Rediscovering the Canary Islands: Maritime Notes Towards a New Historical Geography of Genocide

When, and where, was the first genocide? Drawing on Robert Meister’s dialectics of race and place, I argue that the European encounter with the Canary Islands provides a cogent answer to this politically fraught question. Moreover, framing violence against the indigenous peoples of the Canaries as such creates new avenues for theorising genocidal violence in relation to insular and oceanic spaces. Through this framing, I construct a ‘prehistory’ of the European encounter with the Islands that centres a resurrection of the Roman Empire’s Mediterranean maritime unity as an ideological preoccupation within European Christendom that informed its eventual Atlantic expansion. From here, I show how these logics of war, conquest, and non-Christian status were both maintained and challenged by the encounter with the Canaries in a manner that provides new explanations for Europe’s violent expansion across the globe – and the violence that ensued when this expansion reached its spatial limits.