Introduction to Volume II: Genocide in the Early Modern and Imperial Worlds, c.1535 to World War I

The term “genocide” was coined in 1943. The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention came into force in 1950. It took until 1998 for the first perpetrator of a genocide to be convicted in an international trial – for a crime committed in Rwanda in 1994. Nevertheless it is widely acknowledged that the Nazi regime committed genocide against Jews during World War Two, even though that crime itself had no legal status at the time. The Nazi defendants at Nuremberg were initially charged with genocide, though they were convicted of other crimes. Yet “genocide” is often considered a twentieth-century crime, rather than a retroactive postwar legalism. The man who coined the term, the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, considered the Armenian Genocide during World War One to have been a similar crime, and during the 1930s, Lemkin had actively worked for its international recognition.