About

Benjamin Madley is an historian specializing in Native American history, colonialism, and genocide. Born in Redding, California, he spent much of his childhood in Karuk Country near the Oregon border, where he developed an interest in the relationships between colonizers and Indigenous peoples. He is educated at Yale University and Oxford University, holding a Ph.D. from Yale obtained in 2009. Madley's research focuses on Native America, particularly the history of California and Oregon Indians, Indigenous Hawaiians, and the broader context of genocide and colonial violence. He has authored more than twenty journal articles and book chapters, with his first book, 'An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873,' published by Yale University Press. His work often applies a transnational and comparative approach, examining colonialism in Africa, Australia, and Europe. Madley has held fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and during the 2023-2024 academic year, he served as a Visiting Professor of Indigenous Law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco.

Research topics

• Geography
• Archaeology
• Medicine
• History
• Ecology
• Ethnology
• Biology

Selected publications

• In Memoriam: Natale A. Zappia, 1974–2023

  American Indian Culture and Research Journal · 2024-07-10

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Reprint. Originally appeared in Perspectives on History, vol. 61, no. 8(November 2023).

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Aloha with tears”: Native Hawaiians in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1860

  Journal of American History · 2024-06-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Journal Article "Aloha with tears": Native Hawaiians in the California Gold Rush, 1848-1860 Get access Benjamin Madley Benjamin Madley Associate professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles Readers may contact Madley at madley@ucla.edu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 1, June 2024, Pages 39–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae002 Published: 01 June 2024

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to Volume <scp>ii</scp>

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter

  The Genocide Convention provides an internationally recognised, though restricted, rubric for evaluating possible instances of genocide. First, perpetrators must evince ‘intent to destroy’ a ‘national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Second, they must commit at least one of the five specified ‘acts’ of genocide against one of those four ‘protected’ groups. In addition, the Genocide Convention criminalises the following acts:

  PublisherDOI

• 4 The Third Vector: Pacific Pathogens, Colonial Disease Ecologies, and Native American Epidemics North of Mexico

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geography
  • Ethnology
  • Ecology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• California Unbound

  California History · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  An enduring focus on African American chattel slavery, the U.S. Civil War, and sharecropping in the South has failed to collectively address the varieties of unfree labor and their abolitions in the trans-Mississippi western United States. By exploring systems of servitude and their termination in California and the wider Pacific World, this essay reframes the Age of Abolition. It describes the rise and fall of labor regimes that bound California Indians, African Americans, Chileans, and Chinese women. Citing Chinese-, English-, and Spanish-language sources from a variety of archives and libraries, this article expands the chronology, geography, and actors of the Age of Abolition. Finally, it suggests trajectories for rethinking this momentous transition from Pacific World and western U.S. vantage points to suggest the need for a global history of abolition.

  PublisherDOI

• ‘A War of Extermination’

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  On 18 June 2019, California’s Gavin Newsom became the first governor in United States history to apologise publicly for a genocide committed in their state. Shaded by a grove of trees at the site of West Sacramento’s future California Indian Heritage Center, Newsom stood in a circle with tribal leaders. After recounting evidence of state-sponsored mass murder, Governor Newsom insisted: ‘It’s called a genocide. That’s what it was: a genocide, no other way to describe it. And, that’s the way it needs to be described in the history books.’ Finally, the governor of the most populous and prosperous state in the wealthiest nation in the world publicly apologised: ‘I’m sorry on behalf of the state of California.’1 Genocide was a formative event in the making of the state. Yet relatively few people, even in California, know this history.

  PublisherDOI

• Migrant Ecologies

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2023

  • Geography

  Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World is the first volume explicitly dedicated to the environmental history of Earth’s largest ocean. Covering nearly one-third of the planet, the Pacific Ocean is remarkable for its diverse human and non-human inhabitants, their astounding long-distance migrations over time, and their profound influences on other parts of the world. This book creates an understanding of the past, present, and futures of the lands, seas, peoples, practices, microbes, animals, plants, and other natural forces that shape the Pacific. It effectively argues for the existence of an interconnected Pacific World environmental history, as well as for the Pacific Ocean as a necessary framework for understanding that history. The fifteen chapters in this comprehensive collection, written by leading experts from across the globe, span a vast array of topics, from disease ecology and coffee cultivation to nuclear testing and whaling practices. They explore regions stretching from the Tuamotu Archipelago in the south Pacific to the Kamchatka Peninsula in the far north, resisting the depiction of the Pacific as isolated and uninhabited. What unites these diverse contributions is a concern for how the people, places, and non-human beings of the Pacific World have been shaped by, and have in turn modified, their oceanic realm. Building on a recent renaissance in Pacific history, these chapters make a powerful argument for the importance of the Pacific World as a coherent unit of analysis and a valuable lens through which to examine past, ongoing, and emerging environmental issues. By showcasing surprising and innovative perspectives on the environmental histories of the peoples and ecosystems in and around the Pacific Ocean, this work adds to current conversations and debates about the Pacific World and offers myriad opportunities for further discussions, both inside and outside of the classroom.

  DOI

• ‘Too Furious’

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The 1636-1637 Pequot War and its aftermath were formative events in the making of New England and North America. The region’s first major colonial war eliminated the Pequots as a geopolitical power, opened southern New England to English domination, nearly annihilated the Pequots, and helped to establish patterns of extreme violence against Native Americans that shaped much of the continent north of Mexico. Unsurprisingly, few events in colonial North America have produced such prolonged and unresolved historical debate. This chapter will summarize the ongoing modern Pequot genocide debate, narrate the cataclysm in detail, provide quantitative estimates of its death toll, discuss dispersal and enslavement as a genocidal strategy, reevaluate colonists’ culpability, reconsider pre-genocide Pequot population estimates, and explain how this catastrophe constituted genocide under the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention.

  PublisherDOI

• The Third Vector:

  University of Hawaii Press eBooks · 2022-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 9 Tactics of Nineteenth-Century Colonial Massacre: Tasmania, California and Beyond

  Berghahn Books · 2022-10-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cherokee Diaspora

  Yale University

  16 shared

• Howard R. Lamar

  Yale University

  16 shared

• Martha Sandweiss

  Princeton University

  16 shared

• John Mack Faragher

  16 shared

• Robert Utley

  16 shared

• David Samuel Torres-Rouff

  16 shared

• Malcolm Rohrbough The

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  16 shared

• William Cronon

  American Orchid Society

  16 shared

Education

• Ph.D., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2009

• M.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2004

• B.A., History

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2001

Awards & honors

• Long-term fellowships at the Huntington Library and the Swed…