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

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

• the exterminatory rhetoric of racist discourses before the 'scientific racism' of the mid-nineteenth century


• Charles Darwin's preoccupation with the extinction of peoples in the face of European colonialism,


• a reconstruction of a virtually unknown case of 'subaltern genocide'


• global perspective on the links between modernity and the Holocaust

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