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23 results

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Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe
  • Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe
  • Stuart Carroll
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date: March 2023
  • Print publication: 31 March 2023
  • View description
    In this original study Stuart Carroll transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered. Enmity, a state or feeling of mutual opposition or hostility, became a major social problem during the transition to modernity. He examines how people used the law, and how they characterised their enmities and expressed their sense of justice or injustice. Through the examples of early modern Italy, Germany, France and England, we see when and why everyday animosities escalated and the attempts of the state to control and even exploit the violence that ensued. This book also examines the communal and religious pressures for peace, and how notions of good neighbourliness and civil order finally worked to underpin trust in the state. Ultimately, enmity is not a relic of the past; it remains one of the greatest challenges to contemporary liberal democracy.
  • Introduction to Volume iii
  • Edited by Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, University of York, Caroline Dodds Pennock, University of Sheffield
  • Book: The Cambridge World History of Violence
  • Published online: 13 March 2020
  • Print publication: 26 March 2020, pp 1-14
  • View extract

    Summary

    In world history early modernity is a contested category. However, it is commonly accepted that the period from about 1500 to 1800 is a distinct period, bookended by two significant periods of violence. The pattern of long-distance travel that was a feature of the fifteenth century ushered in a period of imperial conquest. The lives of millions of people across the globe were fundamentally transformed between 1500 and 1800 by mass violence, a consequence of European colonisation and enslavement. At the end of this time the Atlantic Revolutions violently overthrow the old order. But early modernity is not simply a period of time. In the period from 1500 to 1800 the problem of violence necessitated asking fundamental questions and formulating answers about the most basic forms of human organisation and interactions, such as the problem of civility in society, the nature of political sovereignty and the power of the state, the legitimacy of conquest and subjugation, the possibilities of popular resistance, and the manifestations of ethnic and racial unrest. Violence also provided the raw material for profound meditations on humanity and for examining our relationship to the divine and natural worlds.

  • 33 - Violence, Civil Society and European Civilisation
  • from Part VII - Representations and Constructions of Violence
  • Edited by Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, University of York, Caroline Dodds Pennock, University of Sheffield
  • Book: The Cambridge World History of Violence
  • Published online: 13 March 2020
  • Print publication: 26 March 2020, pp 660-678
  • View extract

    Summary

    The control and sublimation of violence is a story that is essential to the idea of modernity and the rise of the West. The ability to control one’s emotions is fundamental to the notion of aristocracy and its right to rule over others. Sixteenth-century Europe saw an intense effort to control social intercourse through civility. It is axiomatic to notions of the civilising process that the new civility progressively tamed and controlled violence during the early modern period. But this is not what happened. There was a significant increase in homicide rates from the mid sixteenth century which peaked in the mid seventeenth century. There was a notable increase in elite violence in particular, as gentlemen transgressed codes of etiquette in order to provoke rivals and demonstrate their social superiority. The invention of civil society at the end of the seventeenth century was a response to the problem of violence. The knowledge that European society had undergone a pacification process over the previous half a century was crucial to the invention of ‘civilisation’, a word first coined in the 1750s. This word and its cognates were crucial to legitimising the European colonial project. The language of civilisation was employed as a euphemism for violence, justifying ethnic cleansing and enslavement, and enabling the perpetrators of violence to distance themselves from their victims.

The Cambridge World History of Violence
  • The Cambridge World History of Violence
  • Volume 3, AD 1500–AD 1800
  • Edited by Robert Antony, Stuart Carroll, Caroline Dodds Pennock
  • Published online: 13 March 2020
  • Print publication: 26 March 2020
  • View description
    In the period from 1500 to 1800 the problem of violence necessitated asking fundamental questions and formulating answers about the most basic forms of human organisation and interactions. Violence spoke to critical issues such as the problem of civility in society, the nature of political sovereignty and the power of the state, the legitimacy of conquest and subjugation, the possibilities of popular resistance, and the manifestations of ethnic and racial unrest. It also provided the raw material for profound meditations on humanity and for examining our relationship to the divine and natural worlds. The third volume of The Cambridge World History of Violence examines a world in which global empires were consolidated and expanded, and in which civilisations for the first time linked to each other by trans-oceanic contacts and a sophisticated world trade system.

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