Towards a Theory of Violence
The themes outlined here, in their specificity, stand in contrast to the vagaries that historians have held about theorising violence. As the general editors of the Cambridge World History of Violence suggest, historians often have a ‘Manichaean view' of violence: on the one hand, to condemn violence, especially extreme atrocities such as genocide, and on the other hand, to justify violence in a broader context and thereby to a certain extent excuse it.[15]
The conventional understanding of the English noun ‘violence' takes in three elements: harm (especially physical), transgression and intention.
Despite its universal occurrence, conceptualising violence along the historical record is a relatively new facet within the discipline of history. It may be traced to the 1970s and new interest by historians to find social and cultural meaning in specific instances of violence.[16] [17] Although social scientists, philosophers and political scientists have written about violence - and the anthropology of violence has become a burgeoning sub-field of the discipline - the historical approach only really took hold in the late twentieth century. Following the lead of Nathalie Zemon Davis, Lawrence Stone, Richard Evans and Jean-Claude Chesnais, scholars began researching and publishing on violence in relation to its occurrence in both European and North American historical development. But, as Philip Dwyer observes, the history of violence in general lacks a methodology. 17 It is also culturally contingent, which means that regarding violence from the perspective of world history one may encounter forms and ways of violence that are not common everywhere. For example, transcultural or transhistorical study of hostility and aggression shows that violence need not be centred on the intentional infliction of bodily harm. Coercion through confiscation of land or livelihood, imprisonment, hostage-taking, excommunication, stripping of honours and public humiliation are also forms of violence, albeit non-physical.[18]How the historian employs words and concepts to analyse potential or real conflicts ending in violence, or not, is also relevant for theorising. As mentioned above, clashes between nomadic and agro-urban peoples were common in the Middle Millennium, but how historians in the past wrote about these two groups may not conform to our own expectations. Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406), for example, saw the interaction between nomads and city-based peoples as dialectic. He considered the city to be the site where the inhabitants could access the arts, sciences and crafts, but also a place that softened and corrupted its residents, robbing them of physical vigour and martial potency. In his reckoning, nomads of the desert, on the other hand, were morally pure, vigorous, but also, and not least, desirous of the wealth of cities. In Ibn Khaldun's historical vision, the wild violence of the desert and the decaying vitality of the city reflected two extremes; the violent confrontation between them might re-energise each in turn. And there is the case of Chinese historians who took pride in that imperial-era China condemned violence, played down the glory of military exploits in the historical record, and awarded its highest prestige to literary persons, rather than martial heroes. These historians shun the facts behind China's historical longevity - the Chinese empire maintained the most successful, sustained and continuous military tradition on the planet. War united China, war reunited China and war expanded China. The ‘sanitising' of the role of military violence in Chinese history originated with Chinese literati, and was accepted and perpetuated by their Jesuit interpreters, and later reinforced by Western sinologists, who in their concern with politics and ideology disregarded the centrality of warfare to China's development.[19]
Looking at the long Middle Millennium one may be struck by how similar the strategies of war and violence may seem across the global spectrum.
Societies that were never in contact with each other turned to similar forms of military tactics. Chevauchee, the medieval war practice of burning and pillaging enemy territory in order to reduce the productivity of a region which often set in motion a huge flight of refugees to fortified locations (castles and walled towns), originated with William the Conqueror and continued well into the time of the Hundred Years War. This practice seems comparable, if on a different scale, to the ghazwa of medieval Near Eastern nomadic culture, a kind of raiding technique to avoid head-on confrontation. By taking the opponents' cattle, the victors left the defeated without economic means. In both instances of the practice, the motive was often the same: to disable the enemy, not necessarily to kill him. Another form of violence, albeit more psychological than bodily, was the forced relocation of civilians caught up in war-generated conflicts. In the period when the Liao (916-1125), Song, Jin (1115-1234) and Yuan (Mongol) (1279-1368) regimes successively fought and ruled over parts of China, entire populations were compelled to move from their native regions elsewhere, sometimes as a demonstration of state power but also as an extreme manifestation of the command mobilisation of economic resources.20 The early years of Chinese dynasties are another time of mass relocations as a form of punitive retaliation or even fear of people's power: the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang (d. 1398), viewed the elite of Suzhou, one of China's richest and most cosmopolitan cities, as potential trouble-makers, and uprooted the most wealthy and educated (about 92,000 households) of this group to faraway rural locations, or to the capital Nanjing to work as corvee labourers.
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