This chapter examines the twin threats of invasion and insurrection that most English tropical colonies faced because of dwindling white migration and the English reliance on bondage and forced migration to populate and build the tropical empire. It focuses on the period between 1675 and 1720, when a series of large-scale slave insurrection plots began to rock English settlements in the Atlantic. It shows how the very real threats of invasion and insurrection shaped these colonies and how the English navigated these twin threats. Ultimately, English settlers and governors in the Caribbean turned to brutal and draconian policies of slave management to maintain their colonies, while English agents in Asia and Africa were forced to rely on others to help them control the enslaved and defend their factories and settlements. Yet, by the end of the seventeenth century, the English in both the East and West Indies had begun to tentatively explore arming the enslaved, turning to their non-European bondsmen to build, populate, and even help defend the empire. Armed slaves became agents of empire.

This chapter focuses on six groups that were forced to migrate and become bound laborers at English sites of overseas expansion. It examines the poor, criminals, and prisoners of war from the British Isles forced into servitude, the indigenous people of the circum-Caribbean who wound up enslaved, enslaved West Africans from the Gold Coast, people sold into slavery in India during times of famine (especially on the Coromandel Coast), the Malagasy people of Madagascar sold for firearms, and the indigenous peoples of the Indonesian archipelago forced to labor for the East India Company. This chapter will stress the political and socioeconomic conditions that made these groups vulnerable to enslavement or other closely adjacent forms of bondage. The chapter highlights the ways in which the Little Ice Age created famine and political and social upheaval that shaped forced and free migration. It also emphasizes the added political destabilization that came with the expansion of global trade, the introduction of firearms as a trade good, and competition for access to coastal trades. This destabilization and change made people in the tropics more vulnerable to enslavement.

Chapter 9 turns to an exploration of the repeated history of plaintiffs harmed by gun violence to sue defendant actors in the firearms industry: gun manufacturers, distributors, sellers, and traffickers. The chapter begins with a statistical description of the toll of gun violence in the United States, documenting deaths, murders, suicides, and accidental injuries resulting from use or misuse of guns. The firearms industry has long been immunized from lawsuits based on the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which provided blanket immunity from suit to the firearms industry. Courts have dismissed virtually all firearms litigation in the 20th and 21st centuries, pursuant to PLCAA. The chapter discusses the applicability of PLCAA exemptions, and how plaintiffs have attempted to exploit the predicate statute exception to pursue public nusiance claims against gun defendants. Courts typically have disallowed firearms litigation under the predicate statute exception. The chapter ends with an analysis of recent legislative initiatives in New York, New Jersy, Delaware, and California to enact firearms public nuisance statutes to come within the PLCAA predicate statute exemption.

Chapter 6 examines the special challenges public carry of firearms pose for public protest. Arming public protests is incompatible with peaceful forms of dissent. It threatens to intimidate protesters and chill protected First Amendment activity in the public square. The chapter proposes several measures that can reduce or eliminate these harms, including prohibitions on public carry at permitted events, bans on armed groups in public places, and place restrictions deemed presumptively valid under the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court has recently issued an expansive interpretation of public carry rights, based on the nation’s historical practice of gun regulation. But there is historical support for at least some restrictions on public carry at or near public protest events. Even if the best that can be done is a ban on open carry, that would alleviate some of the most nefarious effects public carry has on public protest.

The final chapter collects and reviews several proposals that can help preserve public protest and dissent for future generations. The reform agenda for the law of public protest includes strengthening rights to assemble and petition governments, preserving breathing space in public for dissent and contention, reforming protest policing, amending public disorder laws, protecting and encouraging campus protest, disarming public protests, and reigning in governmental emergency powers as they affect public protest.

We analyze the gap between public policies regarding domestic violence and the prosecution and defense of such policies in the courtroom. The prosecutors and public defenders we surveyed are on the front lines of domestic violence cases as they enter courtroom; nearly 25 percent of their caseloads involved domestic violence cases and of those, about 50 percent involved repeat offenders. We utilize the information from the public defenders and district attorneys to understand what types of domestic violence cases they see, who the victims are, and what happens to those who are convicted of domestic violence crimes. We also analyze the reported outcomes of domestic violence cases to see whether specific domestic violence laws have any influence on the punishment of domestic violence offenses. We present the first-hand perspectives of some of the individuals who are involved with domestic violence cases on a daily basis. We find that the implementation of public policies regarding domestic violence, such as mandatory arrest and gun removal, is implemented inconsistently across states, and we demonstrate that different policies and implementation practices lead to diverse outcomes of domestic violence cases in the courtroom.

We start the chapter by describing the different modes of hunting and clarify that in this book we primarily focus on subsistence hunting and commercial hunting; the latter provides wild meat for local rural and urban markets. The main objective of subsistence hunting is to provide food for the hunters and their families. This activity plays a vital role in the sustenance and even survival of many peoples in the tropics and subtropical regions of the world. We start the chapter by describing the hunting technology used by humans throughout time and how this has impacted human evolution. We then concentrate on describing modern hunting techniques used from an extensive analysis of published studies of hunter-gatherers and rural communities in the tropics and subtropics. Hunters are described, including hunting by children and the cultural aspects involved in hunting. We end the chapter by entering into the debate of whether rural or Indigenous Peoples manage their resources sustainably as a prelude to the next chapter.

The Ottomans and Safavids had different policies towards nomads, but in both states nomads played an important role. The Safavids retained a strong nomad presence in the army, with tribal structure in both army and administration, organizing their followers in oymaqs. When these threatened the power of the state, Iranians and slave soldiers were brought in as counterweight, but the oymaqs remained in place. The Ottomans attempted fuller control but had to grant considerable autonomy in regions far from the center: eastern Anatolia, the Syrian desert, and the Arabian Peninsula. Competition between the two states led to shifting borders, in which nomad tribal powers allied with one or another state. Thus a largely nomad buffer region developed, stretching from Kurdistan to the Persian Gulf. Especially in Iran, the eighteenth century was a period of decentralization, when nomad tribes gained in power. This chapter discusses the lifestyle of nomads, for which sources are fuller at this period, and the role of firearms relative to nomad power.

Excessive use of force by the police or other law enforcement officials may have lethal outcomes. This chapter describes the core law enforcement principles of necessity and proportionality which govern all use of force in law enforcement. Specific consideration is given to the restrictions imposed on the use of firearms and related ammunition and firing modes. Consideration of less-lethal weapons in law enforcement benefits from the expertise of Dr Abi Dymond of Exeter University. The human rights principles of legality, precaution, and accountability for the use of force are also addressed.

Chapter 4 provides background data about the hunting of apes in central Africa and reviews four different hypotheses concerning the potential mechanism of the original cross-species transmission event from chimpanzee to human. After careful analysis, three of these hypotheses can be rejected: an experimental oral poliomyelitis vaccine in the preparation of which chimpanzee cells were allegedly used, medical experiments during which chimpanzee blood was injected into humans, and testicular transplants pioneered by maverick surgeon Serge Voronoff. The only mechanism that remains plausible is the ‘cut hunter’ theory, namely that a hunter, or perhaps a hunter’s wife, was accidentally infected with the simian virus when injured while handling a chimpanzee carcass in the forest or their village. From estimates that provide an order of magnitude of the frequency of such events, it seems certain that no more than a handful of early twentieth-century hunters were occupationally infected with the chimpanzee virus.

The years around 1200 ce mark a significant turning point in the history of warfare in India, due to the decisive campaigns waged in northern India by the Ghurids of Afghanistan and the concomitant introduction of new forms of military culture from the eastern Islamic world. While limited parts of India’s periphery had been under Islamic rule long before this time, it was only under the Ghurids that Islamic control was established in the core region along the Ganga and Yamuna rivers (the “Ganga-Yamuna Doab”). A series of decisive battles was carried out here between 1192 and 1206, under the direction of Quṭb al-Dīn Aybeg, a Turkish slave commander (ghulām) in the service of the Ghurid sultan Mu‘izz al-Dīn Muḥammad bin Sām. Even after Mu‘izz al-Dīn’s death in 1206, Aybeg remained in India controlling the newly acquired Ghurid territories from his base in Lahore in the Punjab.

The Ottoman empire is named after Osman(d.1324), the eponymous founder of the dynasty, whose name came to be rendered in English as Ottoman. Osman was a Turkish frontier lord – beg in Turkish – who commanded a band of semi-nomadic fighters at the beginning of the fourteenth century in northwestern Asia Minor (Anatolia), known at the time to Turks, Persians, and Arabs as the land of Rum (Rome); that is, the land of the Eastern Roman Empire. Osman Beg was but one of many Turkish lords who carved out their respective principalities in western and central Asia Minor, profiting from the power vacuum caused by the Mongols’ destruction of the Seljuq sultanate of Rum in 1243.