Based on an exploration of both pre-Nazi and Nazi theory and practice, Pete Kakel challenges the dominant narrative of the murder of European Jewry, illuminating the Holocaust's decidedly imperial-colonial origins, context, and content in a book of interest to students, teachers, and lay readers, as well as specialist and non-specialist scholars.

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.

How has Britain understood the Holocaust? This interdisciplinary volume explores popular narratives of the Second World War and cultural representations of the Holocaust from the Nuremberg trials of 1945-6, to the establishment of a national memorial day by the start of the twenty-first century.

European Holocaust Studies (EHS) publishes key international research results on the murder of the European Jews and its wider contexts. In recent years, scholars have rediscovered Hannah Arendt`s "boomerang thesis" – the "coming home" of European colonialism as genocide on European soil – as well as Raphael Lemkin`s work around his definition of genocide and the importance of its colonial dimensions. Germany and other European states are increasingly engaging in debates on comparing the Holocaust to other genocides and cases of mass killing, memorialization, "decolonization" and attempts to come to terms with the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung").

In 1944, Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” to describe a foreign occupation that destroyed or permanently crippled a subject population. In this tradition, Empire, Colony, Genocide embeds genocide in the epochal geopolitical transformations of the past 500 years: the European colonization of the globe, the rise and fall of the continental land empires, violent decolonization, and the formation of nation states. It thereby challenges the customary focus on twentieth-century mass crimes and shows that genocide and “ethnic cleansing” have been intrinsic to imperial expansion. The complexity of the colonial encounter is reflected in the contrast between the insurgent identities and genocidal strategies that subaltern peoples sometimes developed to expel the occupiers, and those local elites and creole groups that the occupiers sought to co-opt. Presenting case studies on the Americas, Australia, Africa, Asia, the Ottoman Empire, Imperial Russia, and the Nazi “Third Reich,” leading authorities examine the colonial dimension of the genocide concept as well as the imperial systems and discourses that enabled conquest. Empire, Colony, Genocide is a world history of genocide that highlights what Lemkin called “the role of the human group and its tribulations.”

Forty years before the war of annihilation in eastern Europe and the Holocaust, German colonial troops in German South West Africa perpetrated the first genocide of the twentieth century. From Windhoek to Auschwitz? interrogates the relationship between colonialism and National Socialism, using genocide, the 'racial state', and systems of forced labour as points of departure for comparative observation. The book is an indispensable document in the intensive debate among German and international scholars about the postcolonial expansion of German history, and it offers a fresh look at the history of colonialism and also the 'Third Reich'.