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? This is the first book to consider the phenomenon within a broad context of world historical development. In this first volume of a major four-volume survey, Mark Levene sets out the conceptual issues in the study of genocide and the historical linkage between the rise of the West, in both its modern and early modern domestic and colonial settings, and increasing tendencies to physically annihilate native peoples or religiously heterodox communal groups who stood as obstacles in its path.