Book contents
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume ii
- Introduction to Volume ii
- Part I Settler Colonialism
- Part II Empire-Building and State Domination
- 4 A Case Lacking Contemporaneous Local Sources
- 5 Atrocity and Genocide in Japan’s Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598
- 6 The English Conquest of Ireland, c.1530–c.1650
- 7 Extirpation and Annihilation in Cromwellian Ireland
- 8 Genocide in the Spice Islands
- 9 ‘Too Furious’
- 10 The Destruction of Wendake (Huronia), 1647–1652
- 11 A ‘Spreading Fire’
- 12 The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars
- 13 A Vicious Civil War in the French Revolution
- 14 The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c.1810 to the Present
- Part III Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides
- Part IV Premonitions
- Index
9 - ‘Too Furious’
The Genocide of Connecticut’s Pequot Indians, 1636–1640
from Part II - Empire-Building and State Domination
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2023
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- The Cambridge World History of Genocide
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume ii
- Introduction to Volume ii
- Part I Settler Colonialism
- Part II Empire-Building and State Domination
- 4 A Case Lacking Contemporaneous Local Sources
- 5 Atrocity and Genocide in Japan’s Invasion of Korea, 1592–1598
- 6 The English Conquest of Ireland, c.1530–c.1650
- 7 Extirpation and Annihilation in Cromwellian Ireland
- 8 Genocide in the Spice Islands
- 9 ‘Too Furious’
- 10 The Destruction of Wendake (Huronia), 1647–1652
- 11 A ‘Spreading Fire’
- 12 The Qing Extermination of the Zünghars
- 13 A Vicious Civil War in the French Revolution
- 14 The Zulu Kingdom as a Genocidal and Post-genocidal Society, c.1810 to the Present
- Part III Nineteenth-Century Frontier Genocides
- Part IV Premonitions
- Index
Summary
The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.
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- The Cambridge World History of Genocide , pp. 215 - 242Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023