Genocides in history (before World War I)

[49][50] During the Gallic Wars Caesar reported that he burnt every village and building that he could find in the territory of the Eburones, drove off all of the cattle, and his men and beasts consumed all of the corn that the weather of the autumnal season had not destroyed.

These tensions were exacerbated by the establishment of a large Roman military presence in Judea, changes in administrative life and the economy, together with the outbreak and suppression of Jewish revolts from Mesopotamia to Libya and Cyrenaica.

[82][83] The Harrying of the North was a series of military campaigns waged by William the Conqueror in the winter of 1069–1070 to subjugate Northern England, where the presence of the last Wessex claimant, Edgar Ætheling, had encouraged Anglo-Saxon Northumbrian, Anglo-Scandinavian and Danish rebellions.

It resulted in a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, and realigned the County of Toulouse in Languedoc, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown, and diminishing the distinct regional culture and high level of influence of the Counts of Barcelona.

[91] Mark Gregory Pegg wrote that "The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder, by making slaughter as loving an act as His sacrifice on the cross.

To revisit the issue of intent already touched on: If an institution is deliberately maintained and expanded by discernible agents, though all are aware of the hecatombs of casualties it is inflicting on a definable human group, then why should this not qualify as genocide?

"[129] From 1885 to 1908, the Congo Free State in central Africa was privately controlled by Leopold II, the second King of the Belgians from the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who extracted a fortune from the land by the use of forced labour of natives.

[136][137] During its military conquests, its centralization of its power and its incorporation of territories into Ethiopia as decreed by Menelik II, his army committed genocidal[138][139] atrocities against civilians and combatants which included torture, mass killings and the imposition of large scale slavery.

[148][149] Warfare in the region essentially involved acquiring cattle and slaves, winning additional territories, gaining control of trade routes and carrying out ritual requirements or securing trophies to prove masculinity.

[167] Beginning as an insurrection against German colonial rule,[168][169] the Herero Wars almost immediately developed into a genocide of the indigenous insurrectionists, with Trotha issuing his Extermination Order in October 1904, a copy of which survives in the Botswana National Archives.

The fires that consumed North America Indians were the fevers brought on by newly encountered diseases, the flashes of settlers' and soldiers' guns, the ravages of 'firewater,' the flames of villages and fields burned by the scorched-earth policy of vengeful Euro-Americans.

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.

[234] According to some scholars, the Canadian government's laws and policies, including the residential school system, that encouraged or required Indigenous peoples to assimilate into a Eurocentric society, violated the United Nations Genocide Convention that Canada signed in 1949 and passed through Parliament in 1952.

[183] University of Hawaii historian David Stannard describes the encomienda as a genocidal system which "had driven many millions of native peoples in Central and South America to early and agonizing deaths.

[272] The leader of this battle, British High Commander Jeffery Amherst authorized the intentional use of disease as a biological weapon, notably during the 1763 Siege of Fort Pitt against indigenous populations, saying, "You will Do well to try to Innoculate the Indians by means of Blankets, as well as to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race.

"[273][274][275] British militia's William Trent and Simeon Ecuyer gave smallpox-exposed blankets to Native American emissaries as gifts during the Siege of Fort Pitt, "to Convey the Smallpox to the Indians", in one of the most famously documented cases of germ warfare.

While it is uncertain how successful such attempts were against the target population,[276] historians have noted that, "history records numerous instances of the French, the Spanish, the British, and later on the American, using smallpox as an ignoble means to an end.

"[290] According to Alexander Hinton, "the genocide of many Native American tribes" including the Mandans, was caused by "governmental assimilationist policies that coexisted with officially or unofficially sanctioned campaigns of war to eradicate, diminish, or forcibly evict the 'savages'".

Mike Davis argues in his book Late Victorian Holocausts that quote; "Millions died, not outside the 'modern world system', but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.

Judging that Bandanese resistance to Dutch attempts to establish their commercial supremacy in the archipelago had to be crushed once and for all, the VOC Governor-General Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote a letter to the Heeren XVII on 26 October 1620, stating: 'To adequately deal with this matter, it is necessary to once again subjugate Banda, and populate it with other people.

[339] In a 2009 news story, Japan Today reported, "Many Ainu were forced to work, essentially as slaves, for Wajin (ethnic Japanese), resulting in the breakup of families and the introduction of smallpox, measles, cholera and tuberculosis into their communities.

In 1869, after the Battle of Hakodate during the Boshin War, the new Meiji government renamed the Republic of Ezo Hokkaido, whose boundaries were formed by former members of the Tokugawa shogunate, and together with lands where the Ainu lived, they were unilaterally incorporated into Japan.

[363] According to Linda A. Newson's research, demographic decline occurred in the Philippines during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, primarily as a result of destructive epidemics which were introduced on the islands during the establishment of the Spanish colonial regime.

[366] Newson also concludes that, for the indigenous population of the Philippines, "the demographic decline which occurred during the seventeenth century was the outcome of a complex interaction of factors which included the Hispano-Dutch War, the restructuring of Filipino communities, and periodic famines, epidemics and Moro raids".

[396] There is concern by the Russian government that acknowledging the events as genocide would entail possible claims of financial compensation in addition to efforts toward repatriating diaspora Circassians back to Circassia.

The massacre began in the night of 23–24 August 1572, the eve of the feast of Bartholomew the Apostle, two days after the attempted assassination of Admiral Gaspard de Coligny,[408] the military and political leader of the Huguenots.

[citation needed] A 2003 study by Israeli demographer Shaul Stampfer of Hebrew University dedicated solely to the issue of Jewish casualties in the uprising concludes that 18,000–20,000 Jews were killed of a total population of 40,000.

[433] Orest Subtelny concludes: Between 1648 and 1656, tens of thousands of Jews—given the lack of reliable data, it is impossible to establish more accurate figures—were killed by the rebels, and to this day the Khmelnytsky uprising is considered by Jews to be one of the most traumatic events in their history.

[449] Historians Kevin Kenny and Cormac Ó Gráda argue that For a mass-death atrocity to be defined as a genocide, it must include the intentional destruction of a people and that the British government's actions do not meet this requirement.

[460] Nat Hill, director of research at Genocide Watch, has stated that "While the potato famine may not fit perfectly into the legal and political definitions of 'genocide', it should be given equal consideration in history as an egregious crime against humanity".