The Khmer Rouge regime frequently arrested and often executed anyone suspected of connections with the former Cambodian government or with foreign governments, as well as professionals, intellectuals, Buddhist monks and ethnic minorities. The regime attempted to purify Cambodian society along racial, social and political lines. Cambodia's previous military and political leadership, business leaders, journalists, students, doctors, and lawyers were all killed.

In this blog and the one that follows, I deal with 20th-century holocausts as the consequence of colonialism because they resulted from racial thinking. To be clear, I am not arguing that racial thinking led automatically to holocausts. Rather, I argue that categorising people into races and the thought that accompanies, was a necessary condition for the killing on a major scale of entire groups of people. Below, I illustrate three entirely separate holocausts with different backgrounds to each other but each was underpinned by racial thinking.

Colonisation led to impoverishment on a scale that has never been measured as such measurements are hard to create with any degree of accuracy. In the following three blogs, I examine the most intense two forms of impoverishment: holocausts and famine. The processes of impoverishment varied widely. In the continent of Africa, the colonising nations enslaved tens of millions of men and women. In the Americas, the indigenous people were almost but not quite eradicated. In India and China, the richest and most powerful parts of the world in 1500, the mechanisms of impoverishment were more complicated.