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...of course all of the major European empires threw their hats into the ring in hopes of coming out on top. <snip> The Seven Years' War(i) (1754 and 1756–1763), incorporating the Pomeranian War and the French and Indian War, enveloped both European and colonial theatres. It is estimated that between 900,000 and 1,400,000 people died.<1> This war involved all of the major European powers of the period: Prussia, Hanover, and Great Britain (including British colonies in North America, the British East India Company, and Ireland) were pitted against Austria, France (including the North American colony of New France and the French East India Company), the Russian Empire, Sweden, and Saxony. Spain and Portugal were later drawn into the conflict, and a force from the neutral Netherlands was attacked in India. The war ended France's position as a major colonial power in the Americas (where it lost all of its possessions except French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Domingue and Saint Pierre and Miquelon) and its position as the leading power in Europe,<1> until the time of the French Revolution. Great Britain, meanwhile, emerged as the dominant colonial power in the world. The French Navy was crippled, which meant that only an ambitious rebuilding program in combination with the Spanish fleet would see it again threaten the Royal Navy's command of the sea.<2> On the other side of the world, the British East India Company acquired the strongest position within India, which was to become the "jewel in the imperial crown". The war was described by Winston Churchill as the first world war,<3> as it was the first conflict in human history to be fought around the globe, although most of the combatants were either European nations or their overseas colonies. As a partially Anglo-French conflict involving developing empires, the war was one of the most significant phases of the eighteenth century Second Hundred Years' War.<4> <MORE> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years'_WarBut there was more: <snip> Genocides in history Genocide is the mass killing of a group of people, as defined by Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) 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 conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."<1>
The preamble to the CPPCG not only 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", but that "at all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity".<1>
Determining what historical events constitute a genocide and which are merely criminal or inhuman behavior is not a clearcut matter. In nearly every case where accusations of genocide have circulated, partisans of various sides have fiercely disputed the interpretation and details of the event, often to the point of promoting wildly different versions of the facts. An accusation of genocide is certainly not taken lightly and will almost always be controversial. The following list of genocides and alleged genocides should be understood in this context and not regarded as the final word on these subjects.
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Timeline of genocides and alleged genocides
Before 1490
Adam Jones explains, in his book Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, that people throughout history have always had the ability to see other groups as alien, he quotes Chalk and Jonassohn: "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.(Chalk and Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide, p. 28.)"<6>
Jones continues that the less that a people have in common with another group the easier it is for the aliens to be defined as less than human and from there it is but a short step to an argument that says if they are a threat, then they should "be eliminated in order that we may live (Them or us)."<7> But after making this assessment 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 emphasize the superiority of one's own gods and religious beliefs." <8>
Scholars of antiquity do differentiate between gendercide in which males were killed, but the children (particularly the girls) and women were incorporated into the conqueror's society, Jones notes that "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 (fifth century BCE), a gendercidal rampage described by Thucydides in his 'Melian Dialogue'."<9>
The Old Testament not only describes the genocides Amalekites and Midianites but justifies them through references to the word of God.<6> Jones quotes Jerusalem-based Holocaust Studies Professor Yehuda Bauer: "As a Jew, I must live with the fact that the civilization I inherited . . . encompasses the call for genocide in its canon."<10>
Ben Kiernan, a Yale scholar, has labeled the destruction of Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War (149–46 BC) the "The First Genocide".<11> Quoting Eric Margolis, Jones observers that in the 13th century the Mongol horsemen of Temüjin the Genghis Khan were genocidal killers (génocidaires)<6> who were known to kill whole nations leaving nothing but empty ruins and bones.<12>
1490 to 1914
Americas
From the 1490s when Christopher Columbus set foot on the Americas to the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee by the United States Army, the indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere may have declined by as many as 100 million.<13> In Brazil alone the indigenous population has declined from a pre-Columbian high of an estimated 3 million to some 300,000 (1997).<14><15> Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. This population debate has often had ideological underpinnings. Robert Royal writes that "estimates of pre-Columbian population figures have become heavily politicized with scholars who are particularly critical of Europe and/or Western civilization often favoring wildly higher figures."<16>
Scholars now believe that, among the various contributing factors, epidemic disease was the overwhelming cause of the population decline of the American natives.<17> After first contacts with Europeans and Africans, some believe that the death of 90 to 95% of the native population of the New World was caused by Old World diseases such as smallpox and measles.<18>
Determining how many people died as a direct result of armed conflict between native Americans, and Europeans and their descendants, is difficult as accurate records were not always kept. In the book The Wild Frontier: Atrocities during the American-Indian War from Jamestown Colony to Wounded Knee, amateur historian William M. Osborn sought to tally every recorded atrocity in the area that would eventually become the continental United States, from first contact (1511) to the closing of the frontier (1890), and determined that 9,156 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Native Americans, and 7,193 people died from atrocities perpetrated by Europeans. Osborn defines an atrocity as the murder, torture, or mutilation of civilians, the wounded, and prisoners.<19>
In his book American Holocaust, David Stannard argues that destruction of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, in a "string of genocide campaigns" by Europeans and their descendants, was the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.<13><20> While no mainstream historian denies that death and suffering were unjustly inflicted by a number of Europeans upon a great many American natives, most scholars of the subject maintain that genocide, which is a crime of intent, was not the intent of European colonization. Historian Stafford Poole 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."<21>
<MORE>
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