(2 Volume Set) Genocide in the Age of the Nation-State, Volume I: The Meaning of Genocide; Volume II: The Rise of the West and the Coming of Genocide

New York: I.B. Tauris, 2005. Hardcover. Good/good. Hardcover. 9 1/4" X 6 1/4". ix, 266pp.; 463pp. Rubbing, creasing, and shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jackets. Gentle rubbing and bumps to corners and edges of black paper over boards. A few spots of faint toning to edges of text blocks. Pages are clean and unmarked. Bindings are sound.

ABOUT THIS SET:
How should we understand genocide in the modern world? As an aberration from the norms of a dominant liberal international society? Or rather as a guide to the very dysfunctional nature of the international system itself? Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (truncated) is the first work to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this book, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide, addressing the fundamental problems of defining genocide and understanding what we mean by perpetrators and victims, before placing the phenomenon in the context of world history. Genocide in the Age of the Nation State is the first of a major four-volume survey which examines its subject within an extensive global and historical framework and which will become the definitive work on the subject.

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.(Publisher). (Inventory #: 16463)