This is the first extensive analysis of large-scale violence and the methods of its restraint in the early modern world. Using examples from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe, it questions the established narrative that violence was only curbed through the rise of western-style nation states and civil societies. Global history allows us to reframe and challenge traditional models for the history of violence and to rethink categories and units of analysis through comparisons. By decentring Europe and exploring alternative patterns of violence, the contributors to this volume articulate the significance of violence in narratives of state- and empire-building, as well as in their failure and decline, while also providing new means of tracing the transition from the early modern to modernity.
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Introduction: violence and the early modern world - Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare, and Peter H. Wilson
Part I: Coherence and fragmentation
1 'None could stand before him in the battle, none ever reigned so wisely as he': the expansion and significance of violence in early modern Africa - Richard Reid
2 Both benevolent and brutal: the two sides of provincial violence in early modern Burma - Michael W. Charney
3 Village rebellion and social violence in early nineteenth-century Vietnam - Vu Ð?c Liêm
4 Towards a political economy of conquest: the changing scale of warfare and the making of early colonial South Asia - Manu Sehgal
5 Ravages and depredations: raiding war and globalization in the early modern world - Brian Sandberg
Part II: Restraint and excess
6 Breaking the Pax Hispanica: collective violence in colonial Spanish America - Anthony McFarlane
7 Restraining/encouraging violence: commerce, diplomacy, and brigandage on the steppe routes between the Ottoman Empire, Poland-Lithuania, and Russia, 1470s-1570s - Alexander Osipian
8 Restraining violence on the seas: the Tokugawa, the Zheng maritime network, and the Dutch East India Company - Adam Clulow and Xing Hang
9 'The wrath of God': legitimization and limits of Mughal military violence in early modern South Asia - Pratyay Nath
Part III: Differentiation and identification
10 'Sacrificed to the madness of the bloodthirsty sabre': violence and the Great Turkish War in the work of Romeyn de Hooghe - Michel van Duijnen
11 Atlantic slave systems and violence - Trevor Burnard
12 A 'theatre of bloody carnage': the revolt of Cairo and Revolutionary violence - Joseph Clarke
13 Conquer, extract, and perhaps govern: organic economies, logistics, and violence in the pre-industrial world - Wayne E. Lee
Select bibliography
Index
Erica Charters is Associate Professor of Global History and the History of Medicine at the University of Oxford.
Marie Houllemare is Professor of Early Modern History at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne (Amiens).
Peter H. Wilson is Chichele Professor of the History of War at the University of Oxford.