This large and important edited collection takes its lead from good authority: the work of Hannah Arendt, which clearly identified a colonial genealogy to the rise of totalitarianism, and the incomplete work of Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent who coined the term genocide, defining it in extraordinarily broad terms encompassing cultural genocide as well as mass extermination, while attempting the perhaps futile exhaustive enumeration of extraordinary acts of human cruelty. This intellectual bedrock serves the purposes of providing some cohesion to an otherwise slightly disjointed series of case studies and reflections on the nature of violence, but it is only as strong as the original concepts themselves.

The volume is organized in three parts. The first is an intellectual overview that covers a number of discussions of the relationship between colonialism and genocide. Dirk Moses’ introduction is a rich theoretical and historiographical overview of the debates and the literature. He notably sets Lemkin in a longer tradition of the critique of imperialism, and also points out that Lemkin had considered cultural genocide as genocide. What makes a genocide as opposed to a policy of assimilation or an unplanned massacre relates to that most difficult concept of intent – often implicit, sometimes assumed mistakenly, often unverifiable, not to mention the fact that intent sometimes only emerges retrospectively. The current legal definitions undoubt edly open up the possibility of a much wider interpretation of genocidal intent but Moses takes great care not to align his work with these latest developments of the jurisprudence developed by the International Criminal Tribunal. The framing of colonial genocide is thus not set against the more recent interpretation but against an analysis of Nazi genocide, which combined, according to Moses, imperial forms applied to Slavic people; exterminatory practices akin to a ‘subaltern genocide’, combined with the ‘security syndrome’ often found in other empires (for instance, the Ottoman empire, or wildly disproportionate acts of retaliation in most colonial empires), and finally a colonizing agenda, which established the east of Europe as a colonial dominion ripe for settlers. This masterful if controversial introduction somewhat dwarfs the other articles – for instance, the very interesting discussions of Lemkin by John Docker and Andrew Fitzmaurice. These articles, which tend to focus on the colonization of Australasia, raise important debates alive today in Australian politics. Raymond Evans’ article, which argues for the concept of indigenocide as opposed to genocide, is a short but welcome critique of a concept that some of the contributors tend to use a little more loosely than Moses himself. Not all the articles of this first section achieve the same high standards as the ones mentioned above.

The second part is the one with the least coherence but it also contains some of the most interesting examples. Mark Levene’s article on empires is an excellent think piece. The following articles stretch the concept of genocide in many directions: from the better known examples of the physical extermination of aborigines – the case of Tasmania is explored by Ann Curthoys, the genocide of the Armenians by Donald Bloxham, and that of the Namibians by Dominik J. Schaller – to the lesser known and perhaps more debatable instances of violence against the Blackfoot’s religious system in Canada (Bianca Tovías), the genocidal impulses of imperial Russia (Robert Geraci), and the colonialism applied in occupied eastern Europe by the Nazis (David Furber and Wendy Lower). The level of violence discussed varies considerably between the various case studies, as does the nature of the intent. On the whole, the racial argument plays a minor role compared with the geopolitical imperatives that drove many of these acts of brutality. The role of settlers’ societies is here intrinsically uncomfortable, since there are very few European societies that have not imposed some form of settlement either abroad or within Europe at the expense of aboriginal groups. The violence applied to the Sami people or to nomadic Roma people even today belongs to this register of brutality that is part of the political and social pedigree of European states. Part of the modernization agenda provides an explanation for some of this violence. The Armenian genocide can thus be read, as Bloxham does, as a complex phenomenon combining identity politics (religious and ethnic), economic and population pressures arising from the repatriation of refugees from Europe, and the geopolitical struggle between the great empires over the ruins of the Ottoman state. The determined destruction of the Armenians combined the purposefulness of a state enacting a disproportionate security agenda with an ethnic purge perpetrated, ironically, by other less well-integrated groups, such as the Kurds.

The third section broadens the concept further by bringing in acts of extreme violence, sometimes genocidal in intent and execution, perpetrated by the victims of colonialism. David Cahill’s article on the great rebellion of the southern Andes led by Túpac Amaru in 1780–82 recasts this major revolt as having a strong ethnic component and having degenerated into ethnocidal brutality. Amaru turned against the Creole only after their betrayal, and this brutality seems to have been politically motivated even if it became increasingly indiscriminate. Robert Cribb puts forward the case of the mass massacre of Eurasians when Indonesia gained independence. This unique episode of extreme violence targeted a specific group that had been singled out by the nationalists as enemies within, and as the group which stood to lose the most from the end of the colonial caste system. As a dispersed group, the Eurasians succumbed in larger numbers than the more easily defended Chinese communities. Once again, politics clearly dominated the agenda, even if the violence exerted against the Eurasians was extensive. Considering the wide coverage and the stunning range of articles it seems surprising that the Rwandan genocide is not fully discussed (though it is often referred to), despite its historiography having undoubtedly reinvigorated the debates on mass killing.

The essential problem of the book – its recurrent question as well as its potential pitfall – is the position of the Holocaust in relation to other acts of extermination. The definition of genocide proves rather flexible and it is used to describe a vast range of massacres (systematic or disorganized), slaughters, and systemic neglect. I will confess that, while I can understand that such diversity is also reflected in the work of Lemkin, it creates a rather uncomfortable feeling of global relativism, setting on the same plane both industrial violence and the localized extermination issuing from a Peruvian peasant revolt. This creates a tension throughout the book; it also makes it worth debating and certainly makes it a remarkably useful text to inform further research and for teaching purposes.