Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 2: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide

Genocide in the Age of the Nation State: Volume 2: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide
ISBN-10
0857712896
ISBN-13
9780857712899
Category
History
Pages
470
Language
English
Published
2005-08-26
Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing
Author
Mark Levene

Description

Most books on genocide consider it primarily as a twentieth-century phenomenon. In The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide, Levene argues that this approach fails to grasp its true origins. Genocide developed out of modernity and the striving for the nation-state, both essentially Western experiences. It was European expansion into all hemispheres between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries that provided the main stimulus to its pre-1914 manifestations. One critical outcome, on the cusp of modernity, was the French revolutionary destruction of the Vendée. Levene finishes this volume at the 1914 watershed with the destabilising effects of the 'rise of the West' on older Ottoman, Chinese, Russian and Austrian empires. "Very impressive" - Eric Hobsbawm

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