The judicial landscape in thirteenth century Japan was highly complex with multiple stakeholders in local conflicts. Court nobles, temples, governors, and warrior families all had vested interests in provincial affairs, yet official institutions for conflict management were often lacking or imperfect. The reach of the political centers was limited, and local officers in charge of law enforcement were rarely reliable in mitigating or de-escalating local conflicts. Local communities therefore had to develop their own conflict strategies on a continuum from evasive strategies to violent confrontations with estate owners, warriors, and neighboring communities. With the threat of a Mongol invasion in the second half of the thirteenth century, central powers sought to increase their control over the periphery. This process led to increasing resistance from locals who saw their traditional or recently acquired privileges and autonomy coming under pressure, and many of them resisted through violent means. This chapter argues that local communities developed armed organizations to manage inter-community disputes and as protection against violent, exterior threats, while such organizations were often described by central elites as banditry and predatory violence.

Early modern European warfare features prominently in several important discussions of early modern violence, notably the debate on the Military Revolution and its variants, as well as forming part of the standard narrative of state formation and the emergence of an international order based on sovereign states. While the dominant trend was towards establishing the state as a monopoly of legitimate violence, the patterns and practices of European warfare remained diverse, as were the ways in which they interacted with state and ‘international’ structures. The creation of permanent forces was slow and uneven, while their implications varied depending on whether they were navies or armies. This chapter contests conventional conceptual models, such as that of ‘limited war’ waged by allegedly disinterested ‘mercenaries’. It argues that efforts to impose tighter discipline arose from multiple political, cultural, social and religious impulses, and varied in effectiveness. War was certainly not limited in terms of its capacity for violence and destruction, but it nonetheless remained broadly within established Christian concepts of ‘just war’ directed by a ‘proper authority’ for legitimate ends. The risks inherent in military operations were an additional constraining factor, despite this period becoming known as an ‘age of battles’.

In this chapter Jolyon Mitchell analyses how audiences, journalists and producers interact with media representations of violence. More precisely he examines the practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering, and responding to mediated images of violence, using a wide range of examples from different media. While recognizing the power of vivid journalistic written and verbal descriptions of violence, through this essay Mitchell primarily considers visual representations over the last two centuries, starting from the 1810s, in the decade before the first photograph (c.1826), to the present day, concentrating upon non-cinematic examples, such as photographic portrayals of non-fictional violence. Other practices such as hiding, selecting, overlooking, forgetting and recollecting are juxtaposed with these core practices of revealing, representing, redacting, remembering and responding. Mitchell argues that these related practices contribute to the way violence manifests itself around the circuit of communication, which begins with acts of creation and production of images of violence, and which is then followed by their dissemination, reception and recycling. Reflecting further on this circuit of communication and these related practices helps answer questions such as: Why do certain images of violence receive more attention than others? Why are some media representations of violence remembered and others easily forgotten?

This chapter explores the evidence for sacrifice in ancient Mesoamerica bloodletting and other forms of self-inflicted injury, staged combat, animal sacrifice, child sacrifice, and the torture and execution of captives. The discussion integrates evidence from Maya archaeology, bioarchaeology, epigraphy, and iconography. Special attention is given to evidence for ritual violence among the Maya during the Classic period (AD 250-900). Central to the Pre-Columbian Maya worldview was an understanding of personal burden and obligation to one’s fellow humans as well as to the ancestors, gods, and other spirit beings. Humans were forever indebted for the gifts of creation and to the great works of those who came before them. Repayment was required in flesh and blood, either one’s own or that of a suitable substitute, conceptualized in a hierarchy that ordered human the natural and supernatural world.

This chapter discusses the growth of military systems in Western Europe during the period from 1460 to 1560, the preliminary stage of what has often, controversially, been called the ‘military revolution’. The main characteristics of military violence generated by dynastic wars were the inexorable growth of armies and the problems of pay and supply which accompanied this. Military technology affected both the nature and duration of wars: artillery came to dominate both in siege warfare, naval warfare and on the open battlefield. The lives of professional soldiers were drastically affected by new forms of trauma and medical treatment remained rudimentary. At the same time, the relations between soldiery and civilians continued to be conflictual, especially in war zones. Endemic violence accompanied any war. The features specific to this period combine a more intensive kind of violence brought about by changes in military technology and the scale of war with a broadly dysfunctional control system. This meant that the larger armies and more destructive campaign had an impact of casualties and losses among the soldiery as well as a chaotic impact on the ‘civilian’ population, though the patterns of ‘collateral’ violence remained much the same as they had been for centuries.

Warfare and violence were central to the identity and experience of early states in the ancient Near East. This chapter focuses on the earliest historical records documenting the rise of kingdoms in early Mesopotamia and their relationship with violence and warfare. It argues that a rhetoric of state-sponsored violence developed in Mesopotamia that guided countless generations of behaviour. The only violence that was legitimate was state sponsored and divinely sanctioned. Kings promised to banish violence at home, except when performed under their auspices, and they pledged to bring the outside world to battle in a muscular extension of power over that world. The chapter is divided into three basic parts: first it introduces a series of related topics about how violence and warfare were imagined and understood in early Mesopotamia; second, it discusses violence in its early historical context by examining cycles of violence related to the growth of the state; and finally it will briefly examine the later development of these kingdoms of violence and the royal rhetoric that accompanied their creation and expansion.

This chapter examines depictions of violence in the early period of Chinese history up to the second century BCE. Violence is widely present in works of history, literature and intellectual history from the period. What is distinctive about the Chinese case is the negative tone of most of these depictions. Early sources show violence, including martial violence, in at best equivocal and often unfavourable ways. This chapter explores depictions in classic texts such as the Book of Songs, which contains poems that pass over battle to deplore the loss and separation that war entailed. Prose descriptions of violence, whether in the Book of Documents or in bronze vessel inscriptions, tend to record fighting, its aftermath and the victors’ rewards without much celebration. Thinkers including Confucius and Mozi explicitly criticise violence, especially warfare. Sunzi, famous for his Art of War, considers the strategy and tactics of its topic, yet decries fighting as inferior to other methods of achieving victory. Even the proposals of Shang Yang, who is commonly seen as a proponent of government through force, have considerable non-coercive elements to them. Just one form of violence, namely revenge, gets much positive attention, and that comes relatively late.

The stereotype of the ‘terrible Turk’ has long existed alongside the romantic view of a multicultural, cosmopolitan Ottoman Empire. Assertions of Ottoman ‘tolerance’ have been very enduring even in the academic literature. In recent decades Ottoman historians have worked hard to historicise both violence and more peaceful relations, between both state and society and within society itself. Tolerance is now better understood as a strategy of rule rather than a value in and of itself. In addition, this was a far-flung empire that lasted for over 600 years, and no one model can hold for all places and all times within the sultan’s domains. Beginning with the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans in the fourteenth century, this chapter considers not only more familiar topics, such as non-Muslim conversion to Islam, but also highlights the fact that most religious persecution in the empire, when it occurred, was directed at non-conforming Muslims, however defined. The rise of the Shi’a Safavid Empire in the east and the ruling elite’s close relationship to Sufi Islam were both major sources of tension and, at times, outright violence. At the same time, communal elites usually shared a strong interest in the maintenance of religious boundaries; this attitude contributed to social peace.

This chapter first reviews the normative bases for penal state violence, in particular for capital punishment and torture, in Islamic law and Islamic political theory. The chapter then moves on to discuss a number of examples of violent punishments, culled from Islamic historiography, first from the reign of the Seljuq sultans of Persia, Iraq and Syria (c. 1040-1194) and then, second, from that of the Mamluk sultans of Egypt and Syria (c. 1250-1517). It argues that a gradual shift took place in this period, supported by changes in the legal doctrine of torture and punishment based on utilitarian considerations of the public interest, towards a proliferation of violent punishment and torture. By the end of the Mamluk period, the law was so underdetermined and so riddled with loopholes that only little opposition could be mounted to check the rising tide of penal violence by the state.

this chapter explores the medium through which the Nigerian population addressed and contested the series of rules, restrictions, and regulations imposed by the British to address the crisis generated by the war. In this context, the letters and petitions Nigerians wrote provided opportunities to locate African voices, as they confronted the new political and economic system introduced during the war. This chapter reveals that, although support for the war cut across class lines, most of the upper class and political elite were less concerned with the issues of daily survival, such as food insecurity and matters of daily subsistence, that lay at the root of these petitions. It concludes that the richness of these petitions allows for a better understanding of the impacts of the war on rural families and urban communities and situates the civilian experience within the larger context of the war and colonial society while creating a space for petitioners to participate in the larger discourse. It argues that Nigerian petitions reveal how local economic conditions and production systems linked a broad range of people, classes, and spatial categories and allowed them to move into the realm of public discourses on war, colonialism, and policy.

The European Neolithic was a period of enormous social and economic changes affecting lifeways and population size, as well as beliefs and world views. By its closing stages in around 2500 BCE central and western European communities had been transformed from mobile or semi-mobile hunter-fisher-gatherer groups to settled populations reliant on farming and herding. The extent and significance of violence within and between communities during this period has long been debated, although attempts to resolve this issue have tended to generate more heat than light. However recent years have seen a growing corpus of evidence for violent assaults recognised among human remains from throughout Neolithic Europe. Viewed in aggregate, this line of evidence casts considerable doubt over notions of the period as a time of relative peace and stability. This chapter draws together the skeletal evidence for violence-related injuries from across Neolithic Europe and discusses these in terms of both overall prevalence and regional variation as well as the extent to which variations in demographic distribution are discernible. These patterns are considered in regard to the changing social contexts in which they occurred, with particular attention given to the role of population expansion, resource competition and the rise of social inequality. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Neolithic in the development of organised violence among human societies.

Just how violent was medieval Europe? Traditionally, historians have depicted the Middle Ages as an era of brute strength and underdeveloped empathy, leading to high rates of violence. Yet, the evidence to support this interpretation is highly flawed. While we cannot measure medieval rates of violence with enough accuracy to draw medieval-modern comparisons, we do know that medieval Europeans deemed some forms of violence as not only necessary, but laudable. God’s wrath was the archetype of principled violence wielded by a righteous authority. Spectacles of justice in the form of staged executions, shaming rituals, or torture procedures, when enacted by the church or the state, fell neatly in line with this view of violence as a purgative, removing sin from society before it infected others. This ideology was imposed also on the family, where communities urged patriarchs to govern their dependents with a firm hand. Nevertheless, violence also had its limits. As king in his own home, a patriarch’s conduct might still cross the line between chastisement and cruelty. The law generally sided with figures of authority, but in practice the courts protected both ends of the social and familial hierarchy from abuse.

Ritual violence in the form of regulated types of close combat had been widespread in western Africa, even on the battlefield. The arrival of Europeans along the coast and an invading Moroccan army equipped with firearms in the sixteenth century challenged more ritualised approaches to combat in many areas of western Africa. In the savannah regions however, ritualised close combat in the form of martial contests remained important as military training that continued to be effective on the battlefield. In western Sudan, competitions of wrestling, equestrian acrobatics and fencing prepared elite males for battlefield combat, which was dominated by cavalry heroics. In the savannah regions of Angola, fighters performed danced combats to pay tribute to rulers, to develop combat skills crucial for the battlefield and to exercise their king’s leopard-like power over life and death on the battlefield. Elements of these ritual violence traditions were carried to the Americas where enslaved Africans and their descendants armed themselves with these practices even under slavery.

Upper Egyptian iconography early on equates warfare and hunting as corresponding, ritualised displays of the triumph of order over chaos. Within rituals, displays of physical prowess may represent military activity, and within the realm of actual warfare the subjugation of foreigners may take the form of ritual execrations and the ritualised display of both living and deceased enemies. In the practice of war the Egyptians emphasised manoeuvre over the clash of a shield wall, and captured enemies appear on the whole to have been given a route to acculturation through service to the pharaonic state. Literary sources reveal the use of epistolary taunts in addition to physical violence. As part of the Egyptian concept of the enemy as the opposite of Egypt and order, foreign women tend to appear in a more positive light than do male enemies, and no evidence appears for sexual violence as an element of sanctioned warfare.

Early modern European sport victimised animals in two broad ways, both building on medieval and classical precedent: through hunting methods and traditions, and spectator sports such as cockfighting, bear-baiting and bullfighting. With hunting, early modernity witnesses the decline and/or transformation of medieval practices in response to the introduction of gunpowder weapons. The shift to firearms leads to increased carnage as European hunters deplete the supply of indigenous game and export their methods to colonies in the New and Old Worlds. Likewise, European imperialism induces a shift in the social function of hunting, as colonists leave Old World countries where the sport is an attribute of privilege and travel to colonial settings where it figures as an essential life skill. Like hunting, animal-based spectator sports developed out of earlier practices, and these sports, too, participated in systems of hierarchy and privilege. As with firearms, they were exported by European colonists, but with varying results: bullfighting, for example, survives in Latin America, whereas the bear-baiting introduced to North America by English colonists has largely disappeared under Protestant sectarian pressure. Likewise, back in Europe, sectarianism influenced festival pastimes, such as Katzenmusik processions, deriving originally from pagan practice.

In the 1960s African hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert were described as gentle people who used dispute resolution to prevent violence between band members. This ideal was a good fit for those anthropologists on one side of a debate on the nature of human behaviour. The Kalahari San played a role in the debate not only because anthropologists had categorised them as ‘gentle’, but also because they were seen as frozen remnants of our prehistoric ancestors. More recently, researchers have realised that the San of prehistory had very different lives from the ones anthropologists encountered in the ‘ethnographic present’. Evidence from archaeological skeletons from the middle and late Holocene suggests that interpersonal violence was a regular occurrence among the prehistoric foragers of the southern African Later Stone Age. Research has documented a number of antemortem and perimortem injuries on skeletons that can only be signs of interpersonal violence. The injuries have been found on women and children as well as adult males, and evidence suggests that inter-band violence was common in prehistoric times and that forager competition for resources may have been the cause of conflict.