Genocide in Tasmania, California, and Namibia began with a common lie: the assertion that the land was “empty,” “unclaimed,” or should be “made empty.” The British in Australia employed a doctrine of terra nullius, or “land where nothing exists,” while in the US settlers and their advocates spoke of vacuum domicilium, or “empty domicile,” to justify invasion and expropriation. In Namibia, colonists enacted policies of tabula rasa, or “creating a map scraped smooth,” to facilitate dispossession and ethnic cleansing. The concept of tabula rasa asserted that indigenous people should be removed and that these people had minimal moral claim to the land. If white settlers saw no European-style agriculture or Western trappings of civilization, they often deemed an area “empty” to rationalize conquest and settlement. Under the British doctrine of terra nullius, Aboriginal Tasmanians had no right to territory because they were not using the land in a European fashion and had no legal title under British law. Likewise, under the vacuum domicilium doctrine, the California legislature excluded the Yuki from state citizenship and thus legal land ownership. The German government did grant land titles to Hereros, but utilized the “empty” land concept as part of the rationale behind Chancellor von Caprivi’s 1893 claim that “the territory is ours, it is now German territory and must be maintained as German territory”. Later, the Germans justified policies designed to transfer land from blacks to whites with the same concept. The idea of “empty” or unclaimed land provided the legal and intellectual framework for genocide by rationalizing dispossession and by suggesting that native people were less worthy of land ownership and thus essentially less human than white settlers.