Vanished

Summary

Historian Sadiah Qureshi traces extinction as an idea and finds it younger than we assume. Fossil finds in the age of revolutions turned it from a theological threat into an inevitability; Europeans and Americans then used that supposedly natural process to excuse persecution and genocide, writing off peoples from the Beothuk to Aboriginal Australians as doomed to vanish.

Rationale

It shows a dominant idea doing what we think dispositions do, passing as plain nature while it licenses harm, and ties the loss of species to the persecution of peoples.