Remaking Identities: God, Nation, and Race in World History

This fascinating book offers a rare combination of rigorous historical analysis and a fine narrative that will appeal to a wider readership. The discussion on Islam in the Indian subcontinent is particularly significant, as it highlights the complex ways in which medieval Islamic rulers and ideologues handled sensitive questions of crucial import, especially tricky issues of the intermingling of religion and politics in diverse, multicultural contexts. It is also important for the appreciation of South Asian Islam as a major factor that policy analysts and others in the business of government would do well to understand. As a lesson from history, responsible governance based on a progressive law and an inclusive political theory can be the mantra for dealing with the current international crises involving failures of governments to resolve conflicts over religious and ethnic identities.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer who coined the term 'genocide' in 1944, complained that historians did 'not stress enough the death of civilizations as a result of genocide.' Ben Lieberman's Remaking Identities would surely satisfy Lemkin's moral and analytical stipulation. Ranging assuredly from antiquity to the present day, the book's argument that civilizational expansion all too often entailed the cultural destruction of others will disturb contemporary complacency about progressive liberal narratives, especially in the former settler colonies.

Lieberman (Fitchburg State Univ.) proficiently documents the destruction, creation, and intriguing dual realities that emerge when groups attempt to plant their universal and exclusive ideologies in foreign soil. The author builds off his previous work on genocide by offering seven essays documenting the varying intensities of violence and genocide resulting from monotheistic expansion (the realm of Islam and Christendom), nation building (North American colonial frontier and early-20th-century Balkan nation-states), and racial empire (Nazi Germany). Lieberman demonstrates in each historical episode that the question "was it genocide?" is not the crucial topic. He contends that genocidal actions were one of many methods (persuasion, teaching, narratives, and remaking local geographies) utilized to create identity. Thus, the important question becomes how and why certain methods and levels of genocide were used in particular times and places. Lieberman convincingly demonstrates through historical record and thoughtful storytelling how practicality determined the particular method of implanting an ideology/identity. A main contribution to the literature concerns his theory that some of the worst violence emanated from the tension due to dual realities, which, Lieberman contends, is inherent in attempts at remaking identities. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.

What do you say to someone who suggests that genocide is not just destructive, but constructive? This is the basic theme of Benjamin Lieberman‘s excellent new book Remaking Identities: God, Nation and Racein World History. The book surveys two thousand years of history to explain how people have used violence to reconstruct identities. This obviously involves death and destruction. But it also involves recasting the identities of survivors. It involves evangelism and religious conversion. It entails education and persuasion. It sometimes requires forced separation from one’s community and integration into a new community and a new way of viewing the world. In doing so, Lieberman reminds us, many perpetrators intended to create a new world, not just destroy an old one. It’s an important insight, one Lieberman explores through a variety of case studies ranging from the Islamic expansion of the 700s to the violence of the 20th century.