This volume 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." Gervase Phillips's book is the ideal introduction to the subject, for anyone interested in the long and complex history of human persecution.
Introduction
1. ‘Your Cruelty is Our Glory’: The Roman Persecution of Christians, 64–313 CE
2. ‘More Ruthless than the Tyrant, More Bloody than the Executioner’: Christianizing the Roman Empire and Forging a Theory of Persecution, 313 CE–c.430 CE
3. ‘Peace for the Gods of Our Forefathers’: Pagans Between Persecution and Forbearance, 313–529 CE
4. ‘Slay Them Not’: The Medieval Roots of Modern Antisemitism, c.313–1492
5. ‘Kill Them All. God Will Know His Own’: The Albigensian Crusade and the Persecution of Heretics, 1209–1321
6. ‘Some Fantastic Delusion’: The Witch Hunts in Early Modern Europe, c.1420–1782
7. ‘God’s Fire Impressed the Mark of Slavery Upon You’: Race and Slavery, c.1450–1888
8. ‘How Godly a Deed It Is to Overthrow So Wicked a Race’: Genocide and Colonialism, 1492–1908
9. ‘More Unpitying than Pestilence or Fire’: Genocides in the Ottoman, Russian, and Soviet Empires, 1864–1945
10. ‘The Annihilation of the Jewish Race in Europe’: Persecution and the Holocaust, 1933–1945
Conclusion
Biography
Gervase Phillips is Principal Lecturer in history at Manchester Metropolitan University. He is a historian of conflict, persecution, genocide, and slavery. His previous publications include The Anglo-Scots Wars, 1513–1550 (1999).
"Phillips' account of persecution as a dynamic of genocide reaches into the histories Europe and North America exposing the ideological and religious roots of mass violence. The story is meticulously assembled as it portrays the populist political uses of persecution to eradicate the threatening Other. This history of persecution is a moral reckoning and warning."
Christopher Davey, Binghamton University, SUNY, USA
