Examining and contesting the emergence of ‘third world theatre’ in the mid twentieth century, Brueton traces how Jean-Marie Serreau, the director feted for his inaugural productions of absurdist plays by Ionesco and Beckett, sought to disrupt the Eurocentric nihilism of the post-war dramatic canon. Serreau brought the anticolonial drama unfolding throughout the Empire to Parisian stages. Producing seminal works by the Algerian playwright Kateb Yacine, Martinican poet, playwright and politician Aimé Césaire, and French iconoclast Jean Genet, Serreau pursued a radical new humanism that aimed to decentre the intellectual and artistic hegemony of the West. He envisaged a third world theatre that would not only eschew the ghettoization of major Francophone playwrights but also contest the very values of colonial humanism that had developed under France’s Third Republic. Brueton compares Kateb’s representation of the anticolonial uprisings in Algeria in Le Cadavre Encerclé (The Encircled Corpse, 1958); Genet’s critique of French imperialism and Algerian neo-nationalism in Les Paravents (The Screens, 1966); and Césaire’s tragic exposition of Congolese independence from Belgium in Une saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo, 1967), to argue that they refuse forms of understanding where cultural difference is reduced to one decolonial agenda.

The aim of this chapter will be threefold: to revisit the economic arguments advanced by Hilton and others by considering them in their full political context; to provide an account of the identity of the attackers and of the Flemings who were killed in East Anglia and London by drawing on documentary and prosopographical work; and to evaluate the effects of the massacre on the immigrant community and immigration in England after 1381. First, it will reconstruct a three-decade-long quarrel between native and alien weavers of London which culminated in the murder of Flemings during the Peasants’ Revolt.Then, attention will be turned to the available judicial records in order to develop the biographies and prosopography both of the attackers and the victims in East Anglia. Finally, the years after the revolt will be examined from the perspective of old and new immigrants, both of which groups seem to have been affected.

Violence helps to define revolution as a mode of historical change; however, violence is a factor, not an actor, in history. Widespread violence in a variety of forms persisted in France despite three constitutions (1791, 1795, 1799) and their accompanying claims to end the Revolution. The popular violence that began in 1789 helped to eliminate the vestiges of feudalism and abolish inherited privilege. In 1792, rural revolts, urban riots, and foreign war served to bring down the monarchy and promote social leveling. Dismantling the old order provoked widespread resistance, which inspired state-authorized terror, exceptional justice, and mass executions on an unprecedented scale in 1793-94. Royalism, Jacobinism, religious resistance, continuing war, and politicized vigilantism all fueled continuing cycles of violence after 1794. Economic chaos, parlous policing, and partisan judges also prolonged an endemic violence that ranged from solipsistic banditry to armed counter-revolution. These multivalent forces of instability could only be tamed by enhancing and depoliticizing the repressive powers of the state. Efforts both to ensconce the republic and contain violence, notably by militarizing justice, enhancing repression, and limiting democracy, spawned a growing liberal authoritarianism after 1797. Reducing factionalism, banditry, and regional resistance fostered a security state and personal dictatorship in 1802.

Chapter 1 focuses on locusts and the Arabic-speaking Shammar nomadic group between 1858 and 1890. It explains how locusts foiled Ottoman attempts to transform the Jazira into a cotton-growing heartland in the midst of the American Civil War. As locusts challenged the designs of certain humans, they also ensured that the Jazira landscape remained productive depending on how one moved within it. It was in part the landscape created by locusts that undermined Ottoman attempts to forcibly settle the Shammar during the 1860s, and made far more difficult the settlement of Chechen refugees at Ras al-Ayn this same period. And it was this same landscape of locusts that incubated a revolt in 1871, as the Shammar protested the formation of the special administrative district of Zor, created in an effort to match the desert with administrative borders with the help of the empire’s foremost reformers, Cevdet Pasha and Midhat Pasha. The revolt was crushed and ended with different branches of the Shammar attached to separate districts of the Jazira. But it did not end the power of locusts and mobility, and so people continued to imagine how to close the gap between Ottoman provinces and the environment it divided up.

This chapter focuses on the series of conflicts between the Roman government and the Jewish population of the Roman empire during the first and second centuries CE. Modern theories on this relationship are as elaborate and convoluted as the corpus of primary sources available for it. Both will be analyzed here through the scope of genocide, in an attempt to determine whether there ever existed a Roman intent to destroy the Jewish group or parts of it, and the extent to which actual destruction ultimately occurred.

Chapter 5 examines how the Great Plague Scare unfolded in the entangled colonial empires of France and Spain. Despite their intertwined histories in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic, few works in the English language have focused on Franco-Spanish colonial relations. The chapter describes the orders coming from the metropoles for dealing with the threat of plague and analyzes how those on the ground ultimately responded. In the end, it answers the question, what was different in the colonies? It opens in Fort Royal, Martinique, where a major scandal unfolded when a French vessel arrived from the Languedocien port of Sète. What I call the “Sète affair” offers the opportunity to examine the “spirit of sedition” that endured in the French Antilles well before the Age of Revolution. The chapter then transitions to plague-time violence and Franco-Spanish relations in the Caribbean and demonstrates that the demands of the metropole were not always in line with the needs or wants of the people in the overseas colonies. On the surface, disaster centralism during the Plague of Provence seemed to extend from Europe to the colonies, but on the ground, local needs and economic concerns often outweighed the demands of a far-flung ruler.

As Nicholas approached the third year of his imprisonment, he had had enough. On July 13, 1849, when the slave broker John M. Gilchrest went to retrieve an enslaved woman (possibly Nicholas’s wife) from the workhouse, Nicholas and several slaves kept Gilchrest from taking her. The workhouse officers, with the assistance of city guardsmen, went to subdue Nicholas, who had been left unrestrained in the workhouse yard. When they attempted to restrain Nicholas, several slaves came to his aid. The authorities raised the alarm and some civilians went to the Guard House to retrieve guns meant for slave insurrections. Nicholas led thirty-five slaves out of the workhouse and into the streets of Charleston. Most of them were captured with the first couple of days, but a handful were able to remain at large for eleven days. Nicholas and the two enslaved men who assisted him most were sentenced and executed within a week of the incident, their bodies donated to the medical school for dissection. Many more slaves went before the court and were sentenced to confinement and torture in the workhouse.

Camus takes a Woolfian message of human limitation and solidarity – not domination and hierarchy – from his vision of nature and from his reading of Greek tragedy. Camus argues that modern European history “has put on the mask of destiny”; this history behaves as the divine or natural fatality that it claimed to supersede. Grounded in Camus’s writing on the Greeks and tragedy in his lectures, interviews, essays, and infamous dispute with Jean-Paul Sartre, this chapter explores Camus’s ethics of tragedy. Camus's ethical paradigm – cognizance of injurious power accompanied by lucid revolt – is on offer in The Plague, the lyrical short story “The Adulterous Wife,” and his unfinished novel The First Man. Finally, this chapter argues for Camus’s fierce indictment of genocidal politics in The Stranger and The Fall.

Solidarity is founded in violence and bears the signs of violence, and revolt. The beginning/creation of community in innumerable foundational myths is a terrible killing. According to whether this killing is of the father or the brother, the chapter suggests that solidarity is either hierarchical, and geared towards those strictly understood as children of the father, or fraternal, in the sense of geared towards the stranger, the non-brother. These solidarities sometimes exist in combined forms within the same foundational myth. In the socio-political imaginary concatenation that Europe is right now, different types of solidarity constantly co-exist and sometimes clash with each other. Revolt is violence-in-solidarity and it reconciles different sorts of debt, different conceptions of time, that is, it allows for simultaneity of the event (or suspension of time, which happens in the area of the sacred, the religious, the Durkheimian mechanic) and the historical, continuous flow of time (which happens in the area of the reasonable, the Durkheimian organic).

The closing decades of British colonial rule were tumultuous. Communists supported rural rebellions throughout the Bengal delta, and communal politics produced the idea of a post-colonial homeland for Muslims: Pakistan. As the colonial endgame drew to a close, it became clear that the Muslim-majority Bengal delta would be separated from the Muslim-minority parts of Bengal to the west.

British rule was increasingly challenged by religiously inspired resistance movements, and, from the early twentieth century, nationalist political parties. They attempted to split the province of Bengal in 1905 but had to undo this administrative measure soon after. Towards the end of their rule, they allowed elections at the provincial level, instituting communal politics.