Technology and Violence
The two centuries from 1800 to the present day are marked by the increasing efficiency of the means by which humans inflict violence. The myriad causes of violence differ little, if at all, from the other periods analysed in the first three volumes of this collection - greed, envy, lust, anger, vanity and shame produce interpersonal violence while differences in race, language, religion, class or creed are common prompts justifying mass-scale violence.
The novel aspect of the years explored in this volume largely revolves around the impact on violence of technological advances. The energy unleashed in the Industrial Revolution spurred the rapid growth in technologies supporting the execution, organisation, annotation and representation of violence from 1800. The digital revolution of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries accelerated many of these trends with the advent of the capacity to move information instantaneously around the globe. This volume examines the impacts of this technology-enhanced efficiency with its large-scale acts of violence - mass deaths in minutes - hitherto unseen in human history. It also tracks the ways that increased access to stories of and information about violence has changed public perceptions of the parameters of legitimate violence at both the mass and the interpersonal level. The decreasing public appetite for violence exists simultaneously with expanding, new forms of leisure which have rendered representations of violence banal.Technological advances in transportation and weaponry gave European powers with expansionist aspirations the capacity to consolidate their hold on vast swathes of other people's lands in the nineteenth century. The great empires that had typified new forms of global organisation in the centuries 1500-1800 (discussed in Volume iii) appeared set to continue in the nineteenth century with these new tools of travel and force.
Technological change facilitated a rapid expansion in the geographies of empire. The entire South Asian subcontinent came firmly under Britain's control through the 1800s, while the French extended their control over territory in North, West and Central Africa, in countries as diverse as present-day Algeria, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon and Madagascar during this same century. The advance of military technology was so dramatic that, where in 1800 conflicts were fought with hand-held swords or bayonets and manually primed cannon, by the 2000s heat-seeking missiles and armed robots called drones are commonplace in inter-state conflicts. Scientific advances produced efficiencies in warfare such that 240,000 people could be destroyed by just two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki only three decades after aeroplanes first featured in conflict. At the start of the 1800s, belligerents faced each other before attack, while our current conflicts are conducted from computers on desktops thousands of miles away from the target zone. As controllers of robots perpetrate long-distance violence, light-weight, rapid fire, semi-automatic guns designed for military conflict are brought into American schools to settle petty, personal scores in fits of youthful rage - warzone equipment has become a violent ‘personal accessory'.The techniques and technologies developed through the 1800s and 1900s in the consolidation of empires would later be used by resistance and national liberation movements to expel the colonisers or overthrow oppressive regimes in the twentieth century. Russian Marxists disrupted centuries of monarchical rule in 1917, inspired by liberationist ideals that underpinned their willingness to use violence to achieve political goals. Colonised peoples, undergirded with modern weaponry and mass communication tools, produced independent nations with new geographic borders - polities that were created, built and defended with varying degrees of violence. As empires disintegrated, the authority to wield violence increasingly accrued to the nation state.
Nationalism emerged as a powerful new form of patriotism that would spur both the formation of new nation states and attacks on rivals for the land, resources and peoples therein.New methods of recording and organising societies, coupled with the advances in communication technologies, allowed all forms of governments - monarchies, democracies, dictatorships and socialists - to extend their violence to larger and larger sections of their populations. Populations, counted and categorised, could be forcibly relocated, corralled in monitored zones, moved into workcamps, or simply executed with a speed hitherto unseen in human history. In Germany and Poland during World War II, somewhere in the region of 8 million Jews and Romas were identified, documented and killed in newly designed facilities that pumped poisonous gas into locked chambers. The work of modern scientists, architects and bureaucrats combined to decimate specific populations in carefully planned strategies that took years to develop but once operationalised were brutal in their efficiency.
Technologies were essential to the deployment of the power of the modern state as that institution held claim to the legitimate use of violence. In the twentieth century, states became killing machines with a reach they had never had before. This required not only machines but dedicated cadres to use them. In the extreme cases - Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia - violence against enemies within and without created the conditions for the stability of the regime itself. Without sequential paroxysms of violence, these regimes would have collapsed. Thus, the modern state came to devour itself.
The records and artefacts of eugenicist policies would later be used as evidence to punish perpetrators for violence in war crimes courts and reconciliation tribunals - starting in earnest after World War II. International law, backed up by the victors' military might, emerged as an important new technology in the International Military Tribunal's Nuremberg Trials from 1945 and for the Far East in 1946.1 These international military courts determined both the scope of new violence - the execution of convicted war criminals - as well as the parameters around future violence by formulating the acceptable limits of warfare on both troops, prisoners of war (POWs) and civilians.
The brutality uncovered in these post-World War II tribunals stood as evidence of the failure of the earlier Hague and Geneva Conventions, that had been written and rewritten over the decades from 1899 with the goal of protecting civilians and POWs and limiting the use of biochemical weapons. New technologies for killing, it had been hoped, could be mitigated by new technologies of multilateral legal agreements.The newly available records of mass violence in the twentieth century prompted the formulation of new rules designed to constrain violence and set parameters around its legitimate use - led by a new global organisation, the United Nations (UN). Global legal frameworks that outline appropriate behaviours between warring countries, for securing justice after outbreaks of violence and for individuals within systems empowered to inflict violence, are now the norm. The operations of the UN's peacekeeping forces along with [1] international weapons monitoring agencies, from the second half of the twentieth century, are emblematic of the global organisation's attempts to monitor and constrain violence. Outbreaks of mass violence are now framed as ‘failures' of the UN and presented as evidence of the limits of its efficacy. The limits of UN power were evident in the most ghastly of ways during the massacres of Tutsi by the Hutu-led government in Rwanda in 1994 and of Bosnian Muslim men in former Yugoslavia in 1995, in which between 500,000 and 1 million Rwandans and 8,000 Bosnian men and boys were killed, respectively. The massacre in Srebrenica of these men and boys represented just a small fraction of the death toll of Bosnians during this war. Both massacres occurred despite a UN presence. Nonetheless, the UN as a forum has negotiated the reduction of numerous inter-state tensions around the globe through diplomatic pressure in the seventy years of its existence and it remains the dominant voice for the peaceful resolution of conflict.
The establishment of these new global norms through the UN and the technology of international law not only delineated boundaries for behaviours between nation states but also provided protection for human beings as individuals. The new discourses of human rights as universal reminded nation states, but also organisations within those states, of their obligations to all people and their fundamental equality. Human rights became a shield for citizens against their own states as well as against the depredations of others. Laws echoing these principles diffused into national documentation and institutions, and served as constraints on hitherto legitimate interpersonal violence inflicted by elders on their children, husbands on their wives or employers on their workers. In the early twenty-first century, in many societies around the world, violence of any sort is regarded as a path of last resort and the least desirable option. The abolition of the death penalty, which gained momentum in nation states from the mid twentieth century as ideas of reform rather than revenge infused the justice systems, is indicative of this trend.
Advances in printing press technologies during the 1800s gave us the capacity to mass-produce daily newspapers with photographs and propaganda posters of greater colour and design complexity. The emergence of the camera would provide first image and then sound so that people could see and hear real or imaginary violence. Later, the emergence of digital technologies using the internet made text, image, sound and data instantly available all around the globe on a wider array of smaller and smaller devices. At the start of the 1800s ordinary people were not offered this daily diet of diverse horrors occurring elsewhere or in other periods to other people - violence was known directly only through personal experience or eyewitness accounts.
The advances in technology led to the emergence of a professional cohort of journalists who would provide content for the pages - including sensational stories of violence.
Once the long-distance telegraph became widespread in the 1850s, journalists working in one part of the globe were able to post stories to another instantly. This capacity to transmit information, and to print and then disseminate stories, would proceed apace through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, bringing more and more people into contact with knowledge about actual or confected violent acts committed by individuals, groups or military forces. Violence was no longer limited to one's personal experience, and awareness of the horrors of war and the miseries of soldiers as described by journalists in situ, rather than novelists in armchairs, changed popular views about when, where and to what extent violence was ‘appropriate'.But these new communication technologies would also produce a concomitant increase in misinformation designed to sway popular opinion to support violent acts. By the mid 1800s, propaganda spread through newspapers and magazines was actively used to justify the violence of which readers were increasingly becoming aware thanks to the same medium. For example, British colonialism in South Asia gained widespread popular support after false newspaper reports of English women and girls being raped at the hands of Indians resisting the takeover of their land in the 1857 Indian Rebellion. Through the twentieth century, propaganda would reach new heights in the world wars with governments establishing special units charged with information management in all conflicts - such as the USA's Office of War Information, the UK's Ministry of Information, and Japan's Information and Propaganda Department. The Third Reich in Germany established a Ministry of Propaganda, with the infamous Joseph Goebbels at its head, charged with creating in the public mind a cohort of domestic enemies and later foreign ones to advance support for the war. Legitimating international violence now required a strong narrative in order to gain public support, since new technologies gave many groups access to the public sphere.
By the second decade of the twenty-first century, people all over the world had access to a 24-hour media cycle that presented a smorgasbord of violence in graphic, multimedia formats through small hand-held devices. The wide array of means available for people to view, hear and participate in violence - real and representational - is unparalleled in human history. Social media websites, streamed video clips and podcasts flow through the internet to even remote parts of the world. This wave builds from earlier leaps in technology dissemination which similarly carried stories of violence directly to individuals - the mid-twentieth-century technologies of broadcast television, radio, and documentary and feature films continued a tradition set in the nineteenth-century boom in print media of newspapers, posters, brochures and magazines. This plethora of media technologies provided popular access to vast numbers of stories and images of violence - sometimes unspeakable and horrific and at other times mundane. Human access to increasing volumes of representations of historic and current violence is a key feature of the years from 1800 onwards.
The capacity of communication technologies to promote the use of violence has not diminished in the twenty-first century, but both the increasing public awareness of the consequences of violence and the very real capacity of major military powers, like the USA and Russia, to destroy the world multiple times over with weapons of mass destruction in their nuclear arsenals has reduced the popular appetite for violent solutions and reinvigorated the disarmament activism that started in the 1960s and 1970s.[2] The expanding middle classes sought to distance themselves from personal experience of violence as rapidly as they were vicariously experiencing it in the media. They were also instrumental in struggling to rid their worlds of violence through pressing for cultural and legal changes that would make actual violence punishable.