The Nazi deportation of Jews in the 1940s and the US deportation of Native Americans in the 1830s cannot be equated. The differences, both in scale and intent, are so immense that they scarcely need to be pointed out. Suffice to say that there were no industrialised death camps in the 1830s, and that some Indigenous Americans, fully informed of the risks, truly believed that it was in their best interest to accede to US demands that they move.
Nonetheless, though the Nazi death camps appear to be unfathomable and incomparable, state-sponsored forced migrations share a genealogy. The Final Solution ultimately took on a horrific form all of its own, yet the steps leading up to it covered familiar ground. State administrators widely believed that it was good policy to move problem peoples, whom they deemed backward or incapable of modernising, to remote colonies. That is why Franklin Roosevelt’s advisor on refugee policy, Isaiah Bowman, declared that the resettlement of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany ought to be understood as ‘a broad scientific undertaking, humanitarian in purpose’. Pioneering, as Bowman called it, would resolve territorial conflict to everyone’s benefit. It is also why Wilson Lumpkin, one of the lead architects of the US plan to deport native peoples in the 1830s, asserted that the ‘Indians can never be happy and prosperous’ in their homelands. Only if they were moved elsewhere would ‘a happy destiny’ await them.
While the US campaign of the 1830s is part of the violent history of European colonialism in the Americas, it also belongs to the history of state-sponsored forced migrations. This history began at least 2,800 years ago, when the neo-Assyrian empire expelled conquered peoples and annexed their lands. The list of perpetrators includes Byzantine rulers, Iranian shahs, the English crown and Qing emperors. In fact, state-sponsored mass deportations are so common historically as to be forgettable. Who remembers that Alfonso III sold the entire population of Minorca, perhaps some 40,000 people, into slavery in 1287?
And yet not all deportations are the same. Beginning in the 19th century, ambitious state administrators around the world, driven by nationalist fervour and racist ideology, began to focus on remaking their citizenry. They employed bureaucratic tools of state administration such as censuses to create unified and homogeneous citizens: Greece for the Greeks, Turkey for the Turks, and so on. Indian Removal, understood in this context, is among the first mass deportations in the modern world.