This chapter historicizes the intersecting keywords of the “language of transgression” – shock, conscience, and mankind / humanity – since the early modern period when, I argue, we can locate its operation for the first time. The analysis focuses on the Western maritime empires that colonized the Americas, Oceania, and later Africa. Because we are interested in laying out the linguistic context from which Lemkin invented “genocide,” as well as the vested interests that went into its restricted legal meaning, this chapter highlights its operation and development as an instrument of power. The keywords in the language of transgression were naturally open to interpretation. And yet, a common feature in all their uses was the framing of exploitative and violent excesses – atrocities – as “barbaric.” Significantly, atrocities were understood not only as punctual events but as the outcomes of corrupt political and economic processes.

The language of transgression has been multidirectional from its beginnings. Using it to expose abuses, as in the campaign to stop the system of labor exploitation in the Congo in the name of humanity and civilization, was common. Violating the sovereignty of another European power’s colonial possessions was a potential in this discourse, especially when the state that purported to represent human freedom in general could align this universal ideal with its interests. Britain’s campaign to end the slave trade embodied this posture in the nineteenth century. In this respect, Britain’s rival was less Germany than the USA, whose developing naval power and trading capacity combined with its anti-colonial self-understanding and republican civilizing mission to produce world-ordering aspirations. These would be realized in the League of Nations when “international conscience” and the “public mind” were joined in the reformist imperial project of tutelage over “backward” peoples” in its mandates system.