In his useful introductory essay on the concept of genocide, Dirk Moses returns us to the originating work of the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who, indignant that the perpetrators of the Armenian genocide had largely escaped prosecution, began lobbying in the 1930s for international law that would criminalise the wilful destruction of human groups, such as Armenians or Jews. In his book about the Nazis, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944), Lemkin coined the new term ‘genocide’ to ‘denote an old practice in its modern development’. Genocide did not require mass killings. There were many ways to destroy a people, as Lemkin elaborated:

The end may be accomplished by the forced disintegration of political and social institutions, of the culture of the people, of their language, their national feeling and their religion. It may be accomplished by wiping out all basis of personal security, liberty, health and dignity. When these means fail the machine gun can always be utilized as a last resort.

Lemkin’s emphasis on the different ‘techniques of destruction’ that might be employed to exterminate a group of people shaped the formulation of the United Nations Convention in 1948, except that it omitted the concept of ‘cultural genocide’. In recent years, many commentators have invoked ‘cultural genocide’ when discussing the impact of Australian assimilation policy on Aborigines, but, as Moses suggests and as Russell McGregor argues later in this volume, to equate national assimilationism with genocide is to ‘render the term conceptually and morally incoherent’.

The Australian experience that is most commonly cited in the international literature as a case of genocide is the destruction of the Tasmanian Aborigines, yet, as Henry Reynolds shows, on the basis of extensive research, Governor George Arthur, together with officials in London and Van Diemen’s Land, said again and again that they must do everything possible to prevent the extermination of the natives. Their regret seemed to enable them to distance themselves from responsibility. But the Tasmanian case shows clearly that ‘elimination’, as Patrick Wolfe has written elsewhere, was the ‘primary logic’ of settler colonialism. Colonial Office men might deplore the deadly consequences of settlement, but they knew from experience, and from ongoing reports, that this was the likely outcome of the imperative of settlement and Aboriginal resistance.

British imperialism, in the form of settler colonialism, had a genocidal logic. ‘A logic of elimination towards Indigenous peoples,’ writes Moses endorsing Wolfe’s argument, ‘does indeed constitute its essence.’ This was the case regardless of the subjective attitudes or sympathies of policy-makers: ‘the British colonization of Australia was objectively and inherently [his italics] “ethnocidal”,’ writes Moses carefully, ‘fatal for many Aborigines, and potentially genocidal.’ Was the potential realised? Not unless the destruction of a group was intended and sanctioned by state authorities, insists Paul Bartrop, whose chapter comparing settler outrages in Victoria and Colorado concludes that whereas the massacre of Aborigines at Warrigal Creek in Gippsland in 1843 does not qualify as genocide, that of Cheyenne at Sand Creek, Colorado, was ‘clearly a genocidal massacre undertaken as part of a larger campaign of genocide against the Cheyenne and Arapaho’.

Historical analysis must attend to specific instances of dynamic interaction as well as analysing deep structures. According to Moses, certain situations generated ‘processes of radicalization’ that produced, in turn, ‘genocidal moments’. The task for the historian is to identify moments of crisis – usually induced by indigenous resistance – that produced ‘subjective genocidal policy development’, when policy-makers and settlers together became agents with genocidal intent. When the struggle over land became most intense, settlers determined to subdue Aborigines and, if necessary, to be rid of them. State soldiers or police sometimes helped them reach this goal. Raymond Evans, in one of his two chapters, documents the brutality and mass murder that ensued in Queensland during what Aborigines called ‘the Wild Time’: ‘arguably one of the most violent places on earth during the global spread of Western capitalism in the nineteenth century.’

There is no doubt that the Queensland frontier – or the ‘outback’, as some preferred to term that undefined space – was a place of terrible violence. Hundreds of people of European and Asian descent, and thousands of Aborigines, died, large numbers of the latter shot by the Queensland Native Police. Settlers got away with murder, for, as Evans tells us, despite all the slaughter no Queenslander was successfully prosecuted for any crime against an Aboriginal person until 1883, when a lone Townsville man was sentenced to life for the rape of a child who was under ten years of age.

Another case study of the ‘radicalization process’ is provided by Anna Haebich, who describes the collaboration of white settlers and the state in ‘Clearing the Wheat Belt’ of an indigenous presence in the south-west of Western Australia. Haebich takes a cue from her editor in emphasising the dynamic nature of the situation: ‘government intentions evolve over time as policy-makers, faced with changing circumstances, head in directions they had not foreseen.’ Many of the Aboriginal families were forcibly relocated to make way for the subdivision of country into wheat farms for agriculturalists, including soldier settlers. The great democratic project of small-scale land settlement – intended to free settlers from wage slavery – rested on the dispossession of indigenous Australians.

Dirk Moses is an historian of Germany, which explains, in part, what might otherwise look like an anomaly: two chapters of Genocide and Settler Society focus on German history. But there is a larger transnational argument here. Increasingly, the field of ‘genocide studies’ seeks to illuminate relationships between European and colonial histories, suggesting that race thinking in the European heartland was shaped by European experience in the colonies. In his chapter, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Towards an Archaeology of Genocide’, Jurgen Zimmerer argues that Nazi policies towards Eastern Europe are best understood as colonial in nature, shaped by the politics of race and space. Territory in Poland and Russia would be occupied, resources mobilised and large numbers of people killed in the course of securing ‘Lebensraum’ in a vastly expanded German empire.

Hitler himself saw his precedent for his policies in British imperialism: ‘The Russian territory is our India and, just as the English rule India with a handful of people, so will we govern this our colonial territory. We will supply the Ukrainians with headscarves, glass chains as jewellery, and whatever else colonial peoples like …’. Zimmerer’s essay provides an exploration of the ‘structural similarities and connections’ between colonialism and National Socialism, especially with regard to the ‘formulation and function of the concepts of race and space’ – clearing space for the occupation of a superior race. He looks particularly at the German war against the Herero and Nama in south-west Africa, justified by General Lieutenant von Trotha as clearing the way for the settlement of Europeans. Colonialism, Zimmerer suggests, established an important precedent: the murder of the Jews ‘would probably not have been thinkable and possible if the idea that ethnicities can simply be wiped out had not already existed and had not already been put into action’.

The other chapter on German history examines the Nazi policy of removing children of ‘valuable racial stock’ from parents in occupied Eastern European countries, such as Czechoslovakia, and ‘Germanising’ them through adoption. The programme, administered by the SS under Heinrich Himmler, aimed at strengthening the Volk through the infusion of ‘good blood’. Those responsible were successfully prosecuted by Nuremberg judges, who referred to Lemkin’s definition of genocide. A few months later, the UN Genocide Convention explicitly defined the process of ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ as a genocidal act. It was this article that was invoked by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) in its report on Aboriginal child removal, Bringing Them Home (1997).

Russell McGregor, in his chapter ‘Governance not Genocide’, takes issue with HREOC’s approach, insisting that the meaning of Aboriginal child removal depends on the policy framework in which it was administered, and that this changed from biological absorption between the wars to social assimilation after World War II. Assimilation policies, far from seeking the elimination of Aborigines, sought to ensure their survival as a part of the national community. Robert Manne examines earlier goals of biological absorption promoted by state and territory governments during the first decades of the twentieth century, and notes a shift from a concern to ameliorate the conditions of children’s lives to a growing anxiety about Australia’s ‘half-caste problem’.

When administrators such as Cecil Cook and A.O. Neville determined that the half-caste population could be merged with the general population and thus be made to disappear, then the ‘genocidal dimension’ of their thinking became evident. Paradoxically, one of the bases for this idea was the scientific belief that Aborigines were not in fact racially different (like Negroes) but shared with white Australians a common Caucasian ancestry. Ironically, many opponents of the plan to ‘breed out the colour’ were animated by racist outrage at the prospect of widespread miscegenation. While Cook and Neville were animated by fantasies of radical social engineering, neither had the power or the resources to realise their goals. Their attempts to control Aborigines’ lives and the consequent separation of families undoubtedly caused untold pain and misery, but Manne concludes that because of the ‘fantastical nature of the absorption policy’, ‘genocidal thoughts’ and ‘genocidal plans’ are more adequate ways of describing their projects than ‘genocidal crimes’.

The value of this collection of historical essays is that it points to both the usefulness of a transnational framework for analysing race thinking and the necessity for close attention to the historical specificity of particular moments and places.