For paid military service to constitute wage labour, soldiers’ labour power ought to be acquired on a labour market. Such a market develops when multiple employers compete over the labour of the same pool of workers and workers can negotiate their terms of service. As argued in this chapter, during the campaign of Alexander soldiers not only leveraged their collective voice to improve their conditions of service but were also promoted up the ranks when their skill set warranted it. These phenomena laid the foundations for the development of a market for labour during the Wars of the Successors, when multiple employers had to vie for the service of the same group of soldiers. Increasingly motivated by monetary gains and not restricted by political allegiance, these soldiers enlisted with the highest bidder, thereby driving the price of military labour upwards.

Chapter 2 confronts the gender, race, and class composition of state violence in the American Revolution. General Washington attempted to exclude women and non-White men from the military - moves that foreshadowed similar exclusions from military work and political participation in the United States. At the same time, the work, at times violent work, of marginalized individuals in and around American military establishments was essential. The army also needed money - and the interdependence of state finance, state violence, and military discipline was key. Failed finances led to deplorable army condition. Thirty percent of Continental Army soldiers rebelled in January 1781. Washington was infuriated by the protest, but he was even more upset when political leaders negotiated with the men. Disobedient soldiers, he believed, responded best to physical chastisement. Much like recent work that highlights how American nationalism was forged in violent acts against Loyalists, so too this chapter shows how it was forged in military discipline: violent acts against Continental Army soldiers.

We consider changes (Persianizing one) that Alexander made to his court from mid-330 BCE onwards, as well as opposition to it (and him) in the form of conspiracies and other clashes. Discussion is framed by a brief look at changes introduced by previous kings, as well as at new evidence from archaeology in north Greece that alters our understanding of early Macedon. It also takes into account the Greco-Roman literary topoi that overlay our sources, particularly with regard to major conspiracies, conflict, and the ‘mutiny’ at Opis – all in an effort to excavate the original underlying Macedonian perspective, insofar as we can.

How did Dar es Salaam became a ‘Cold War city’ in Africa? This chapter sets out the principles which informed the basis of Julius Nyerere’s engagement with the outside world – a set of foreign policy coordinates which remained remarkably consistent. It then shows how a violent revolution in the Zanzibar archipelago pushed Tanganyika into a hasty union with the islands, while an army mutiny in Dar es Salaam exposed the fragility of Nyerere’s government. A series of foreign policy crises with major Western states followed. Meanwhile, Tanzania reached out to the socialist world and developed close connections with China. By the mid-1960s, Dar es Salaam had attracted the attention of the Cold War world. The remainder of the chapter then demonstrates how a ‘Cold War political culture’ became inscribed into Dar es Salaam’s public sphere and concrete spaces. Propaganda, rumour, and espionage were major preoccupations of the Tanzanian government.

In the 1770s, the rapid expansion of the Company’s territorial empire sparked social and political unease in Britain, fueling efforts to reform and to rein in the corporation. For many commentators, few reforms seemed more important than dissolving the Company’s independent army. For years, disagreements about the relative authority of Company and royal forces had complicated British military operations in India, and “consolidating” the two bodies into a unified British Army seemed the clear solution. This chapter explores how the Company’s white officers pushed back against this campaign, establishing a coherent political community in India and an influential lobbying group in Britain. In a flurry of petitions and pamphlets, officers maintained that “consolidation” was both unjust and imprudent: Royal officers would not know how to lead sepoys or to negotiate a war in India. When this written campaign failed to halt the planned reform, white officers across India staged a mutiny, which Company and Crown officials proved unable or unwilling to rebuff. Plans for consolidation were abandoned, while the officers’ collective influence over imperial policies was further solidified.

This chapter explores how punitive mobility expanded the reach of convicts’ political beliefs, including the ideologies for which they had been punished. The first section of the chapter employs examples from the Dutch and English East India companies, and the Danish-Norwegian empire, from the seventeenth century onwards, the chapter traces the spread of resistance to imperial governance in the early-modern period by people subjected to punitive mobility, including through religious practice. The second section centres on the history of penal transportation and servitude in Ireland, revealing its global dimensions, and foregrounding its relationship to convict unrest in Britain’s hulks and penal colonies. Finally, the chapter suggests that there were important continuities between insurgency, politics, and religion in the Spanish Empire and its successor nation states, including in Chile, Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, and Mexico. Overall, the chapter also reveals some of the ways in which penal colonies became sites of cosmopolitanism and cultural transformation. If convicts carried political ideologies to their punitive destinations, their mobility also facilitated cultural and religious dissemination, adaptation and transformation. Thus, punitive mobility was a vector for community formation, nationalism, and resistance to the changing geopolitical formations created by empires.

How did Dar es Salaam became a ‘Cold War city’ in Africa? This chapter sets out the principles which informed the basis of Julius Nyerere’s engagement with the outside world – a set of foreign policy coordinates which remained remarkably consistent. It then shows how a violent revolution in the Zanzibar archipelago pushed Tanganyika into a hasty union with the islands, while an army mutiny in Dar es Salaam exposed the fragility of Nyerere’s government. A series of foreign policy crises with major Western states followed. Meanwhile, Tanzania reached out to the socialist world and developed close connections with China. By the mid-1960s, Dar es Salaam had attracted the attention of the Cold War world. The remainder of the chapter then demonstrates how a ‘Cold War political culture’ became inscribed into Dar es Salaam’s public sphere and concrete spaces. Propaganda, rumour, and espionage were major preoccupations of the Tanzanian government.

In 1857, a string of military mutinies soon followed by a series of popular uprisings tore apart the core heartland of colonial India and threatened to unravel the British Raj. Units of the Bengal Army rose up against their British officers and in conjunction with other discontented groups quickly seized key cities and towns. The British were ejected from major centres, and there were genuine fears that the conflagration would spread to other regions of colonial India. The scale of the revolt, and the violence with which it was accompanied, was unprecedented. Moreover, the intense racialization of the conflict and the anxieties it spawned, would shape British military, strategic, and political policy throughout the empire for generations to come. Ultimately, the British were able to restore order, but not without a huge amount of bloodshed, in large part because of a lack of common purpose and organization amongst the rebels. The British benefitted from the fact that the revolts did not spread much beyond the north, leaving much of India tense but quiet. Resources could therefore be more easily pooled and concentrated on the rebels who operated bravely but without direction. Militarily, the revolt was a watershed moment for the British Army and for the British Empire.

This chapter examines three subjects relating to the themes of authority and allegiances. The first section considers the qualities that Romans considered important for effective generalship, including calculated displays of courage and a reputation for good fortune, which astute generals could foster as a way of strengthening their authority and the morale of their men. The much-debated subject of pre-battle speeches is also discussed, with less familiar but highly relevant late Roman evidence brought to bear. The second section examines the strategies deployed for maintaining the obedience of soldiers and changing patterns of military mutiny over the course of Roman history, with a view to identifying factors which influenced its incidence. The third and final section addresses the subject of civil war: its incidence and impact, and the ways in which commanders sought to negotiate the strains that internal conflicts placed on soldiers’ loyalties.

Rebellious collective action is rare, but it can occur when subordinates are severely discontented and other circumstances are favorable. The possibility of rebellion is a check – sometimes the only check – on authoritarian rule. Although mutinies in which crews seized control of their vessels were rare events, they occurred throughout the Age of Sail. This book is the first to analyze mutiny sytematically using techniques borrowed from epidemiology and in light of a new theory that links grievances to collective action.

Accepting that white and black soldiers were physically different meant that army commanders could treat them differently too. White soldiers were housed in the newest barracks and healthiest locations precisely because it was thought that black soldiers preferred, and indeed would thrive in, places too sickly for whites. If economies in diet or clothing needed to be made, it was generally thought that West India Regiment soldiers enjoyed living off the land and could easily cope without army rations, or complete uniforms. But it was the perceived ability of black soldiers to labour in tropical conditions that caused the most significant problems. Some unscrupulous commanders were willing to use the men as forced labour. This was not uncontested, some army commanders warned against it, and the men of the 8th West India Regiment mutinied in Dominica in 1802 as a direct result of being used, as they saw it, as slaves. The blame for this mutiny was eventually laid at the feet of abusive commanders, but differential treatment was clearly shaped by an understanding that white and black bodies were not the same.

This chapter aims to provide a conceptual overview of the role of violence in the workings of the colonial state in British India, with reflections on how various modalities of violence constructed concepts of the nation, shaped anti-colonialism, hardened communal identities, and informed the constitution of the early independent Indian state. In this we bring theoretical interventions on violence and the state to the historiography of the Indian nationalist movement, with the aim to underscore the violence of colonialism and to de-centre the emphasis on non-violence in anti-colonialism. We interpret violence broadly but not expansively, reading its presence or effects in a number of explicit and implicit state projects. Our aim is to highlight the dialectic between colonial coercion in its various guises and the formation of Indian nationalism and its other, ‘communalism’. Such a framework helps to explain how it was that an avowedly non-violent nationalist movement managed to deliver an independence that was among other things marked by the extraordinary violence of partition. The independent state inherited many of the mechanisms of violence of the colonial state that preceded it.