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

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 Vendee. 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.

Mark Levene is Reader in Comparative History in the Department of History and the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton. His research ranges from Jewish history to genocide and climate change and his most recent book is History at the End of the World? History, Climate Change and the Possibility of Closure (with Rob Johnson and Penny Roberts, eds.). He is founder of Rescue!History and co-founder of the Crisis Forum.