A Violent World? Changes and Limits to Large-Scale Violence in Early Modernity

A Violent World? Changes and Limits to Large-Scale Violence in Early Modernity

Organizer
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
Venue
All Souls College, University of Oxford
Location
Oxford
Country
United Kingdom
From - Until
29.06.2017 - 01.07.2017
By
Erica Charters

This conference brings global approaches to the history of violence, reassessing the nature of violence during the early modern period. Integrating warfare and other crucial forms of large-scale violence with recent scholarship on the history of collective and inter-personal violence, this three-day conference will probe historical assumptions about the limits of violence and its decline during the early modern period.

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.’

Registration now open:
http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/short-courses/history-faculty/history-faculty-events/a-violent-world-changes-and-limits-to-largescale-violence-in-early-modernity

Programm

29 June, Thursday

1.30 pm Registration

2 pm Introduction: Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare, Peter Wilson

2.15 pm Session 1: Multi-scale Violence
Richard Reid (SOAS): ‘None could stand before him in the battle, none ever reigned so wisely as he’: Violence and its uses in early modern Africa
Cécile Vidal (EHESS, Paris): Chattel Slavery, War, and Multi-Scale Violence in Early English and French America

Chair: Trevor Burnard (Melbourne)

4.15 pm Session 2: Interpersonal and State Violence
Stuart Carroll (York): Violence and the state in early modern Europe Speaker TBC
Chair: Peter Wilson (Oxford)

30 June, Friday
9.15 am Session 3: Overseas violence
James Belich (Oxford): Plague, the Military Revolution, and European Expansion
Adam Clulow (Monash): Drawing Lines in the Sea: The Dutch East India Company, the Zheng Maritime Network and the Uses of Early Modern Law
Chair: Erica Charters (Oxford)

11.15 Session 4: Representations of Violence
Pratyay Nath (Ashoka University): ‘The Wrath of God’: Justification of Military Violence in Mughal Imperial Discourse
Michel van Duijnen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam): ‘Sacrificed to the madness of the bloodthirsty sabre’: The Great Turkish War and the visualization of violence in the Low Countries
Chair: Brian Sandberg (Northern Illinois University)

2 pm Session 5: Banditry, Raids and Non-state Warfare
Brian Sandberg (Northern Illinois University): Raiding war and globalization in the Early Modern World
Alexandr Osipian (National University of Kyiv): Dealing with bandits and authorities: legal and customary restrains of violence in the caravan trade between the Ottoman Empire, Polish- Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Russia
Chair: Lauren Benton (Vanderbilt)

4 pm Session 6: Collective Violence, Riots and Massacres
Mark Meuwese (Winnipeg): The outburst and restraint of racial massacres in European colonies in the mid-eighteenth century
Gulay Yilmaz (Akdeniz University, Antalya): Violence taking over the Ottoman capital, urban protests of 17th century Istanbul
Chair: Adam Clulow (Monash)

1 July, Saturday
9 am Session 7: Revolutionary Violence
Joseph Clarke (Trinity College, Dublin): ‘Preaching Philosophy at Bayonet Point’: Violence and the French Revolutionary Wars
Anthony McFarlane (University of Warwick), Counter-Revolutionary Violence in Spanish America, 1810-1825.
Chair: Stuart Carroll (York)

11 am Session 8: Patterns of Violent Conquests
Lauren Benton (Vanderbilt): The Law of Small Wars: Rethinking Conquest in the Atlantic World Wayne Lee (UNC): Conquer, Extract, and Perhaps Govern: Comparative Landscapes, Logistics, and Violence in the Early Modern World
Chair: Marie Houllemare (Amiens / Institute Universitaire de France)

12.30 Lunch and concluding discussion

Contact (announcement)

Email: globalviolence@history.ox.ac.uk

http://global.history.ox.ac.uk/?page_id=2395
Editors Information
Published on
31.03.2017
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