{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.028191703584373742, 'fraction_numerical': 0.004430124848973017, 'mean_word_length': 5.385604113110539, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Genocide Before the Holocaust (review)

Genocide Before the Holocaust, Cathie Carmichael (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 256 pp., cloth $45.00. Has Europe been the site of numerous genocides over hundreds of years? If modernization led to the Holocaust, did it also contribute to half a dozen other genocides on the continent? What is the real history of Europe behind the “progress” narrative of Western civilization? Such questions are raised, if not always answered, in Genocide Before the Holocaust, which ranges from the Balkans through Anatolia to the Caucasus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Over the past decade Mark Levene, Donald Bloxham, and other scholars have problematized the received assumption that Europe’s genocides are limited to the Holocaust and Bosnia. Levene, Bloxham, and Carmichael have examined populations that fell within reach of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, and in particular the violence resulting from the crumbling and then collapse of those structures. Bloxham has argued that the Holocaust culminated a period of imperial collapse, emerging nationalisms, and complicating economic and political interests of the Great Powers. Levene has privileged not Europe per se but the spread of Western European ideals of social “homogeneity” in the emerging system of nation-states. Both focus on the genocide of the Armenians. Carmichael adds a number of other histories. Re-evaluations have followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and reflect a new institutional preference for world history courses that supplant the narrative of an East-West divide. Marshall Hodgson’s work on the relationship between Islam and Europe argues that this “division” between East and West is a reflection of Western ethnocentrism. In work on the European Union, Gerard Delanty postulates instead “many Europes,” a plurality extending into the continent’s “very civilisational nature”: as a geopolitical entity Europe is as much “Eastern” as “Western.” Carmichael’s book advocates key features of the revised narrative. Genocide Before the Holocaust casts modernization as suffering, contradicting both the great “progress narrative” and notions of genocide as atavistic. It details relentless attempts to homogenize populations and to narrow identities. The targets were almost always religious and ethnic minorities, some extending over many parts of Europe and the Near East. Genocide Before the Holocaust depicts a normalization