The University of Oxford's Centre for
Global History organizes a conference on violence in early modernity.
Conference description:
This conference brings global
approaches to the history of violence, reassessing the nature of
violence during the early modern period. Using violence and the
restraint of violence as a unifying theme, participants are encouraged
to make trans-national comparisons and connections across the early
modern world.
An abstract of 400 words, accompanied by a short (two-page) CV, should be submitted to globalviolence@history.ox.ac.uk by 31 December 2016.
The history of violence and its restraint has been crucial to
definitions of ‘Western civilization’ and the modern world, often by
contrasting them with barbaric predecessors and the cultures that they
claim to have tamed. Yet, evidence for the restraint of violence varies
according to one’s viewpoint: the sharp decline of homicide in
seventeenth-century Europe, for example, diverges from the simultaneous
rise in violence of Atlantic colonial societies. As histories of
violence and restraint are usually written from national and nationalist
perspectives, this conference brings global approaches to the study of
violence in order to probe historical assumptions about the limits of
violence and its decline during the early modern period. It thereby also
questions narratives of the inexorable rise of the nation-state
alongside historical periodization of the ‘early modern’ and ‘modern.’
Recent historical approaches to violence, shaped by the cultural
turn, have tended to focus on inter-personal violence and its patterns
in civil society. This conference will integrate warfare and other
crucial forms of large-scale violence with recent scholarship on the
history of collective and inter-individual violence. By examining
large-scale, organized violence alongside broader social and cultural
patterns, this conference will explore the boundaries between ‘war’ and
‘violence’, as well as how they relate to ideas of morality, social
order, law, and political legitimacy in the early modern world. We
encourage scholars to address contemporary perceptions of violence and
its restraint, framing analysis through thematic, rather than
geographic, approaches.
Given that we are encouraging scholars to probe assumptions about
historical periods, our definition of ‘early modern’ is purposefully
flexible.
Confirmed speakers include: Wayne Lee, Alan McFarlane, Stuart
Carroll, Pratyay Nath, Brian Sandberg, Cecile Vidal, Lauren Benton, Adam
Clulow, Simon Layton, Richard Reid, and James Belich.
We welcome papers that address:
- Global comparisons and indicators of violence
- Definitions of organized violence and crime, such as banditry and piracy
- Linkages between organized, collective and interpersonal violence
- Law’s penetration into oceanic, battlefield, domestic, and/or other novel arenas
- The nature of extra-territorial violence
- Actual practices of violence
- Toleration and restraint of violence
- Methods of measurement, used by contemporaries and/or historians, in assessing what is or was appropriate
We particularly welcome papers on violence in regions not covered by
confirmed speakers, such as China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and
Africa.
Organisation:
Peter H. Wilson, Chichele Professor of the History of War, University of Oxford
Marie Houllemare, Institut Universitaire de France, Université d’Amiens (CHSSC)
Erica Charters, Oxford Centre for Global History Centre, University of Oxford
