Preliminary Programme

The past two decades have seen significant transformations in the ways in which archaeologists have perceived inter-personal violence in past societies. Prehistoric archaeology in particular provides a unique long-term perspective on the development and institutionalisation of violence in human societies. Evidence can be drawn from a range of sources, including material culture, settlement patterning, iconography and (crucially) patterns of trauma in human remains. The interpretation of such evidence remains inseparable from wider contextual understandings of prehistoric social forms and practices. With regard to studies of violence, archaeological understandings are guided to a significant extent by the work of cultural anthropologists studying more recent non-state societies. This paper considers the specific role of archaeological evidence in establishing a broader historical context for the study of violence. (Show less)

One of the main hypotheses deriving from Elias’s theory of the civilizing process is that the process of state building resulted in a pacification of the elites. However, very little is currently known about long-term trends in elite homicide. To fill this gap, the paper will present findings from a study that collected data on the occurrence of regicide in 35 political entities across Europe between 600 and 1800 AD. The search resulted in 167 cases of certain or suspected killing of a monarch outside the battlefield. Information was coded on a variety of contextual variables such as duration of the reign, background of the killers, situational ground and modus operandi. The presentation will focus on presenting descriptive data regarding long-term trends in the frequency of regicide and discuss their implications for theorizing the relationship between state-building and elite violence. (Show less)

The steep and long-term decline of homicide rates in England from the 14th century to the mid 20th has been much analysed by historians. Considerable attention has also been paid to the so called ‘decline of theft and violence’ in the Victorian and Edwardian period. However, as this paper will show, in the first half of the nineteenth century recorded homicide rates rose very substantially in England and Wales as a whole and doubled in Scotland. Thus at precisely the point when these two parts of Britain (which had very different legal systems)were undergoing rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, homicide rates in both places also rose very rapidly. By investigating the geography of that rise and analysing the consistent urban/rural differences in murder and manslaughter accusations which such an investigation uncovers, this paper will present a fresh analysis of the relationship between rapid economic and social change and levels of lethal violence in two of Europe’s most rapidly urbanising areas. (Show less)

Once Belgium was acknowledged internationally (1839), the concerns of the young State’s governments quickly passed from outwards to inwards, with the increase in popular upheavals and the emergence of social conflicts of a new generation in the background. The 1840s therefore represented a critical period as regards the legitimization process of the State. Thanks to an “efficient” control and repression system, disorder was avoided whilst, in a background of economic crisis, revolutions burst out across the old continent. Yet, this critical moment in the history of the inward legitimization of the State must not make us forget the highly time-consuming undertaking aimed at imposing the new regime and its way of working to the country as a whole, including rural parts. Indeed, as regards the way of living and the forms taken by social regulation in particular, the ways of the “Ancien Régime” still prevailed for a long time in the Belgian countryside of the 19th century. In this context, the judges, and more globally, judicial actions played the role of a privileged interface between the people and central administration, which also proved to be a conflictive interface through which the State tried to legitimize itself and to impose its regulation modes, but also to share the middle-class and liberal values on which its creation was based.

We learn through the archives of the prosecution offices that notably except the crisis periods where certain fringes of the population were suddenly under the spotlights of the repression, the customary population dealing with the administration system and penal justice was composed of rural people, essentially day workers, many of which due to their taking part in brawls and other street violence, which could result in human death. The more we progress in the century, the more this type of violence played an increasing role in the matters dealt with by the courts. In this respect, it is interesting to note that in Belgium, as everywhere in North Europe at the time, while extreme violence represented by homicide rather tended to decrease, the “Assaults” category was rather on the increase.

What does the increase in ordinary violence mean? A surge in daily violence, an increasing intolerance of society towards certain ways of social interaction or the use of penal justice as a way to rule the country?

The matter will be addressed based on published statistics and archives of the prosecution offices, particularly heeding the parties on the field (local police, plaintiffs, prosecutors, ...). (Show less)

Due to violence’s cross-cultural and trans-historical importance in human societies and its contemporary significance as a locus of social fears, it has unsurprisingly been a key topic in research on the influence of innate biological factors on human psychology and behaviour. At the same time, especially since the 1980s, historians of crime have been focusing ever more attention on the topic of small-scale, ‘everyday’ violence, taking into account both its quantitative social history (e.g., analysing homicide and assault rates) and qualitative cultural history (e.g., reconstructing attitudes toward violence).

There are many points at which these two strands of inquiry – natural science and socio-cultural history – might usefully contribute to a unified analysis. However, there have so far been few efforts to consider what a natural science perspective on violence (in particular that offered by ‘evolutionary psychology’ would actually mean for historical understanding of a topic such as violence. The work that has been done in this direction has been promising, but has also revealed certain difficulties in integrating approaches. Finally, some historians have sought to position history (particularly cultural history) as a site of resistance to ‘biological’ analyses of behaviour. In this paper, I will discuss some key interdisciplinary efforts made so far and argue that there are useful ways that evolutionary psychology can assist our understanding of violence within historical time frames. (Show less)