Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur

Ben Kiernan

Yale University Press, Jan 1, 2007 - Social Science - 724 pages

For thirty years Ben Kiernan has been deeply involved in the study of genocide and crimes against humanity. He has played a key role in unearthing confidential documentation of the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. His writings have transformed our understanding not only of twentieth-century Cambodia but also of the historical phenomenon of genocide. This new book—the first global history of genocide and extermination from ancient times—is among his most important achievements.

Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides.

What people are saying

User Review -

This book is the best work on Genocide that I've read, and as a teacher of Genocide Studies I've read my share of books on the subject.

User Review -

A great companion book for genocide scholars. A history of the world's most horrific genocide and war crimes.

Contents

• Introduction: 1
• Early Imperial Expansion: 41
• Classical Genocide and Early Modern Memory: 43
• The Spanish Conquest of the New World 14921600: 72
• Guns and Genocide in East Asia 14001600: 101
• Genocidal Massacres in Early Modern Southeast Asia: 133
• Settler Colonialism: 163
• Introductory Note: 165
• The English Conquest of Ireland 15651603: 169
• Colonial North America 16001776: 213
• Genocidal Violence in NineteenthCentury Australia: 249
• Genocide in the United States: 310
• Settler Genocides in Africa 18301910: 364
• TwentiethCentury Genocides: 391
• Introductory Note: 393
• The Armenian Genocide National Chauvinism in the Waning Ottoman Empire: 395
• Blut und Boden Germany and Nazi Genocide: 416
• Rice Race and Empire Japan and East Asia: 454
• Soviet Terror and Agriculture: 485
• Maoism in China A Rural Model of Revolutionary Violence: 511
• From the Mekong to the Nile Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: 538
• Notes: 606
• Acknowledgments: 697

Popular passages

Page 205 - Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked like anatomies of death ; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves...‎

Page 3 - Jebusites, seven nations greater and mightier than thou ; and when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee ; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them ; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them...‎

Page 332 - Humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country, and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it, but its progress has never for a moment been arrested, and one by one have many powerful tribes disappeared from the earth.‎

Page 230 - And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty Let fall upon their Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished.‎

Page 318 - The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.‎

Page 318 - I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe.‎

Page 439 - Today I will once more be a prophet: If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!‎

Page 243 - Whatsoever he tilled and reaped, laid up and made use of, before it spoiled, that was his peculiar Right; whatsoever he enclosed, and could feed, and make use of, the Cattle and Product was also his. But if either the Grass of his...‎

Page 218 - ... our fathers had plenty of deer and skins, our plains were full of deer, as also our woods, and of turkies, and our coves full of fish and fowl. But these English having gotten our land, they with scythes cut down the grass, and with axes fell the trees ; their cows and horses eat the grass, and their hogs spoil our clam banks, and we shall all be starved...‎

About the author

Ben Kiernan is the A. Whitney Griswold Professor of History, professor of international and area studies, and the founding director of the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University (www.yale.edu/gsp). His previous books include How Pol Pot Came to Power: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975 and The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979, published by Yale University Press.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur
• Author: Ben Kiernan
• Edition: unabridged
• Publisher: Yale University Press, 2007
• ISBN: 0300100981, 9780300100983
• Length: 724 pages
• Subjects: Social Science / Gender Studies