The transition from a foraging lifestyle to structured political systems is one of the most momentous changes in the history of our species. This chapter reviews the various parameters that changed as a result of the transition to agriculture, including health, wealth, and power structures. There are a considerable number of debates over this transition, as researchers studying health, violence, political and personal power, and gender equity have studied it, with significant political implications in disciplines such as anthropology, economics, political science, and gender studies.

Chapter 8 discusses the processes involved in building and maintaining satisfactory relationships.It covers politeness theory, facework, morality, and how these contribute to relationship homeostasis.

How did the Gestapo enforce laws governing criticism? Recent historiography highlights denunciation driven policing as well as the overrepresentation of Communists and Jews in cases taken to trial. A system of selective enforcement is well-established fact, but the dynamics remain unclear. Enemies of the People randomly samples two categories of “criminal opinion” to capture the changing decision-making processes behind routine investigation, interrogation, and enforcement practices. Five arguments take shape. First, a conscious policy of selective enforcement based on political reliability as defined by standing within the Nazi people’s community. Second, the system punished subversive motive rather than actions. Third, political police viewed targeted minorities as subversives, privileged minorities as supporters, and carefully investigated “politically colourless” Germans. Fourth, from 1935 to 1944, the Gestapo behaved as an ordinary detective service when investigating individual Germans. Fifth, selective enforcement involved state prosecutors and the Party through five configurations. The violence of revolution and collapse were bookends on a decade of much cooler suppression.

After Stalingrad, the Gestapo only dealt with critics the Party identified as threats. Case load dropped 76 per cent while charges under capital offences rose to a rate of one-in-three. Yet selective enforcement continued. Each institution took on different roles. The Gestapo relied on political officials to warn loyal offenders and identify subversives. The Party singled out repeat offenders when education failed, and case officers rubber-stamped their preliminary investigations. The judiciary could then punish anything that filtered up with lengthy deterrent sentences. New roles shaped new standards and practices. The damning classification of “doubtful attitudes” blurred lines between defeatism and subversion. Distinctions between actions and motive disappeared for repeat offenders. Investigation practices also sharpened as focus narrowed to targeted minorities and opinionmakers. Surveillance and torture were used in any case with the slightest hint of organized resistance. Sentencing practices followed in step. Leftist slogans were once again treason, and Marxists who encouraged surrender risked execution. The dangers multiplied for a select few deemed opponents by the Party.

The Gestapo gradually wrested enforcement authority from the courts between 1935 and 1939. A conflict over jurisdiction played out in national journals as the political police asserted a mandate of prevention. At first, case officers reported findings to prosecutors without commentary. After Himmler became Chief of German Police in June 1936, the Gestapo routinely withheld cases with insufficient evidence to convict and even dropped charges against a few remarkably loyal offenders in extraordinary circumstances. Enforcement authority remained with prosecutors in most cases. The Party and the Ministry of Justice exercised joint discretion built into the law to target highly public offences, recidivists, and political opponents presumed to be subversives. But the Gestapo increasingly encroached by prescribing a desired outcome in the case summary. Political police used these “recommendations,” backed by the power of protective custody, to gradually assert control over enforcement decisions by the judiciary. By 1939, the Gestapo determined who deserved to be punished based on their character, while the courts determined who could be punished based on available evidence.

The means of detection determined investigation and interrogation practices. Conspiratorial networks and targeted minorities were vulnerable to surveillance and infiltration in ways that society was not. Distinct groups with organized structures could be mapped to uncover organized resistance. Policing criticism was sisyphean by comparison. Blanket surveillance was neither realistic nor desirable. Practically, general suspicion threatened popular support. Ideologically, the police were to cooperate with racial comrades. Faced with limited resources and an impossible task, the Gestapo relied on Germans to denounce opponents in their midst. The Party played an integral role to this end. On the one hand, it screened accusations and channeled reports to the Gestapo. On the other, its officials reported a fifth of critics and encouraged others to do the same. These intermediaries dismissed minor offences, yet the Gestapo ultimately relied on denouncers with mixed motives. Highly questionable evidence documented potentially serious incidents. The Gestapo investigated critics thoroughly and cautiously as a result.

The Gestapo balanced the scales of justice with the weights of people’s community from 1939 to 1942. Political police resolved twice as many cases while state prosecutors’ workload, but not conviction rates, dropped by a third. The Gestapo evaluated “political reliability” based on a range of socio-political behaviours distinguishing upstanding “racial comrades,” who embodied the values of people’s community, from subversive opponents who either rejected Nazism or embraced alien ideologies. Supporters might complain, but they sincerely apologized, cooperated, and usually conformed. Subversives advocated alternatives. At best, repeat offenders were simply chronic complainers. Private exchanges might be overlooked, but repeated public criticism was intolerable. Hinting toward a change of government was utterly unforgivable. Supporters who acted in “momentary weakness” received “psychological understanding” and educational warnings. Subversives who called for regime change, swayed other against Nazism, or were connected to targeted minorities faced the courts. Himmler’s mandate “to create and uphold the desired order” of a people’s community was finally being realized.

This chapter begins with existing explanations for rights informality: weak state capacity, left-wing ideology, and competing state goals. It then develops a theory for understanding why governments that distribute land often withhold property rights, presiding over widespread rural property informality for long periods, and why other governments grant more secure property rights over land. Authoritarian regimes tend to redistribute land from large landowners to peasants but withhold property rights. Democracies often grant property rights to beneficiaries of previous land reforms but do not redistribute additional property. This difference is driven by how political regimes empower or disempower landed elites and peasants, differences in institutional powers, and constraints that political elites face, and the incentives of incumbency and political competition. Democracies are better at channeling popular demands into policy. But policies can also be blocked by the powerful in a legislature. Finally, foreign pressure during economic crisis can force a country to turn to international financial institutions for help. Privatization and greater security of property rights can be a condition for support.

Conflict and Social Control in Late Antiquity examines how the cultivation and application of violence across a range of ‘small worlds’ contributed to the making of society in the late Roman period. From households and families to schoolrooms and monasteries, chapters address the different roles that violence played in maintaining and reinforcing the social order, even during a period of intense religious and political change. Elites adopted a range of approaches – formal and informal, legal and illegal, private and public – to keep subordinates in their place. Especially important were the efforts of social elites to inculcate in their followers the idea that the social order was natural rather than contingent, and therefore should not be challenged but rather perpetuated. Chapters focus on written sources from the fourth and fifth centuries, mainly on Christian authors. Collectively, they show that rather than seeking to transform the fortunes of those who were most vulnerable in society (slaves, women, children), such writers drew creatively on pre-existing discursive traditions, in the process reproducing and (occasionally) attempting to mitigate the plight of the downtrodden.

Social order in the Navy was produced vertically through formal institutions and professional practices that usually assured good governance. It was also produced horizontally through informal mechanisms that knitted seamen to one another, provided leadership and enabled cooperation. This social order could be fragile, however. Poor governance fomented grievances and incidents of misrule focused existing grievances on commanders. As grievances mounted, the informal groups that gave coherence to seamen’s lives provide a basis for protest. The challenge for seamen was coordinating a response and attaining the solidarity necessary to achieve their collective goals.

Mutiny tells us much about threats to social order and the exercise of command. Attaining social order in so large and complex an enterprise as the Royal Navy was no small feat. Inspired by now-classic explorations of social order at sea, our study explains how order was attained in the Navy and why it sometimes broke down. In addition to correcting many misperceptions about mutiny that traditional approaches have fostered, our book explores why people commit to participate in dangerous collective action, exploring the roles of grievances, coordination, leadership and dynamic mobilization processes.

Perceived threats to established social order can influence the willingness of those in authority to inflict punishments as well as the severity of those punishments. This chapter analyzes the case of summary punishment by flogging in the Royal Navy. Eighteenth-century reforms were intended to rationalize and normalize flogging and limit its severity. However, naval commanders saw the established order under attack after 1789 and, emphasizing moral offenses, imposed tighter discipline on their crews. Our analysis shows that greater penal severity is associated with several factors, including a period effect associated with the onset of the revolutionary age. Our findings are consistent with research that suggests that disorder influences the willingness to punish.