Human rights are a complex concept with distinct parts, whose histories are often independent from one another. Histories of human rights are almost always partial histories, and we cannot reduce their history to that of one part. This article challenges one of the central tenets of the early-modern history of human rights, namely that it was the “discovery” of subjective rights in the late medieval period that was the critical move in the development of human rights. It examines in particular the work of Richard Tuck, and exposes his debt to the French legal historian Michel Villey and to Leo Strauss. In so doing, it disputes the existence of a “modern school” of natural law theory, and sketches an alternative history of natural rights, which passes from the Huguenot monarchomachs and the English Levellers to the American and French revolutionaries.

Most histories of early-modern rights focus on particular concepts of rights: for instance, notions of subjective vs. objective right, or on the presence/absence of particular rights (e.g., self-preservation). But focusing on specific rights has led scholars to pay less attention to what happens to rights as a whole when individuals enter into a political state, and also to miss the fact that historical actors tended to think about rights within broader conceptual regimes. In this paper, I identify three major early-modern rights regimes: the abridgment regime, which emphasizes the abandonment or alienation of rights (e.g., Hobbes); the transfer regime, in which natural rights are transferred to the state, and can only be retrieved under specific conditions (e.g., Spinoza and Locke); and the preservation regime, which insists that we should be able to enjoy the individual exercise of our natural rights even under government (e.g., Jefferson). After laying out the historical origins and conceptual bases of these regimes, I sketch a brief history of their respective trajectories between the early sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries, focusing in particular on the rather curious and contingent reasons why the preservation regime shot to success after the 1760s.

Genocide occurs in every time period and on every continent. Using the 1948 U.N. definition of genocide as its departure point, this book examines the main episodes in the history of genocide from the beginning of human history to the present. Norman M. Naimark lucidly shows that genocide both changes over time, depending on the character of major historical periods, and remains the same in many of its murderous dynamics. He examines cases of genocide as distinct episodes of mass violence, but also in historical connection with earlier episodes.

Unlike much of the literature in genocide studies, Naimark argues that genocide can also involve the elimination of targeted social and political groups, providing an insightful analysis of communist and anti-communist genocide. He pays special attention to settler (sometimes colonial) genocide as a subject of major concern, illuminating how deeply the elimination of indigenous peoples, especially in Africa, South America, and North America, influenced recent historical developments. At the same time, the "classic" cases of genocide in the twentieth Century - the Armenian Genocide, the Holocaust, Rwanda, and Bosnia -- are discussed, together with recent episodes in Darfur and Congo.