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Enmity and Violence in Early Modern Europe

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Stuart Carroll transforms our understanding of Europe between 1500 and 1800 by exploring how ordinary people felt about their enemies and the violence it engendered.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 3, 2024

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This video video is a detailed discussion reflecting on historical concepts of society and enmity, particularly focusing on the evolution of these ideas from the 16th to 18th centuries. The speaker, who seems to be an academic or historian, begins by exploring the invention of the term "society" in the 17th century and emphasizes the necessity of understanding the historical context behind its emergence.

The speaker connects the concept of enmity to human identity, explaining how conflict shapes our self-understanding and societal structures. They discuss how hostility and jealousy, especially stemming from social change and competition, intensified during periods of political and civil turmoil, particularly evident in Italy during the Italian Wars and in Germany.

The discourse touches on violence, particularly elite violence and its legal ramifications, indicating a notable rise in violent acts, like homicides, during the late 16th and 17th centuries. The significance of feuds, honor, and social mobility is noted as key factors influencing enmity in different societies.

The speaker emphasizes how the understanding and expression of conflicts have changed over time, urging that while past societies exhibited overt enmity, modern societies have learned to trivialize disputes to maintain social order. They underscore the importance of recognizing historical patterns to inform contemporary societal challenges, especially in the context of rising populism and social media conflicts.

Ultimately, the speaker proposes a need to rethink civil society and rebuild trust and civility within modern contexts, drawing lessons from the past while recognizing the unique challenges posed by contemporary social dynamics.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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Originally what I was working on was the

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invention of society.

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That's a word we all use,

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but, we don't really talk about where that came from.

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It's really invented in the 17th century.

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Um, but in order to write that book, I need

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to explain why society needed to be invented.

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Um, and, and so I, I started working on enmity.

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I'd already done quite a lot of work on violence, so I knew

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that there was a problem that needed

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to be solved in the 17th century, a a

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and so that, that, that's how I got there.

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Really, we just need to explain why we, we have

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that thing called society.

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Well, I guess really, I mean, enmity is, it's, it's part of

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what it means to be human, so that's important.

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It, it's a state of hostility with another person

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or group or another nation.

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It's a feeling that we all have, there is an,

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an emotional element to that and a, and a relationship with,

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and also a relationship with another

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or another country, another being.

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So it's also an important way of constructing ourself,

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our ourself, our self identity.

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We, we, we, we know

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who we are in con conflict with each other.

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You know, who we, which political party we support.

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There's always another political party we don't like,

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or, you know, if you're a sports fan, you,

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there's always a, a team you don't like.

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And that, that's part of how you can structure identity.

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So hostility is about is, is, is is fundamental

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or entity is fundamental about understanding

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ourself and our identity.

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Now, we might think they're trivial things

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and, you know, an academic feud, for example, I'm,

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I'm involved in lots of those petty little feuds we have

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with, I'm sure as a journalist you do the same thing.

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You don't particularly like they're trivial,

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in the public's sphere.

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But to us, they're important.

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You know, this is the kind of thing that keeps

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you and me awake at night.

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The people we don't particularly care for at work

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and the, the relationships that we have with those people.

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Um, so they're important to us and to our,

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and to our sense of self, and is also

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a dynamic relationship.

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We can learn to become friends and,

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and we can learn, you know, that's

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what the EU iss about, right?

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Um, we, we have former enemies can come together

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and learn how to cooperate.

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So it's not, it's not kind of a one way traffic.

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It's something can you, we, we can learn how to, to,

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to operate in better ways.

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There's, I think, a difference between public

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and private ems.

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I said, you know, the, the trivial petty EMS we all have

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with our neighbors and our friends,

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and our course aren't quite the same as the public ems,

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which dominate the political scene.

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I think what's different about the past,

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however, in the,

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the period I work on the early modern period,

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that's the 16th, 17th,

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and 18th centuries is the way in which in that period,

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the public and the private become very much entangled.

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The feuds and the ven debtors were important public things.

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They might have a private, private origin,

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so they could be a kind of big public concern.

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What's changing the interim between

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that period in our period is

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that we've learned to trivialize those.

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We don't, we don't make a big thing about them.

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And the state exists

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through inter mediate our social relations.

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I don't, I don't go beating up my neighbors

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because the, the state,

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Uh, mediates the relationship between me and my neighbors,

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or between my, me and my colleagues as a historian.

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What was interesting to me was the ways in which the

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medieval world was breaking down around 1500.

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Uh, you've got a world which is dominated

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by the ways in which the church reconciles enmity

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of which its rituals and structures.

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Um, and that's breaking down because of the reformation.

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You've also got social change

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and social changes mean the old world,

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the old medieval world, the IC world, the world of, of,

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of hierarchies is really breaking down

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as you're getting social mobility

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and you'll get a change in sort of class relationships and a

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and you're getting, you're

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getting social differentiation.

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So you're getting social mobility.

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Some people get, are doing pretty

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well and they're doing better than others.

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And that's creating all sorts of feelings of grievance,

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injustice, which is maybe creating more entities

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after here, 1500, once you get the state involved,

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as state power grows, you get otherwise a public office.

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Some people are doing better than others.

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So again, you're getting competition between winners

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and losers, and,

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and that's mean thees are being created, in a world

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where the medieval church has kind of broken down.

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So you, you, you, you, it's a world where we are trying

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to work out new social relations,

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and it's a world, of course, in, in the post 15 with,

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with much more civil war,

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because there's a much more civil conflict.

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Some of those are religious wars, some

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of those are internal civil conflicts, and these public

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and private entities, some of them are religious,

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Catholic against Protestants, and the personal antagonisms

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between great aristocratic plans

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or factions, they get entangled together.

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So I, I, you know, I I I, I think it got worse

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after 1500 that in some ways goes

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and got rather against a lot of what some historians say.

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Uh, there's a lot of, kind

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of fashionable kinda ish history.

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It says that modernity makes everything better

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and that the Middle Ages is terrible,

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and things get a lot better after 1500.

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If you read the book by Stephen Pinga, who's a kind

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of big thinker and sos Oxford book, he, he thinks

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that in some ways that's kind

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of 19th century historical thinking.

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Um, what I want to do is to, to really, focus on lots

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of really interesting new researchers,

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which is coming out on violence.

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And one thing we know is particularly

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a bit in on illegal violence.

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That is a massive increase in violence,

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particularly homicide rates, in the late 16th century.

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And they peak in the 17th and decline the 18th.

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And, and so this, this, this, this empties re driven

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by the elite violence elite competition in elite contention.

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And I think my, the final, reason for writing this book,

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I think, and the historical

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background, I think it's a present one.

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Uh, I very much wanted to do a kind of work

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of comparative history.

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So it's about, England, France, Germany, and Italy.

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And I wanted to, and all those states had some sort

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of civil conflict, and so they're all comparable.

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But I think in the wake of Brexit, I was very keen to show

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that England in particular is a, is a, there,

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there are differences when you do

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comparative history, there are contrasts.

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But I also wanted to, to to show that England was very part,

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much of mainstream European history.

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So these are the kind of

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motivations I had in writing the book.

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Well, it is really important

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for understanding the whole process about what's going on.

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Italy's the center of Europe, most

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educated people would've seen Italy as the center of Europe.

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And it's very important 'cause they have really

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good sources for Italy.

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Italy produces great records.

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So this, this, this rise of elite violence that we can see,

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we can map that very closely using,

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a very good judicial archives in Italy.

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So we know this phenomenon of, of an explosion

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of violence in the 16th century,

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and a decline in the 18th century is a phenomenon.

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We can, we can map that. And we could also know,

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for example, if you, if you know your Romeo

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and Juliet, that Shakespeare was describing something

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that was true, and that is the rise

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of factionalized violence in, in Italians.

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If it is a very urbanized place with lots

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of factional violence and gangs, really,

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we might call it gang culture, really.

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Um, and, and this violence is driven by leak violence and,

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and the vendetta culture.

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Now, vendetta culture didn't suddenly start in 1500,

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but it got a whole lot worse after 1500

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because of what's known as the Italian wars.

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And that's a, a, a series of wars that go on from 1494

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to 1559, which is really the struggle between France

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and Spain for control of Italy.

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Uh, but they are also great civil wars.

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They're, they're great, factual divisions between,

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pro imperialist post Spanish

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and pro French parties within Italian cities.

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And when that comes to an end, one thing

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that civil war happens,

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and if you are an American, you'll know this very well,

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once civil war comes in, that doesn't mean

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to say the violence go, comes to an end.

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Violence goes on and on

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and on the, the, the, the, the, the shocks of that,

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conflict go on for decades.

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And the legacy of that is faction and political violence.

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The other thing, that's one thing

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that was also clear about Italy, Italy's a lawless place.

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It's got a very sophisticated state bureaucracy,

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and it's got, very developed legal systems.

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It's not lawless. The thing is

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that people are fighting their disputes through the law

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and through violence at the same time.

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So litigation, the law and

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and violence is part of the same thing that's going on.

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It's, it is part of this kind of elite contention.

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Um, then Dees fought using the laws and legal risks

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and, competition for public office

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and making sure you're keeping judges happy

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becomes very important.

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Gaining control of, courts becomes important in terms

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of factional advantage.

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A particular feature of the Italian system,

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which makes Italy so violent with some of the highest rates

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of homicide ever recorded, is the problem of bandit tree.

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And that's really simply, we need to get our ideas,

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of bandit tree,

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and go beyond sort of, spa westerns really,

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bandits really simply, outlaws

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and outlaws don't tend to be marginal people,

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though they can be marginal people,

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but they tend often to be aristo aristocratic people

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or people who are part of these, these factions.

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You wanna outlaw your enemy

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and then you can legally kill them.

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So, so bandit tree's a real problem.

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You can cancel your,

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the price on your head by killing someone else.

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There's a kind of whole currency of this,

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which drives up the, the rate of violence.

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So, so the contrast, I think in Italy is, is banditry

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and the, the mechanism of outboarding,

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which doesn't really exist in the rest of Europe.

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Um, so that's, that's the, that's vendetta for you.

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Yeah, I think class is very important in

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what's driving a lot of the violence.

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So if we take dealing, for example,

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that's a very much an elite phenomenon,

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and that's coming in our period as a kind of dispute,

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re resolution between gentlemen,

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and that's making enmity much more bloody.

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And you can see that in Germany,

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and we can see that very clearly.

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So until 1495 in Germany, it was legal

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to feud that made,

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and feuding really made a, a, a violence as a form of,

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dispute settlement.

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Um, you could, that usually meant,

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training cattle or ransoming people didn't usually

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kill being killing people.

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What that shows that Germany was hundreds of years behind,

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France, Germany, Italy, most places got rid

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of feuding hundreds of years before where feuding survives

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as, as a practice,

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although it's banned by law in 1495, it survives

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as a customary practice amongst peasants.

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So a amongst ordinary folk, you still get that use

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of feuding and,

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and the rituals of has various rituals involved.

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Those rituals usually involved.

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Uh, the, the announcement of some sort of,

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it's called ab in German, that's the, that there's some sort

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of, you have some sort of injustice

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or grievance that needs settling.

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The, they're usually some form of threats.

10:39.425 --> 10:41.005
So threats of are sort of pretty common.

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Uh, they could be verbal, a verbal threat.

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I'm, unless you gimme that by land

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or give that my sheep, I'm gonna burn your barn.

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It's that kind of thing. It could be the posting

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of written libel or a challenge, or a complaint in town,

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or it could be some sort of warning, a symbol, some type

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of burning f****t or something like that,

10:59.225 --> 11:00.965
or some sort of sign that you're gonna do something

11:00.965 --> 11:04.125
unless you get, you know, an adjustment

11:04.125 --> 11:05.805
for the neighborly grievance you have.

11:06.655 --> 11:08.005
Witchcraft is part of that.

11:08.505 --> 11:11.685
So witchcraft is, is, is, is a form of, en entity

11:11.685 --> 11:14.325
because you, you, you want to kind of poison your enemies,

11:14.325 --> 11:15.325
or you want to kill their cattle,

11:15.345 --> 11:17.485
or you want witches to do incantations and things.

11:17.485 --> 11:19.605
That's called Maia that's doing harm.

11:19.835 --> 11:21.685
It's particularly associated with Germany.

11:22.265 --> 11:24.925
By far, the largest number of witches who are murdered,

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sorry, executed judicial murder are,

11:26.845 --> 11:28.085
are witch, are are in Germany.

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It's about 23,000, mainly women who are killed.

11:30.905 --> 11:33.285
So w witchcraft is a weapon of the weak.

11:33.315 --> 11:34.525
It's, it's, it's peasants.

11:34.525 --> 11:37.325
It's women who, who are using this to get at their enemies.

11:38.525 --> 11:39.865
What's happening in Germany is

11:39.865 --> 11:42.225
that the elites increasingly see that as a kind

11:42.225 --> 11:43.505
of something you don't really wanna be doing.

11:43.535 --> 11:45.145
It's, there's something the plebs do, the

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get involved in this, we wanna be gentlemen, what they start

11:48.945 --> 11:50.585
to is adopt Italian

11:50.605 --> 11:52.465
and French practice of dispute settlement.

11:52.725 --> 11:54.845
And that effectively means the cult of honor

11:55.545 --> 11:57.485
and the cult, the renaissance cult of honor.

11:57.745 --> 12:01.525
And particularly, and we can see that where we see,

12:01.525 --> 12:03.205
the adoption of Renaissance values.

12:03.745 --> 12:06.365
Um, universities, universities will have fencing masters.

12:06.705 --> 12:08.605
So when you get new, new,

12:08.625 --> 12:10.885
new universities founding in 16th century Germany,

12:11.115 --> 12:13.125
they always have a nice Italian fencing master

12:13.265 --> 12:15.085
to teach gentlemen how to fence.

12:15.665 --> 12:19.005
Um, JA German gentleman, go, go

12:19.005 --> 12:20.205
to France in Italy on a tour.

12:20.355 --> 12:23.365
They learn how to, comport themselves and how to behave.

12:23.785 --> 12:25.805
And you wanna have enmity with your peers

12:25.985 --> 12:27.485
and people above your social station.

12:27.485 --> 12:29.885
You don't really wanna have enmity with a peasant.

12:30.005 --> 12:31.445
That's not something that's very honorable.

12:31.705 --> 12:34.205
You wanna make sure that your, your disputes of people

12:34.225 --> 12:36.085
who tend to be of a higher social state,

12:36.085 --> 12:39.485
because that's, that's accruing you honor in this world

12:39.485 --> 12:41.245
of competition and contention.

12:42.025 --> 12:45.405
Um, and also what this tells us is that the medieval feud,

12:46.145 --> 12:48.005
which was based around kidnapping

12:48.005 --> 12:50.445
and ransom, is getting a lot more violent.

12:51.265 --> 12:52.645
Uh, there's a lot more killing.

12:52.665 --> 12:54.725
And we can again, see this pattern in Germany

12:54.995 --> 12:56.285
from the late 16th century.

12:56.505 --> 12:58.565
German elites adopt the deal.

12:58.945 --> 13:00.365
The numbers of murders

13:00.365 --> 13:04.005
and homicides, goes up significantly in the late 16th

13:04.065 --> 13:05.165
and 17th century.

13:05.985 --> 13:08.485
So you see this as a different pattern with

13:08.485 --> 13:11.805
what you might call Ian forms of, of, of enmity.

13:12.365 --> 13:14.325
I think the word quarrel is an important word.

13:14.665 --> 13:17.365
Um, it comes from the, the Latin quala

13:17.365 --> 13:18.805
or complaint, or the French.

13:20.025 --> 13:21.045
The French have the same word.

13:21.625 --> 13:26.285
Um, it today, when we use the word quarrel, when I,

13:26.325 --> 13:29.205
I have a quarrel with you, it really means a trivial dispute

13:29.635 --> 13:32.245
between people who are at heart on good terms.

13:32.775 --> 13:34.125
We're not real enemies.

13:34.505 --> 13:36.245
We fall out, we get, we get back together.

13:36.395 --> 13:40.035
It's a trivial thing in the 16th and 17th century.

13:40.055 --> 13:41.395
The quarrel did not mean that

13:41.905 --> 13:44.915
when Shakespeare used the word quarrel, he meant something

13:44.915 --> 13:46.755
that was really serious that was going

13:46.755 --> 13:48.995
to potentially disrupt the community

13:49.655 --> 13:51.635
or possibly at a high level the state.

13:52.715 --> 13:54.295
So a qual, the, the fact

13:54.295 --> 13:56.055
that the word qual has changed its meaning.

13:56.055 --> 13:59.455
You can use semantic changes in language to see

13:59.475 --> 14:00.615
how we've moved.

14:01.475 --> 14:03.335
And what we've done since the 17th

14:03.375 --> 14:07.575
and 18th century is that we've learned from being in society

14:08.755 --> 14:10.295
to trivialize our quarrels.

14:10.295 --> 14:12.535
We trivialize our disputes, and we do that

14:12.535 --> 14:14.535
because we know that if we make a big thing about it,

14:14.535 --> 14:17.655
if everyone did that, the social contract will be over.

14:18.445 --> 14:19.855
We'd all be, you know,

14:19.855 --> 14:21.455
we'd all be punching each other in the streets.

14:21.595 --> 14:23.655
So we know that we have to learn

14:23.795 --> 14:25.215
and trivialize our disputes.

14:25.215 --> 14:27.695
We keep them, we keep them trivial and petty,

14:27.915 --> 14:29.055
and we keep them to ourselves

14:29.055 --> 14:30.575
because it keeps us awake at night.

14:30.755 --> 14:32.295
But it doesn't disturb the neighborhood.

14:32.595 --> 14:34.815
In the 16th and 17th century, Quas tend

14:34.815 --> 14:35.815
to be public affairs.

14:36.445 --> 14:38.855
They tended to e even private ones,

14:38.855 --> 14:41.655
even private issues about land or whatever, or, or,

14:41.675 --> 14:44.655
or the law tended to be, have big imports

14:44.955 --> 14:47.455
and they can get murderously entangled when you have

14:47.455 --> 14:48.815
periods of civil conflict.

14:48.915 --> 14:51.725
So, in those periods,

14:51.875 --> 14:54.525
what becomes clear in civil wars is that private

14:54.625 --> 14:56.965
and public feelings about people get entangled.

14:58.125 --> 15:01.145
Now, early modern people thought and wrote a lot about this.

15:01.145 --> 15:03.865
Early modern thinkers, philosophers, writers,

15:04.555 --> 15:06.705
juris also, they thought a lot about this.

15:07.045 --> 15:09.585
And there's quite a lot of writing in the six, 17th,

15:09.585 --> 15:12.785
and 18 century about how we should behave and could point

15:13.005 --> 15:15.945
and be more civil towards one another, and,

15:16.005 --> 15:17.065
and that we should try.

15:17.065 --> 15:19.905
And, in all, in all, for everybody's sake,

15:20.285 --> 15:23.425
if everybody cut their cloth and was a bit more reserved

15:23.765 --> 15:25.665
and didn't take their disputes too far,

15:26.295 --> 15:27.425
then we'd all be better off.

15:27.445 --> 15:29.345
So there's a lot of, talk about that.

15:29.935 --> 15:31.585
What we've done in the interim between the,

15:31.645 --> 15:33.145
the 17th Act is we've learned

15:33.365 --> 15:35.225
to be civil in our disagreements,

15:35.565 --> 15:38.265
and that that social contract binds us all together.

15:39.045 --> 15:40.545
Ely, I don't think is, is something, what I'm trying

15:40.545 --> 15:41.785
to say here as a historian is

15:41.785 --> 15:44.025
that is a thing in the pa just in the past.

15:45.125 --> 15:47.665
Um, it's a feeling we all have.

15:48.325 --> 15:49.945
And some, sometimes that's a bad thing.

15:49.945 --> 15:51.345
We shouldn't make enemies of people

15:51.345 --> 15:52.625
who have a different race and religion,

15:52.845 --> 15:55.065
but sometimes there's, there's some good entity, you know,

15:55.125 --> 15:56.865
it might be good to stand up to Vladimir.

15:57.405 --> 15:59.225
It might be good to know who our enemies are.

15:59.325 --> 16:02.225
And it might be good to have a sense of, sometimes

16:02.225 --> 16:03.825
that those enemies are generated by injustice.

16:04.685 --> 16:07.625
You know, there, there can be real grievances.

16:07.925 --> 16:10.465
So it's not necessarily, it's something that it, it ties us,

16:10.465 --> 16:11.465
it binds us to the past.

16:11.575 --> 16:13.225
I'll say we where we travel,

16:13.285 --> 16:14.905
but we can always go back there.

16:14.905 --> 16:17.385
There's no reason to say that social contract can always be,

16:17.385 --> 16:18.665
will always stick.

16:18.805 --> 16:20.625
We may go back to a, a situation

16:20.625 --> 16:22.185
where anything could get worse.

16:22.855 --> 16:25.025
It's a particular problem in democracies

16:25.025 --> 16:28.305
because politicians can instrumentalize that and use that.

16:28.305 --> 16:30.585
And you, you know, as a journalist of instances

16:30.585 --> 16:32.585
where people will use that, now we've seen that.

16:32.725 --> 16:34.145
So we need to be very wary.

16:34.395 --> 16:37.865
We're very wary of, yeah, race, for example.

16:38.085 --> 16:40.745
And we need to be policed that and, and, and wary of it.

16:41.315 --> 16:45.265
Class entities are one that, seem to have come back.

16:45.525 --> 16:48.305
It used to be the left. Now it's the populist, right?

16:48.305 --> 16:50.865
They talk about, you know, experts, liberal elites,

16:51.045 --> 16:53.705
the blob, that, that you target a group

16:53.705 --> 16:56.065
and you, you, you, you, you put all your on that,

16:56.935 --> 16:58.465
I'll give you an example of that, a personal one.

16:58.465 --> 17:02.305
I was talking to, my, one of my son's friends

17:02.405 --> 17:04.305
and his dad hates students.

17:05.655 --> 17:07.995
Now, what's interesting about that is that this,

17:07.995 --> 17:10.915
this dad, this bloke, he son, he is also a student,

17:11.175 --> 17:13.835
so he's, his hostility to students seems irrational.

17:14.335 --> 17:16.715
But what it also tells us is the ways in which quite a lot

17:16.715 --> 17:20.275
of working class people in the society we live in could kind

17:20.275 --> 17:21.835
of feel disconnected or alienated.

17:21.865 --> 17:23.835
They feel that students are getting on doing well.

17:23.835 --> 17:26.275
He isn't doing very well. He's alienation.

17:26.535 --> 17:27.835
I'm not, I'm not saying I agree with it,

17:27.855 --> 17:30.835
but it, that that's where populism comes from, that kind

17:30.835 --> 17:32.315
of alienation that he doesn't, he doesn't,

17:32.345 --> 17:33.555
he's getting anything from society

17:33.555 --> 17:34.595
that everyone else is doing well.

17:35.135 --> 17:36.515
So that, that, that creation

17:36.515 --> 17:37.995
of entity is particular problem in liberal

17:37.995 --> 17:40.755
democracy, social media.

17:41.095 --> 17:43.915
Uh, I, I think again, future research

17:44.055 --> 17:45.075
that's gonna create a problem.

17:45.275 --> 17:46.515
'cause that prep upon, for civility

17:46.855 --> 17:48.835
and civil disagreement,

17:49.105 --> 17:51.885
we all know about online bullying and, and microaggressions

17:51.885 --> 17:54.045
and all this kind of stuff, but that's gonna be really,

17:54.045 --> 17:55.325
it's gonna get, is it gonna get worse?

17:55.325 --> 17:57.925
We, we worry about, so that, that's an area for,

17:58.465 --> 17:59.605
for future research.

18:00.025 --> 18:01.965
And as I said, we've all, we've all learned

18:01.965 --> 18:03.405
to trivialize our evidences.

18:04.405 --> 18:05.985
Um, and that's a good thing.

18:06.365 --> 18:09.505
But God forbid if we should return to civil conflict,

18:09.505 --> 18:11.505
and violence could begin become murderous.

18:11.685 --> 18:14.105
So we should be wary about civil conflict

18:14.125 --> 18:17.105
and that, if you take the, the United States,

18:17.165 --> 18:20.025
for example, very recent history,

18:20.325 --> 18:22.825
the US homicide rates have gone down significantly in the

18:23.025 --> 18:25.825
1990s and 2010s, they, they,

18:25.825 --> 18:26.905
they've gone down significantly.

18:27.005 --> 18:28.785
So, so obviously great success there.

18:29.365 --> 18:33.985
Um, is it in 2020, with the background of civil conflict

18:33.985 --> 18:37.425
with Trump, there, homicide votes jumped 30%.

18:37.485 --> 18:39.745
So you can see the point I'm making there is

18:39.745 --> 18:44.265
that you can see how civil conflict could,

18:45.105 --> 18:46.665
generate things of distrust.

18:46.925 --> 18:49.385
And I think that probably likely the, the challenge to

18:49.385 --> 18:51.185
that will probably likely to come in the populist, right?

18:51.445 --> 18:54.785
The point I'm making here, I I think in general Sam, is that

18:55.695 --> 18:58.745
history has, is a, a subject.

18:58.745 --> 19:01.705
It's not just dead in the past. It, it has lessons for us.

19:02.485 --> 19:05.505
It will not repeat itself. History will not repeat itself.

19:05.505 --> 19:06.745
But there are patterns there

19:07.415 --> 19:09.585
that it can teach us about what is important.

19:09.965 --> 19:11.585
You know, society is important.

19:11.905 --> 19:13.065
I just kind of underline that really,

19:13.065 --> 19:14.985
that history has something

19:14.985 --> 19:16.745
to say about the present and future concerns.

19:16.745 --> 19:19.425
We shouldn't be complacent. History ebbs and flows.

19:19.425 --> 19:21.225
It doesn't go in a linear way.

19:21.235 --> 19:23.665
We're not always marching somewhere to the future.

19:23.665 --> 19:25.625
Some utopian future things gonna get, always get better.

19:25.845 --> 19:29.065
It might e and flow. And we need to realize what that, how,

19:29.205 --> 19:31.185
how we can kinda rebuild society

19:31.245 --> 19:33.145
and technology changes over time that we,

19:33.485 --> 19:34.705
we really change, right?

19:34.935 --> 19:37.465
What I'm trying to do is recognizing ourselves in the past,

19:37.605 --> 19:41.185
our, our, our petty genesis, the, the emotions

19:41.185 --> 19:42.585
that we feel were very real.

19:42.935 --> 19:44.745
That the, the, the, you know, those dreams

19:44.745 --> 19:47.025
that sometimes keep us awake at night of getting even,

19:47.495 --> 19:49.905
they are things that in motivated people in the past,

19:49.905 --> 19:51.145
you only have to reach Shakespeare.

19:51.325 --> 19:53.665
So, I I, I would take that away.

19:54.245 --> 19:55.785
The other thing i, I would take away is the value

19:55.785 --> 19:56.865
of doing comparison history.

19:56.865 --> 19:59.225
So we've talked about England, we talked about Germany,

19:59.685 --> 20:02.785
we talked about, Italy.

20:03.205 --> 20:05.025
And there are contrasts definitely,

20:05.025 --> 20:06.425
but we need to know about those.

20:06.445 --> 20:08.585
If we just do English history,

20:08.585 --> 20:10.385
you're not gonna know anything because you won't

20:10.385 --> 20:11.585
have anything to compare to.

20:11.965 --> 20:13.785
Um, English history, I think has gone down a bit

20:13.785 --> 20:15.145
of a, a, a blind alley.

20:15.165 --> 20:17.425
We need to know more about other places.

20:17.485 --> 20:19.025
You need to know where we stand.

20:19.965 --> 20:22.345
And the other thing I, again, I would under,

20:22.665 --> 20:23.825
I would underline, I'll go back

20:23.825 --> 20:25.145
to this issue I talked about at the beginning.

20:25.455 --> 20:27.865
What is society? Um, Mrs.

20:27.865 --> 20:29.425
Thatcher, this is kind of some, I I,

20:29.485 --> 20:30.785
I'm a 58-year-old bloke,

20:30.785 --> 20:32.225
so I was 18-year-old when she said that.

20:32.285 --> 20:34.025
She said, there's no such thing as society.

20:34.965 --> 20:37.385
Um, the eight, the danger of that idea

20:37.385 --> 20:39.985
that we are just kinda selfish individuals pursuing our own

20:40.225 --> 20:43.145
interests and there's no social contract, is

20:43.145 --> 20:46.625
that it can destroy trust, with our

20:46.625 --> 20:48.245
Fellows and alienate us like that.

20:48.605 --> 20:49.685
Talking you from our fellows.

20:49.785 --> 20:51.805
And the danger I think of social media is that it can,

20:51.905 --> 20:52.965
it can magnify that.

20:53.265 --> 20:54.845
So I think ity is a problem.

20:55.705 --> 20:58.085
Um, I think society's a solution to that.

20:58.085 --> 20:59.845
And that that's, and that's the question I would,

20:59.965 --> 21:01.125
I would leave and I wanna think about

21:01.125 --> 21:03.445
that is the book I'm writing next is how do we

21:04.295 --> 21:06.125
build a more civil society?

21:06.585 --> 21:08.085
That's what people did in the 17th

21:08.085 --> 21:11.475
and 18th centuries, that their solution to anything was

21:11.475 --> 21:14.315
to rebuild a civil, how are we gonna do that?

21:14.555 --> 21:16.275
'cause we've got a different asset 'cause we've got social

21:16.365 --> 21:17.635
media and technology.

21:18.015 --> 21:21.635
How are we gonna rebuild social civil society

21:21.735 --> 21:22.915
in a, in a, in a different age?

21:22.915 --> 21:24.355
But I think there are lessons from the past,

21:24.375 --> 21:26.075
and certainly there are, there are connections

21:26.075 --> 21:26.555
with the past.

00:00 - Originally what I was working on was the invention of society. That's a word we all use, but, we don't really talk about where that came from. It's really invented in the 17th century. but in order to write that book, I need

00:12 - to explain why society needed to be invented. and, and so I, I started working on enmity. I'd already done quite a lot of work on violence, so I knew that there was a problem that needed to be solved in the 17th century, a a and so that, that, that's how I got there. Really, we just need to explain why we, we have that thing called society. Well, I guess really, I mean, enmity is, it's, it's part of what it means to be human, so that's important.

00:38 - It, it's a state of hostility with another person or group or another nation. It's a feeling that we all have, there is an, an emotional element to that and a, and a relationship with, and also a relationship with another or another country, another being. So it's also an important way of constructing ourself, our ourself, our self identity. We, we, we, we know who we are in con conflict with each other.

01:01 - You know, who we, which political party we support. There's always another political party we don't like, or, you know, if you're a sports fan, you, there's always a, a team you don't like. And that, that's part of how you can structure identity. So hostility is about is, is, is is fundamental or entity is fundamental about understanding ourself and our identity. Now, we might think they're trivial things and, you know, an academic feud, for example, I'm,

01:28 - I'm involved in lots of those petty little feuds we have with, I'm sure as a journalist you do the same thing. You don't particularly like they're trivial, in the public's sphere. But to us, they're important. You know, this is the kind of thing that keeps you and me awake at night. The people we don't particularly care for at work and the, the relationships that we have with those people. so they're important to us and to our,

01:47 - and to our sense of self, and is also a dynamic relationship. We can learn to become friends and, and we can learn, you know, that's what the EU iss about, right? we, we have former enemies can come together and learn how to cooperate. So it's not, it's not kind of a one way traffic. It's something can you, we, we can learn how to, to, to operate in better ways.

02:08 - There's, I think, a difference between public and private ems. I said, you know, the, the trivial petty EMS we all have with our neighbors and our friends, and our course aren't quite the same as the public ems, which dominate the political scene. I think what's different about the past, however, in the, the period I work on the early modern period, that's the 16th, 17th,

02:27 - and 18th centuries is the way in which in that period, the public and the private become very much entangled. The feuds and the ven debtors were important public things. They might have a private, private origin, so they could be a kind of big public concern. What's changing the interim between that period in our period is that we've learned to trivialize those. We don't, we don't make a big thing about them. And the state exists

02:53 - through inter mediate our social relations. I don't, I don't go beating up my neighbors because the, the state, mediates the relationship between me and my neighbors, or between my, me and my colleagues as a historian. What was interesting to me was the ways in which the medieval world was breaking down around 1500. you've got a world which is dominated by the ways in which the church reconciles enmity of which its rituals and structures.

03:17 - and that's breaking down because of the reformation. You've also got social change and social changes mean the old world, the old medieval world, the IC world, the world of, of, of hierarchies is really breaking down as you're getting social mobility and you'll get a change in sort of class relationships and a and you're getting, you're getting social differentiation. So you're getting social mobility.

03:37 - Some people get, are doing pretty well and they're doing better than others. And that's creating all sorts of feelings of grievance, injustice, which is maybe creating more entities after here, 1500, once you get the state involved, as state power grows, you get otherwise a public office. Some people are doing better than others. So again, you're getting competition between winners and losers, and, and that's mean thees are being created, in a world

04:01 - where the medieval church has kind of broken down. So you, you, you, you, it's a world where we are trying to work out new social relations, and it's a world, of course, in, in the post 15 with, with much more civil war, because there's a much more civil conflict. Some of those are religious wars, some of those are internal civil conflicts, and these public and private entities, some of them are religious, Catholic against Protestants, and the personal antagonisms

04:26 - between great aristocratic plans or factions, they get entangled together. So I, I, you know, I I I, I think it got worse after 1500 that in some ways goes and got rather against a lot of what some historians say. there's a lot of, kind of fashionable kinda ish history. It says that modernity makes everything better and that the Middle Ages is terrible, and things get a lot better after 1500.

04:51 - If you read the book by Stephen Pinga, who's a kind of big thinker and sos Oxford book, he, he thinks that in some ways that's kind of 19th century historical thinking. what I want to do is to, to really, focus on lots of really interesting new researchers, which is coming out on violence. And one thing we know is particularly a bit in on illegal violence. That is a massive increase in violence,

05:12 - particularly homicide rates, in the late 16th century. And they peak in the 17th and decline the 18th. And, and so this, this, this, this empties re driven by the elite violence elite competition in elite contention. And I think my, the final, reason for writing this book, I think, and the historical background, I think it's a present one. I very much wanted to do a kind of work of comparative history. So it's about, England, France, Germany, and Italy.

05:40 - And I wanted to, and all those states had some sort of civil conflict, and so they're all comparable. But I think in the wake of Brexit, I was very keen to show that England in particular is a, is a, there, there are differences when you do comparative history, there are contrasts. But I also wanted to, to to show that England was very part, much of mainstream European history. So these are the kind of motivations I had in writing the book.

06:02 - Well, it is really important for understanding the whole process about what's going on. Italy's the center of Europe, most educated people would've seen Italy as the center of Europe. And it's very important 'cause they have really good sources for Italy. Italy produces great records. So this, this, this rise of elite violence that we can see, we can map that very closely using, a very good judicial archives in Italy.

06:25 - So we know this phenomenon of, of an explosion of violence in the 16th century, and a decline in the 18th century is a phenomenon. We can, we can map that. And we could also know, for example, if you, if you know your Romeo and Juliet, that Shakespeare was describing something that was true, and that is the rise of factionalized violence in, in Italians. If it is a very urbanized place with lots of factional violence and gangs, really,

06:50 - we might call it gang culture, really. and, and this violence is driven by leak violence and, and the vendetta culture. Now, vendetta culture didn't suddenly start in 1500, but it got a whole lot worse after 1500 because of what's known as the Italian wars. And that's a, a, a series of wars that go on from 1494 to 1559, which is really the struggle between France and Spain for control of Italy. but they are also great civil wars.

07:17 - They're, they're great, factual divisions between, pro imperialist post Spanish and pro French parties within Italian cities. And when that comes to an end, one thing that civil war happens, and if you are an American, you'll know this very well, once civil war comes in, that doesn't mean to say the violence go, comes to an end. Violence goes on and on and on the, the, the, the, the, the shocks of that,

07:40 - conflict go on for decades. And the legacy of that is faction and political violence. The other thing, that's one thing that was also clear about Italy, Italy's a lawless place. It's got a very sophisticated state bureaucracy, and it's got, very developed legal systems. It's not lawless. The thing is that people are fighting their disputes through the law and through violence at the same time. So litigation, the law and

08:06 - and violence is part of the same thing that's going on. It's, it is part of this kind of elite contention. then Dees fought using the laws and legal risks and, competition for public office and making sure you're keeping judges happy becomes very important. Gaining control of, courts becomes important in terms of factional advantage. A particular feature of the Italian system, which makes Italy so violent with some of the highest rates

08:32 - of homicide ever recorded, is the problem of bandit tree. And that's really simply, we need to get our ideas, of bandit tree, and go beyond sort of, spa westerns really, bandits really simply, outlaws and outlaws don't tend to be marginal people, though they can be marginal people, but they tend often to be aristo aristocratic people or people who are part of these, these factions. You wanna outlaw your enemy

08:57 - and then you can legally kill them. So, so bandit tree's a real problem. You can cancel your, the price on your head by killing someone else. There's a kind of whole currency of this, which drives up the, the rate of violence. So, so the contrast, I think in Italy is, is banditry and the, the mechanism of outboarding, which doesn't really exist in the rest of Europe. so that's, that's the, that's vendetta for you.

09:20 - Yeah, I think class is very important in what's driving a lot of the violence. So if we take dealing, for example, that's a very much an elite phenomenon, and that's coming in our period as a kind of dispute, re resolution between gentlemen, and that's making enmity much more bloody. And you can see that in Germany, and we can see that very clearly. So until 1495 in Germany, it was legal

09:43 - to feud that made, and feuding really made a, a, a violence as a form of, dispute settlement. you could, that usually meant, training cattle or ransoming people didn't usually kill being killing people. What that shows that Germany was hundreds of years behind, France, Germany, Italy, most places got rid of feuding hundreds of years before where feuding survives as, as a practice,

10:10 - although it's banned by law in 1495, it survives as a customary practice amongst peasants. So a amongst ordinary folk, you still get that use of feuding and, and the rituals of has various rituals involved. Those rituals usually involved. the, the announcement of some sort of, it's called ab in German, that's the, that there's some sort of, you have some sort of injustice or grievance that needs settling.

10:37 - The, they're usually some form of threats. So threats of are sort of pretty common. they could be verbal, a verbal threat. I'm, unless you gimme that by land or give that my sheep, I'm gonna burn your barn. It's that kind of thing. It could be the posting of written libel or a challenge, or a complaint in town, or it could be some sort of warning, a symbol, some type of burning f****t or something like that, or some sort of sign that you're gonna do something

11:00 - unless you get, you know, an adjustment for the neighborly grievance you have. Witchcraft is part of that. So witchcraft is, is, is, is a form of, en entity because you, you, you want to kind of poison your enemies, or you want to kill their cattle, or you want witches to do incantations and things. That's called Maia that's doing harm. It's particularly associated with Germany. By far, the largest number of witches who are murdered,

11:24 - sorry, executed judicial murder are, are witch, are are in Germany. It's about 23,000, mainly women who are killed. So w witchcraft is a weapon of the weak. It's, it's, it's peasants. It's women who, who are using this to get at their enemies. What's happening in Germany is that the elites increasingly see that as a kind of something you don't really wanna be doing. It's, there's something the plebs do, the

11:45 - get involved in this, we wanna be gentlemen, what they start to is adopt Italian and French practice of dispute settlement. And that effectively means the cult of honor and the cult, the renaissance cult of honor. And particularly, and we can see that where we see, the adoption of Renaissance values. universities, universities will have fencing masters. So when you get new, new, new universities founding in 16th century Germany,

12:11 - they always have a nice Italian fencing master to teach gentlemen how to fence. JA German gentleman, go, go to France in Italy on a tour. They learn how to, comport themselves and how to behave. And you wanna have enmity with your peers and people above your social station. You don't really wanna have enmity with a peasant. That's not something that's very honorable. You wanna make sure that your, your disputes of people

12:34 - who tend to be of a higher social state, because that's, that's accruing you honor in this world of competition and contention. and also what this tells us is that the medieval feud, which was based around kidnapping and ransom, is getting a lot more violent. there's a lot more killing. And we can again, see this pattern in Germany from the late 16th century. German elites adopt the deal.

12:58 - The numbers of murders and homicides, goes up significantly in the late 16th and 17th century. So you see this as a different pattern with what you might call Ian forms of, of, of enmity. I think the word quarrel is an important word. it comes from the, the Latin quala or complaint, or the French. The French have the same word. it today, when we use the word quarrel, when I,

13:26 - I have a quarrel with you, it really means a trivial dispute between people who are at heart on good terms. We're not real enemies. We fall out, we get, we get back together. It's a trivial thing in the 16th and 17th century. The quarrel did not mean that when Shakespeare used the word quarrel, he meant something that was really serious that was going to potentially disrupt the community or possibly at a high level the state.

13:52 - So a qual, the, the fact that the word qual has changed its meaning. You can use semantic changes in language to see how we've moved. And what we've done since the 17th and 18th century is that we've learned from being in society to trivialize our quarrels. We trivialize our disputes, and we do that because we know that if we make a big thing about it, if everyone did that, the social contract will be over.

14:18 - We'd all be, you know, we'd all be punching each other in the streets. So we know that we have to learn and trivialize our disputes. We keep them, we keep them trivial and petty, and we keep them to ourselves because it keeps us awake at night. But it doesn't disturb the neighborhood. In the 16th and 17th century, Quas tend to be public affairs.

14:36 - They tended to e even private ones, even private issues about land or whatever, or, or, or the law tended to be, have big imports and they can get murderously entangled when you have periods of civil conflict. So, in those periods, what becomes clear in civil wars is that private and public feelings about people get entangled. Now, early modern people thought and wrote a lot about this. Early modern thinkers, philosophers, writers,

15:04 - juris also, they thought a lot about this. And there's quite a lot of writing in the six, 17th, and 18 century about how we should behave and could point and be more civil towards one another, and, and that we should try. And, in all, in all, for everybody's sake, if everybody cut their cloth and was a bit more reserved and didn't take their disputes too far, then we'd all be better off. So there's a lot of, talk about that.

15:29 - What we've done in the interim between the, the 17th Act is we've learned to be civil in our disagreements, and that that social contract binds us all together. Ely, I don't think is, is something, what I'm trying to say here as a historian is that is a thing in the pa just in the past. it's a feeling we all have. And some, sometimes that's a bad thing. We shouldn't make enemies of people

15:51 - who have a different race and religion, but sometimes there's, there's some good entity, you know, it might be good to stand up to Vladimir. It might be good to know who our enemies are. And it might be good to have a sense of, sometimes that those enemies are generated by injustice. You know, there, there can be real grievances. So it's not necessarily, it's something that it, it ties us, it binds us to the past. I'll say we where we travel,

16:13 - but we can always go back there. There's no reason to say that social contract can always be, will always stick. We may go back to a, a situation where anything could get worse. It's a particular problem in democracies because politicians can instrumentalize that and use that. And you, you know, as a journalist of instances where people will use that, now we've seen that. So we need to be very wary.

16:34 - We're very wary of, yeah, race, for example. And we need to be policed that and, and, and wary of it. Class entities are one that, seem to have come back. It used to be the left. Now it's the populist, right? They talk about, you know, experts, liberal elites, the blob, that, that you target a group and you, you, you, you, you put all your on that, I'll give you an example of that, a personal one. I was talking to, my, one of my son's friends and his dad hates students.

17:05 - Now, what's interesting about that is that this, this dad, this bloke, he son, he is also a student, so he's, his hostility to students seems irrational. But what it also tells us is the ways in which quite a lot of working class people in the society we live in could kind of feel disconnected or alienated. They feel that students are getting on doing well. He isn't doing very well. He's alienation. I'm not, I'm not saying I agree with it, but it, that that's where populism comes from, that kind

17:30 - of alienation that he doesn't, he doesn't, he's getting anything from society that everyone else is doing well. So that, that, that creation of entity is particular problem in liberal democracy, social media. I, I think again, future research that's gonna create a problem. 'cause that prep upon, for civility and civil disagreement,

17:49 - we all know about online bullying and, and microaggressions and all this kind of stuff, but that's gonna be really, it's gonna get, is it gonna get worse? We, we worry about, so that, that's an area for, for future research. And as I said, we've all, we've all learned to trivialize our evidences. and that's a good thing. But God forbid if we should return to civil conflict, and violence could begin become murderous.

18:11 - So we should be wary about civil conflict and that, if you take the, the United States, for example, very recent history, the US homicide rates have gone down significantly in the 1990s and 2010s, they, they, they've gone down significantly. So, so obviously great success there. is it in 2020, with the background of civil conflict with Trump, there, homicide votes jumped 30%. So you can see the point I'm making there is

18:39 - that you can see how civil conflict could, generate things of distrust. And I think that probably likely the, the challenge to that will probably likely to come in the populist, right? The point I'm making here, I I think in general Sam, is that history has, is a, a subject. It's not just dead in the past. It, it has lessons for us. It will not repeat itself. History will not repeat itself. But there are patterns there that it can teach us about what is important.

19:09 - You know, society is important. I just kind of underline that really, that history has something to say about the present and future concerns. We shouldn't be complacent. History ebbs and flows. It doesn't go in a linear way. We're not always marching somewhere to the future. Some utopian future things gonna get, always get better. It might e and flow. And we need to realize what that, how, how we can kinda rebuild society

19:31 - and technology changes over time that we, we really change, right? What I'm trying to do is recognizing ourselves in the past, our, our, our petty genesis, the, the emotions that we feel were very real. That the, the, the, you know, those dreams that sometimes keep us awake at night of getting even, they are things that in motivated people in the past, you only have to reach Shakespeare. So, I I, I would take that away.

19:54 - The other thing i, I would take away is the value of doing comparison history. So we've talked about England, we talked about Germany, we talked about, Italy. And there are contrasts definitely, but we need to know about those. If we just do English history, you're not gonna know anything because you won't have anything to compare to. English history, I think has gone down a bit

20:13 - of a, a, a blind alley. We need to know more about other places. You need to know where we stand. And the other thing I, again, I would under, I would underline, I'll go back to this issue I talked about at the beginning. What is society? Mrs. Thatcher, this is kind of some, I I, I'm a 58-year-old bloke, so I was 18-year-old when she said that.

20:32 - She said, there's no such thing as society. the eight, the danger of that idea that we are just kinda selfish individuals pursuing our own interests and there's no social contract, is that it can destroy trust, with our Fellows and alienate us like that. Talking you from our fellows. And the danger I think of social media is that it can, it can magnify that. So I think ity is a problem.

20:55 - I think society's a solution to that. And that that's, and that's the question I would, I would leave and I wanna think about that is the book I'm writing next is how do we build a more civil society? That's what people did in the 17th and 18th centuries, that their solution to anything was to rebuild a civil, how are we gonna do that? 'cause we've got a different asset 'cause we've got social media and technology.

21:18 - How are we gonna rebuild social civil society in a, in a, in a different age? But I think there are lessons from the past, and certainly there are, there are connections with the past.

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