In this blog and the one that follows, I deal with 20th-century holocausts as the consequence of colonialism because they resulted from racial thinking. To be clear, I am not arguing that racial thinking led automatically to holocausts. Rather, I argue that categorising people into races and the thought that accompanies, was a necessary condition for the killing on a major scale of entire groups of people. Below, I illustrate three entirely separate holocausts with different backgrounds to each other but each was underpinned by racial thinking.

Racism had many consequences for the indigenous peoples of invaded lands. The various strands of Christianity fed into the colonial mindset from the last decades of the 18th century when missionaries followed the invaders. For the churches, these were their ‘civilising missions’, bringing what they thought was the best of their own culture. The literature is full of chaplains seeing their missions as bringing light to the darkness of the heathen. Many of the invaded did not see it that way, viewing the Christian churches as an attempt to denigrate their cultures and ways of life.