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Stuart Carroll, "Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
00:51:09
An interview with Stuart Carroll
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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, everyone, and welcome back to New Books in Early Modern History, a channel on the New Books Network. I'm Yana Byers, your host, and I'm here today with Stuart Carroll, professor of Early Modern History at the University of York, to talk about his new book, Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe, out this year. That's March 2023 with Cambridge University Press. Hello, Stuart, and welcome to the program.
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Hi, Jana, thanks for inviting me and welcome. Hi to all you listeners out there.
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This is very exciting. It is the. The awkward. The joyful and awkward moment where a couple of basically library nerds talk to people they've never met before. Awkward, but good.
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I'd like to think I'm something more than a library nerd, but, you know, I'll. I'll. I'll take that one.
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Well, I'm sure. Of course, no one's just a library nerd, but, yeah, you know, historians are a little bit historical, I think. I don't know what I mean by that. All right, so how are you today? The news from the UK isn't all good these days, but I hope you're keeping warm and safe.
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Yeah, we're kind of surviving, you know, strikes, cost of living crisis, but at least Arsenal are doing really well, Top of the league. So you Know, I'm pretty happy.
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Yeah, fair enough. Even take our pleasures where we can. Right?
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Yeah.
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Okay. So we were just chatting a bit before we began the recording. This is a really big book and it's an important book. And so my first task is that I want to situate this in your intellectual milieu. So you have this long standing interest in the history of violence and its role in the. In power and how power is exercised. And your monographs tell that story in Noble Power during the French wars of Religion. That's Cambridge back in 1998. Then Blood and Violence in Early Modern France, Oxford, 2006. Pretty self explanatory. Murders and murderers. The Guise Family in the Making of Europe is a study of one particularly incredibly important family. But it's also an examination of violence and power. Right, so you've got this kind of long standing demonstration of this. Yeah, interesting.
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Power, I mean. Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good intro. I mean, violence, I guess I'm known as the bloodthirsty guy and I work a lot on violence. What I'm really interested in is social relations, the way in which people relate to each other and ways in which power relations work the way out. And violence is a really good way into that. Because the thing about the past and particularly our period, the early modern period, is record survival. And Certainly from the 14th century, there is very good record survival about violence and murder in particular. And violence is really a way of tracking social relations because violence is not just the kind of we think violence is caused by anger or being uncivilized. Violence, certainly according to recent sociology and recent work, is very much related to notions of legitimacy of class and gender norms. Who has the right to take violence? And this can tell us quite a lot about social relations. Obviously in the past, the big difference about the early modern period than today is that in the past the social elite are much more involved in violence. They're using violence to enforce their own rights and believe they have the right to use violence in the pursuit of their own interests. So we can say quite a lot about society, particularly in the early modern period, through looking at records of violence, particularly murder, because murder leaves very, very good records.
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C
Yeah, and that's, that's always a question. We'll get to that in a second too. Like the records and what we can know from, you know, this 500 year remove in some cases. But with this work with enmity and violence in early modern Europe, you're moving your focus, I mean, to a much more personal, individual lens on Some level, yeah. You're looking at kind of these microsystems, intimate relations. So is that a fair characterization of the way this book differs? And if so, like.
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Yeah, absolutely. I wanted to get away from the state and about the criminality and control of violence. There's lots of work on that. Very good work. What I really wanted to do was look at individual, real people and how they felt about. And to get the idea of emotional history and how people felt about their enemies. I mean we have, we all have enemies today. Sometimes in modern democracies that sublimated we, we have a loyal opposition and we feel we shouldn't have feelings of anger and vengeance towards our enemies. But we still have enemies in the past. That's more problematic. An enemy in the past could represent a real threat to one's life and to one's status. And I wanted to get a handle on a fix on what ordinary people thought about their enemies, how they felt about those and why that often led to violence. And the big difference between the early modern period and the medieval period is that we have really, really good first hand accounts. We have diaries, journals, memoirs, all sorts of what's called self writing or Edo documents. And when I was working on the. When I first started working on this, what struck me particularly when I started working on France was how often people talked about this. And what I wanted to do was to take this story from France about how people felt about their enemies and look at that through a European lens, that was England, Italy and Germany and compare those and see how. Because obviously once you go beyond one country, there's a much larger corpus of material.
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And there's these very different situations. Before we go any further, I'd like you to define enmity as you use it in this book for our listeners.
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Well, enmity is a feeling or relationship of hostility and it's something which I think we all feel, we all feel we have enemies, whether they're public or private. Enmity is also a dynamic category. We can learn to love our enemies. We obviously know from the Bible that we're supposed to love our enemies. That's what Christian teaching tells us. It goes back all that way. So it's something which links us through, I think to, to the past. It's something which is both present and something which is I think universal in human societies. This friend, enemy, relationship and enemies also tell us something about us by revealing who our enemies are. I don't like, you know, the Republicans or I don't like a certain ethnic or group or I like this Tells us something about. I don't like, you know, so and so this tells us something about us. By establishing who our enemies are, we reveal something about ourselves. That there's something about the psychology of the self in revealing who our enemies are.
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And it's self as part of a larger group as well. Right. I can tell you.
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Sure. We can feel. Yeah. I mean, there are two types of enmity, I think there's public enemies, which is. If you use the Latin term. Often we use the Latin term here, which is hostess. We have public enemies. We think of public enemy number one. You might have enemies. Obviously, we can think of the 20th century where there might be enemies of progress or enemies of the states or traitors. All these things which we think of public enmity. And of course, we've seen recently that populists are using this term to identify people. We saw this in England in the Brexit vote, that people were enemies of the people. So this language has returned. I'm more concerned with the construction of private enmities, which is the neighbors we don't like, the people we don't like around us. Sometimes, quite often, people within the family. We've seen quite recently with a guy in America who's the Duke of Sussex. He's written this big book called Spare that within families there can be fratricidal feelings. And you only have to read your Shakespeare to know how that can actually affect the state. So the difference, I think, in the early modern period is that private enmities can get involved in public. The public world, the four categories I looked at. Italy, Germany, France and England all had significant civil wars in our period. And what happens during civil war is that public enmities and private feelings about people we don't like, private feuds, vendettas, get mixed up in that kind of public confrontation. So I was interested in that ways in which the public and the private become mixed. Now, obviously, in modern societies, in modern democracies, we try to divorce. Divorce. Divorce public from personal feelings. That's not always easy to do. But we succeeded, perhaps, in doing that. We have traveled. What I'm trying to show in the book is the ways in which we've traveled from the enmity of the 16th and 17th century to a modern understanding. I'll give you an example of that. The English word quarrel today, if we have a quarrel, if you and I have a quarrel, it really means a trivial dispute between two people who really are heart friends. So if you and I have a quarrel now about history, we don't really, we're not enemies. In the 16th and 17th century, the word quarrel has a much more stronger feeling of enmity. And it comes from the French word querelle, the Latin quarrel, to mean a judicial complaint. So in the 16th and 17th century, the English word quarrel has a much more idea about the justice and right and feelings of opposition and enmity. It's a much stronger term. When Shakespeare used the term quarrel, and he uses the word quite a lot, he really means a significant enmity, a feud, if you want.
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And that feud can be as we just, you know, as you might see in vendetta. In some cases, that feud can also be an intellectual feud. I'm thinking, of course, Carole des femmes, but in our period, a confessional quarrel, right?
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Absolutely. Just to stop you there, when you talk about the carrel des femmes, we say it was a quar. It means something a lot stronger. I think we're missing the. How strong that. That meaning was to contemporaries. To us, it's a kind of trivial dispute. To them. If we. If we talk about God's quarrel in the 17th century, this is not a trivial dispute. And it's a word that's used a lot in, say, the English Civil War. It really means a Manichaean struggle between two systems which despise each other. So it just shows how far we travel. We've Learned since the 1600s to trivialize our disputes. We've learned to become citizens who need to respect other views. So this is something. That process which really begins in the 18th century. Something which I think comes out of the civil conflicts of the vicious civil conflicts of the 16th and 17th century.
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I mean, the fact that we've trivialized this word that is so common is a demonstration of that in itself. Right. That there are quarrels that are matters of life and death, state determining future, determining quarrels are. Should indicate the importance of disagreement, hatred, and argument writ large in this period. Yeah, yeah.
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And I think. I think we need to underline that. And also in the fact that things had got a lot worse after the Reformation and the Renaissance. We tend to think that, hey, the Reformation and the Renaissance came along, and it created modernity. And the primitive and kind of brutal Middle Ages were suddenly kind of civilized. That did not happen. There's actually much more interpersonal violence in the 16th and 17th century than there had been in the late Middle Ages. So we can know that statistically, and we shouldn't be surprised at that, because the Renaissance is driving a kind of new masculinity, which is about the nature of the right of the man to take vengeance and to take what they want. This kind of new, as you know, as an Italianist, a new masculine virtu, which Machiavelli is promoting, which is very much against the idea of Christian humility in the Middle Ages. And the Reformation, of course, is leading to an explosion of violence as the medieval church is fractured. Medieval systems of settlement and reconciliation through the sacrament of penance and through the right of the mass and through the paxful, the kiss of peace, which had reconciled neighbors. This had all been destroyed by the Reformation. And there's very good evidence that feuding and neighborly feuds and violence is actually exploding, particularly at the end of the 16th century. This is also exacerbated by economic and social change. And we can track that through statistics. So we know that things are getting kind of worse in the late 16th. And this is even before civil war starts. And of course, civil war makes that worse.
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Yeah. And like. So there's this, the narrative, the arc of this through the early modern period. I want to get to in a second. Let's take. Let's step back and talk about you. You say, you know, there's evidence for this. Tell me what that is. What kind of sources are you using for this book? Where does. Where does your argument. Upon what does your argument rest?
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Well, in terms of the sorts of sources I'm using. I said I'm using judicial archives to track disputes and also to track. We can use the digital archives to track statistical analysis, giving us things like homicide rates. I'm using in order to look at individuals and what they say, to look at all sorts of ego documents. That's journals, diaries, what in French called livre de raison, reckoning books. And there is an explosion of those in the 16th century. And often they're there. The reason why they're so many of them is they're often there. They have a particular purpose, and that is to track. Sometimes there are particular instances where these people are using these books to track enmities because you needed to if you were going to court. There's a boom in litigation in the 16th century. You needed to track all the infractions that your enemy or your neighbor was doing. So that's often why reckoning books or ego documents start. You need to track what your enemies are doing. Or if you're a Christian, you're supposed to love your neighbor. And that's rather hard to do. So private diaries are often a way of navigating difficult feelings for the Christian who's supposed to love their neighbor. Other sources I'm using, I'm using a lot of antiquarian sources for data mining I'm interested in. If you're looking at disputes, I use a lot of antiquarian 19th century sources which many modern historians have neglected, particularly in local archives. Some regions are better than others, like Germany and France are particularly good with kind of local histories and local historians, which have often been neglected by the kind of meta narrative of academic historians. So I'm quite interested in antiquarian historians of local society. They're often interested in feuds and vendettas which have got missed by the academy.
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This, this work that is often not just missed, but largely like pointedly disrespected by the academy.
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Absolutely, yeah.
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And it's, it's wonderful. There's a lot of secondary literature, a lot of, a lot of work that you use. Fellow historians you use. And there's the prescriptive literature like law codes and what have you talk to me about what, what is available and the problems there in this period.
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And there's quite a lot of that. But it varies where you are. Now. The Italians wrote a huge. Italy has a particular problem with violence. As you'll know, it's by far the most violent place in Europe with extraordinary rates, high rates of homicide, even as high as some American cities. You'll be pleased to hear it's sometimes much higher. And the Italians wrote a lot about this. They wrote a lot about peacemaking, how to. How to reconcile disputes. They had an entire system of what are called pache privat, or private peacemaking pacts, how to make peace with their enemies. Obviously it's the center of the Renaissance. There's lots of Renaissance thinking about this that doesn't seem to. There's one or two French examples of this kind of literature, but there's not much thinking about that in Northern Europe. Most of the literary northern is theological. It's particularly driven by the Reformation. There's lots of sermons about why you must love your enemy and how you can make peace. Luther writes a lot about this. I've got a whole chapter on Germany and Lutheran thinking about this, which I think is very interesting and new. Luther, for example, didn't like lawyers. He believes that, you know, he has things to say about peacemaker. Of course, the reformers significantly changed the liturgy and put the onus on the believer to make peace. That was in some ways quite a burden for many people, particularly in rural communities. So there's quite a lot of prescriptive Literature in terms of theological texts, learned Renaissance texts, I mean, Italians wrote a lot about enmity. Much of this material doesn't migrate to northern Europe, however. So there is quite a large normative literature as well.
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Right. So you made this decision. You're telling a story that has, I mean, you have the possibility to tell this story simply by using Italy or France, where a lot of your work has happened, or England, where you, you know, where you're what you call home. But you made this decision to do all of that, plus Germany, which is. And if you're not an historian and you don't understand how historiography works, this may seem even minor to just out of fourth country. But I am an historian, I know, and a lot of our listeners, I need, will understand as well that this is not just an extra country. It's a huge swath, huge swath of land, massive variation in culture, religion, legal tradition and secondary literature. Like that's a whole new historiography and that's massive. That was a massive decision. And I'm wondering, and it's got real benefits, wonderful things. But I'm wondering what made you. Why did you decide that you needed to do that?
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That's a really good question. I think my dissatisfaction really is that as kind of Europe, early modernists, we've got so siloed into doing national histories, and which is ironic given the kind of rise of the eu, but in some ways the EU has driven that even more. And I think that's a danger that we've become so siloed because as you know, as any early modernist will know, there aren't national histories. It may be that some regions of France are the same as Italy. In fact, there are very strong resemblances between southern France and Italy for all sorts of reasons. Certainly politically, in terms of office holding, German regions are very different. You know, there's much. There might be more in common between German Rhineland towns in France than there are between the Rhineland and eastern parts of Germany. So I think that it was an idea to get away from national histories. I was also quite interested in the whole idea of comparative history as a kind of concept. We do a lot of that teaching in York. And I got quite passionate about the benefits of that and seeing local histories through a comparative framework. I also wanted to foreground local history because I think in national history, the local, the specificities of the local couldn't get lost. This is less of a problem in say, someone Italy, because Italian history tends to be very regional anyway. You know, you say, I'm A Venetian historian or I work on Bologna, so this is less of a problem. So in some ways it was to kind of foreground and say, hey, we don't need these kind of national categories. We can do. You can be Venetian, that's fine. But it might be good to compare Venice with something else in Europe. So it was an idea of breaking that down. I think certainly post Brexit, the most difficult thing to write was less, actually. I know you said there's a lot to do, but in some ways the hardest thing to incorporate was the English stuff, mainly because the historiography is so stuck in a kind of. In many ways, in a very much a Whiggish rut, and also because it's very difficult to compare with. British historians don't tend to read European history, so that was the most difficult to incorporate. Also because I'm English, so in some ways, if you're doing. I'm quite into anthropology, anthropological approaches. So if you're doing something like Germany or Italy, you approach it as the outsider, as the anthropologist, and that makes it comfortable for you. If you're doing your own country, that makes it more difficult in a way. So I wanted to. I think, particularly post Brexit, I was very keen to press this comparative line because I think the national history is, I think, in the world is probably going to be more on the rise. I think there's a kind of danger. Even historians who don't think they're doing national histories are still doing national history. So I was very much against this and wanted to, as I said, fight against something which I don't like, which is this obsession. I think it's a particular problem, I say, for early modernists, because these national borders really are only fairly inchoate, then they're not. They're not fixed as they were in the modern period so much.
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C
No. And in some ways, you know, being a Venetian historian tends to mean anything I can get at the archive in Venice, I'll go to the Archiva di Stadio Venezia, and I work there. That's what I cover. And that's practical as well as anything else. Right. I mean, there's. The idea of doing several regions is really daunting, or I would.
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I'm not doing massive amounts of archival research in one area. I can't do that. As you alluded to, I'm using a huge amount of recent literature, which has exploded over the last 20 years. There's been. Particularly in the history of the law and the ways in which people access and Consume the law. There's been an absolute revolution in our understanding of that and I'm using a huge amount of this would not be possible without the recent work of other historians. So I'm not, it's not my work. I'm very much a kind of lightning rod for other people. So having said that, there are some soundings in judicial archives. There are, there is an attempt to use sources particularly. I think what is manageable is that when I talked about these ego documents, that's diaries, journals, all sorts of self writing that's possible to master because although there's a lot of it, I set out, I recently set out to read everything I could of that genre. Now most of some of that stuff isn't germane to what I'm working on, but there was enough of that, I think I was able to. And the thing about that, it's comparable because most of it's written by literate people. They've had a fairly similar humanist or grammar school education. They're Christians, so they're actually, if they're members of the elite, they turned out they might have an aristocratic outlook or whatever. So many of the themes and many of the problems they face are actually fairly similar. Now obviously there are local contexts, but I think that there are comparisons that you can make. And again, the Civil War context is comparable. Now again there are differences between the Civil wars and the violence that we see, but I think there are comparable experiences of, of having an enemy, whether that's a public one or a private one.
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C
And I think that, I mean that the fact that like that there's a similar context for the aristocrats makes it possible to do this and makes it kind of necessary to do this work. And you know, these large, you know, the history of everything, this history of this thing from the dawn of time to yesterday has fallen out of fashion. Comparative history has fallen out of fashion a little bit as we become. We're so siloed and it's. This is the way you're able to make this work is a reminder that not only is this possible, it's admirable, it's possible and it's necessary. Right? Because you're able to make this argument. That you are able to make an argument by reading across these regions and across confessions across a lot of what we consider as very hard borders and you're able to tell. To craft a narrative about Europe writ large or non Habsburg Europe writ large. That I think is. It's wonderful and it's a reminder of what we can do as historians?
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I think that's a really good question. Again, as we've become more professional as historians, as we've gone into the archives, we've become more skeptical about making big claims because we don't think those big claims stand up and we've got kind of hunkered down the archives. And I've done that. I've spent my time critiquing kind of master narratives and of course we've left the field to non historians. So the Jared Diamonds of the world and the Steven Pinkers, they step in and write stuff which we don't think is very good because it tends to be rather old fashioned or it has a kind of, you know, Whiggish narrative or whatever we don't like about it. So I did feel that there was a space for a professional historian, as it were, or I'm an archive historian, I love going to the archives to step back and try to say something which had a bigger narrative to use the recent literature that's come out to reconstruct. I'm quite interested in, as you know, as I said, other disciplines. I'm quite interested in anthropology, quite interested in particularly legal anthropology. I'm particularly interested in historical sociology. So I wanted to think about the ways in which the new story, the new historiography that's come out, the new social history could be rewritten not as a Weberian account because most of, I think most of us are kind of critiquing either constitutional history or kind of Iberian notions and to rethink the state and some of these big categories. So I was trying to think, you know, I'm not going to write a big kind of, you know, Steven Pinker blockbuster. You know, my wife might like me to do that financially. But you know, I was trying to think how we have to answer these guys. We have to, we can't just say you're wrong. We have to. It's no good just to be a critic. You have to put something else in place. And I think I have a kind of counter narrative which I don't think in some ways is particularly new. But I tried to reinforce some particular things about individual agency and the ways in which people themselves change. We tend to have a view that change in the past is kind of imposed by the state and it's all rather top down. I tried to look at the ways in which people themselves reflect on events and their enmities and their place in a thing called society, which is an invention of the 17th century, and how they might want to act in a society and how the individual should behave. So it's a. It's an opportunity to take things like Hobbes out of the kind of, you know, the, I don't know, the ivory tower and show how people themselves were rethinking the world around them and how they would respond to that, how they would trivialize their disputes.
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C
And. And, yeah. And. Yes. All right, let's talk about a case study. So you've got your four countries or four countries. And I'm using countries very loosely. I keep saying this, but I want to make sure. I know, you know that. I want to make sure we. That it's clear. I mean, like regions, you know, Italy, a geographical expression. Right. Etc. But like, let's talk. So let's talk about a particular example, maybe the story of France. Right. And so if you could tell our listeners kind of what happens in France across this period.
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A
Well, France in the early 16th century is a very strong and powerful state where there's very little evidence for feuding. Obviously there's interpersonal violence, but the medieval system, the medieval state is particularly effective at controlling that. And the church controls that through the sacrament of penance. That's destroyed. It's exploded really by two things, I think, or three things, I think. First of all is the Reformation. France has the largest Calgary church in Europe by 1562. So you have a civil war which lasts for 36 years, which generates a huge amount of violence. But that violence is not just Protestants against Catholics. I think what I wanted to do in all these conflicts is get away from the idea that violence is simply kind of religious. Religion is very important. But in any civil war situation that generates all sorts of other enmities as well. There's violence between Catholics and as the book shows, also amongst Protestants. There are feuds amongst Protestants and feuds amongst Catholics. The violence is very confused and ambiguous. It's not just Catholics against Protestants. So there's a huge amount of violence caused by this. And that violence doesn't stop. Stop. When the wars of religion come to an end in 1598, the enmities go on well into the 17th century. So the period between about 1550 and 1660 is characterized by very high levels of interpersonal violence. There are also changes. It's not just civil war that's causing that. There are changes in masculine behavior, particularly elite behavior, caused by the Renaissance. That's the invention of the duel. The idea that Christian humility really isn't the way that one should be acting, that every man has to Enforce his, particularly men. I think it's. It's a kind of masculine virtue. So quite a lot about masculinity, that there's this kind of masculine bravado, that any affront needs to be challenged, that honor is an imperative. This is a kind of secular kind of honor code, the point of honor. And this is also, again, generating quite a lot of us. This is again a Renaissance idea. It's also an idea which is getting more traction because of the expansion of the social elite. The best way of getting on is to take someone else's honour, is to give someone an affront. Duelling, in some ways, is quite a democratic thing, because you don't need a vast train of people and a castle to show that you're a gentleman, you just need to take part. I think the other thing that's happening is the expansion of the state. This is not always a good thing, as I try to show in one of the chapters. It's about a village. The way in which the state is intervening in local society is upsetting a fragile equilibrium in villages as taxes increase and the state begins to make more demands. Now, there's a paradox here, as I show that what happens is the state, in some ways in Europe, it's a question of divide and rule. You encourage violence, you cause more conflict, and then you intervene as an arbiter to pacify those. So there's a. We tend to think that the state advances through France is a very good example of this, through repression and through mechanisms of order. That's part of the story, yes. But another thing it's doing, as I show, particularly in the case of the late 17th century, is the ways in which the state is both causing conflict and dividing communities by making more demands and then using that conflict to intervene as an arbiter. And I show that in a particular case study of one village, and Louis IV is a terrible vendetta in that village caused by disputes about tax and access to office holding. And Louis XIV personally intervenes in that dispute to make peace, and that's caused a death of dozens of people. So the violence itself is, in some ways the state profits from enmity and is able to exploit that. Of course, authoritarian regimes even today know how to do that. So it's not. This kind of divide and rule thing is not a new thing. But I try to rethink the French state. So France is a good example of that. It's the one that I tried to replicate what I did on previous work on France into Italy, Germany and England. They're rather different cases, by the way.
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C
Yeah, everyone. I mean, there's a very different situation in Italy, in part because there's not such a strong centralized state.
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A
Yeah, absolutely. England is very different. It's the most centralized state in Europe. It has a national forum for the resolution of disputes and that makes dispute resolution different. And also by the end of the 17th and 18th, it's much more effective. You have the rise of an idea of you can have enmities which are inside parliament and the idea of a loyal opposition so representatives can be an effective way of sublimating enmities.
- [35:32]
C
After reading this book and then checking in on 2006 blood and violence, one could be forgiven for believing that enmity, enmity and a number of guises just sits at the center of European life. That there's some sort of hate driven, often violent disagreement that is just the natural state of people. You know, am I overreacting or is that really kind of what you is to get the case?
- [36:00]
A
I think that's a really good question and I think it might go to the heart of what is to be European as a. I mean, one thing I was very interested in terms of the comparative stuff is when I did the. I did the Cambridge World History of Violence is looking at East Asia. The great East Asian states of particular China and Japan are much more effective at controlling violence. They're much more repressive. They seem to be very effective. In fact, interpersonal violence used to be lower in 18th century China than it is in Europe. What's different about Europe is Europe is both balkanized, but it's incredibly. It has a very vigorous system of debate and concatenation. You talk about the Carre des Femmes. These are. And we saw this as not a quarrel, as not being a particularly positive thing, but there's a positive side to that quarrel that people can have debates and disagreements. The difficulty of Europeans is learning how to have a civil disagreement. And I think that there are benefits of. If we think about the Reformation, okay, it led to lots of violence, but it also led to pluralism and the ability to have diversity. So it's this enmity we see as a bad thing, but it's learning to have enemies who we don't beat up and kill. I think Europe is different and as a European historian is interesting because of that. Its history is turbulent and has lots of churn. That itself is what fascinates me as an early modernist, that shattering of medieval Christendom. And within that violence, it's not all bad. Violence is not necessarily a bad thing. It might be. One thing I talk about a lot is injustice. A lot of the violence that is caused in the early modern period is through people standing up to injustice. They're not getting what they think is their due. There's a lot of. When I talk about political change, we talk about the Renaissance idea of. We talk about public enemies. There's, of course, a huge move towards the idea of public enemies, of defending the republic, the commonwealth, against public enemies. Of course, the problem is that often gets mixed up with private entities. So I think a lot of that tells us about Europe and learning how to. How Europe learns to have civil public debates about changing regimes or identifying public or dealing with public enemies. Clearly, political thought in that sense, we think of, particularly of Hobbes, is very important in that. And I try to foreground political thinking not just as something that's in the ivory tower, but something that. Which has practical impact. So, yeah, I think that Europe is different and interesting, but.
- [39:04]
C
And there's something. There's something here about, like, what it means to be European and the growth of Europe that seems very timely right now, as, you know, as people who live in Europe and in the midst of the discussions about what Europe is in a post Brexit universe particularly, there's something really. And as we find ourselves in Europe, parts of Europe are embroiled in violent conflict right now on the state level, and then on the neighborhood level, there's something really compelling here, you know, and then there's this story. The one last kind of historiographical trend I want to talk about is the standard interpretation of the early modern era is that village justice, like, writ large, village justice is replaced and localized violence is smothered steadily in this way that kind of fits a progress narrative by an ever strengthening centralizing power. And I. I see a lot here that definitely challenges and nuances that narrative. Yeah.
- [40:03]
A
Yeah, look, I mean, most, when we talk about the law and litigation, the state is only interested in certain things. They're not really interested in private disputes amongst people. There is very little. There is little public prosecution in our period and in Italy anyway, there's so much violence that there's system, particularly if you take Venice as an example that the system's overwhelmed. They simply cannot deal with it, so they have to come up with other mechanisms. So the state is important, but it's only one actor. We should see the state as only one actor. There are other actors involved. We need to think about the disputants themselves and how they're using the state or the law or friends or contacts they might have. Clearly, the statistics tell us that the statistics seem fairly clear that there's a significant increase in violence in interpersonal violence in the late 16th century. This is a European phenomenon. There's a parabola. There's not a steady decline from the Middle Ages. In fact, violence used to be going down in the late Middle Ages. The late medieval states is fairly effective. But there's an explosion in the mid 16th century. It peaks in the mid 17th century across Europe, and there's a decline in the 18th century. So there's a kind of European parabola which goes up in the late 16th, peaks in the mid 17 and goes down the 18th. There's some correlation there with civil war, but the violence used to be going on before civil war starts. So we can say with fairly certain there's not a progressive decline. I try to explain why that parabola occurs. I try to give some indication why that parabola should be.
- [41:53]
C
And this isn't a very simple story. This is not a very. The answer is one thing.
- [41:58]
A
It does go in hand in hand. It goes in hand with litigation. Litigation explodes in the 16th century and declines in the 18th. So one thing I'm trying to say is the law and violence, not opposites. They're part of the same continuum. People are using both violence and the law to enforce their rights or get what they want or to pursue their everyday enemies. Of course, people in the 16th, 17th century, well aware there's a whole kind of literature about why you shouldn't go to law. Christians in particular are told they shouldn't go to law because going to law is a sign of enmity. And people took legal writs about all sorts of things, even if they're about debt, as a sign that you were my personal enemy. They saw it as uncharitable and unchristian. If we look at the modern United States, which has high rates of homicide compared to Europe, the United States is also a much more litigious society. What that tells us is that the US has more kind of conflict, more social conflict in it. We've seen that recently. The U.S. homicide rate, although it's been going down a lot in the 90s, jumped by an astonishing 30% in 2020. So we need to think about why homicide rates go up and down. We need to think about why that is. We need to think about the political and social environment. In fact, US historians have been at the forefront of this in many respects. I'm taking a kind of modern History, modern sociological and historical research back into the early modern period. There's been quite a lot of work done on the US which is kind of. Kind of cutting edge, in which we.
- [43:42]
C
See that personal violence and state violence are not mutually exclusive by any means.
- [43:48]
A
No, I think the thing is, it's very difficult to us to get a handle on something. There might be something in the atmosphere which we as historians can't get a handle on. How did you know? What did it feel like to be a venetian in the 16th century? Did you trust the state? Did you trust your neighbors? We don't know. And that's when I said the violence is a way of getting at social relations. I think, you know, we can say quite a lot about social and political relations. We don't think that that knife crime or violence or interpersonal is just a product of, you know, people being mean. That's part of it. We do think. I think most people think it might have social and political causes. Again, the higher rates of violence in the United States. Part of that is guns. Part of that is drugs. It's not just that. It's also part of the social and political system. And history, I have to say, history is important. How you feel about where you are historically, we think those things are important. So as Europeans working on the 16th, we should also think that the social and political relationships, how one historically locates oneself, say, for example, if you're thinking in terms of faction or where you stand in a faction or what a faction has done in the past, these all might be important. So the history of a civil War, for example, if we take America, is the Civil War over? I don't know. You tell me. You're an American. I think it's still going on in some parts. We shouldn't think that the English Civil war ended in 1650. 49. The consequences went on, as I tried to show, certainly in terms of rates of violence, or France or Germany went on for decades. You know, you had your house trashed during the war. You still got neighbors you didn't like because of what happened during the war. That's going to continue for decades to come.
- [45:31]
C
Sure. Yeah. Wonderful. Thank you so much for talking to me today. This is. It was a really enjoyable book, listeners. It is. It, it's. It's. It's out in March. Right. And I will have a link.
- [45:49]
A
I think it's June, June now.
- [45:51]
C
All right. And I will have. We'll have a link on the website. And thanks, Drew, for taking so much time to talk to me today. I've just got one more question, which is what is next? What are you working on?
- [46:04]
A
Good question. Well, originally I set out to write a book on civil society. The idea of a space of debate and I guess contention, where you could be civil. And I do allude to that in the book. And I'll be taking, I guess the story of the book really into the late 17th and early 18th century. Taking that idea of civil society and looking at that word, that word that's invented the idea of an abstract society. I'll be looking at how that is. I think ordinary people, the role they played in that. Rather just looking at in previous iterations, that's really been looked at in terms of political thought. And I want to take that into the kind of everyday sphere of how people believe themselves to be citizens and how they conceived of being in something called society and how they should behave accordingly. I think I. I think that the Anglo French confabulation is the one that I'll be looking at because that's the realm where most of the thinking is done, I think. So I'll be looking at that.
- [47:15]
C
Yeah. I mean, as a citizen, or not a citizen, a resident of the Netherlands, I might suggest. Look here.
- [47:27]
A
That is important. And I have to say that when I started this project, I did actually do a year of Dutch because I thought we need to have the Netherlands in there. It's just too much. If you were going to do it properly, you'd have a tripartite because you'd have to do Amsterdam, London and Paris. But I just think it's too beyond. At my age, I think doing Dutch is going to be beyond me.
- [47:48]
C
I'm doing it right now and I got to tell you, it's not fun.
- [47:52]
A
Dutch is hard. Speaking. It's really hard, you know, even for an English person. It makes German look easy.
- [47:58]
C
It's so close to English and yet incomprehensible. And those sounds they make, they're inhuman. It's really. Yeah. So. And I like the cross. The cross national borders. I think the work you're doing is really important. I want to say that as an historian, I really think it's important to break away from our silos and our. We've got to ask bigger questions. That's.
- [48:23]
A
But the thing is, we need people work that. We still need people working in silos because then I wouldn't be able to kind of take that material. So I think the thing is to try that. The thing is, we need people still working on the silos, but we need to do better at putting these things together and that.
- [48:42]
C
Yeah, we need to write accessible histories, so, you know, it's. It's not too specialists speaking to each other either. We need to be able to speak to the rest of the world. People who do not have PhDs in history.
- [48:54]
A
Yeah, I hope so.
- [48:55]
C
It's important work. All right. Thank you so much for talking to me. I'm interested in the Civil Society project. Perhaps we'll talk in a few. Couple years. Yeah, it'll be done in a couple years.
- [49:05]
B
Right.
- [49:05]
C
That's how long a book takes.
- [49:07]
A
Thank you for inviting me, and thank you all for listening. Hope to see you again soon.
- [49:12]
C
Absolutely. Take care. Ciao.