New book: Persecution and Genocide: A History
We are delighted to announce that pre-orders are now open for Persecution and Genocide: A History, by HaCC member Gervase Phillips. The book offers an unparalleled range of comparative studies considering both persecution and genocide across two thousand years of history from Rome to Nazi Germany, and spanning Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Topics covered include the persecution of religious minorities in the ancient world and late antiquity, the medieval roots of modern antisemitism, the early modern witch-hunts, the emergence of racial ideologies and their relationship to slavery, colonialism, Russian and Soviet mass deportations, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust. It also introduces students to significant, but less well known, episodes, such as the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres and forced expulsions suffered by the Circassians at the hands of imperial Russia in the 1860s, as the world entered an ‘age of genocide’.
By exploring the ideological motivations of the perpetrators, the book invites students to engage with the moral complexities of the past and to reflect upon our own situation today as the ‘legatees of two thousand years of persecution’.