This chapter presents a number of contact zones in the spectrum of violence, zones around which the fears, anxieties, concerns and aspirations provoked by instances of violence and their representation were concentrated. I discuss the following scenes of violence: The War Against Time; Apocalypse; The Anxiety of Remembrance; Abomination; The Nonhuman World; Spectacle. These zones do not constitute categories of violence but, like violence itself, are porous and mimetic. The temporal focus of the survey covers some six centuries, from the pre-Islamic sixth century to the twelfth century and the Crusades.

Historians of violence in the French Empire have focused primarily on official agents of the state, such as soldiers, policemen, judges, and administrators. Violence perpetrated by non-state actors – that is, by European settlers, merchants, and travelers – remain far less explored in the historiography of French colonialism. In important ways, brutality perpetrated by non-state actors helped perpetuate the Manichean dynamics of colonialism so powerfully described by colonial and post-colonial critics alike. The prevalence of violence suggests that quotidian brutality was central to settlers’ sense of power and identity in regions where they felt under constant threat from larger non-European populations. This chapter examines how civilian mistreatment of colonial populations often differed starkly from the state’s efforts to legitimate its own use of violence in military, administrative, and judicial capacities. Indeed, such daily acts of violence were potentially threatening to the French power. They undermined administrative control of French citizens and destabilized what were often delicate balances of power between officials and subject populations. Equally important, uncontrolled violence jeopardized the central rhetorical claim that colonization brought rationalism and civilization to allegedly less-developed societies in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

The control and sublimation of violence is a story that is essential to the idea of modernity and the rise of the West. The ability to control one’s emotions is fundamental to the notion of aristocracy and its right to rule over others. Sixteenth-century Europe saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. It is axiomatic to notions of the civilising process that the new civility progressively tamed and controlled violence during the early modern period. But this is not what happened. There was a significant increase in homicide rates from the mid sixteenth century which peaked in the mid seventeenth century. There was a notable increase in elite violence in particular, as gentlemen transgressed codes of etiquette in order to provoke rivals and demonstrate their social superiority. The invention of civil society at the end of the seventeenth century was a response to the problem of violence. The knowledge that European society had undergone a pacification process over the previous half a century was crucial to the invention of ‘civilisation’, a word first coined in the 1750s. This word and its cognates were crucial to legitimising the European colonial project. The language of civilisation was employed as a euphemism for violence, justifying ethnic cleansing and enslavement, and enabling the perpetrators of violence to distance themselves from their victims.

Martyrdom was a central component in the fashioning of both ancient Jewish and early Christian identities. Within Christian circles martyrdom is often presented as an exclusively Christian phenomenon that emerged in the context of persecution by the Romans. The presence of ‘suicidal’ martyrs in both Jewish and Christian traditions demonstrates both that martyrdom is not the exclusive property of the Christian tradition and also that prior to the third century CE it and suicide were not clearly distinguished from one another.

After 1975, British policymakers no longer believed that the IRA would settle for a political compromise. Instead, the British government sought to reduce IRA activity to a level at which it would not interfere with potential political agreements between constitutional nationalists and unionists. Continuing IRA activity convinced the Thatcher government to continue this strategy towards Irish republicans. The aim of enticing Irish republicans to fully politicise via backchannel negotiations would only be readopted under Peter Brooke in 1990. In order to force republicans to promptly agree to a political compromise, John Major’s government followed a similar strategy to that of Harold Wilson’s government between 1974 and 1975. There would be a combination of backchannel conversations alongside a continuing intelligence campaign to erode the IRA’s armed capacity. This chapter also outlines how the IRA and Sinn Féin leadership privately only sought a return to talks after 1975. They sought to persist with the IRA’s campaign and to maximise Sinn Féin’s share of the vote in order to get the British government to return to talks and provide concessions towards Irish republican objectives.

This chapter surveys violence imposed by medieval western-European Christians upon their chief religious “others”: heretics, Jews, and Muslims. Modern scholars have often found it useful to understand such violence collectively, echoing medieval Christians’ own frequent grouping together of those “others.” Yet it is important to disassemble the differences in why and how Christians wielded violence against each, and to recognize how violence took variegated forms, was committed by diverse actors, and resulted from multiple, coexisting motivations. Violence against Jews interpenetrated with their increasing demonization in Christian polemic and with their subject status in Europe. Both church and state, increasingly ambitious institutions, assisted in the general transformation of European Jews from protected minorities to not “real” Jews rightly deserving toleration. Violence against heretics (a more subjective identity than that of Jews and Muslims) was only rarely and early the object of mob violence. That was soon succeeded by “crusade” and the institutional violence of inquisitions, which owed a debt to monastic and penitential violence. While Christian violence against Muslims in Europe was geographically limited, key there was the evolution of Muslims from rulers to ruled, and even an acceptance of Muslims as agents of violence. Despite the varying circumstances, motivations, agents, and forms of Christian violence against all three, it was nevertheless embedded within a universalizing Latin-Christian theology and ecclesiology.

The early modern period, 1500–1800, was one of the most volatile periods of Vietnam’s long history. It saw three dynastic transitions, the separation of the nation into two autonomous realms beginning in the early seventeenth century, and a succession of popular rebellions that dominated the historical landscape of the eighteenth century. The contours of these upheavals were driven variously by internal political tensions, the expansion of Vietnamese state authority into new regions, questions of dynastic legitimacy, and, ultimately, economic hardships caused in part by a collapse of foreign trade and currency fluctuations. Violent rebellions were a prominent feature of these events, some driven by inter-family rivalries among elites, others sparked from among rural populations in protest at economic woes. The effects of all of these challenges to state authority were profound. Large-scale dislocation of populations was a prominent element, as was forced military and labour service that only caused further discontent among peasant farmers. This chapter traces these events chronologically within a larger analytical framework that contextualises upheaval in terms of large-scale political, economic and sociological phenomena.

Piracy, or violent despoliation at sea, is ancient, yet it took on global dimensions after 1500. This chapter examines piratical violence as an early modern, global, cross-cultural phenomenon motivated by politics and religion as well as profit. Varieties of piracy ranged from random pillage of merchant vessels to state-sanctioned corsairing companies. Forms of violence included murder, kidnapping, enslavement, rape, battery, mutilation, impressment and forced conversion. In some regions, extortion rackets formed wherein the threat of piratical violence was offset by regular payments. Rising seaborne violence prompted consequential reactions, from naval arms races to coastal depopulation. By the eighteenth century powerful states such as Great Britain and Qing dynasty China passed harsh anti-piracy laws and outfitted navies for pirate extermination, which led to the jailing and execution of many suspects, some of them innocent. Sea sovereignty came to be defined as monopolising violence at sea and treating anyone defined as a pirate as subject to harsher laws than those applied to land thieves. By this logic, pirates were ‘enemies of humankind’.

Ancient Egypt, its society, law and belief system were brought into being, and sustained, by the threat and application of violence in the form of cruel and unusual punishments intended unabashedly to intimidate. The ‘Big Man’ role which informs the office of kingship from the outset of Egyptian history, maintains itself on celestial as well as terrestrial levels. The fertility of valley and delta promised untold agricultural riches to the human community if there was general cooperation; it was essential therefore to deter free thought and action by all available means of violent force. Prosperity would come through the plans of a single authority, not the collective debate of a people. Similarly, in Egypt’s sphere of influence whole-hearted subservience was required on pain of violent punishment. From the third millennium BCE Egypt had begun the process of cloning this life to produce a heaven and hell.

This chapter treats topics such as military recruitment, the provisioning of armies, and taxation problems. The well-known outbursts of military violence during the Mongol invasions of the 13th century or the campaigns of Timur (1370-1405) are not described again; the focus is rather on common forms of violent behaviour by the military but also the tax administration. One of the most evident forms of everyday violence was related to the billeting of troops and other military personnel in private homes, and a substantial section of the chapter is devoted to this practice. The coming of the Türkmen pastoralists to Iran in the 11th century changed the picture: whereas billeting seems to have become less important because of the different social profile of the army, other forms of violence became much more prominent. A last important source of violent behaviour are local powerholders who often practiced a kind of violent lordship.

The ritualisation of violence in Iron Age Europe has long been seen through the distorting lens of classical literary sources. Signs of perimortem trauma and the complex processing of human remains have typically been seen as evidence for Druidic sacrifice or the ‘Celtic cult of the head’. This chapter presents a more anthropological perspective, drawing analogies with societies documented through the ethnographic literature. Evidence for ritualised killing in the Iron Age comes from bodies found preserved in peat bogs, who suffered extremely violent deaths. Similarly, complex killings are represented by skeletal evidence from archaeological sites ranging from small settlements to large religious complexes. Despite differences in scale, similar cosmological principles underlie these sorts of practices across the Continent. Particularly common is a concern with the removal, curation and display of the human head; rather than representing a singular ‘cult of the head’, however, headhunting was a complex and recurrent practice that altered its character and meaning through time. The ritualisation of warfare is also implicit in the design of major hill forts and oppida. Overall, the archaeological evidence suggests that ritualised violence was a core element of the religious and cosmological beliefs that underpinned social relations in Iron Age Europe.

This chapter discusses the various ways in which the relationship between kingship, violence and non-violence was conceptualised in ancient India during the period c. 500 BCE to 500 CE, both in general terms as well as in special relation to punishment and war. Examining a variety of textual, epigraphic and visual sources, it identifies a strong and enduring tension in ancient Indian political thought between the ethical principle of non-violence and the pragmatic need for the king to use force while discharging his duties. While non-violence was considered a laudable virtue, there was an acknowledgement, even in Buddhist and Jaina thought, that it was incompatible with political power. At the same time, a distinction was made between necessary force and force that was unnecessary, disproportionate, random or excessive. The former was accepted, the latter condemned. Moral and pragmatic arguments for the measured use of force were accompanied by a constant emphasis on self-control as a desirable royal virtue. By the middle of the first millennium a ‘classical’ model of kingship had emerged, wherein the king’s violence was legitimised and aestheticised. Nevertheless, a window for critiquing the potential and actual violence of the king remained.

It is now widely acknowledged that warfare played an important role in cultural developments throughout Maya history, including from its earliest origins. There is still much disagreement, however, over a number of fundamental aspects of Maya warfare, such as who participated in it, how it was conducted, the scale of conflicts and what the motivations were. This chapter provides a brief synthesis of current knowledge and controversies in the archaeology of ancient Maya warfare. First, a brief overview is provided of who the Maya are, the geographic region they have inhabited for over 3,000 years, the periods under study, and general patterns in how they conducted warfare. New findings produced by a diverse array of methods and specialists are then placed side by side and situated within their chronological and regional context. The focus here is on areas that have seen recent advances, in particular new archaeological evidence on the Preclassic period roots of Maya warfare, epigraphic advances showing the complexity of geopolitics during the Classic period in particular involving the Kaanul Snake kingdom, Postclassic mass burials and contact period war among Maya and between Maya and Spanish.

In the Anglo-American settlements of North America the most conspicuous causes of violence were rivalries at contested frontiers, weak government, racism, race slavery, indentured servitude and class differences, and state-sanctioned war. Unrestrained by laws and magistrates, migrants to North America in the seventeenth century violently attacked Native Americans and fellow Europeans at rates as high as 200 homicides per 100,000 population. In time public authority grew and tempered egregious violence, but it did not disappear. Frontiers shifted further inland, and at contested western and southern borders it proliferated. Racism underlay much of the violence, clearly in conflicts with Native Americans, such as King Philip’s War and Pontiac’s Rebellion, and in the enslavement of Africans and the violence which maintained the subordination of African Americans. Ironically, certain populations shared race, ethnic or religious prejudice towards ‘outsiders’ and these shared prejudices moderated violent behaviour within those populations. Indentured servants comprised a large portion of the immigrant population; their disorderly and violent behaviour taxed local governments and elites over two centuries. At the end of the era the American Revolution provoked a wave of internecine violence that outlasted the conflict with England and subsided especially with the expansion of white, male democracy in the nineteenth century.

Military historians have traditionally depicted the Ottoman’s second siege of Habsburg Vienna and the disastrous, ‘Great Turkish War’ that followed (1683–99) as a decisive victory that saved Europe and triggered Ottoman decline. But what gets lost in this historiography is the extent to which the war profoundly altered the confessional and ethnic make-up of the Ottoman army. The recurring defection of Ottoman Orthodox Christian warrior populations like the Serbs to rival armies, followed by Muslim retribution against them, constituted a sea-change in the nature of Ottoman imperial sovereignty and social relations on the ground. Not only would Istanbul henceforth bar Christian warriors from serving in the army; it was forced to outsource imperial governance and defence to pastoral Muslim warrior populations like Albanians on unprecedented levels. The Ottoman state, however, lacked both the resources and the will to pay and offer them sufficient access to status and power, which meant that these new agents of empire were difficult to control. This chapter sketches the nature and repertoire of violence and crime stemming from Istanbul’s massive privatisation of military and policing powers and its deleterious impact on inter-confessional and inter-ethnic relations in Ottoman society.