By expanding the geographical scope of the history of violence and war, this volume challenges both Western and state-centric narratives of the decline of violence and its relationship to modernity. It highlights instead similarities across early modernity in terms of representations, legitimations, applications of, and motivations for violence. It seeks to integrate methodologies of the study of violence into the history of war, thereby extending the historical significance of both fields of research. Thirteen case studies outline the myriad ways in which large-scale violence was understood and used by states and non-state actors throughout the early modern period across Africa, Asia, the Americas, the Atlantic, and Europe, demonstrating that it was far more complex than would be suggested by simple narratives of conquest and resistance. Moreover, key features of imperial violence apply equally to large-scale violence within societies. As the authors argue, violence was a continuum, ranging from small-scale, local actions to full-blown war. The latter was privileged legally and increasingly associated with states during early modernity, but its legitimacy was frequently contested and many of its violent forms, such as raiding and destruction of buildings and crops, could be found in activities not officially classed as war.
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This chapter studies collective actions and social movements, social fears, perceptions of the state, and of its monopoly of physical force (c. 1916–20). First, in Hamburg, an urban social movement tried to establish a space-time regime organised around public democracy, rooted in working-class neighbourhoods and on the shop floor. Publicly employed acts of physical violence served to communicate elements of the newly established space-time regime to the local public. Second, the middle classes in Hamburg and in Seattle were shaken by a plethora of fears ignited by the Russian Revolution of 1917. In Germany, however, revolution and regime change made it much easier to name those deemed responsible for ending the Kaiserreich (social democrats, Spartacists). In the USA, a complex imaginary of nearly omnipresent fears focused on innumerable vaguely defined threats shaped the impression that a revolution could be triggered by any event which was defined as not ‘normal’ – as un-American. This socially deep-rooted fear-driven dramatisation, however, had a pacifying consequence: the Seattle General Strike clearly showed that even in the USA there is no inbuilt tendency for strikes in urban settings to always escalate into violent confrontations. While in Seattle massive fears of an uncontrollable revolution led all parties involved in the General Strike to act very cautiously, in Hamburg the activists of the urban social movement through their collective actions, third, challenged the legitimacy of the newly established uniformed security forces. Re-establishing an accepted monopoly of physical force was a key problem for the early Weimar Republic.
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Part I: Space-time regimes and regulations
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Part II: Rhythms and spatiotemporal dynamics
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Part III: Memories and (religious) imaginations
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Publics and their health
Historical problems and perspectives
The nature of the relationship between publics and their health has long been a concern for those seeking to improve collective and individual health. Attempts to secure the health of the population of any given place are one of the oldest forms of governmental action. Whether it be providing clean water or preventing the spread of disease, such efforts require the involvement of the publics these measures are designed to protect. Despite its importance, surprisingly little attention has been paid to who or what the ‘public’ of public health consisted of. This collection addresses this gap by considering ‘who’ the public of public health was in an array of places and around a variety of public health problems. Ranging across Europe and North and South America, and from the interwar period to the near present, this book explores the construction of ‘problem publics’ to deepen our understanding of the ‘who’ of public health. This book offers detailed case studies of the making of ‘problem’ publics and public health problems in different places and at different times. By placing examples of the construction of problem publics in contexts as diverse as the USA in the interwar period, East Germany in the 1980s and contemporary Argentina, this collection identifies what is general and what is specific to the processes that make certain kinds of publics appear problematic. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this volume offers fresh insights into the nature of public health problems, practices and publics.
Feeling the strain
A cultural history of stress in twentieth-century Britain
Drawing on a wealth of sources including self-help books, Mass Observation
diaries and directives, oral history interviews, social science research and
popular culture, Feeling the strain examines why stress became the ubiquitous
explanation for a range of everyday ills by the end of the twentieth century in
Britain. It explores the popular, vernacular discourse of nerves and stress to
uncover how ordinary people understood, explained and coped with the pressures
and strains of daily life and illuminates not only how stress was known, but the
ways in which that knowledge was produced.
By focusing on contemporary
popular understandings, it reveals continuity of ideas about work, mental
health, status, gender and individual weakness, as well as the socio-economic
contexts that enabled stress to become the accepted explanation for a wide range
of daily experiences. It foregrounds continuities in managing stress and changes
in ideas about causation, revealing a vocabulary of ‘nerves’ and ‘nervous
disorders’ as precursors to stress but also illustrating the mutability of the
stress concept and how its very imprecision gave it utility.
Feeling the
strain provides first-hand accounts from sufferers, families and colleagues and
offers insight into self-help literature, the meanings of work and changing
dynamics of domestic life over the century, delivering a complementary
perspective to medical histories of stress and making a significant contribution
to histories of everyday life and emotion in Britain during the twentieth
century.