This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the role of violence in the workings of the colonial state in British India, with reflections on how various modalities of violence constructed concepts of the nation, shaped anti-colonialism, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution of the early independent Indian state. In this we bring theoretical interventions on violence and the state to the historiography of the Indian nationalist movement, with the aim to underscore the violence of colonialism and to de-centre the emphasis on non-violence in anti-colonialism. We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was among other things marked by the extraordinary violence of partition. The independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it.

This chapter describes the sociopolitical and economic changes that accrued in Nigeria during the critical postwar years and situates these developments within different contexts. Foremost on the minds of colonial officials was the anticipated effects of the demobilization of thousands of men who had been employed as soldiers, and in auxiliary services, such as drivers and hospital orderlies, and who had enjoyed a higher pay, and the concomitant unemployment that would be experienced after demobilization. It reveals that the postwar period was characterized by continuing shortages of food and other essential items and labor strikes in many parts of the country, causing disruptions in shipping and manufacturing. It argues that the significant amounts of cash that entered the economy as a result of the war became the impetus for new social formations as ex-servicemen returned to their villages with a substantial amount of money and trading firms paid higher prices for export produce than in the prewar times. With this influx of money during the war years, cultural practices, including local marriage practices, were affected. The political changes that ultimately led to the independence of Nigeria from colonial rule occurred during this period of significant social and economic change.

This chapter seeks to examine the nature and some key forms of remembering and forgetting violence in the twentieth century. Through considering a range of sites of memory linked to specific acts of violence, we explore the shifting nature of remembrance. The violent pasts, and presents, that we examine include world wars, civil wars, the Holocaust, colonization, child sexual abuse and the place of gender in violence. In particular we focus on bodies, pilgrimages, memorials, truth and reconciliation processes, and public apologies to reveal the variety of ways historical and ongoing violence is brought to the fore in the public sphere. We also reflect upon the ways remembering and forgetting violence in the world has been transformed by novel developments in technologies, particularly DNA testing, as well as radically reformed through personal and political activism and shifting ideological demands. The impacts of these influences can be seen in examples of cultural practices that have changed over time. Through these explorations we can see the range of ways the legacies of violence are remembered, and the work violence can do when it is remembered and forgotten in the world today.

Violence emerges many times in medieval literature, either in the form of war or of personal violence. This paper examines a selection of narratives where various types of domestic violence and criminal activities leading to or based on violence are presented. Against the backdrop of an intensive theological and philosophical discourse on violence from St. Augustine to Thomas Aquinas, this chapter investigates violence in the private spheres of married couples (Marie de France), in the public sphere of the court to eliminate a threatening outsider (Nibelungenlied), within the family, pitting a mother-in-law against her daughter in law (Mai und Beaflor), which ultimately leads to matricide, then among friends and relatives (Boccaccio’s Decameron), and finally violence in the name of personal self-defence (Heinrich Kaufringer). As the analysis demonstrates, violence was ubiquitous in medieval society, but the poets always reflect also on legal conditions, the threat to society at large resulting from violence, and on the position of the individual when confronted with violence.

The introduction outlines how despite Stakeknife and Donaldson infiltrating the IRA, this book argues that the intelligence war did not force the IRA into the peace process. The secretive and elusive nature of rural IRA units, republican units in England and the IRA leadership, alongside the additional security provided by the cell structure in Belfast and Derry City, meant that the IRA was not pushed into terminal decline by British intelligence. I explain how the peace process resulted from a political and military stalemate that existed for all sides. I also outline how the IRA's prolonged ceasefires in 1972, 1975, 1994 and 1997 did not result from the intelligence war.

This chapter outlines key themes in the history of racial violence in modern America, as well as exemplary scholarship on this important subject. More important, the essay centers white supremacy as a primary motivator of racial violence across region and era. The emancipation of enslaved African Americans led to violent struggles over citizenship and civic equality in the Civil War’s wake, yet those struggles extended far beyond the postbellum south. Violence fueled campaigns to disenfranchise, segregate, and exclude non-whites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As the United States emerged as a global power in these same decades, ideologies of racial dominance informed American encounters with peoples abroad. Yet racial violence also spurred organization and protest, from African American anti-lynching campaigns to civil rights activism in Latinx, Native American, and Asian American communities, the history of racial violence is necessarily a dual history of repression and resistance. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, continued resistance to racial reform and full equality expresses itself in highly destructive and deeply systemic forms of violence.

This chapter examines the history of ‘warrior asceticism’ in South Asia with a focus on the ‘gosain’ army of Rajendragiri and his disciples in eighteenth-century north India. It begins with a discussion of asceticism and power (including martial power) in Indic thought over the longer term, drawing on key concepts in the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Developments under the Mughals and post-Mughal successor states are also examined. Warrior asceticism experiences dramatic expansion, however, during the eighteenth century, a fact that is due principally (the author suggests) to the complementarity of yogic asceticism and the rise of infantry warfare in South Asia, often understood as part of a global ‘military revolution’. Though ‘Hindu’ warrior asceticism became an ideological font for much anti-British (and anti-Muslim) nationalist thought from the late nineteenth century, the gosain army of Rajendragiri’s disciples Anupgiri and Umraogiri was noteworthy for its role in buttressing British power in the geostrategic buffer region of Bundelkhand, as Company forces confronted the amassing armies of the Marathas during the second Anglo-Maratha War (1803–5).  Also contrasted are eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century theorisations of yoga and violence, focusing on the reflections of Padmākar, Mān Kavi, Bankim and Gandhi.

After 600 years without executions of heretics, several were burned in France in 1022. Persecutions, erratic across western Europe, remained rare in Orthodox lands. Debate continues over whether large medieval heretical movements existed or were inflated by authorities seeking an excuse to assert their authority. Hunts for heretics turned into witchcraft trials by the late 1300s. Soon a stereotype of the witch insisted that she rejected Christianity and committed evil acts at the devil’s command. Witch hunts then occurred in various lands, especially along the Rhine in 1580–90 and 1620–30. Such persecutions, also erratic, never took place in many areas. The relatively few Russian cases rarely mentioned alliance with Satan. Both strains of persecution arose in western Europe by the eleventh century as fear worsened of enemies within Christendom. The church strengthened its influence, making heresy identifiable. In Catholic and Protestant regions witch hunts arose when villagers accused their neighbours of foul deeds and the local elite seized on the witch stereotype. But authorities often rejected that image, while central officials in Sweden, for instance, halted trials. Thus, it is doubtful that the hunts had the intention or effect of terrorising women, instilling social discipline among peasants or strengthening the state. They ended as objections grew that evidence for witchcraft was weak or conjectural.

This chapter analyses four intercultural emblems of violence constructed by indigenous and Spanish artists in New Spain and Peru in the sixteenth century, when the region was under imperial Spanish rule. These highly stereotyped and conventional images combined the conventions of indigenous and European visual arts to present summarised and eloquent images of their violence, and this in turn facilitated Spain’s victory over the Aztec and Inca rulers, and also the imposition of Christianity over pagan religion. The detailed analysis of the contents, style and many layers of meaning of these emblems allows us to understand the diverse, even contradictory, cultural meanings of violence in this colonial situation.