Honour versus Criminalisation
We are better informed about one qualitative element in the non-Western world that relates to violence: the traditional concept of male honour. In many societies, a man's honour depended on his readiness to fight.
He had to defend his dignity whatever his interests were, if necessary by force. The more successful he was in this, the more honourable his peers considered him to be. An insult - verbal, by gesture or otherwise - could be cancelled out only by a physical attack or at least its threat. Thus, honour was not so much a motive for violence as it was an integral part of it. A man was obliged to defend his reputation and that of his dependants, in particular the sexual reputation of his wife and daughters. As a corollary, the slightest suggestion that a man could not control his dependants constituted an insult. In early modern Europe this concept of male honour played a crucial role in nearly all violent encounters. As will be shown, the rise of new notions of what it meant to be honourable was instrumental in the decline of homicide. Hence, levels of interpersonal violence are high when traditional male honour is widely valued. During the Middle Ages codes of chivalry and Catholic teaching acted to keep masculine codes of honour in check with varying degrees of success.[524] [525] Similar codes were developed in other pre-modern non-Western societies too. And we can be sure that these codes also functioned to control masculine behaviour in societies characterised by a strong tradition of machismo.Such societies prevailed throughout Latin America, Africa and Asia in early modern times and beyond. A culture of traditional male honour shows up, for example, in the Inquisition and in court records of the Spanish American colonies. Colonists had brought this culture from the homeland, but indigenous peoples, African slaves and men of mixed descent adapted their behaviour to fit the European cult of honour.
As John Iliffe demonstrates, traditional male honour has been cherished equally by nearly all social classes throughout the African continent from pre-colonial times onwards. His literary evidence dates back to before 1500, showing the importance of warrior-like notions of male honour in the Ethiopian highlands and among the horse-riding elites of the sub-Saharan savannas.[526] For Asia we can point to, among others, the samurai culture of Japan and similar martial traditions on the islands of Indonesia. For all regions mentioned there is no evidence that traditional male honour was less strongly valued in 1800 than in 1500, so we must assume that corresponding levels of honour-based male-on-male violence remained endemic throughout the early modern period.Developments in Europe were different. Honour remains important to us today, but in different ways. Academic feuds are sparked by fears about reputation and essays are written ‘in honour of professor X at his retirement'. But the merits of these professors do not consist of wielding swords. The academic ‘honour' bestowed on them has to do with inner qualities rather than bravado. In European history, honour gradually became spiritualised, losing its close association with the body and the necessity of using violence in its defence.[527] [528] By 1800 a large share of the upper and middle classes and even the ‘respectable‘ layer of the working classes subscribed to the ideal that a man could be both honourable and peaceful. This change in the concept of honour is key to the decline of homicide in early modern Europe.
The creation of European empires and the export of slavery to the New World transformed indigenous societies and created features which distinguished the new colonial regimes from the European metropole in the early modern period.15 The institution of slavery and the creation of diverse multiracial societies with distinct racial hierarchies had a deep effect on the nature of interpersonal violence as well as on the code of honour that accompanied it.
For example, freedmen of African descent in colonial Latin America might show their superiority by acting with extreme severity against slaves they considered disrespectful. This served to underline that the attackers, unlike the slaves, had some honour to begin with. Slavery likewiseMen Fighting Men: Europe from a Global Perspective affected the obligations of masters. In order to be considered men of honour, they not only had to control their own wives and daughters, as in Europe, but also had to supervise the sexual relations of their slaves. An incident in Cartagena de Indias, in present-day Colombia, makes clear what this might lead to. In 1602 the port city's bishop issued an edict encouraging citizens to report cohabitating male and female slaves, which was forbidden. A hatter, Jeronimo de Serpa, made secret inquiries about the domestic situation of two slaves belonging to his neighbour, the merchant Francisco Luis. Luis considered his neighbour's poking around in his affairs to be a sign of enmity. After exchanging a number of insults, Serpa finally challenged Luis to a duel, which took place in the street watched by a large crowd. Serpa received a serious head injury, of which he died six hours later. Luis had successfully regained dominion over the bodies of his slaves.[529]
In Europe, long before the waning of the honour code set in, states gradually suppressed interpersonal violence. Laws increasingly disqualified the defence of honour as justification for a physical attack. I have termed the entire process the ‘criminalisation of homicide'. This was a long drawn-out process that began in the Middle Ages and was not completed until the mid seventeenth century. Here I will only focus on the phases after 1500. By then, judicial prosecution had already become the norm in cases of homicide. However, most murderers were unlikely to suffer corporal punishment since sovereigns issued pardons freely and under the Roman law system it was possible to satisfy a blood crime with monetary compensation.
A killer's claim of provocation by the victim, always implicating a man's honour, was usually sufficient to obtain a pardon from the French or English king, or the Burgundian rulers and their Habsburg successors. Criminal laws, moreover, were often ambiguous. Charles V's law for the Holy Roman Empire of 1532, known as the Carolina, says: ‘When someone challenges, attacks or strikes another with a deadly weapon or arm and the imperilled person cannot reasonably escape without danger or injury to his body, life, honor and good repute, he may save his body and life through appropriate counterforce without any criminal penalty.'[530] This wording treats a threat to the defender's life and honour as a unity; whenever it is dishonourable to retreat, the Carolina does not oblige you to do so. Contemporary legal writers confirmed this interpretation. In Spain, as late as the 1620s several killers had confidentlyannounced to their prospective victims that the penalty would be no more than 100 ducats, the price for registering a pardon.[531] [532]
Presently, the available evidence for the completion of the criminalisation of homicide is most detailed for the northern Netherlands. By the sixteenth century pardons were granted there on condition that the killer and his kin had formally reconciled with the victim's family, which originally was a voluntary ritual. Subsequently, in about 1650, the ritual of reconciliation had practically disappeared and pardons for homicide became infrequent. Criminal prosecution had become the rule. A similar development took place in the whole of Scandinavia and in parts of the Holy Roman Empire.19 Of course, full criminalisation does not require that the punishment be death, as modern legal practice demonstrates. Thus, English killers of the eighteenth century were frequently pardoned, but this meant that they received the penalty of transportation instead. In France and Italy the full criminalisation of homicide was hampered by the ubiquity of pardons and the venality of the legal system, where it was fairly easy for those with the resources to pay off crimes of blood.
Those convicted and punished for crimes of violence were invariably people of marginal status. For the Dutch Republic, we have the additional evidence of a tightening of the rules for self-defence. Notably, defending your honour and defending your life became disentangled, with just the latter counting as self-defence. Amsterdam homicide trials of the late seventeenth century illustrate this development. A man whose victim had been the first to draw a knife had subsequently offered his assailant the opportunity to exchange his broken knife for his friend's: instead, he could have fled the scene, the court pointed out. The magistrates told another man who had not begun the fight that he could have retreated into one of the many houses at the spot. For these two defendants this would have meant acting dishonourably, but the Amsterdam court no longer recognised their honour code.Can we find parallels to the criminalisation of homicide in non-Western societies? Since such a process presupposes some measure of monopolisation of force and a functioning judicial system, we would expect to find them only in relatively developed states. China is an obvious candidate. Here, the least we can say is that the criminalisation of homicide had been achieved under the Qing dynasty (1644-1912). This can be concluded from legal texts as well as court records. The Qing legal code included elaborate provisions for differentially punishing all kinds of murder. Only husbands who killed adulterous wives or their lovers met with relative leniency and understanding. Courts investigated all homicide cases that came to their knowledge and capital sentences were subject to review by a central institution.[533] It is less easy to determine whether or not this system was already in place before the Qing. The evidence for other continents is even more patchy. Latin America saw the introduction of Spanish and Portuguese judicial institutions. It is therefore not surprising to see that in Mexico pardons were frequently being issued in 1800. In the West African Ashanti kingdom, on the other hand, few killers seem to have been criminally punished by a court. Justice continued to rely on an out-of-court ceremony sealed by the payment of blood money. This was very different to most European Roman law systems, where compensation for killing was mediated solely by the law courts, which invariably handed out some form of punishment, most often banishment. However, a fuller examination of the legal evidence from non-Western societies would extend our picture of the level of criminalisation of homicide there, and offer the possibilities of real and productive comparison with European practices.