Exterminate All the Brutes

Part travelogue, part intellectual history, Lindqvist's book traces how European racial science and the doctrine of extermination made the mass killings of empire thinkable long before the twentieth century. Taking Kurtz's scrawled command as its title and its thread, it argues that Europe already knew what it was doing. It tied colonial mass death to later European atrocity and unsettled easy stories of progress.

Its legacy. It reframed the Holocaust as continuous with, not separate from, the violence of empire.