This chapter examines how the authors of the Mahābhārata, India’s great epic, seek strategically to edify real human warriors and kings through a set of martial tropes and expectations. Specifically, nine chapters of the epic’s twelfth book, the Śānti Parvan (MBh.12.96–104), present in religious and ritual terminology a clear set of ideals, which kings can use to convince warriors that fighting and dying in battle is the right thing to do. For example, the paradigmatic model for the courageous behaviour of human warriors is the śūra (‘hero, champion’). In contrast to his heroic exploits, acting like a ‘coward’ (bhīru) is the single most abhorrent thing a warrior could do in social and cosmological terms. What is more, warfare is reconceived in ritual terms and thus dying in battle is elevated to an act of ritual sacrifice which will secure the fallen warrior everlasting heaven with its promise of sexually eager nymphs. Consequently, these chapters provide kings with a coherent masculine ideology to ensure the loyalty of troops, whose willing death in battle will secure martial victory and ultimately protect the kingdom.

In world history early modernity is a contested category. However, it is commonly accepted that the period from about 1500 to 1800 is a distinct period, bookended by two significant periods of violence. The pattern of long-distance travel that was a feature of the fifteenth century ushered in a period of imperial conquest. The lives of millions of people across the globe were fundamentally transformed between 1500 and 1800 by mass violence, a consequence of European colonisation and enslavement. At the end of this time the Atlantic Revolutions violently overthrow the old order. But early modernity is not simply a period of time. In the period from 1500 to 1800 the problem of violence necessitated asking fundamental questions and formulating answers about the most basic forms of human organisation and interactions, such as the problem of civility in society, the nature of political sovereignty and the power of the state, the legitimacy of conquest and subjugation, the possibilities of popular resistance, and the manifestations of ethnic and racial unrest. Violence also provided the raw material for profound meditations on humanity and for examining our relationship to the divine and natural worlds.

This chapter examines the history of racial violence in Portuguese America as a transatlantic coercive pedagogy. It considers the ideas and methods refined by secular and ecclesiastical authorities to teach peoples of indigenous and African descent, as well as white settlers, about the parameters governing the permissible use of force. Concentrating on the enslavement of Indians and blacks, it examines how colonisers came to accept violence organised along racial lines. The Portuguese devised an array of practices intended to inflict physical and psychological harm on early Brazil’s non-white majority population. Imperial authorities rationalised physical aggression as necessary, virtuous and just, deeming violence indispensable as an instructional practice intended to communicate and secure the dominant position of Portuguese settlers. They did so by making biologised judgements about native, African and mixed-race peoples. They then translated these judgements into punitive acts orchestrated to achieve didactic effects. The chapter concentrates on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century efforts to assemble and control the largest enslaved workforce in the Americas.

The theme of violence is largely represented in the visual media of ancient Mesopotamia and Syria, from ancient times (fourth millennium BCE) up to the periods of the great empires of Assyria and Babylonia in the first millennium CE. Violent scenes, mostly related to war, principally show the punishment and killing of enemies according to recurrent visual topoi – such as beheading, beating, impalement, blinding, cutting and amputation of limbs – on different media, from cylinder seals to inlays and larger reliefs. This chapter seeks to point out the differing nature of the visual documents and contexts where scenes of violence on monuments and pictures were eventually shown, displayed and thus perceived, and will analyse the representation of violence accordingly, taking into consideration the use of violence within the religious and political spheres and pointing to cultural differences across time as a reflection of the political system.Mesopotamia, Syria, ritual, sacred violence, warfare, prisoners of war, rituals of war, visual narrative, visibility, audience

Between July 1972 and February 1974, the British Conservative government focused on creating a power-sharing settlement with the constitutional parties. In the meantime, the security and intelligence services would try to reduce IRA activity to a level at which it could not obstruct the power-sharing government. But once the power-sharing executive collapsed in May 1974, the British government's political policy radically shifted. Between May 1974 and December 1975, the British Labour government under Harold Wilson and Merlyn Rees envisaged an agreement on Northern Irish independence between Irish republicans, Ulster loyalists and others as being possible. This idea was not irrational. Various leading IRA and UDA members had demonstrated a willingness to contemplate an independent six-county Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, the Labour government refused to give the public or private declaration of intent to withdraw that the IRA wanted. The British feared that any declaration would provoke a loyalist uprising and civil war. The ceasefire collapsed as the IRA was not willing to forgo a British declaration of intent to withdraw. Nevertheless, the British Labour government under Harold Wilson had been willing to explore withdrawal from Northern Ireland, if republicans and loyalists could agree to independence.

Little thought per se has been given to women as agents of violence in antiquity, let alone to the role of the royal harem as the site of revenge-fuelled violence and murder. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring how royal women in the Persian Empire could be instruments of violence. While acknowledging the Greek obsession with this topos, it goes beyond the Western preoccupation with the harem as a site of Oriental decadence and attempts to put stories of women’s violence against women into its ancient Near Eastern context. It explores the mutilation of the body and is particularly focused on the Herodotean tale (which has genuine Persian roots) of the revenge mutilations of Amestris, wife of Xerxes I.

The eighteenth century has been considered a flourishing era during the Qing dynasty, but the century also witnessed an upsurge in interpersonal violence that triggered a protracted crackdown on crime. Part of a broader ‘legislative turn’, Qing rulers responded with legislation that fine-tuned existing laws, created new offences, restricted pardons and expanded the use of the death penalty. By embracing a strategy that deployed the presumed deterrent power of capital punishment, eighteenth-century emperors presented staggering practical and ideological challenges that threatened to overwhelm the judicial bureaucracy. Violent crime exposed fissures in the social order that endangered bedrock principles such as ties of filiation, patriarchal privilege, social hierarchy and female chastity. Evidence gleaned from homicide reports illustrates incidents of horrendous violence that were inextricably linked to macro-economic and demographic changes. The rural poor engaged in survival strategies that were desperate, pathetic and horrifically violent. Unfortunately, the crackdown on crime alone could not adequately address the inequities of eighteenth-century economic and demographic change that undermined social and economic norms, vitiated conventional concepts of justice, and disrupted the ideological consensus of Chinese civilisation.

Evidence for violence and organised warfare in Iron Age Europe is varied and abundant, but it is not clear how frequently large-scale conflict occurred. Weapons, including especially swords, spears and lances, are common in graves and deposits. Defensive weapons, such as shields, helmets and body armour, also occur but are less common. The fortification of hilltops for defensive purposes is characteristic in much of Iron Age Europe. Representations of warriors, including stone statues bearing arms and scenes of marching troops, show how the weapons were deployed by soldiers. Only a few actual battlefields have been investigated. Weapons and landscape defences surely played important symbolic roles in the Iron Age, but the extent of armed conflict is not yet fully clear.

Communal violence took many forms in early modern Europe, but much of it was shaped by an unprecedented level of inter-confessional conflict. The Reformation resulted in the rapid spread of minorities which, in the sixteenth century in particular, caused clashes with the majority confession and the authorities seeking to curb civil strife. Violence was often localised and small scale but could also be significant and widespread. As regimes sought to incorporate the new reality of confessional coexistence, so resentment and tensions grew within communities, often resulting in outbursts of both popular and official violence. Attacks on individuals and groups as well as objects, through acts of iconoclasm, were commonplace; massacres and other atrocities less so. This chapter explores these issues with respect to communities across both eastern and western Europe and argues that the similarities are more striking than the differences. It considers in what circumstances outbreaks of intercommunal violence were more likely, how successfully such tensions were accommodated, and to what extent there was a decline in their incidence as the period progressed. By 1800, it appears that political violence had displaced confessional violence within communities as the predominant form of repression and exclusion.

This essay consists principally of a tandem historical dissection of the two most notoriously consequential uprisings in the history of China’s late medieval age. These cataclysmic domestic revolts were those led by the rebels Huang Chao (d. 884) at the close of the ninth century and Fang La (d. 1121) at the beginning of the twelfth, respectively. The analysis herein seeks to reveal how integrally and thoroughly an ongoing culture of insurgency belied what has emerged as an anachronistic mythology of imperially sanctioned order. Spanning throughout these centuries as it did, we must indeed regard internal disorder as having been a hallmark of Chinese life during that time. Moreover, with shockingly regularized frequency and brutality, the resolution of disorder pitted the weaponized citizenry of the empire against the very armies that were nominally intended to protect it. No less enigmatic or ironic is the revelation that these armies – especially through the abuses that attended their increasing reliance on conscription in transitioning from elite into professionalized forces – played just as pivotal a role in fomenting of the very resistance waged against them as they did in being chiefly responsible for its suppression.

By mid-1966, about half a million adherents of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) were dead, many more were arbitrarily imprisoned and even more lost civil rights. The biggest communist party outside the communist bloc disappeared almost overnight, as did its affiliated social organisations. It was the worst political violence since Indonesia´s 1945-1949 war of national liberation. How could this happen? The chapter first dismisses two once-popular analytical approaches. Neither behaviourist depictions of rampaging anti-communist crowds, nor statist images of a military conducting pogroms on its own are adequate to the known facts. It then develops a contentious politics approach with multiple collective actors. The cold war looms large; the economy is politicised; institutions are weak, factionalised, and deeply embedded in various social formations. Contention escalates from September 1963, as President Sukarno and the PKI pivot from the gradualist Soviet Union to a militant People´s Republic of China. An emerging legitimation crisis pits a social justice discourse popular among lower classes against a growing middle class religious, law-and-order discourse. When the PKI leadership makes a false move on 1 October 1965, the military mobilises its allies to strike back, with genocidal results.

Imperial Chinese society accepted and even lauded certain types of violence. Ideas about sanctioned violence developed largely in response to ideas about masculinity. In ancient China’s prevailing honour culture, elite men often used violence to win public approbation. They undertook hunting and warfare in order to construct a positive masculine identity. Up through the medieval era, the elite considered vengeance a legitimate response to shame. This value system fostered instability, so the government strove to limit sanctioned violence to representatives of the state. Over time, Chinese society reassessed traditional ideas about violence. Officials and thinkers deliberately sought to curtail violent behaviour in order to reduce the threat of chaos. Instead of glorifying bellicose heroes, historians reserved the highest praise for rulers and officials who fostered ethics, order, and harmony. From the tenth century onward, literati became China’s primary administrative class. These educated men prized scholarship and high culture, and they belittled violent behaviour as demonstrating a person’s embarrassing lack of self-control. The political and cultural pre-eminence of refined literati caused Chinese to further question the legitimate role of violence. Over time, Chinese behavioural norms became increasingly benign.

The main focus of this chapter is the role of propaganda in influencing participation and opinions during the war. It analyzes how the British extensively used wartime propaganda to draw the support of the Nigerian people and explores the critical role propaganda played in Nigeria’s appropriation of the war and the enthusiastic support different sections of the population provided Britain during its hour of greatest need. It illustrates that the propaganda intended for African audiences reiterated the idea of the “interdependency” of the empire by stressing the unity of the British Commonwealth of Nations. The call on Africans to produce goods and conserve resources during the war was seen by the colonial government as an extension of its patriotism toward the empire. By creating space for the participation of the local population to consume a particular form of propaganda, the empire made Nigerians active participants in the creation of propaganda. Their intellectual contribution to this mission was largely based upon their appropriation of a new status and identity as “citizens of the empire.” Propaganda provided an effective avenue for expressions of imperial unity and acceptance of Britain’s self-image as a “virtuous imperial power,” in the words of Sonya Rose.

This chapter deals with male-on-male homicide and serious interpersonal violence in Europe, 1500–1800. Although it uses a global perspective, the evidence for the non-Western world in this period is very limited. In much of Europe homicide rates declined markedly and since male-on-male fighting accounts for the great majority of these rates, it means that this type of violence declined as well. In the south, however, in particular in Italy, homicide rates did not begin to fall until the end of the seventeenth century. Everywhere high homicide rates went hand in hand with widespread value being laid upon the traditional concept of honour which obliged a man to uphold his reputation by violence. In Europe, again less so in the south, notions of honour gradually changed, while homicide became more fully criminalised. The traditional concept of male honour held sway in many regions of the non-Western world, in 1800 no less than in 1500. From this we may hypothesise that violence was endemic in these regions throughout the early modern period. A final feature of non-Western interpersonal violence, in contrast to Europe, was its being affected by ethnic differences and slavery.