Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples by Mohamed Adhikari (review)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:

• Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples by Mohamed Adhikari
• Mark Meuwese

Destroying to Replace: Settler Genocides of Indigenous Peoples. By mohamed adhikari. Critical Themes in World History. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2022. xliv + 179 pp. ISBN 978-1-64792-049-4. $18.00 (paper).

Mohamed Adhikari rightly points out that settler genocides are often overlooked in comparison to the wider known mass-killings of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. This book examines four settler genocides in the context of Western expansion across the world from approximately 1400 until the early twentieth century. The cases include the genocide of the Canary Islanders in the fifteenth century, the genocide of California’s Indigenous peoples during the Gold Rush from 1848 to 1870, the destruction of Aboriginal societies in Queensland in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth century, and the genocide of the Hereros of Southwestern Africa in the early twentieth century. The author has previously published on the genocide of the San people of South Africa. Destroying to Replace, part of a series aimed at undergraduate students, contains a preface, a series editor’s foreword, an introduction, a detailed examination of the four case studies, and a conclusion highlighting several themes common to each case study. Each chapter of the four cases ends with a selection of primary sources to encourage discussion.

The introduction contains a succinct overview of the concepts of genocide and settler colonialism. The author emphasizes the influential role of the Polish-Jewish legal scholar Raphael Lemkin in developing the concept while in exile in the United States during the Second [End Page 172] World War. As part of negotiations at the United Nations (UN), Lemkin’s original expansive definition was revised as the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide by the international body in December 1948. Although many scholars have used the UN definition, Adhikari argues that it is useful in international law but not in academia. The author settles on his own, which is the “intentional physical destruction of a social group or the intentional annihilation of such a significant part of the social relationships that constitute its communal life, that it is no longer able to reproduce itself biologically or culturally” (p. xxxii). Next, Adhikari discusses settler colonialism. Unlike resource exploitation colonies where violence committed against the Indigenous populations is relatively limited, Adhikari argues that in settler colonies, “where the expropriation of Indigenous land is central to the colonial project, violence is likely to be more intense” (pp. xxxiv–xxxv). Like scholars such as Lorenzo Veracini and Patrick Wolfe, Adhikari characterizes settler colonialism as a zero sum game in which settlers refuse to compromise with the Indigenous peoples because the latter need to make way for the settlers. At the same time, Adhikari views settler colonialism not as inherently genocidal. According to the author, forced removals, residential schools, and reserves are by themselves not evidence of genocide. Although Indigenous peoples were invariably faced with dispossession, removal, and assimilationist policies, not all were the subject of a focused campaign of exterminatory violence.

Adhikari’s conceptual and comparative approach has several strengths. The four case studies that he examines are unequivocally examples of settler genocides. In all cases, settlers perpetrated sustained campaigns of physical violence against the Indigenous peoples resulting in their near complete destruction. This was especially the case for the little known Canary Islanders who faced relentless campaigns of Normandy and Spanish knights, soldiers, and settlers during the fifteenth century. The Spanish either killed or enslaved the Indigenous islanders as a workforce on the sugar mills of Madeira and the Canary Islands. By the early sixteenth century, no autonomous Indigenous communities were left on the islands. The Indigenous populations of California and Queensland suffered similar catastrophes during the nineteenth century as large numbers of aggressive settlers took over their homelands. Another strength of the book is that it clearly shows how commercial motives drove the taking of Indigenous lands as well as the large-scale enslavement of Indigenous populations, including women and children. Another common factor that Adhikari highlights well is how Indigenous resistance escalated settler violence. Whenever [End Page 173] Indigenous peoples put up...