This essay examines the reciprocal contest of wills as mediated through the use of political violence from roughly 1773 to the end of the war in 1783. In other terms, it covers the escalating application of violence and how that led to outright war in April 1775, as well as the war itself. In both periods, violence was used to influence the will of one’s opponent and the political preferences of the undecided—but sometimes its political intent was exceeded, with escalatory effects. Three broad categories of violence are considered here. The first, “intimidative and catalytic” was primarily associated with the period from 1773 to 1776, in which violence was used by both sides, mostly publicly, to force political opponents to accede or step aside. Some of those efforts at intimidation catalyzed further violence, leading ultimately to armed military confrontation. Once the war had begun, the strong conventions associated with “war” shaped military behavior by both sides’ regular forces, although not always successfully, and always subject to logistical requirements. These behaviors form the second category of “Regular and Logistical.” The third category, “Retaliatory” was primarily associated with peripheral militia forces, which were much less restrained by the customs and usages of war, and often instead indulged in escalating retaliation.

Violence helps to define revolution as a mode of historical change; however, violence is a factor, not an actor, in history. Widespread violence in a variety of forms persisted in France despite three constitutions (1791, 1795, 1799) and their accompanying claims to end the Revolution. The popular violence that began in 1789 helped to eliminate the vestiges of feudalism and abolish inherited privilege. In 1792, rural revolts, urban riots, and foreign war served to bring down the monarchy and promote social leveling. Dismantling the old order provoked widespread resistance, which inspired state-authorized terror, exceptional justice, and mass executions on an unprecedented scale in 1793-94. Royalism, Jacobinism, religious resistance, continuing war, and politicized vigilantism all fueled continuing cycles of violence after 1794. Economic chaos, parlous policing, and partisan judges also prolonged an endemic violence that ranged from solipsistic banditry to armed counter-revolution. These multivalent forces of instability could only be tamed by enhancing and depoliticizing the repressive powers of the state. Efforts both to ensconce the republic and contain violence, notably by militarizing justice, enhancing repression, and limiting democracy, spawned a growing liberal authoritarianism after 1797. Reducing factionalism, banditry, and regional resistance fostered a security state and personal dictatorship in 1802.

This chapter traces the origin of the 1798 rebellion in Ireland to that great destabilization in the Atlantic world provoked by Britain’s stunning victories in the Seven Years’ War, and the consequent acquisition of a worldwide Empire. These impacted on Ireland in that the quest for recruits to garrison this empire led directly to a repeal of many of the most stringent Penal Laws against Catholics, for Irish Protestants, a deeply unsettling development. In their turn, these triggered a continual political crisis in Ireland that was sharpened by the American crisis and the attendant whiff of British vulnerability. The French Revolution sent out mixed but powerful messages. Its Jacobin promise of liberty and equality found an eager audience in Ireland and elsewhere among those who were educated but marginalized. Among some Presbyterians the incredible events in France were viewed as a preliminary to the downfall of the Anti-Christ and as a prelude to the Second Coming. For many Irish Catholics, the message was also clear: the Jacobite moment had come and with it the real prospect of deliverance by a French invasion force. These mixed, sometimes contradictory strands led inexorably to armed rebellion in 1798.

Until 1988, little was known about the extent of massacres of Aboriginal people and British settlers across the Australian frontier 1788-1928. Since then the question has dominated Australian historiography and raised the critical question: Were the massacres an expression of genocide? This chapter surveys the debate’s origins in the 1970s and the opposing schools of thought that emerged in response: settler genocide versus Aboriginal resistance. In the 1990s the debate focussed on the level of violence on the colonial frontier in Victoria. A decade later the debate shifted to the colonial frontier in Tasmania and changed direction. Historians of Aboriginal resistance were accused of inventing frontier massacres and fabricating footnotes while others claimed there were very few massacres and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people were responsible for their own demise. In response new methods emerged to understand the characteristics of frontier massacre and interrogate the disparate sources of evidence. New texts argued that frontier massacres were a critical component of Tasmanian Aboriginal dispossession. Today digital mapping technologies have identified more than 300 sites of frontier massacre across Australia, providing new evidence that they constitute genocide.

For decades, historians have expressed divergent perspectives on the question of genocide in North America. These debates often hinged on legal technicalities and narrow political definitions of genocidal “intent.” This chapter takes a more robust view of the causes of genocidal violence early colonial North America. Paying particular attention to the contested terrain of historical causation, the following chapter encourages readers to remain cognizant of the overlapping, intersecting, and competing ideas, motives, and patterns of mass violence that shaped, and reshaped, North America prior to the Revolutionary era. From New England to Michigan Territory, the Chesapeake Bay to southern Appalachia, Indigenous nations navigated preexisting rivalries while also grappling with the arrival of often-aggressive European colonizers. As the bloody history of the Kikotan people in early-seventeenth-century Virginia reveals, the perpetrators of genocide came in many forms. And when violence did come, it caused social discord and the loss of life and culture as the violence of settler greed, ambition, a brute force took root and extended across eastern North America like a “spreading fire.”

This chapter provides an integrated history of territorial seizure and annihilative measures across three distinct colonial regions - Queensland, the Northern Territory and the northern reaches of Western Australia. The vast arc of Tropical Australia is examined within a single narrative frame, bound by several consistent, over-arching themes: escalating land theft with all its accompanying violences in the latter nineteenth century, into the twentieth; the enhanced capacity in remote regions to mask multiple colonial atrocities and promote intense cultural denialism; and the dramatic intensity of Western expansion, first throughout the vast territory of Queensland, then pushing westward from that base across the remaining tropical zones. Thus, the seemingly independent colonial stories are conjoined into a singular narrative of advance, dispossession and the brutal destruction of lives, societies and cultures, underscoring the environmental theft and transformation of land and nature. This destructive process is here termed ‘indigenocide’ – the inter-connection of mass homicide, ethnocide and ecocide, simultaneously imposed in one sustained, three-pronged attack. Indigenous military resistance continually contests the invasive thrust, demonstrating how, in situations of asymmetrical struggle, warfare can rapidly morph into relentless massacre; as colonialism, in its fundamental practices, becomes virtually synonymous with all the attributes of racial genocide.

This chapter demonstrates that when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth and latterly Oliver Cromwell ruled in England the word conquest involved the deliberate slaying of many inhabitants in the area being subjected to conquest, and the taking of measures to ensure that the survivors would abandon their identity to become English and Protestant. This means that when the English government undertook to conquer Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s and again in the 1650s, it was launching campaigns that, by modern definitions, were genocidal in intent. The author shows that this reality was acknowledged by historians of Ireland, regardless of their religious and political allegiances to the close of the nineteenth century even if the terms they used a different vocabulary. The chapter then proceeds to explain why academic authors in Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century chose to discount these gory aspects of Ireland’s early modern past , and how the older verities have been rehabilitated to recent decades. The author throughout draws a distinction between the many massacres that occurred in Ireland during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the attempted conquests, with associated intended genocides, of which there were but two.

The question as to whether a genocide took place in nineteenth-century Algeria has always been deeply contentious in western academic scholarship. By contrast, it has tended to be accepted as a given in many Algerian accounts of the past, both as expressed in conversation and in published works. This divergence has arguably been grounded in the manner in which the prevailing means of framing and defining genocide varied wildly between these two literatures. Curiously, Algerian texts, even when they are 'popular' rather than 'academic' accounts lie closer to the spirit and terms of reference of the scholarly field of Genocide Studies. Looked at comparatively, the violence of imperial Algeria shares remarkable affinities with both the exterminatory impulses and outcomes of other settler colonies, as well as other instances of European incursions into the Arabo-Islamic world, especially in Algeria's north African neighbours Morocco and Tunisia, Mauritania and Libya. Lemkin's diagnostics of genocide certainly seem to map onto the organised system of massacres perpetrated in Algeria, the general desire to cause harm to 'recalcitrant' groups en masse, the belief in the merits of a Maghrebi tabula rasa, and the 'slow violence' of the destruction of groups, communities and identities.

By the 1830s, a number of British humanitarians saw empire as a solution to problems. The final section of this book focuses on the Buxtons, a powerful British gentry family whose members turned from the abolition of slavery to the defence of Indigenous peoples in the British settler empire in the late 1830s. This first chapter of two discusses Priscilla Buxton, daughter of leading abolitionist MP Thomas Fowell Buxton and his close collaborator, who sat at the centre of an empire-wide information gathering network. She spent much of her life on international political causes in response to her deep sense of Christian duty even as she also ultimately supported an expedition that would have begun the colonization of what is today Nigeria. The chapter analyses the evidence that Buxton accumulated about police and settler killings on the Eastern Cape frontier and shows how a political case was made, relayed in part through kinship networks. The study also follows the fate of key stories, notably evidence for the killing of Xhosa chief Sigcau and seven of his men by settlers on commando, once they entered the discursive space of a commission of inquiry and were attacked by the supporters of the colonial administration.

Chapter 4 recounts the most intense phase of the violence of the 1937 Genocide and it focuses on the lived experiences of the victims and the survivors. The chapter is largely based on refugee testimonies collected in 1937 as well as a range of oral histories collected since. By closely examining the survivors’ testimonies, the chapter prioritizes their own understanding of the event. It provides a detailed reconstruction of the magnitude, brutality, and premeditated nature of the state-directed violence that took place in 1937. The chapter focuses on several key features of the 1937 Haitian Massacre in considering its relationship to other genocides in the twentieth century. Elements of secrecy, local complicity, extermination, and land appropriation were key features of this genocide. The chapter argues that victims of the 1937 Genocide interpreted the massacre as a major land grab. They also explained local civilian participation in the massacre in terms of pillage. In addition to focusing on their interpretation of the genocide as a form of land grab, the chapter argues that local complicity was more important than previously acknowledged. It also carefully considers patterns of killings that survivors described that occurred months and years after October 1937.

This chapter examines the complexity of rights-claiming in South Korea related to the violence on Jeju Island around April 3, 1948. The Jeju case demonstrates that rights claiming and counterclaiming over seventy years shaped the transitional justice process, which can be divided into four distinct periods according to the nature and dynamics of rights claims and counterclaims. I find that rights claims by both sides were not made in a vacuum but within a thick layer of existing discourses and narratives, colored by existing power structures. Over the decades, interesting dynamics of claim diversification and frame resonance occurred depending on the opportunity structures in a particular time and space. I found that rights claims diversify when the counterclaims are strong and the opportunity structure opens up. In addition, frame resonance influences the effectiveness of rights claims.

There were many alternatives to shooting unarmed civlians in Beijing. Soldiers or police could have used non-deadly force. Leaders could have ignored the protesters and waited them out. More military officials could have followed the lead of General Xu Qinxian, who refused to carry out martial law, or of He Yanran, who passively resisted on June 4, 1989, and allowed soldiers under his command to disperse. The massacre was not inevitable.

Studying the Beijing massacre from a historical distance allows for a careful accounting of the death toll, listening to the voices of a few soldiers who have spoken about their experience, and analyzing how the Peope's Liberation Army assessed its own performance, as recounted in internally published sources.

The most dangerous part of Beijing was along Fuxing Road, Fuxingmen Avenue, and West Chang’an Avenue between 10 p.m. on June 3 and 1 a.m. on June 4 as the 38th Army forced its way through barriers and crowds on its way to Tiananmen Square. After arriving at Tiananmen, the 38th Army repeatedly opened fire on civilians at Nanchizi, just east of the square. The 15th Airborne also killed civilians as it approached the square from the south, passing through the Zhushikou intersection and entering Tiananmen by way of Qianmen.

Top Communist Party officials admitted that some civilians had been wrongfully killed during the massacre, and promised that victims and their families would receive compensation. This was a tacit admission that the massacre had gone horribly wrong. If compensation came, it was meager and not systematic. While victims suffered, military officials and soldiers quietly received honors and promotions.

Policy documents show that the post-massacre purge was akin to a political movement, or yundong, but was not allowed to be called a yundong. Central purge officials carefully identified purge targets and procedures in their effort to punish disloyalty and reward compliance in late 1989 and early 1990.

PLA soldiers continued killing civilians in Beijing on June 4, 5, and 6.

Ordinary people resisted the Beijing massacre by vandalizing military vehicles and venting their rage. These young working-class men received long prison sentences; some were executed.