*sigh* I was halfway through a very lengthy & entirely comprehensive reply and then... to the delight of everyone else it got et! In brief, then (I kid you not!).

Jim - you know better; bruce should, but bruce never does. If you want to squabble, children, take it to PMs please & spare everyone else!

Genocide is an ill-used word & an over-used one. I can understand Steve's reservations over Holocaust with a capital H, as per the title; holocaust with a small h works as a class noun... Except that it's an unnecessary word because we already have genocide (& many wouldn't recognise a distinction between upper- & lower-case). Both are used where they are not justified because they evoke... The Nazis on the Jews was an attempted genocide. The Hutu on the Tutsi was an attempted genocide. What happened in the break-up of Yugoslavia was an attempt at genocide. What worth in comparing them? Numbers? The Tutsi suffered far more than the Jews. The horror of how they died? Does anyone *really* want to quantify that? I agree that "Whose was worse" is utterly fatuous.

The dikker def of genocide amounts to "systematic & deliberate attempt at mass-murder, usually along racial lines". What about the Turks on the Armenians, or America's several Trail of Tears inflictions on the Native? There are those who would argue that these were also genocides. Certainly, they were brutal, callous, careless of human life, inhumane. But, as with the various Japanese "Death Marches" of Allied POW's, I don't believe that any of them were genocides. They were "brutal... ...inhumane", but they weren't "systematic & deliberate..."

Thus, after preamble, I arrive at Raggy's original purpose. Colonialism was never benign or, at least, not wholly so. All of Europe was Wherever for a given object of Profit. If you know even a little of European involvement in Africa & Asia up to the earlier part of the 20thC, you will know (rather than just believing) that all of the colonial powers were seeking some sort of a profit (for a given value of 'profit'). However! If you know even a little, you will also know that most colonialism wasn't simply rapacious either.

Also consider this. If the Industrial Revolution had occurred in, say, Ulundi or Bombay, how different would the world be? We might have had Hindu priests or those of the ancestral spirits proselytising across Western Europe... My point here is that people are people the world over. The balance of power would be different, globally the centre would different; we might all be using an Indian language, isiZulu, or some other Bantu language as a lingua franca, rather than English. But the repercussions of the balance would probably not be different. Western Europe would have been conquered, the resentments et al would be the same.

The German & Belgian versions of colonialism were particularly brutal & unpleasant. But were they genocide? It seems that at least some of the German efforts have been classified by rather higher powers than me as genocide. But someone above (I forget who) used the word "profiteering".

It is a common mistake to view history through the prism of our own times (and all too many historians, who ought to know better, are guilty of it). It was Joe, above, who asked How could our ancestors have thought they had the right to do that? The simple answer is, "Because they were them then." And perhaps it sounds trite, but if they had not been them then, we would not be us now. We change & evolve socially as well as physically. Four hundred years ago, everyone accepted that slavery was normal; nowadays, few cultures do, for one very obvious example.

Our ancestors, Joe, did not see the world in the same terms that we do, any more that everyone across the world now does. I have been known to remark that the problem with Islam is that their calendar is about five & a half centuries behind ours. I mean no offence by this, but if you look at it that way that all too much of the Muslim world behaves, its level of tolerance & its reaction to aberration is not so very different from the way the One True Church was behaving 1440 CE, which is where their calendar currently is. Plus ca change etc; 'oomans is as 'oomans does, nowt so queer as folk, etc!

I can't comment very directly on the Kaiser's holocaust, Raggy. I am well aware that it did happen, but my knowledge is more general than specific. I doubt anyone on the 'cat can do better. If you google, you'll only find what I would look up to check that what I told you had a shred of accuracy! ;-) I will repeat, though, colonialism was never unalloyed anything. It was never inherently inimical, it was never benign. It was for the colonisers benefit, and it's hard to make a profit out of dead people so, in most cases, genocide for the sake of it; as attempted in the examples at the beginning of this post; would make no sense, either now or then.

The Belgian & German versions of colonisation were particularly brutal, perhaps partly because they came late to it. The Portuguese, I seem to remember, were bad but nowhere near AS bad. The Spanish, well most of their old empire had gone by the start of the 20thC. The French? They certainly still had colonies then. There were tensions with Britain throughout the 19thC. As late as 1898, we might have gone to war over the Fashoda Incident (google it!). But whilst someone above suggested they were awful in the Congo, in general what I know suggests they were less awful overall. I don't know enough specifics to be able to be more specific.

The British, of course, the British... There my knowledge is far greater but it is perhaps also biased. Britain was a slaver. Bristol was the centre of the slave trade; there its prosperity was founded. Britain was the first nation to abolish slavery too. Our colonial history is long. It's also complicated. Up to the Indian Mutiny it was John Company, the EIC, that ran India. How much influence the UK govt had is very much open to argument! After the Mutiny... the Govt took over. There were characters in our colonial history such as Robert Clive & Cecil Rhodes who very definitely WERE rapacious bastards... But there again, they weren't unalloyed bad. There certainly were many, many thousands of people, often over several generations of a family, who went out to various colonies believing that it was their task to improve the natives' lot. Many died trying. And presumably the same can be said of other colonial powers as well if, perhaps, not to the same extent.

This isn't very much help, in terms of a direct response to you, Raggy, more of a caution. Remember, whatever period of history takes your interest, that they were them then as we are us now. If everyone reading this now had been born in Edo in 1914, some of us would have been in the Imperial Japanese Army in the 1930s. So one or two of us would have been in Nanking in 37/38, bayoneting babies, raping women, murdering civilians, not because we are evil, but because we are products of our culture. We are fortunate in that we all are products of relatively benign cultures in a relatively benign age. Judge not our ancestors too harshly because they were not so lucky!