This meticulously researched and voluminous book represents a first of sorts. It is the first synthetic, single-authored global history to connect state power and formation to violence through the willful extermination and attempted extermination of peoples. Its reach is not only global, it is also temporal, as the book examines violence through time as well as geographies. Kiernan periodizes this breadth and depth of range in the following organization of this book: “Early Imperial Expansion,” “Settler Colonialism,” and “Twentieth-Century Genocides”—chapters that form the historical and conceptual spine of the book. These periodizations (which are thematics) may well come to characterize mainstream understandings of these historical eras as the book becomes the scholarly reference that it is shortly about to be: the most comprehensive and synthetic account of willful (political and bodily) genocide to date.
Ranging through ancient Greece, medieval Ireland, Native North America, indigenous Australia, Japan's occupation of China, Mao's...
