Introduction to Volume iii

ROBERT ANTONY, STUART CARROLL AND CAROLINE DODDS PENNOCK

Over the past half-century the period from about 1500 to 1800¹ has been widely recognised as being distinct in world history.

Between the fifteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries across Eurasia and much of the Americas this period witnessed the apogee of pre­industrial state building and economic achievement, often referred to as advanced organic societies. Prior to the exploitation of coal for cheap energy all societies were dependent on organic sources of energy - biomass from crops to power the muscles of men and animals and wood for fuel and industrial processes. These were supplemented by wind and water power. Advanced organic societies were characterised by vigorous commercial economies that encouraged capital accumulation and in which the rule of law was enforced by centralised bureaucracies. They furthermore were characterised by considerable incremental innovation and long-term eco­nomic growth.

The period from 1500 to 1800 is far from being the story of ‘the rise of the West'. The process of economic growth and political consolidation began much earlier in Asia, perhaps as early as the tenth century in China, and continued to the end of our period: eighteenth-century China and Japan enjoyed agricultural productivity and standards of living equal to or greater than that of contemporary European nations.^[3] A modern economy, charac­terised by the significant technical advantages offered by steam power and nearly unlimited cheap energy for production, was only being realised in north-western Europe at the very end of our period. Until then, the self­contained and powerful centralised states of Asia had little to fear from the Europeans. This volume presents an opportunity to compare and contrast the nature, use and control of violence in these advanced organic societies.

Not until the victory of the English East India Company at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 did any major Old World territory come remotely close to falling to European conquest.

The societies of the Americas, and to a lesser extent of sub-Saharan Africa, were fundamentally transformed between 1500 and 1800 by mass violence. Sub-Saharan Africa was torn apart by fighting caused by Europeans and Muslims seeking slaves. This was intensified by Africans seeking to enslave other groups. In the Americas the European invasion also exacerbated con­flict and war between competing indigenous groups. Bartolome de las Casas reported ‘cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see'.^[5] The silver mines at Potosi in present-day Bolivia operated through the labour of tens of thousands of indigenous workers in brutal conditions, with the mitayos drafted under the Inca system of labour service undertaking the most appalling jobs. When this proved insufficient the workforce was reinforced by the import of thousands of African slaves. The exploitation of the mines was directly linked to early modern or ‘proto-globalisation' in another way. A good proportion of Potosi's silver went across the Pacific to fuel Chinese demand for silver in a complex trade pattern that linked Manila, Malacca, the Portuguese settlement of Macao and the port of Nagasaki in Japan. Thus Asian economies inadvertently helped to perpetuate the brutal mistreatment of miners in the Americas.

The great ‘early modern' Eurasian empires bear comparison, but also contrast. The advanced organic societies of Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) China and Mughal India (1526-1857) displayed substantial accomplishments in science and technology; they also had long periods of relative peace that helped foster trade, capital accumulation and massive population growth. The resulting socio-economic contradictions fuelled increasing social instability and conflict. Taking homicide rates as an indicator of the general distribution of violence in a given society, China had signifi­cantly lower homicide rates than Europe in the period 1600-1800. Nevertheless, the trends were going in the opposite direction. Whereas homicide rates were falling in eighteenth-century Europe, homicides and violent crimes in general actually increased tremendously in China during this same period.^[6] With the diminishing coercive capacity of the Qing state after 1760, there was a marked upsurge in millenarian rebellions, peasant uprisings, ethnic disturbances, piracy and banditry.^[7]

In contrast, in Europe the widespread violence that characterised the German Peasants' War - the greatest popular uprising in European history until 1789 - was not repeated after 1525. A fair and accessible legal system was essential to this process. What distinguished Europe in this period was not the strong state, but the fact that the State was increasingly complemented by a sophisticated and vigorous civil society, one based on a contract for mutual preservation.

Recent research challenges traditional accounts that explain the rise of European modernity based on a model which blended the civilising process and social disciplining imposed by the state and reformed churches. First, the traditional peacemaking role of the church was disrupted by the Reformation, confessional conflict and finally civil war. Second, more puni­tive law codes did not suppress violence.

The experience of civil war led to an atmosphere of acceptance of change in which the security and order provided by a strong state was elevated to the status of a supreme public good. The civil and religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stimulated Thomas Hobbes to argue that violence is rooted in human nature. In Leviathan (1651), Hobbes also wished to liberate us from the fear that bred violence. The belief that men naturally hate each other and that civil society protects us from anarchy formed the basis of the new civility that conquered Europe in the eighteenth century. In contrast to the honour code, which was predicated on the recognition of one's own power and abilities and a concomitant hostility to any apparent signs of being undervalued, the new civility taught what to avoid, ensuring that social relations were protected from violence by the hygiene of tact. In Europe, violence became a measure of society, which shifted the boundaries of acceptable violence towards criminals, women and even animals.

The comparison with East Asia is instructive, since both China and Japan also emerged transformed by a period of intense civil conflict at the same time as Europe. The designation ‘early modern' (approximately covering the eras of Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa Shogunate from 1568 to 1868) has become a standard way of periodising Japanese history. It is used to describe the establishment of strong central authority, especially under the Shoguns after 1603, following a century of civil war. This long period of peace and stability was based on a rigidly hierarchical society dominated by an elite warrior class, the samurai. The state maintained order by mediating conflict effectively, protected Japan from foreign invasion and permitted the economy to develop by the eighteenth century into one of the world's most advanced. Tokugawa Japan was more effective in terms of central political control than Qing China and even the most interventionist police state in Europe. In China, the emergent public sphere, predicated on the sixteenth-century revival of Confucian ideals of the common good and the cultivation of virtue, was temporarily shattered by the civil conflicts of the mid seventeenth century, which toppled the Ming dynasty. The Qing regime that seized power in the aftermath attempted to regulate public discourse in the name of unity. The reinvigorated civil service exam system imposed conformity among the ruling educated elites, while the literary inquisitions of the High Qing (1662-1795) systematically curtailed the scope of culture and learning available to them. The intention was to better control and dominate scholar-officials by creating a climate of fear and mutual suspicion. The state severely persecuted non-conformists with thousands of intellectuals imprisoned, sent into exile or executed.^[8] Different from Europe, neither Qing China nor Tokugawa Japan developed civil societies or public spheres that generated discussion and debate or the questioning of traditional assumptions and received opinions. China and Japan therefore maintained a traditional view of the political; that dissent or difference was indicative of faction and enmity, which required policing and repression.

Although notions of civilised behaviour and restraint were not absent from East Asia, nonetheless political culture in Europe developed along a different trajectory. Enmity was not completely suppressed - the Balkanised nature of Europe and its colonies encouraged intense interstate competition, which resulted in frequent wars and fostered patriotic chauvinism - but internally states developed structures and social systems which meant that political

differences could be debated and expressed without recourse to violence. In Europe, political fragmentation set limits on the power of the state to control the circulation of ideas, and dissent and debate were not necessarily inter­preted as indicative of faction or resistance. Civilised behaviour was increas­ingly measured according to international standards; a source of national or dynastic pride, it was an indication of cultural superiority. Civility required changes to traditional concepts of masculine honour. The culture of ven­geance that generated very high rates of interpersonal violence in the six­teenth and seventeenth centuries was banished to the periphery - southern Italy, the Balkans and the Mediterranean Islands - and homicide rates fell very sharply in the eighteenth century in western Europe in particular. The boundaries of civil society were, however, marked by race and class. The link between civility and good breeding was at its most pernicious in colonial America, where it became a tool of white and mestizo supremacy, legitimising violence against the supposedly racially inferior.

Although early modern Chinese and Japanese elites also developed the notion that civil order required self-restraint, the culture of kin obligation and revenge was not replaced by a civil society on the European model. In Japan the traditional culture of feuding built on the mediation of ancient enmities did not disappear. The culture of revenge was exacerbated as the mediating power of the Shogun began to falter in the nineteenth century.^[9] At the same time in China ethnic and lineage feuding were also on the rise, especially in the south. Rising rates of interpersonal violence in eighteenth-century China are indicative of growing economic contradictions, social conflicts and resis­tance to the encroachments of the centralising state. The tardiness of the Qing state in developing responsive legal and political mechanisms meant that social and economic grievances could not be addressed effectively, laying the foundations for the great millenarian movements and social rebellions of the nineteenth century, beginning with the White Lotus Rebellion (1796­1805), in which up to one hundred thousand people died and millions were displaced.

World history in this era has traditionally been written from the perspec­tive of the economy or trade, and the period is often understood in terms of the clash between the great Eurasian empires. The danger with this approach - particularly when studying violence - is that it tends to privilege the history of warfare and the institutions of the state in creating and maintaining order. Both of these have an important place in our volume. But violence is a protean subject; it cannot be reduced to economic or political variables. Crucial to the recent cultural anthropology of violence is that it is ‘perspectival’. According to David Riches, violence is ‘an act of physical hurt deemed legitimate by the performer and illegitimate by (some) witnesses’.^[10] It is precisely because violence's legitimacy is contestable that it is opened up for debate, and so rhetorical strategies are employed that persuade people of its acceptability and reduce the chances of a reply in kind. Understanding the relations between performer, victim and witness will tell us much about the political and social environment within which the act occurs. The study of violence therefore permits us to analyse social relations and tensions as well as cultural norms and practices. The rulers of the great Eurasian empires claimed divine sanction and the promotion of ideals of universal peace was a legitimating strategy common to all. The strong states of the ‘early modern' period supported and reinforced a millennia of religious practice and thought. But state laws and religious injunctions are not the only factors that shape the nature and intensity of violence. Official norms were mediated and even inverted by popular beliefs, rituals and practices. And norms were shaped by gender and age expecta­tions - the licence attributed to young males in traditional societies was not at all appropriate in patriarchs and women. Divine authority might also subvert the earthly hierarchy; it was routinely invoked in all societies to resist tyranny and subjugation.

All societies promote ritual behaviour that helps to limit and contain violence. The role of religion and custom in establishing moral codes and tempering violence was not new in our period. Few states at this time were able to claim the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within their territory. In many areas religious officials held as much authority as political leaders and religious law was as important, or even more important, than the dictates of the state. The period after 1500 is distinguished by the sheer volume of documentary evidence about violence and new ways of thinking about it and recording it. The explosion of information after 1500 includes not just law codes, judicial documents, moralising religious texts and cautionary tales, but also ego documents and other first-person writings. The growth of history writing from the fifteenth century onwards was closely related to changes in patterns of long-distance travel and imperial conquest, as well as to contacts between human societies previously isolated from one another. Mughal historical works bloomed after 1570. Epic tales, such as the Hikayat Siak, helped to create a Malay identity that celebrated the violence and prowess of Siak maritime raiders, such as Raja Ismail. As Timothy Barnard has explained, ‘Tales of raids and battles preoccupy the author(s) of the Hikayat Siak, and these raids were not only to gain economic and manpower advantages. Violence itself seemed to occupy a primary position in Siak-Malay identity, as it did in states throughout the region in the eighteenth century.’¹¹ The intermingling, often collision, of cultures led to the reinvention of ethnogra­phy. Our knowledge of Aztec war and ritual sacrifice relies heavily on mis­sionary texts, such as Bernardino de Sahagun’s Florentine Codex, completed in the 1570s, which demonstrates the complex ways in which warfare and violence were bound up with Mesoamerican identities. Historians are wary of outmoded imperial perspectives on subject societies, which perpetuate stereotypes about indigenous cultures. This volume is a testimony to the ways in which new sources and interpretative tools have enabled us in recent years to gain a more nuanced understanding of indigenous societies and their role as agents in the transformations wrought by European invasion.

It is possible to invert Eurocentric expectations and narratives. Even the idea that the modern introspective self is a European invention is a myth. The diary of Japanese merchant Enomoto Yazaemon (1625-86) is instructive in this regard.^{[11] [12]} Yazaemon’s pursuit of profit tempered by frugality shows there was nothing particularly special about European capitalism. His views about violence are also edifying. Though he did not belong to the samurai class, he describes a youth in which masculine honour required the frequent threat of violence. As he reached middle age, the diary records his mature realisation that violence was a problem that threatened the social equilibrium. Yaezemon learned to tame his violent impulses and searched for other means to settle disputes. However, it is clear that his primary duty was to his parents and family - he did not wish to make mortal enemies of his kinsmen in squabbles over the family inheritance. His emphasis on self­control and self-discipline echoed early modern samurai thinking, which ostensibly privileged the duty to one’s lord over self-interest. The conscious attempt to channel masculine bravado is common to many cultures. Confucian teaching placed a high premium on the power of reason, human perfectibility and social harmony. Yaezemon’s emphasis on restraining the will is strongly suggestive of the neo-stoicism that became fashionable in sixteenth-century Europe.

But Europe also provides points of contrast. Chivalry had long existed to establish rules of the game and limit violence. But chivalric conventions collapsed during the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centu­ries. The Reformation was an ideological revolution because it legitimised the politics of revenge in defence of the constitution and the commonwealth. Political justice required the pursuit of enemies in the name of the public good. This justified political assassination and tyrannicide, which became common currency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This thinking contributed to outbreaks of popular intercommunal religious violence in some regions. It was this violence that encouraged Montaigne to find answers to the human condition. His purpose in the Essays was to critique the masculine ego and replace the cult of honour with an ethos that was more reflexive and circumspect. More specifically, in his essay ‘On the Cannibals', in which the indigenous peoples of the Americas are a mirror used to critique contemporary European society, Montaigne went further.^[13] Rather than viewing other parts of the world as inferior, he saw them as different. Although Montaigne had a huge impact on European culture (Hamlet, the quintessential exploration of conscience, duty and revenge, owes a great deal to him), his view of indigenous peoples was not the one that would prevail.

The deeply chauvinistic views developed by Europeans about their ‘civi­lisation' (a word invented in the 1750s) and its superiority to the Middle East, Asia and Africa, as well as the indigenous peoples of the Americas, legitimised conquest, subjugation and enslavement. The same beliefs that underpinned notions of civil society also served to exclude, marginalise and legitimise violence. The imperative to Christianise and ‘civilise' led to widespread violence against both Native Americans and Africans, in forms that were driven by differing European understandings of humanity. British American territories tended to place all non-white people outside of civil society altogether, promoting structures of racial difference which led to the infa­mous ‘one-drop rule' and underpinned the systematic use of racialised violence against both black and indigenous peoples. In Spanish America, indigenous Americans were declared to be ‘fully human' and their enslave­ment repeatedly declared illegal, but the boundaries of society were shaped by blood and race, which legitimised Creole domination and violence against those who were perceived to be inferior. Nonetheless, indigenous people possessed legal recourse against indiscriminate violence, unlike most African slaves. These unfortunate souls, perpetually impure under the Curse of Ham, were precluded from ever being fully part of the communal contract in which Spanish society was rooted.^[14] The social structures and racial hierarchies that legitimised violence in the colonial system had far-reaching consequences. During the Enlightenment ideas of natural slavery were given fresh impetus across the whole of Europe. The belief that certain classes, races and people were naturally made for slavery and subjection and others naturally made to rule laid the foundation for nineteenth-century empire building and racial theories of domination.

The idea that violence is not simply structural but perspectival assumes a role for human agency. Violence is a dynamic category that touches on questions of morality, the answers to which may make people change their views or may challenge their preconceived notions. Violence is therefore shaped by and can subvert cultural norms and expectations. The architecture of this volume bears testimony to this approach. World history has tradition­ally been approached from a materialist standpoint. It has privileged inter­state conflict, conquest and nation building. These themes are ripe for comparative analysis and are well represented in the chapters that follow. But the present volume attests to the wealth of research done over the past fifty years on the social and cultural context of violence. This has enabled the recovery of the experience of those excluded from traditional modernising discourses. It has emphasised the significance of class, race and gender as ordering and organising principles in the use and legitimation of violence. The interconnectedness of the world after 1500, the spread of literacy and the significant increase in the source base for this period permits a much more detailed attention to the subaltern, the criminal, the domestic and the every­day dimensions of violence than is possible for previous eras.

In any project of world history there are likely to be gaps in coverage. This is particularly the case in a presentation of the state of the art in a field that, warfare aside, is still relatively new. This volume does not claim to be comprehensive, but the intention of the editors is that it should inspire others to fill in the gaps. The assessment of violence in African history before the nineteenth century is fraught with difficulty. The operation and impact of the slave trade are relatively well covered, but even here the source material is overwhelmingly European and problematic, not least because of its propensity for racial stereotyping and cultural miscomprehension. The current state of the research does not, at present, lend itself to a survey. This will only be possible once Africanists have overcome the methodological and conceptual problems posed by the fragmentary sources.^[15] The available sources, the possibilities for constructive comparison and the need to address the most significant global changes in our period have the led the editors to place a particular emphasis on Europe, Asia and the Americas. Part I introduces the theme which most distinguishes the period after 1500: the rise of empire - particularly the invasion of the Americas - and the establishment of colonial regimes that used slave labour to produce luxury commodities - coffee, tobacco and sugar - for export. A culture of terror shaped the slave societies in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese America. Violence was essential to the perpetuation of the system and had a profound impact on the continent, the legacy of which remains today. The Ottoman Empire established a very different system of rule by permitting its polyglot religious communities a wide degree of toleration. The convivencia that characterised Ottoman rule came under threat from the top with Sunni confessional demands for conformity at the end of the seventeenth century and at the end of the eighteenth century by the penetration of western European merchants who brought competition and new ideas that threatened community cohesion.

War transformed societies and moulded states. The story of the rise and clash of the ‘gunpowder' empires - Habsburg, Ottoman, Safavid, Ming and Mughal - has been written many times. Our period witnessed incipient warfare between established states - the period from 1550 to 1683 was one of the most warlike periods in the long history of East Asia - which was increasingly conducted over vast distances. The adoption of firearms put a premium on the ability to raise funds to equip armies and navies. The complex fortifications that were required to resist artillery also required resources on an enormous scale. The Ottomans led the way in the Middle East and Africa. Their nearly unstoppable army built one of the largest empires since the Romans. During the seventeenth century the ‘gunpowder empires' were evenly matched in terms of training and technology. It was only by the beginning of the eighteenth century that European perfection of military drill and adoption of the faster flintlock firing mechanism permitted tactics that gave Europeans a considerable advantage.^[16] Part II covers this story but is distinguished from traditional military histories by its emphasis on the human cost of war and the culture of violence that warfare created.

Part III continues to explore what it means to be human by focusing on intimate violence. In all societies the boundaries of legitimate violence are closely related to ideas of gender and status. It is commonly supposed in traditional societies that men's stock of honour can go up or down, but that women only have honour to lose. The cult of masculine honour required that any slight be met with an immediate riposte. But patriarchal societies require the control of male sexuality, as well as the subjugation of women. There were changes in our period as the control of passion was increasingly associated with social superiority and the right of men of status to rule. States in our period did little to interfere in the domestic arena and the traditional expectation that men could beat their wives and that parents needed to discipline children with force continued to be shaped largely by religious and moral strictures and community pressure.

Part IV demonstrates a further significant feature of ‘early modernity’, namely the role of the state in developing police and judicial systems to enforce order and suppress criminality. The mature states of Europe and Asia enacted and codified a significant corpus of law designed to control violence. There are strong comparisons between China and Europe in regards to debates about the morality of inflicting corporal punishments on offenders. There was a growing assumption that the appropriate and restrained use of corporal punishment was an indicator of a civilised state. The ability of states to temper punishment is a testimony to the strong legitimacy that states across Eurasia had achieved by the eighteenth century. This was less appar­ent in regimes based on violent conquest that had weak legitimacy and continued to require judicial terror as a routine weapon of rule. Part V demonstrates the points of resistance as population growth led to pressure on resources and created tensions within communities which were exacer­bated by the growth of the fiscal demands of the state. Exorbitant taxation is a form of violence and the harm caused by the fiscal and labour demands of both the state and lords on an undernourished rural population cannot be overlooked. The opening of the world’s seas after 1500 created opportunities for pirates and commerce raiding and for the first time European states were required to protect property and impose the rule of law over vast distances. There was a close relationship between this form of conflict and modern navies, which operated according to the prize system, the monetary reward that the crew was due for capturing an enemy vessel. There remained a grey zone between unsanctioned and sanctioned maritime raiding, not only in the West but also in other areas of the world.

Part VI deals with the close relationship that violence has to the sacred. For some believers violence is a sacred performance. Many of the world's religions have foundational myths that originate in violence, and they shared a view of history that was eschatological and redemptive. This presented a threat to states and social order when popular movements invoked divine authority in the quest for justice. One of the points of comparison between the strong states of Eurasia was the rise of religious non-conformity, which sparked intercom- munal violence and caused the state to intervene and attempt more system­atically to suppress dissent. Some empires - the British, the Ottoman, the Mughal and Holy Roman - were tolerant of religious differences. But a general feature of this period was the effort made by states in Europe, South America and Asia to enforce confessional conformity through the expulsion of minority groups and the criminalisation of heterodox beliefs. Changing attitudes to religious authority were a major feature of the Enlightenment and contributed significantly to the Atlantic revolutions of the eighteenth century.

During this period violence was the raw material for some of the profound- est meditations on humanity and its relationship to the divine: ‘is't not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd to let this canker our nature come in further evil?' ponders Hamlet. These are universal themes which thinkers, artists and poets addressed. For most people violence also provided entertainment and spectacle. The satisfaction of witnessing executions, participation in extreme sports and the pleasure taken in the ritual baiting and slaughter of animals were features of all the societies under scrutiny. But there were changes too. There was a growing disdain by elites in many of our societies for pastimes that were seen to be unseemly and plebeian. They wished the state to regulate popular culture. Our final section, ‘Representations and Constructions of Violence', therefore reprises many of the themes common across the world in our period: the gender, generation and class expectations that shaped violence; the role of the state in policing its boundaries; the ways in which violence was legitimised and critiqued; and the central role that violence had in forming both individual and collective identities.