During the Tokugawa period, commoners developed increasingly sophisticated methods of challenging what they perceived as unjust government policies or unethical behavior by the wealthy. Popular movements coalesced around petitions that stated grievances. They typically took the form of mass demonstrations that required preparation, organization, and leadership. Even urban food riots had a logic to them. In many cases, they erupted after women had called on merchants to feed the poor, and they followed a code for conduct that cautioned against stealing. In the early nineteenth century, farmers created village leagues that employed representatives to manage issues with regional implications and make their case for commercial policies. In some instances, they argued that all human beings are equal, an argument made unsuccessfully by outcaste villagers. Villagers commemorated popular movements in chronicles and tales, mixing fact and fiction in the interests of a good story, and they remembered their fallen leaders in memorial services.

This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

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.

Chapter 1 defines the concepts of “protest” and “dissent.” It defends public protest on marketplace, self-government, autonomy, and tolerance grounds. The chapter explores the communicative and other characteristics of public protests and demonstrations. It examines public attitudes toward protest and protest movements and the state’s typically violent and negative responses to public protest. The chapter examines the typical purposes or goals of public protests. Finally, it responds to several arguments about protest “fatigue” and the continued efficacy of public protest as a means of democratic change.

In Chapter 5, I turn to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Long understood in opposition to Richard Wright’s naturalism, Ellison’s work nevertheless retains its sense of social determination. Equal parts bildungsroman and picaresque, Invisible Man seems to undo every stable category it creates. Dominated by an idea of surplus that is both aesthetic and economic, the hallucinatory logic of Invisible Man represents a book-length dissection of our culture’s naturalization of race. In doing so, it reveals itself to be profoundly ambivalent about the protagonist’s search for his true self, which becomes, in this reading, a mark of his subjection to America’s racial imaginary. Like Beckett, then, Ellison presents a world with little hope, but his protest against catastrophe contains the negative image of a freedom currently impossible to attain.

Chapter 3 explores Mexican opposition to the aftosa campaign, drawing on hundreds of complaints, local studies, and an original database of over 450 incidents of civil disobedience, riots, and rebellions. Rather than portraying resistance as rooted in the Mexican peasantry or rural tradition, this chapter emphasizes the geographical breadth, cross-class character, and the self-consciously modern public discourse of many opponents, and the vigorous but localized focus of most action.

This chapter explains the dissipation of violence. Consistent with my theory, once political exclusion was ameliorated in conflict-ridden districts, the level of violence dropped. The creation of new districts and the implementation of direct elections of local executives accommodated these demands for inclusion. Whereas previously excluded political hopefuls faced impenetrable barriers to election, the creation of new districts multiplied the number of elected positions and increased the likelihood of opposition electoral victories, particularly in post-conflict areas where the electorate was already receptive to ethnic appeals and likely to vote for members of their ethnic group.

Many of the historical and contemporary phenomena in which social scientists are interested are difficult to study using traditional methods of comparative analysis.  Since most cases are complex systems – marked by interdependence and operating at multiple levels of analysis at once – controlling comparisons to adjudicate causality is fraught with difficulty.  This chapter argues that scholars can use historical archival research to help disaggregate the temporal and spatial properties of the phenomena we hope to compare while also tracing connections among those disaggregated elements.  Specifically, practices associated with archival inquiry – classifying, contextualizing, layering, and linking – allow us to identify the boundaries around subsystems that can be treated as relatively independent while identifying the hierarchical connections tying those substemic activities together. The chapter concludes by showing how William Tuttle’s masterful history of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 provides a template for comparing complex cases.

The closing decades of British colonial rule were tumultuous. Communists supported rural rebellions throughout the Bengal delta, and communal politics produced the idea of a post-colonial homeland for Muslims: Pakistan. As the colonial endgame drew to a close, it became clear that the Muslim-majority Bengal delta would be separated from the Muslim-minority parts of Bengal to the west.

Profound religious, political, social and economic change marked the early modern period of European history. The religious reformations of the sixteenth century, the expanding power and fiscality of the monarchical state, the pressures of a growing population, and economic change associated with agricultural enclosures and the first stirrings of industrialisation all contributed to frequent eruptions of collective popular violence. That violence assumed three chief forms. Riots were characterised by geographically limited violence, of relatively brief duration, that generally arose over local issues like the high cost of necessities such as bread in local markets. In rebellions, local protests, often beginning as riots, merged with more general issues to affect more than one locale and to extend for more than a few days when protestors secured effective leadership, often by social elites. Revolutions drew the support of a national group, or of a single ethnic group within one of the ethnically composite states emerging in our period, to seek fundamental countrywide change.

Focusing on the “crisis year” 1879, in which uprisings by Volga Tatars were violently crushed by the Kazan authorities, the final chapter investigates one of the situations in which the existing legal order broke down and gave way to arbitrary rule. The example shows that while the formalized rule of law was influential by the late 1870s, it continued to be challenged by the autocratic order.