Introduction to Volume I

Two preliminary questions must be confronted in approaching the history of genocide in the premodern and early modern worlds.¹ The first, as discussed in the General Editor's Introduction, is the foundational, definitional question: what exactly is genocide? The second is the question of possible anachronism. This stems from the fact that the term 'genocide' itself is a modern term, a neologism introduced by the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 work Axis Rule in Occupied Europe to describe atrocities being perpetrated during World War Two, but also earlier cases, drawing on his own historical research that stretched back to antiquity. Here, then, we deal with two interrelated problems.² The first is the question of whether genocide should be seen as a transhistorical phenomenon, or alternatively a peculiar product of modernity. While mass killing is clearly transhistorical, is there something particular about what is termed 'genocide' in the modern period?