity.
Julius Caesar's army waged a genocidal war against the Germanic chiefdoms (Gallic Wars 1:17). The Annales Bertiniani recorded the impression of survivors from the onslaught of the chiefdom of the Vikings: "Wild beasts... killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons and mothers... They overthrow, they despoil, they destroy, they burn, they ravage; sinister cohort, fatal phalanx, cruel host."
Scholars of antiquity differentiate genocides from gendercides, in which groups of people were conquered and the males who belonged to the conquered groups were killed but the children (particularly the girls) and the women were incorporated into the conquering groups. Jones notes, "Chalk and Jonassohn provide a wide-ranging selection of historical events such as the Assyrian Empire's root-and branch depredations in the first half of the first millennium BCE, and the destruction of Melos by Athens during the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his 'Melian Dialogue'". Jones and Wendy Lower also detail how gendercides are a common feature through much classical literature in the western tradition. Additionally, Jones highlights in an article published in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2000, that the gender specific targeting of men for extermination has persisted through many cases of conflict in the 20th century.
In the Cambridge World History of Genocide, anthropologist and archaeologist Danielle Kurin wrote that there is archaeological evidence of genocidal violence at various points in time in the prehistoric Andes in South America.
During the Third Punic War, the city of Carthage was besieged by Roman forces for three years (149–146 BCE). Once the city was breached, the Romans spent seven days systematically destroying it and killing its inhabitants. Ben Kiernan has labelled the devastation of the city and the massacre of its population "the first genocide". Kiernan highlights calls for the destruction of Carthage before the third Punic war, and escalating rhetoric during the siege, with Polybius stating in his report from the battle that the Carthaginians were "utterly exterminated". Scholars Bridget Conley and Alex de Waal, as well as Lemkin considered the destruction of Carthage to have been genocidal.
In 88 BCE, king Mithridates VI of Pontus ordered the murder of all Italics in Asia Minor, resulting in the deaths of about 100,000, mainly civilians. The death toll makes it one of the deadliest recorded genocides in classical antiquity. This action provoked the Romans, leading to the First Mithridatic War.
Julius Caesar's campaign against the Tencteri and Usipetes has been characterised as a genocide. During the Gallic Wars Caesar reported that he burnt every village and building that he could find in the territory of the Eburones, drove off all of the cattle, and his men and beasts consumed all of the corn that the weather of the autumnal season had not destroyed. He left those who had hid themselves, if there were any, alive in the hope that they would all die of hunger in the winter. Caesar said that he wanted to annihilate the Eburones as well as their name. Their country was soon occupied by a Germanic tribe with a different name, the Tungri. However, the report by Tacitus which states that the Tungri were the original "Germani" who first crossed the Rhine, and the way this matches Caesar's description of the Eburones and their neighbours, leads to the possibility that they survived under a new name.
However, historian Johannes Heinrichs [de] (2008) argues that the genocide of the Eburones in 53 BCE could not have happened as Caesar claimed. If the systematic destruction of infrastructure by the Roman forces was intended to prevent the local people from regaining power, the physical extermination of them proved to be impractical. The available areas of refuge which were hardly accessible to the Roman legions were numerous: the low mountain range of the Ardennes, the swamps and wastelands which were located towards the Menapii, the coastal islands, etc. Moreover, Caesar's second attempt to annihilate the tribe two years later is proof that the community survived, and its apparent ability to regenerate itself lead Caesar to believe that he needed to launch more raids against them. According to Nico Roymans, their disappearance from the political map may have resulted from "a policy of damnatio memoriae on the part of the Roman authorities, in combination with the confiscation of Eburonean territory". A great part of their gold fell into Roman hands during repeated Roman raids on the Eburones in 53–51 BCE, and then it was melted down and carried off.
The Bar Kokhba revolt (Hebrew: מֶרֶד בַּר כּוֹכְבָא; Mered Bar Kokhba) was a rebellion against the Roman Empire by the Jews of the Roman province of Judea, led by Simon bar Kokhba. Waged from circa 132–136 CE, it was the last of three major Jewish–Roman wars. The revolt erupted as a result of religious and political tensions which existed in Judea since the end of the failed First Revolt in 66–73 CE. These tensions were exacerbated by the establishment of a large Roman military presence in Judea, changes in administrative life and the economy, together with the outbreak and suppression of Jewish revolts from Mesopotamia to Libya and Cyrenaica. The proximate reasons seem to be the construction of a new city, Aelia Capitolina, over the ruins of Jerusalem and the erection of a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount. The Church Fathers and rabbinic literature emphasise the role of Rufus, governor of Judea, in provoking the revolt. The Bar Kokhba revolt resulted in the extensive depopulation of Judean communities, more so than during the First Jewish–Roman War of 70 CE. According to Cassius Dio, 580,000 Jews perished in the war and many more died of hunger and disease. In addition, many Judean war captives were sold into slavery. The Jewish communities of Judea were devastated to an extent which some scholars describe as a genocide. However, the Jewish population remained strong in other parts of Palestine, thriving in Galilee, Golan, Bet Shean Valley and the eastern, southern and western edges of Judea. Roman casualties were also considered heavy—XXII Deiotariana was disbanded after serious losses. In addition, some historians argue that Legio IX Hispana's disbandment in the mid-2nd century could have been a result of this war. In an attempt to erase any memory of Judea or Ancient Israel, Emperor Hadrian wiped the name off the map and replaced it with Syria Palaestina.
The Later Zhao dynasty (319–351) was a Jie-led state that ruled most of northern China during the Sixteen Kingdoms period in the fourth century CE. At the time, northern China was home to many non-Han Chinese tribes collectively known in historiography as the Wu Hu or "Five Barbarians", of which the Jie were one of them. In its final years, the Later Zhao fell into civil war between members of the imperial family over the throne. One powerful member, Shi Min (later known as Ran Min), was an adopted Han Chinese, and in 350, he seized control of the emperor and capital, Ye through a coup.
After surviving multiple assassination attempts, Shi Min concluded that he could no longer trust the Jie and other non-Han people under his command. In late 350, he issued an order to kill any Jie or central Asians found in the city of Ye, rewarding any Han Chinese for killing any Jie or "barbarian" person they find. Shi Min personally led his army to massacre the tribes in the capital, while ordering his generals to purge their armies of tribespeople. The Jie were an ethnic group which possessed racial characteristics which included high-bridged noses and bushy beards, and as a result, they were easily identified and killed. However, many of the people killed were also mistakenly-identified Han Chinese. In total, 200,000 of them were reportedly massacred. The historians David Graff and Victoria Tin-Bor Hui both describe the actions of Shi Min as a "genocidal campaign", alongside historian Steven L. Jacobs who also considers it as an example of genocide.
Zindīq (Arabic: زنديق) or Zandik (Middle Persian: 𐭦𐭭𐭣𐭩𐭪) was initially used to negatively denote the followers of the Manichaeian religion in the Sasanian Empire. By the time of the 8th-century Abbasid Caliphate however, the meaning of the word zindīq and the adjectival zandaqa had broadened and could loosely denote many things: Gnostic Dualists as well as followers of Manichaeism, agnostics, and atheists. However, many of those who were persecuted for being zandaqa under the Abbasids claimed to be Muslims, and when it was applied to Muslims, the accusation was that the accused secretly harbored Manichaean beliefs. "The proof for such an accusation was sought, if at all, in an indication of some kind of dualism, or if that individual openly flouted Islamic beliefs or practices." As such, certain Muslim poets of early Abbasid times could also be accused of being zandaqa as much as an actual Manichaean might be.
The charge of being a zandaqa was a serious one, and it could cost the accused his/her life. A history of the time cites the "Spiller" caliph Abu al-'Abbas as having said "tolerance is laudable, except in matters which are dangerous to religious belief, or matters which are dangerous to the sovereign's dignity." The third Abbasid caliph, Al-Mahdi, ordered the composition of polemical works that were to be used to refute the beliefs of freethinkers and other heretics, and for years, he attempted to completely exterminate them, hunting them down and exterminating freethinkers in large numbers, putting anyone who was merely suspected of being a zindiq to death. Al-Mahdi's successors, the caliphs al-Hadi and Harun al-Rashid, continued the pogroms, although they occurred with diminished intensity during the reign of the latter and were later ended by him. In turn this policy influenced the Mihna policy of al-Ma'mun which targeted those Muslim religious scholars and officials who refused to accept the doctrine of the created nature of the Quran.
A 2010 study suggests that a group of Ancestral Puebloans in the American Southwest were killed in a genocide that took place circa 800 CE.
The Harrying of the North was a series of military campaigns waged by William the Conqueror in the winter of 1069–1070 to subjugate Northern England, where the presence of the last Wessex claimant, Edgar Ætheling, had encouraged Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian, Anglo-Scandinavian and Danish rebellions. William's strategy, implemented during the winter of 1069–70 (he spent Christmas 1069 in York), has been described by William E. Kapelle and some other modern scholars as an act of genocide. Medieval historian C. P. Lewis details how the consensus view of the Harrying of the North is that it was a particularly harsh course of action and that "modern labelling commonly falls not far short of genocide." Lewis also highlights how the limitations of the evidence available mean it is difficult to assess whether the Harrying of the North meets any of the frameworks of genocide.
From the 11th century to the 16th century, hundreds of massacres were committed against Jewish communities in Europe. The historian Maya Soifer Irish details how these pogroms meet the criteria of "genocidal massacres" as developed by the genocide scholars Leo Kuper and Ben Kiernan.
The Albigensian Crusade or the Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year-long military campaign which Pope Innocent III initiated to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in Southern France. The Crusade was primarily prosecuted by the French crown and it promptly took on a political flavour. It resulted in a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, and realigned the County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown, and diminishing the distinct regional culture and high level of influence of the Counts of Barcelona.
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide" in the 20th century, referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history". Mark Gregory Pegg wrote that "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross."
Robert E. Lerner argues that Pegg's classification of the Albigensian Crusade as a genocide is inappropriate, on the ground that it "was proclaimed against unbelievers ... not against a 'genus' or people; those who joined the crusade had no intention of annihilating the population of southern France ... If Pegg wishes to connect the Albigensian Crusade to modern ethnic slaughter, well—words fail me (as they do him)."
Laurence Marvin is not as dismissive as Lerner regarding Pegg's contention that the Albigensian Crusade was a genocide. He does however take issue with Pegg's argument that the Albigensian Crusade formed an important historical precedent for later genocides, including the Holocaust.
Kurt Jonassohn and Karin Solveig Björnson describe the Albigensian Crusade as "the first ideological genocide". Kurt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk, who together founded the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, include a detailed case study of the Albigensian Crusade in their genocide studies textbook The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies, authored by Joseph R. Strayer and Malise Ruthven.
In 2023, Pegg highlights in the Cambridge World History of Genocide, how since his 2008 work a variety of other scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds have concluded that the Albigensian crusade was genocidal in nature.
Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones claims that in the 13th century, the Mongol armies under Genghis Khan were genocidal killers who were known to eradicate whole nations. He ordered the extermination of the Tata Mongols, and all Kankali males in Bukhara who were "taller than a wheel" using a technique called measuring against the linchpin. In the end, half of the Mongol tribes were exterminated by Genghis Khan. Rosanne Klass referred to the Mongols' rule of Afghanistan as "genocide". It has been estimated that approximately 11% of the world's population was killed either during or immediately after the Turco-Mongol invasions (around 37.75 – 60 million people were killed during the genocide which was committed in Eurasia, out of which at least 35 million people were killed in China). If these calculations are accurate, these events would constitute the deadliest acts of mass killing in human history. The second campaign against the Western Xia, the final military action which was led by Genghis Khan, because he died during it, involved the intentional and systematic destruction of Western Xia cities and culture. According to John Man, because of this policy of total obliteration, Western Xia is little known to anyone other than experts in the field because very few records of the existence of that society still exist. He states that "There is a case to be made that this was the first ever recorded example of attempted genocide. It was certainly very successful ethnocide."
Historian and specialist on the Mongol empire, Timothy May, details how genocide scholars have been divided as to whether the Mongol conquests should be considered a case of genocide. He then argues that while the Mongols frequently employed massacres as a tool of war during their conquests, they could only be described as genocidal in some cases. Two Mongol military campaigns which can be considered genocidal are the massacre of the Tanguts at Zhongxing and the massacre of the Nizari Ismailis.
Similarly, the extreme brutality of the Turco-Mongol conqueror Tamerlane was well-documented and his conquests were accompanied by genocidal massacres. William Rubinstein wrote: "In Assyria (1393–4)—Tamerlane got around—he killed all the Christians he could find, including everyone in the, then, Christian city of Tikrit, thus virtually destroying Assyrian Church of the East. Impartially, however, Tamerlane also slaughtered Shi'ite Muslims, Jews and heathens."
Evidence suggests that the Inuit are the descendants of the Birnirk culture of Siberia and Alaska, who expanded into northern Canada and Greenland, where they completely replaced the Indigenous Dorset people through the Thule culture, both genetically and culturally, sometime after 1300 AD. The question of why the Dorset disappeared so completely has led some to suggest that Thule invaders wiped out the Dorset people in "an example of prehistoric genocide."
In 1311, the Delhi Sultanate's ruler Alauddin Khalji ordered a massacre of the "New Muslims" (Mongols who had recently converted to Islam), after some Mongol amirs of Delhi conspired to kill him. According to chronicler Ziauddin Barani, 20,000 or 30,000 Mongols were killed as a result of this order.
The conquest of the Canary Islands by the Crown of Castille took place between 1402 and 1496. Initially carried out by Norman aristocrats on behalf of the Castilian nobility in exchange for a covenant of allegiance to the crown, the process was later carried out by the Spanish crown itself during the reign of the Catholic Monarchs. Some historians have labelled the conquest genocidal in nature due to the brutal treatment of the Islands' indigenous Guanches which contributed to their extinction as a distinct group. Historian Francisco Morales Padrón [es] wrote in 1978 that the conquest of the islands constituted a genocide. Historian Daniele Conversi locates the conquest of the Canary Islands within the history of colonial and imperial genocides. Genocide scholar Mark Levene has stated that while there was not the intent by the Castilian crown to commit genocide, the result of their conquest was the same as if they had intended to commit genocide. Historian and specialist in genocide studies Mohamed Adhikari published an article in 2017 analysing the settler colonial history of the Canary Islands as a case of genocide, saying that the Canary Islands were the scene of "Europe's first overseas settler colonial genocide," and that the mass killing and enslavement of natives, along with forced deportation, sexual violence and confiscation of land and children constituted an attempt to "destroy in whole" the Guanche people. The tactics used in the Canary Islands in the 15th century served as a model for the Iberian colonisation of the Americas.
The transatlantic slave trade resulted in a vast and as yet unknown loss of life for African captives both in and outside the Americas. Estimates have ranged from as low as 2 million to as high 60 million. Patrick Manning estimates that about 12 million slaves entered the Atlantic trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, but about 1.5 million died on board ship. About 10.5 million slaves arrived in the Americas. Besides the slaves who died on the Middle Passage, more Africans likely died during the slave raids and wars in Africa and forced marches to ports. Manning estimates that 4 million died inside Africa after capture, and many more died young. Manning's estimate covers the 12 million who were originally destined for the Atlantic, as well as the 6 million destined for Arabian slave markets and the 8 million destined for African markets. Of the slaves shipped to the Americas, the largest share went to Brazil and the Caribbean.
Canadian scholar Adam Jones characterised the mass death of millions of Africans during the Atlantic slave trade as a genocide due to the fact that it was "one of the worst holocausts in human history" because it resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths according to one estimate, and he contradicts arguments such as the one which states that "it was in slave owners' interest to keep slaves alive, not exterminate them" by stating that they are "mostly sophistry" by stating: "the killing and destruction were intentional, whatever the incentives to preserve survivors of the Atlantic passage for labor exploitation. To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?"
From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II, the second King of the Belgians from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labour of natives. Under his regime, there were 2 to 15 million deaths among the Congolese people. Deliberate killings, abusive punishments, and general exploitation were major causes of the deaths. As in the colonisation of the Americas, European diseases, hitherto unknown in the region, also led to a considerable number of deaths. Because the main motive for the killings was financial gain, it has been debated whether the term genocide describes these atrocities well. The journalist Adam Hochschild, writing in King Leopold's Ghost, stated that the level of killing in the Congo was of a "genocidal proportion", but did not consider it a genocide as, according to Hochschild, King Leopold's aim was not the extermination of the Congolese people.
Raphael Lemkin considered the crimes in the Congo to be an unambiguous case of genocide. Robert Weisbord wrote in the Journal of Genocide Research in 2003 that attempting to eliminate a portion of the population is enough to qualify as genocide under the UN convention, this has more recently been supported by historian Dean Pavlakis, who argues that the atrocities in the Congo Free State meet the requisite criteria of the UN Genocide Convention. Reports of the atrocities led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century, and Leopold was ultimately forced in 1908 by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to the civil administration.
During its military conquests, its centralisation of its power and its incorporation of territories into Ethiopia as decreed by Menelik II, his army committed genocidal atrocities against civilians and combatants which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery. Large scale atrocities were also committed against the Dizi people and the people of the Kaficho kingdom. Some estimates of the number of people who were killed in the atrocities that were committed during the war and the famine which coincided with it go into the millions. According to Alexander Bulatovich, Menelik's Russian military aide, Menelik's armies "dreadfully annihilated more than half" of the Oromo (Galla) population down to 5 million people, which "took away from the Galla all possibility of thinking about any sort of uprising." Eshete Gemeda put the death toll even higher at 6 million.
These deaths may have also been caused by the great famine, which lasted from 1888 to 1892 and was the worst famine in the region's history; a third of Ethiopia's total population of 12 million was killed according to some estimates. The famine was caused by rinderpest, an infectious viral cattle disease which wiped out most of the national livestock, killing over 90% of the cattle. The population of native cattle had no prior exposure to the disease and as a result, it was unable to fight it off. Despite the violence of the conquest, some historians stress the fact that before the centralisation process was completed, Ethiopia was devastated by numerous wars which started in the 16th century. In the intervening period, military tactics had not changed much. In the 16th century, the Portuguese Bermudes documented depopulation and widespread atrocities against civilians and combatants (atrocities which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery) during several successive Aba Gedas' Gadaa conquests of territories which were located north of the Genale river (Bali, Amhara, Gafat, Damot, Adal). Warfare in the region essentially involved acquiring cattle and slaves, winning additional territories, gaining control of trade routes and carrying out ritual requirements or securing trophies to prove masculinity. Wars were fought between people who might be members of the same linguistic group, religion and culture, or between unrelated tribes. Centralisation greatly reduced these continuous wars; minimising the loss of lives, raids, destruction and slavery that had previously been the norm.
Ben Kiernan wrote in his book Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur on the French conquest of Algeria, that within three decades of the French conquest of Algeria in 1830, war, genocidal massacres, and famine had reduced the original population from 3 million by a figure ranging from 500,000 to 1,000,000.
Historian William Gallois argues that using a variety of frameworks, the conquest of Algeria should be considered a case of genocide.
In response to France's recognition of Armenian genocide, Turkey accused France of committing genocide against 15% of Algeria's population.
The Maji Maji Rebellion (German: Maji-Maji-Aufstand, Swahili: Vita vya Maji Maji), was an armed rebellion of Africans against German colonial rule in German East Africa. The war was triggered by German colonial policies which were designed to force the indigenous population to grow cotton for export. The war lasted from 1905 to 1907, during which 75,000 to 300,000 died, overwhelmingly from famine. The end of the war was followed by a period of famine, known as the Great Hunger (ukame), caused in large part by the scorched-earth policies used by governor von Götzen to suppress the rebellion. These tactics have been described by scholars as genocidal.
Identified as the first genocide of the 20th century, the Herero and Namaqua peoples of present-day Namibia endured a genocidal persecution between 1904 and 1907 while their homeland was under colonial rule as German South West Africa. Large percentages of their populations perished in a brutal scorched earth campaign led by German General Lothar von Trotha. An estimated 10,000 Nama were killed, with estimates for the Herero ranging from 60,000 and 100,000. Historian Leonor Faber-Jonker highlights how genocidal violence in German South-West Africa was built up to with ever more eterminatory wars during the late 19th century.
Beginning as an insurrection against German colonial rule, the Herero Wars almost immediately developed into a genocide of the indigenous insurrectionists, with Trotha issuing his Extermination Order in October 1904, a copy of which survives in the Botswana National Archives. The order states "every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot. I will no longer accept women or children, I will drive them back to their people [to die in the desert] or let them be shot at." Olusoga and Erichsen write: "It is an almost unique document: an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide." Trotha further explained that the German response to the indigenous insurrection "is and remains the beginning of a racial struggle".
Many of those not killed were moved to concentration camps, such as Shark Island, after the destruction of their villages, where many succumbed to starvation. These concentration camps were also the location of medical experiments by German eugenicists such as Eugen Fischer.
Between 1810 and 1828, the Zulu kingdom under Shaka Zulu and Dingane laid waste to large parts of present-day South Africa and Zimbabwe. Frequently, Zulu armies not only aimed to defeat their enemies, they aimed to totally destroy them. Those who were exterminated included prisoners of war, women, children and even dogs. Estimates of the death toll range from 1 million to 2 million.
According to The Cambridge World History, the Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, and the Cambridge World History of Genocide, colonial policies in some cases included the deliberate genocide of indigenous peoples in North America. According to Harald E. Braun, Spanish colonisation of the Americas also included genocidal massacres.
According to historian David Stannard, over the course of more than four centuries "from the 1490s into the 1890s, Europeans and white Americans engaged in an unbroken string of genocide campaigns against the native peoples of the Americas." Stannard writes that the native population had been reduced savagely by invasions of European plague and violence and that by around 1900 only one-third of one percent of America's population—250,000 out of 76,000,000 people–were natives. He calls it "the worst human holocaust the world had ever witnessed", and it leveled off because "there was, at last, almost no one left to kill." On 20 January 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa wrote to the king advocating genocide against the native population in the Caribbean. Balboa slew hundreds in Caribbean villages. The crown later withdrew support and Balboa was executed in 1519.
Raphael Lemkin considered colonial abuses of the Native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide including the abuses of the Encomienda system. He described slavery as "cultural genocide par excellence" noting "it is the most effective and thorough method of destroying culture, of desocialising human beings." He considers colonists guilty due to failing to halt the abuses of the system despite royal orders. He also notes the sexual abuse by Spanish colonisers of Native women as acts of "biological genocide." In this vein, Stannard described the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonising deaths."
Anthropologist Jason Hickel asserts that during Spanish rule of Hispaniola, many Arawaks died from lethal forced labour in the mines, in which a third of workers died every six months and that within two years of the arrival of Christopher Columbus half the population of Hispaniola had been killed. According to anthropologist Russell Thornton, for the American Indians "the arrival of the Europeans marked the beginning of a long holocaust, although it came not in ovens, as it did for the Jews. The fires that consumed North America Indians were the fevers brought on by newly encountered diseases, the flashes of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of 'firewater,' the flames of villages and fields burned by the scorched-earth policy of vengeful Euro-Americans." Some authors, including Holocaust scholar David Cesarani, have argued that United States government policies in furtherance of its so-called Manifest Destiny constituted genocide.
Some historians disagree that genocide, defined as a crime of intent, should be used to describe the colonisation experience. Stafford Poole, a research historian, wrote: "There are other terms to describe what happened in the Western Hemisphere, but genocide is not one of them. It is a good propaganda term in an age where slogans and shouting have replaced reflection and learning, but to use it in this context is to cheapen both the word itself and the appalling experiences of the Jews and Armenians, to mention but two of the major victims of this century." Noble David Cook, writing about the Black Legend and the conquest of the Americas, wrote that "there were too few Spaniards to have killed the millions who were reported to have died in the first century after Old and New World contact". He instead estimates that the death toll was caused by diseases like smallpox, which according to some estimates had an 80–90% fatality rate in Native American populations. Political scientist Guenter Lewy says "even if up to 90 percent of the reduction in Indian population was the result of disease, that leaves a sizable death toll caused by mistreatment and violence"; however, he rejected calling it genocide stating that
Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz opposes these viewpoints and says, "Proponents of the default position emphasise attrition by disease despite other causes equally deadly, if not more so. In doing so they refuse to accept that the colonisation of America was genocidal by plan, not simply the tragic fate of populations lacking immunity to disease. In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide."
Historian Andrés Reséndez argues that even though the Spanish were aware of the spread of smallpox, they made no mention of it until 1519, a quarter century after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola. Instead he contends that enslavement in gold and silver mines was the primary reason why the Native American population of Hispaniola dropped so significantly. and that even though disease was a factor, the native population would have rebounded the same way Europeans did following the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to. He contends that enslavement of Native Americans was one of the causes of their depopulation in North America; that the majority of the Native Americans enslaved were women and children compared to the enslavement of Africans which mostly targeted adult males and in turn they were sold at a 50% to 60% higher price, and that 2,462,000 to 4,985,000 Native Americans were enslaved between Columbus's arrival and 1900 throughout the Americas.
Several films and books on the subject were released around the year 1992 to coincide with the 500th anniversary of Columbus' voyage. In 2003, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez urged Latin Americans not to celebrate the Columbus Day holiday. Chavez blamed Columbus for spearheading "the biggest invasion and genocide ever seen in the history of humanity."
According to scientists from University College London, the colonisation of the Americas caused so much disease and death in the 100 years after 1492, that it contributed to climate change and global cooling. The depopulation caused the abandonment and reforestation of large areas of farmland, resulting in large enough decreases in carbon dioxide to cool the earth.
The Conquest of the Desert was a military campaign mainly directed by General Julio Argentino Roca in the 1870s, which established Argentine dominance over Patagonia, then inhabited by indigenous peoples, killing more than 1,300.
Contemporary sources indicate that it was a deliberate genocide by the Argentine government, with Argentine troops committing mass executions, reports of nations being "wiped out of existence", and those not killed were often deported from Patagonia. Others perceived the campaign as intending to suppress only groups of indigenous people that refused to submit to the government and carried out attacks on European settlements.
The Selknam genocide was the systematic extermination of the Selkʼnam people, one of the four indigenous peoples of Tierra del Fuego archipelago, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Historians estimate that the genocide spanned a period of between ten and twenty years, and resulted in the decline of the Selkʼnam population from approximately 4,000 people during the 1880s to a few hundred by the early 1900s.
As part of the broader Beaver Wars, between 1640 and 1649, among the Indigenous peoples in Canada, the Iroquois conducted a genocidal war against the Huron people. Settlements were burned, and of the 30,000 Hurons, a few thousand were able to flee and avoid becoming victims of the ethnic genocide. Ned Blackhawk, in analysing the war between the Iroquois and Huron, found that the Iroquois committed all five acts described in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The Beothuks attempted to avoid contact with Europeans in Newfoundland by moving from their traditional settlements, into ecosystems unable to support them, causing under-nourishment and, eventually, starvation. The Beothuks' main food sources were caribou, fish, and seals; their forced displacement deprived them of two of these. This led to the over-hunting of caribou, leading to a decrease in the caribou population in Newfoundland. The Beothuks emigrated from their traditional land and lifestyle, attempting to avoid contact with Europeans, into ecosystems unable to support them, causing under-nourishment and, eventually, starvation. Scholars disagree in their definition of genocide in relation to the Beothuk. While some scholars believe that the Beothuk died out as an unintended consequence of European colonisation, others argue that Europeans conducted a sustained campaign of genocide against them. They were officially declared "extinct" after the death of Shanawdithit in 1829 in the capital, St. John's, where she had been taken.
Beginning in 1874 and lasting until 1996, the Canadian government, in partnership with the dominant Christian Churches, ran 130 residential boarding schools across Canada for Aboriginal children, who were forcibly taken from their homes. Over the course of the system's existence, about 30% of native children, or roughly 150,000, were placed in residential schools nationally; at least 6,000 of these students died while in attendance. While the schools provided some education, they were plagued by under-funding, disease, abuse, and sexual abuse. The negative effects of the residential school system have long been accepted almost unanimously among scholars researching the residential school system, with debate focussing on the motives and intent.
Indigenous people of Canada have long referred to the residential school system as genocide, with scholars referring to the system as genocidal since the 1990s. According to some scholars, the Canadian government's laws and policies, including the residential school system, that encouraged or required Indigenous peoples to assimilate into a Eurocentric society, violated the United Nations Genocide Convention that Canada signed in 1949 and passed through Parliament in 1952. Therefore, these scholars believe that Canada could be tried in international court for genocide. Others also point to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted into Canadian law in 2010, where article 7 discusses the rights of indigenous people to not be subjected to genocide or "any other act of violence, including forcibly removing children of the group to another group".
Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the first ruler of an independent Haiti, ordered the killing of the white population of French creoles on Haiti, which culminated in the 1804 Haitian massacre. According to Philippe Girard, "when the genocide was over, Haiti's white population was virtually non-existent."
The Taíno genocide refers to the extermination of the indigenous population of Hispaniola due to forced labor and exploitation by the Spanish. Raphael Lemkin considered Spain's abuses of the native population of the Americas to constitute cultural and even outright genocide including the abuses of the encomienda system. University of Hawaii historian David Stannard describes the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonising deaths." Yale University's genocide studies program supports this view regarding the abuses in Hispaniola. Andrés Reséndez argues that even though the Spanish were aware of the spread of smallpox, they made no mention of it until 1519, a quarter century after Columbus arrived in Hispaniola. Instead he contends that enslavement in gold and silver mines was the primary reason why the Native American population of Hispaniola dropped so significantly and that even though disease was a factor, the native population would have rebounded the same way Europeans did during the Black Death if it were not for the constant enslavement they were subject to. According to anthropologist Jason Hickel, a third of Arawak workers died every six months from lethal forced labor in the mines. Conley and de Waal highlight the weaponisation of starvation employed by conquistadors against the Taíno as being a contributing factor to the genocide, and historian Harald E. Braun highlight Jaragua massacre in 1503 as a case of genocidal massacre.
The Caste War of Yucatán (approx. 1847–1901) against the population of European descent, known locally as Yucatecos, who held political and economic control of the region. Adam Jones wrote: "Genocidal atrocities on both sides cost up to 200,000 killed".
In 1835, Don Ignacio Zuniga, commander of the presidios of northern Sonora, asserted that since 1820, the Apaches had killed at least 5,000 Mexican settlers in retaliation for land encroachments in Apachería. The State of Sonora then offered a bounty on Apache scalps in 1835. Beginning in 1837, the State of Chihuahua also offered a bounty of 100 pesos per warrior, 50 pesos per woman and 25 pesos per child.
The Mexican government's response to the various uprisings of the Yaqui tribe have been likened to genocide particularly under Porfirio Diaz. By the end of Diaz's rule at least 20,000 Yaquis were killed in Sonora and their population was reduced from 30,000 to 7,000. Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador said he'd be willing to offer apologies for the abuses in 2019.
The Pequot War was an armed conflict that started in 1636 and ended in 1638 in New England, between the Pequot tribe and an alliance of the colonists from the Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, and Saybrook colonies and their allies from the Narragansett and Mohegan tribes. The war concluded with the decisive defeat of the Pequot. At the end, about 700 Pequots had been killed or taken into captivity. Hundreds of prisoners were sold into slavery to colonists in Bermuda or the West Indies; other survivors were dispersed as captives to the victorious tribes. Scholars such as Michael Freeman and Benjamin Madley have concluded that the war was genocidal in nature, with Madley arguing that it set a precedent for colonial relations with Native Americans going forward.
The Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II was an uprising by cacique-led Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo rebels aimed at overthrowing Spanish colonial rule in Peru from 1780 to 1783. During the rebellion, especially after the death of Túpac Amaru II, non-Indians were systematically killed by the rebels. Some historians have described these killings aimed at non-Indians, in conjunction with attempts to violently eradicate various non-Indian cultural customs, as genocidal in nature.
The Putumayo genocide was hunting and enslavement of members of the Huitoto, Andoques, Yaguas, Ocaina and Boras groups by the Peruvian Amazon Company, so they could be used to extract latex. During this time period, several tribes became extinct, with 80–86% of the total population in the Putumayo region perishing during the Amazon rubber boom.
The Kalinago genocide was the genocidal massacre of an estimated 2,000 Kalinago people by English and French settlers on the island of Saint Kitts in 1626.
According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, US history as well as inherited Indigenous trauma cannot be understood without dealing with the genocide that the United States committed against Indigenous peoples. Ortiz states that from the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination.
The leader of this battle, British High Commander Jeffery Amherst authorised the intentional use of disease as a biological weapon, notably during the 1763 Siege of Fort Pitt against indigenous populations, saying, "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.", and instructing his subordinates, "I need only Add, I Wish to Hear of no prisoners should any of the villains be met with arms." British militia's William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts during the Siege of Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare. While it is uncertain how successful such attempts were against the target population, historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end. For smallpox was more feared by the Indian than the bullet: he could be exterminated and subjugated more easily and quickly by the death-bringing virus than by the weapons of the white man."
During the American Indian Wars, the United States Army carried out a number of massacres and forced relocations of Indigenous peoples, acts that some scholars say constitute genocide. The Sand Creek massacre, which caused outrage in its own time, has been called genocide. General John Chivington led a 700-man force of Colorado Territory militia in a massacre of 70–163 peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho, about two-thirds of whom were women, children, and infants. Chivington and his men took scalps and other body parts as trophies, including human fetuses and male and female genitalia. In defense of his actions Chivington stated,
A study by Gregory Michno concluded that of 21,586 tabulated casualties (killed, wounded or captured) in a selected 672 battles and skirmishes, military personnel and settlers accounted for 6,596 (31%), while indigenous casualties totalled about 14,990 (69%) for the period 1850–90. Michno's study almost exclusively uses Army estimates. His follow-up book "Forgotten Battles and Skirmishes" covers over 300 additional fights not included in these statistics.
According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census (1894), between 1789 and 1891, "The Indian wars under the government of the United States have been more than 40 in number. They have cost the lives of about 19,000 white men, women and children, including those killed in individual combats, and the lives of about 30,000 Indians. The actual number of killed and wounded Indians must be very much higher than the given... Fifty percent additional would be a safe estimate..." In the same 1894 report, the Census Bureau dismissed assertions that millions of Native Americans once inhabited what is now the United States, insisting instead that North America in 1492 was an almost empty continent, and "guesstimating" that aboriginal populations "could not have exceeded much over 500,000", whereas modern scholarship now estimates from 2.1 million to more than 10 million.
Chalk and Jonassohn argued that the deportation of the Cherokee tribe along the Trail of Tears would almost certainly be considered an act of genocide today. The Indian Removal Act of 1830 led to the exodus. About 17,000 Cherokees—along with approximately 2,000 Cherokee-owned black slaves—were removed from their homes. The number of people who died as a result of the Trail of Tears has been variously estimated. American doctor and missionary Elizur Butler, who made the journey with one party, estimated 4,000 deaths. Historians David Stannard and Barbara Mann have noted that the army deliberately routed the march of the Cherokee to pass through areas of known cholera epidemic, such as Vicksburg. Stannard estimates that during the forced removal from their homelands, following the Indian Removal Act signed into law by President Andrew Jackson in 1830, 8,000 Cherokee died, about half the total population.
A smallpox epidemic struck the Great Plains in 1836–1840, resulting in the deaths of many, including 90% of the Mandan who previously numbered 1,600. While specific responsibility for the epidemic remains in question, scholars have asserted that the Great Plains epidemic was "started among the tribes of the upper Missouri River by failure to quarantine steam boats on the river", and Captain Pratt of the St. Peter "was guilty of contributing to the deaths of thousands of innocent people. The law calls his offense criminal negligence. Yet in light of all the deaths, the almost complete annihilation of the Mandans, and the terrible suffering the region endured, the label criminal negligence is benign, hardly befitting an action that had such horrendous consequences." Archaeologist and anthropologist Ann F. Ramenofsky writes, "Variola Major can be transmitted through contaminated articles such as clothing or blankets. In the nineteenth century, the U. S. Army sent contaminated blankets to Native Americans, especially Plains groups, to control the Indian problem." According to Alexander Hinton, "the genocide of many Native American tribes" including the Mandans, was caused by "governmental assimilationist policies that coexisted with officially or unofficially sanctioned campaigns of war to eradicate, diminish, or forcibly evict the 'savages'". When smallpox swept the northern plains of the US in 1837, Secretary of War Lewis Cass ordered that the Mandan (along with the Arikara, the Cree, and the Blackfeet) not be given smallpox vaccinations, which had been provided to other tribes in other areas. Some have posited that some tribes weren't given vaccines because they were hostile or because their land wasn't important for trading.
The U.S. colonisation of California started in earnest in 1849, and it resulted in a large number of state-subsidised massacres of the Indigenous peoples of California by colonists in the territory, causing several ethnic groups to be entirely wiped out. In one such series of conflicts, the so-called Mendocino War and the subsequent Round Valley War, the entirety of the Yuki people were brought to the brink of extinction, from a previous population of some 3,500 people to fewer than 100. According to Russell Thornton, estimates of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population of California were at least 310,000, and perhaps as high as 705,000, but by 1849, due to Spanish and Mexican colonisation and epidemics this number had decreased to 100,000, and from 1849 to 1890, the indigenous population of California had fallen below 20,000, primarily because of the killings. In An American Genocide, The United States and the California Catastrophe, 1846–1873, historian Benjamin Madley recorded the number of killings of Indigenous Californians that occurred between 1846 and 1873. He found evidence that during this period, at least 9,400 to 16,000 Native Americans were killed by non-Indigenous. Most of these killings occurred in more than 370 massacres (defined as the "intentional killing of five or more disarmed combatants or largely unarmed noncombatants, including women, children, and prisoners, whether in the context of a battle or otherwise"). 10,000 Native Americans were also kidnapped and enslaved. In a speech before representatives of Native American peoples in June 2019, California governor Gavin Newsom apologised for the genocide. Newsom said, "That's what it was, a genocide. No other way to describe it. And that's the way it needs to be described in the history books."
Indeed, noted children's book author of "The Wizard of Oz", L. Frank Baum, contemporaneously and freely admitted to the definition of genocide—annihilation of a people—as being deliberately intended, in the aftermath of the Wounded Knee massacre and slaughter of the Lakota and their leader Sitting Bull:
In line with Dunbar-Ortiz's assessment, historian Preston McBride argues that the American Indian boarding school system meets the same criteria for genocide as was found in investigations into the Canadian Indian boarding school system.
The Massacre of Salsipuedes was a genocidal attack carried out on 11 April 1831 by the Uruguayan Army, led by Fructuoso Rivera, as the culmination of the state's efforts to eradicate the Charrúa from Uruguay. According to official reports, 40 were killed and 300 were taken prisoner, with an uncertain number managing to escape.
Abdur Rahman's subjugation of the Hazara ethnic group in the late nineteenth century due to its fierce rebellion against the Afghan king gave birth to an intense feeling of hatred between the Pashtun and the Hazara that would last for years to come. Massive forced displacements, especially in Oruzgan and Daychopan, continued as lands were confiscated and populations were expelled or fled. Some 35,000 families fled to northern Afghanistan, Mashhad (Iran) and Quetta (Pakistan). It is estimated that more than 60% of the Hazara were either massacred or displaced during Abdur Rahman's campaign against them. Hazara farmers were often forced to give up their property to Pashtuns and as a result many Hazara families had to move seasonally to the major cities in Afghanistan, Iran, or Pakistan to find jobs and sources of income.
Mike Davis argues in his book Late Victorian Holocausts that quote; "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures. They died in the golden age of Liberal Capitalism; indeed many were murdered...by the theological application of the sacred principles of Smith, Bentham, and Mill."
Davis characterises the Indian famines under the British Raj, such as the Great Bengal famine of 1770 or the Great Famine of 1876-78 which took over 15 million lives as "colonial genocide". Some scholars, including Niall Ferguson, have disputed this judgement, while others, including Adam Jones, have affirmed it.
The Vietnamese Empire adopted repressive measures against the Chams, which some commentators have labeled genocide.
The Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands was a process of military conquest from 1609 to 1621 by the Dutch East India Company (VOC) of the Banda Islands. Judging that Bandanese resistance to Dutch attempts to establish their commercial supremacy in the archipelago had to be crushed once and for all, the VOC Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote a letter to the Heeren XVII on 26 October 1620, stating: 'To adequately deal with this matter, it is necessary to once again subjugate Banda, and populate it with other people.' As proposed, the Heeren XVII instructed him to subjugate the Bandanese and drive their leaders out of the land. This culminated in the Banda massacre, which saw 2,800 Bandanese killed and 1,700 enslaved by the Dutch. Along with starvation and constant fighting, the Bandanese felt they could not continue to resist the Dutch and negotiated a surrender in 1621. Coen expelled the remaining 1,000 Bandanese to Batavia. The conquest saw in total the Bandanese population decrease from aroun 15,000 to around 1,000.
The 1740 Batavia massacre (Dutch: Chinezenmoord; French: Meurtre des Chinois, literally the "Murder of the Chinese"; Indonesian: Geger Pacinan, or the "Chinatown Tumult") was a pogrom in which Dutch East Indies soldiers and native collaborators killed ethnic Chinese residents of the port city of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in the Dutch East Indies. The violence which occurred in the city lasted from 9 October until 22 October 1740, with minor skirmishes continuing to occur outside the city walls into late November. Historians have estimated that at least 10,000 ethnic Chinese were massacred; just 600 to 3,000 are believed to have survived.
The Dzungar (or known as Zunghar), Oirat Mongols who lived in an area that stretched from the west end of the Great Wall of China to present-day eastern Kazakhstan and from present-day northern Kyrgyzstan to southern Siberia (most of which is located in present-day Xinjiang), were the last nomadic empire to threaten China, which they did from the early 17th century through the middle of the 18th century. After a series of inconclusive military conflicts that started in the 1680s, the Dzungars were subjugated by the Manchu-led Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in the late 1750s. According to Qing scholar Wei Yuan, 40 percent of the 600,000 Zunghar people were killed by smallpox, 20 percent fled to Russia or sought refuge among the Kazakh tribes and 30 percent were killed by the Qing army of Manchu Bannermen and Khalkha Mongols.
Mongolist Charles Bawden was the first to describe the Qing treatment of the Dzungar as "genocide" in the 1960s. Political scientist Michael E. Clarke, who specialises in the history of Xinjiang, has argued that the Qing campaign in 1757–58 "amounted to the complete destruction of not only the Zunghar state but of the Zunghars as a people". Historian Peter Perdue has attributed the decimation of the Dzungars to a "deliberate use of massacre" and has described it as an "ethnic genocide". Mark Levene, a historian of genocide, has stated that the extermination of the Dzungars was "arguably the eighteenth century genocide par excellence".
The Taiping Rebellion was a massive rebellion which was launched by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka (a Han subgroup) and the self-proclaimed younger brother of Jesus, who sought to overthrow the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and replace it with a Chinese Christian theocratic absolute monarchy which he named the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. One of the bloodiest wars in history and the bloodiest civil war in history, the Taiping Rebellion was marked by genocidal atrocities which were perpetrated by both of the sides which fought in the conflict.
In every area which they captured, the Taiping immediately exterminated the entire Manchu population. In the province of Hunan one Qing loyalist who observed the genocidal massacres which the Taiping forces committed against the Manchus wrote that the "pitiful Manchus", the Manchu men, women and children were executed by the Taiping forces. The Taiping rebels were seen chanting while slaughtering the Manchus in Hefei. After capturing Nanjing, Taiping forces killed about 40,000 Manchu civilians. On 27 October 1853, they crossed the Yellow River in T'sang-chou and murdered 10,000 Manchus.
Since the rebellion began in Guangxi, Qing forces allowed no rebels who spoke its dialect to surrender. Reportedly in the province of Guangdong, it is written that 1,000,000 were executed because after the collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing dynasty launched waves of massacres against the Hakkas, that at their height killed up to 30,000 each day. These policies of mass murder of civilians occurred elsewhere in China, including Anhui, and Nanjing. This resulted in a massive civilian flight and death toll with some 600 towns destroyed and other bloody policies resulting.
The Ainu are an indigenous people in Japan (Hokkaido). In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, "Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, for Wajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their communities. In 1869, after the Battle of Hakodate during the Boshin War, the new Meiji government renamed the Republic of Ezo Hokkaido, whose boundaries were formed by former members of the Tokugawa shogunate, and together with lands where the Ainu lived, they were unilaterally incorporated into Japan. It banned the Ainu language, took Ainu lands away, and prohibited the Ainu from engaging in salmon fishing and deer hunting." Roy Thomas wrote: "Ill treatment of native peoples is common to all colonial powers, and, at its worst, leads to genocide. Japan's native people, the Ainu, have, however, been the object of a particularly cruel hoax, because the Japanese have refused to accept them officially as a separate minority people." In 2004, the small Ainu community which lives in Russia wrote a letter to Vladimir Putin, urging him to recognise Japanese mistreatment of the Ainu people as a genocide, something which Putin declined to do.
The Jindandao incident was a rebellion by a Han Chinese secret society called Jindandao (金丹道), which rose in revolt in Inner Mongolia in November 1891 and genocidally massacred 150,000–500,000 Mongols before it was suppressed by government troops in late December.
The history of Shi'ism in Kashmir is marked by conflicts and strife, spanning over half a millennium. Incidents of sectarian violence occurred in Kashmir under the rule of Mirza Haider Dughlat, followed by the Mughals (1586–1752), the Afghans (1752–1819), the Sikhs (1819–1845) and the Dogras (1846–1947). A small Shia community has managed to survive in Kashmir until today.
The Massacres of Badr Khan were committed against the Assyrian Christian population of the Ottoman Empire by Kurdish and Ottoman forces between 1843 and 1847, resulting in the slaughter of more than 10,000 indigenous Assyrian civilians who were inhabitants of the Hakkari region, and many thousands more were sold into slavery.
During the suppression of the April uprising in Bulgaria in May–June 1876, 30,000 Bulgarians died and 5,000 Bulgarians were killed in Batak – according to modern researchers, the Batak massacre was the starting point of genocide in the modern era.
Between 1894 and 1896, a series of ethnically religiously motivated Anti-Christian pogroms which are known as the Hamidian massacres were committed against the ancient Armenian and Assyrian Christian populations by the forces of the Ottoman Empire. The massacres were mainly committed in regions which were located in what is modern-day south eastern Turkey, north eastern Syria and northern Iraq. According to some estimates, as many as 325,000 people were killed, and 546,000 Armenians and Assyrians who survived the massacres were made destitute when they were forcibly deported from cities, and almost 2500 of their farmsteads, towns and villages were either destroyed or stolen. Hundreds of churches and monasteries were either destroyed or forcibly converted into mosques.
The Adana massacre occurred in the Adana Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in April 1909. A massacre of Armenian and Assyrian Christians in the city of Adana and its surroundings amidst the Ottoman countercoup of 1909 triggered a series of anti-Christian pogroms throughout the province. Reports estimated that the Adana Province massacres resulted in the death of as many as 30,000 Armenians and the death of as many as 1,500 Assyrians.
From 1913 to 1923, the Greek, Assyrian, and Armenian genocides took place in the Ottoman Empire. Some historians consider these genocides a single event and they refer to them as the late Ottoman genocides.
Belinda A. Aquino describes Spanish colonial rule of the Philippines as one of the "most cruel colonial regimes in world history", characterised by the systematic destruction of native communities and their institutions, while the natives were forced to work on the colonial government's projects. She writes that the Spaniards imposed an alien religion, Catholicism, on the population, while the native people's sacred indigenous religions and shrines were all destroyed. She describes the Spanish conquest as a genocide, with killings of natives being common. Furthermore, she writes that the Spanish continued to view the natives of the Philippines as "savages" and "pagans who had to be civilised" despite the fact that they perpetrated atrocities.
According to Linda A. Newson's research, demographic decline occurred in the Philippines during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily as a result of destructive epidemics which were introduced on the islands during the establishment of the Spanish colonial regime. It was previously assumed that the natives of the Philippines were immune to the diseases which decimated the populations of the New World, but Newson, who used the data which she collected from historical demographic documents, argues that intermittent contact and a low population density prevented the spread of such diseases before the arrival of the Spaniards, thus making them lethal to vulnerable populations. Yet, despite its previous lack of exposure, the diseases which were introduced to the indigenous population of the Philippines were not seen as having an impact which was as great as the impact which they had on the indigenous populations of the New World. Newson also argues that the same factors which kept the diseases at bay before the Spanish conquest also curtailed the spread of the infections during the early years of the Spanish colonial period. Newson also concludes that, for the indigenous population of the Philippines, "the demographic decline which occurred during the seventeenth century was the outcome of a complex interaction of factors which included the Hispano-Dutch War, the restructuring of Filipino communities, and periodic famines, epidemics and Moro raids".
Numerous massacres were committed against Filipinos during the American and Japanese occupations of the Philippines, notably, massacres were committed on Samar and Sulu by Americans during the Philippine-American war, and the Manila massacre was committed by Japanese forces during World War 2.
In 1832, about 70,000 Yazidis were killed by the Sunni Kurdish princes Bedir Khan Beg and Muhammad Pasha of Rawanduz. During his research trips in 1843, the Russian traveller and orientalist Ilya Berezin mentioned that 7,000 Yazidis were killed by Kurds of Rawandiz on the hills of Nineveh near Mosul, shortly before his arrival. According to many historical reports, the Bedir Khan massacres can be classified as a genocide.
The Russification of Poland was an intense process, especially under Partitioned Poland, when the Russian state aimed to denationalise Poles via incremental enforcement of language, culture, the arts, the Orthodox religion and Russian practices. The most forceful Russification was forced onto children.
The Russian Tsarist Empire waged war against Circassia in the Northwest Caucasus for more than one hundred years, trying to secure its hold on Circassia's Black Sea coast. After a century of insurgency and war and failure to end the conflict, the Russian military executed the systematic mass murder, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, and expulsion of 800,000–1,500,000 Circassians. The Georgian government has officially recognised the events as a genocide, as have Circassian advocacy organisations, a stance also held by a plethora of scholars of genocide and other historians, with Oliver Bullough crediting the Russian Empire with "the first modern genocide on European soil", and Anssi Kullberg arguing that the Russian state thus invented "the strategy of modern ethnic cleansing and genocide". Antero Leitzinger flagged the affair the 19th century's largest genocide.
Calculations including those which take the Russian government's own archival figures into account have estimated a loss of 80%–97% of the Circassian nation in the process.
In May 1994, the then Russian President Boris Yeltsin admitted that resistance to the tsarist forces was legitimate, but he did not recognise "the guilt of the tsarist government for the genocide". On 5 July 2005, the Circassian Congress, an organisation that unites representatives of the various Circassian peoples in the Russian Federation, called on Moscow to acknowledge and apologise for the genocide. There is concern by the Russian government that acknowledging the events as genocide would entail possible claims of financial compensation in addition to efforts toward repatriating diaspora Circassians back to Circassia. A presidential commission in Russia has been set up "to counter the attempts to falsify history to the detriment of Russia".
There have been several attempts to extirpate the Romani (Gypsies) throughout the history of Europe:
In 1545, the Diet of Augsburg declared that "whosoever kills a Gypsy (Romani), will be guilty of no murder". The subsequent massive killing spree which took place across the empire later prompted the government to step in to "forbid the drowning of Romani women and children".
In England, the Egyptians Act 1530 banned Romani from entering the country and it also required those Romani who were already living in the country to leave it within 16 days. Failure to do so could result in the confiscation of their property, their imprisonment and deportation. The act was amended with the Egyptians Act 1554, which directed that they abandon their "naughty, idle and ungodly life and company" and adopt a settled lifestyle. For those Romani who failed to adhere to a sedentary existence, the Privy council interpreted the act in a way that permitted the execution of non-complying Romani "as a warning to others".
In 1710, Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor, issued an edict against the Romani, ordering "that all adult males were to be hanged without trial, whereas women and young males were to be flogged and banished forever." Additionally, in the kingdom of Bohemia, the right ears of Romani men were to be cut off; in the March of Moravia, their left ears were to be cut off. In other parts of Austria, they would be branded on the back with a branding iron, representing the gallows. These mutilations enabled the authorities to identify the individuals as Romani on their second arrest. The edict encouraged local officials to hunt down Romani in their areas by levying a fine of 100 Reichsthaler on those who failed to do so. Anyone who helped Romani was to be punished by doing forced labor for half a year. The result was mass killings of Romani across the Holy Roman empire. In 1721, Charles VI amended the decree to include the execution of adult female Romani, while children were "to be put in hospitals for education".
In 1749 the Great Gypsy Round-up (Spanish: Gran Redada de Gitanos), also known as the general imprisonment of the Gypsies (prisión general de gitanos), occurred where most of the Roma in the region were arrested, and 12,000 Romani people were killed.Although a majority were released after a few months, many others spent several years imprisoned and subject to forced labor. The raid was approved by the King Ferdinand VI of Spain, and organised by the Marquis of Ensenada, and set in motion simultaneously across Spain on 30 July 1749.
In 1774, Maria Theresa of Austria issued an edict which forbade marriages between Romani. When a Romani woman married a non-Romani man, she had to produce proof of "industrious household service and familiarity with Catholic tenets", a male Rom "had to prove his ability to support a wife and children", and "Gypsy children over the age of five were to be taken away and brought up in non-Romani families."
The St. Bartholomew's Day massacre (French: Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy) in 1572 was a targeted group of assassinations and a wave of Catholic mob violence, directed against the Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants) during the French Wars of Religion. Traditionally believed to have been instigated by Queen Catherine de' Medici, the mother of King Charles IX, the massacre started a few days after the marriage of the king's sister Margaret to the Protestant Henry of Navarre (the future Henry IV of France) on 18 August. Many of the wealthiest and most prominent Huguenots had gathered in largely Catholic Paris to attend the wedding.
The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle, two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, the military and political leader of the Huguenots. King Charles IX ordered the killing of a group of Huguenot leaders, including Coligny, and the slaughter spread throughout Paris. Lasting several weeks in all, the massacre expanded outward to the countryside and other urban centres. Modern estimates for the number of dead across France vary widely, from 6,000 to 30,000.
The massacre marked a turning point in the French Wars of Religion. The Huguenot political movement was crippled by the loss of many of its prominent aristocratic leaders, and many rank-and-file members subsequently converted. Those who remained became increasingly radicalised. Though by no means unique, the blood-letting "was the worst of the century's religious massacres". Throughout Europe, it "printed on Protestant minds the indelible conviction that Catholicism was a bloody and treacherous religion".
In 1986, Reynald Secher argued that the actions of the French republican government during the revolt in the Vendée (1793–1796), a popular mostly Catholic uprising against the anti-clerical Republican government during the French Revolution, was the first modern genocide. Secher's claims caused a minor uproar in France and mainstream authorities rejected Secher's claims.
Timothy Tackett countered that "the Vendée was a tragic civil war with endless horrors committed by both sides—initiated, in fact, by the rebels themselves. The Vendeans were no more blameless than were the republicans. The use of the word genocide is wholly inaccurate and inappropriate." Historians Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn consider the Vendée a case of genocide, while historian Peter McPhee highlights that using Chalk and Jonassohn's definition the Vendée does not fit a case of "one-sided mass killing". Historian Pierre Chaunu called the Vendée the first ideological genocide, linking it to later examples of totalitarian mass killings. Adam Jones estimates that 150,000 Vendeans died in what he also considers a genocide.
The Khmelnytsky uprising (Polish: Powstanie Chmielnickiego; Lithuanian: Chmelnickio sukilimas; Ukrainian: повстання Богдана Хмельницького; Russian: восстание Богдана Хмельницкого; also known as the Cossack-Polish War, the Chmielnicki Uprising, or the Khmelnytsky insurrection) was a Cossack rebellion within the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1648 to 1657, which led to the creation of a Cossack Hetmanate in Ukrainian lands. Under the command of Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the Zaporozhian Cossacks, allied with the Crimean Tatars and local peasantry, fought against the armies and paramilitary forces of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The insurgency was accompanied by mass atrocities committed by Cossacks against the civilian population, especially against the Roman Catholic clergy and the Jews. In Jewish history, the Uprising is known for the concomitant outrages against the Jews who, in their capacity as leaseholders (arendators), were seen by the peasants as their immediate oppressors.
Most of the Jewish communities which existed in the rebellious Hetmanate were devastated by the uprising and the ensuing massacres, though occasionally a Jewish population was spared, notably after the capture of the town of Brody (the population of which was 70% Jewish). According to the book which is titled History of the Rus, Khmelnytsky's rationale for sparing the Jews of Brody was largely mercantile because Brody was a major trading center and as a result, the Jews who lived there were judged to be useful "for turnovers and profits" and based on this assumption, they were only required to pay "moderate indemnities" in kind.
Although many modern sources still give estimates of Jews killed in the uprising at 100,000 or more, others put the numbers killed at between 40,000 and 100,000, and recent academic studies have argued fatalities were even lower.
A 2003 study by Israeli demographer Shaul Stampfer of Hebrew University dedicated solely to the issue of Jewish casualties in the uprising concludes that 18,000–20,000 Jews were killed of a total population of 40,000. Paul Robert Magocsi states that Jewish chroniclers of the 17th century "provide invariably inflated figures with respect to the loss of life among the Jewish population of Ukraine. The numbers range from 60,000–80,000 (Nathan Hannover) to 100,000 (Sabbatai Cohen), but that "the Israeli scholars Shmuel Ettinger and Bernard D. Weinryb speak instead of the 'annihilation of tens of thousands of Jewish lives', and the Ukrainian-American historian Jarowlaw Pelenski narrows the number of Jewish deaths to between 6,000 and 14,000". Orest Subtelny concludes:
Ben Kiernan details how genocidal massacres were employed as a strategy in the colonisation of Ireland during the 16th century. The historian David Edwards argues that the Tudor colonisation should not be considered a genocide in line with the popular understanding of genocide, but that the process was a partially exterminatory process.
Towards the end of the War of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651), the English Rump Parliament sent the New Model Army to Ireland to subdue the Catholic population of the country and take revenge on it and prevent Royalists loyal to Charles II from using Ireland as a base to threaten England from. The force was initially under the command of Oliver Cromwell and later, it was under the command of other parliamentary generals. The Army sought to secure the country, and it also sought to confiscate the lands of Irish families that had participated in the fighting. This policy became a continuation of the Elizabethan policy which encouraged Protestants to settle in Ireland, because the Protestant New Model army's soldiers could be paid with confiscated lands rather than cash.
During the Interregnum (1651–1660), this policy was enhanced with the passage of the Act of Settlement of Ireland in 1652. Its goal was to further the transfer of land from Irish to English hands. The immediate war aims and the longer term policies of the English Parliamentarians resulted in an attempt by the English to transfer the native population to the western fringes to make way for Protestant settlers. during the conquest over 200,000 civilians died due to the destruction of crops, forced displacement, and the mass killing of civilians. The policy of land confiscation and English settlement was reflected in a phrase attributed—without factual foundation—to Cromwell: "To Hell or to Connaught", and the policy has been described as a genocide by some nationalist historians.
During the famine, approximately 1 million people died and a million more people emigrated from Ireland, causing the island's population to fall by between 20% and 25% and leading to the formation of the Irish diaspora. The proximate cause of the famine was a potato disease which is commonly known as potato blight. Although blight ravaged potato crops throughout Europe during the 1840s, the impact and human cost in Ireland – where one-third of the population was entirely dependent on the potato for food – was exacerbated by a host of political, social, and economic factors that remain the subject of historical debate. Contemporary commentators did not believe that the blight was the cause of the mass death, instead, they believed that the mass death was caused by the actions of the British government.
While a small number of historians believe that the Great Famine of Ireland (1845–1852) was a genocide, according to Liam Kennedy, "virtually all historians of Ireland" reject the genocide allegations. Historians Kevin Kenny and Cormac Ó Gráda argue that For a mass-death atrocity to be defined as a genocide, it must include the intentional destruction of a people and that the British government's actions do not meet this requirement. Ó Gráda thinks that a case of neglect is easier to sustain than a case of genocide. Historian Donald Akenson, who has written twenty-four books about Ireland, has said the following about the use of the word 'Holocaust' in relation to Ireland: "When you see it, you know that you are encountering famine-porn. It is inevitably part of a presentation that is historically unbalanced and, like other kinds of pornography, is distinguished by a covert (and sometimes overt) appeal to misanthropy and almost always an incitement to hatred." In debates in the United States, law professors Charles E. Rice and Francis Boyle provided statements, concluding that the British government deliberately pursued a race- and ethnicity-based policy aimed at destroying the Irish people and that the policy of mass starvation amounted to genocide per retrospective application of article 2 of the Genocide Convention.
Writing in 2008, historian Robbie Mcveigh highlighted that while discussions around whether the Great Irish Famine was genocidal in nature have a long history, the tools of genocide analysis were never employed to assess such claims. Scholars highlight the similarity of British policies around and in response to the Irish famine and other cases of famine and starvation in the British empire and colonial regimes, with Mcveigh stating in the other cases they "appear not as horrendous imperial incompetence but rather a deliberate administrative policy of genocide", and calls for more rigorous investigation of the history of Ireland in genocide studies. There have been later genocide scholars who support the description of the famine as a genocide. Nat Hill, director of research at Genocide Watch, has stated that "While the potato famine may not fit perfectly into the legal and political definitions of 'genocide', it should be given equal consideration in history as an egregious crime against humanity".
The Ottoman Muslim genocide during the Balkan Wars refers to the expulsion and systematic extermination of Ottoman Muslim civilians which was committed by members of the Balkan League from 1912 to 1913, during the Balkan Wars. In 1912, the Kingdom of Serbia, Kingdom of Greece, Tsardom of Bulgaria and the Kingdom of Montenegro declared war on the Ottomans. The Ottomans quickly lost territory. According to Geert-Hinrich Ahrens, "the invading armies and Christian insurgents committed a wide range of atrocities upon the Muslim population." In Kosovo, Albania, and parts of Macedonia, most of the victims were Albanians while in other areas the victims were mostly Turks and Pomaks. A large number of Pomaks in the Rhodopes were forcibly converted to Orthodoxy but later allowed to reconvert, which most of them did. Jews were also targeted in the ensuing violence.
During these wars, hundreds of thousands of Turks and Pomaks fled from their villages and became refugees. The total number of refugees is estimated to be between 400,000 and 813,000. The number of Ottoman civilians who were killed is estimated to range from 732,000 to 1,500,000.
The massacres of Albanians in the Balkan Wars were perpetrated on several occasions by the Serbian and Montenegrin armies and paramilitaries during the conflicts that occurred in the region between 1912 and 1913. During the 1912–13 First Balkan War, Serbia and Montenegro committed a number of war crimes against the Albanian population after expelling Ottoman Empire forces from present-day Albania, Kosovo, and North Macedonia, which were reported by the European, American and Serbian opposition press. Most of the crimes occurred between October 1912 and the summer of 1913. The goal of the forced expulsions and massacres was statistical manipulation before the London Ambassadors Conference to determine the new Balkan borders. 10% of the population of present-day Kosovo (estimated to be 500,000) were victimised, with between 120,000 and 270,000 Albanians being killed.
According to one report published in 2009, in 1789 the British deliberately spread smallpox from the First Fleet to counter overwhelming native tribes near Sydney in New South Wales. In his book An Indelible Stain, Henry Reynolds described this act as genocide. However the majority of scholars disagree that the initial smallpox was the result of deliberate biological warfare and have suggested other causes.
The Queensland Aboriginal genocide refers to the Queensland frontier that represented the single bloodiest colonial frontier in Australia. Thus the records of Queensland document the most frequent reports of shootings and massacres of indigenous people, the three deadliest massacres on white settlers, the most disreputable frontier police force, and the highest number of white victims to frontier violence on record in any Australian colony. Thus some sources have characterised these events as a Queensland Aboriginal genocide.
The Black War was a period of conflict between British colonists and aboriginal Tasmanians in Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) in the early 19th century. The conflict, in combination with introduced diseases and other factors, had such devastating impacts on the aboriginal Tasmanian population that it was reported that they had been exterminated. Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that by 1830, "Disease had killed most of them but warfare and private violence had also been devastating." Smallpox was the principal cause of aboriginal deaths in the 19th century.
Lemkin and most other comparative genocide scholars present the extinction of the Tasmanian aborigines as a textbook example of a genocide, while the majority of Australian experts are more circumspect. Detailed studies of the events surrounding the extinction have raised questions about some of the details and interpretations in earlier histories. Curthoys concluded, "It is time for a more robust exchange between genocide and Tasmanian historical scholarship if we are to understand better what did happen in Tasmania."
On the Australian continent during the colonial period (1788–1901), the population of 500,000–750,000 aboriginal Australians was reduced to fewer than 50,000. Most were devastated by the introduction of alien diseases after contact with Europeans, while perhaps 20,000 were killed by massacres and fighting with colonists.
Sir Ronald Wilson, a former president of Australia's Human Rights Commission, stated that Australia's program in which 20,000–25,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly separated from their natural families, known as the stolen generations, was genocide. He argued, using statements of intent by the architects of the program, that it was intended to cause the Aboriginal people to die out. The program ran from 1900 to 1969. The nature and extent of the removals have been disputed within Australia, with opponents questioning the findings contained in the Commission report and asserting that the size of the Stolen Generation had been exaggerated. The intent and effects of the government policy were also disputed.
In the early 19th century, Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama (local Māori tribes) massacred the Moriori people. The Moriori were the indigenous people of the Chatham Islands (Rekohu in Moriori, Wharekauri in Māori), east of the New Zealand archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. These people lived by a code of non-violence and passive resistance (see Nunuku-whenua), which led to their near-extinction at the hands of Taranaki Māori invaders in the 1830s.
In 1835, some Ngāti Mutunga and Ngāti Tama from the Taranaki region of North Island invaded the Chathams. On 19 November 1835, the Rodney, a European ship hired by the Māori, arrived carrying 500 Māori armed with guns, clubs, and axes, followed by another ship with 400 more warriors on 5 December 1835. They proceeded to enslave some Moriori and kill and cannibalise others. "Parties of warriors armed with muskets, clubs and tomahawks, led by their chiefs, walked through Moriori tribal territories and settlements without warning, permission or greeting. If the districts were wanted by the invaders, they curtly informed the inhabitants that their land had been taken and the Moriori living there were now vassals."
A council of Moriori elders was convened at the settlement called Te Awapatiki. Despite knowing of the Māori predilection for killing and eating the conquered, and despite the admonition by some of the elder chiefs that the principle of Nunuku was not appropriate now, two chiefs—Tapata and Torea—declared that "the law of Nunuku was not a strategy for survival, to be varied as conditions changed; it was a moral imperative." A Moriori survivor recalled: "[The Maori] commenced to kill us like sheep.... [We] were terrified, fled to the bush, concealed ourselves in holes underground, and in any place to escape our enemies. It was of no avail; we were discovered and killed—men, women and children indiscriminately." A Māori conqueror explained, "We took possession... in accordance with our customs and we caught all the people. Not one escaped..."
After the invasion, Moriori were forbidden to marry Moriori, or to have children with each other. All became slaves of the invaders. Many Moriori women had children by their Maori masters. A small number of Moriori women eventually married either Maori or European men. Some were taken from the Chathams and never returned. Only 101 Moriori out of a population of about 2,000 were left alive by 1862. Although the last Moriori of unmixed ancestry, Tommy Solomon, died in 1933, several thousand mixed-ancestry Moriori are alive today.