In this new book, which builds on his 2006 Blood and Violence in Early Modern France, Carroll takes aim at what he sees as an all too persistent teleological view of the connections between violence, the state, and modernity. Too many historians, he suggests, still distinguish the early modern from the medieval by arguing for a civilizing process, in which external social controls imposed by states were gradually translated by their subjects into self-restraint and levels of interpersonal violence declined. Representative is Steven Pinker, whose work comes in at several points for scathing critique (see e.g. 460–61). To undermine these arguments, Carroll focuses not on violence itself but rather on enmity, which he defines as the emotion or state of opposition or hostility (1). He explores how and why ordinary people in early modern Europe made enemies, how they characterized them, and how they dealt with them (5). His study spans the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries and deals in sequence with Italy, Germany, France, and England, before finishing with a set of thematic comparisons and a brief conclusion. This is therefore a very big and complicated book; my comments will inevitably oversimplify what is a lengthy, complex, and nuanced set of arguments. Nevertheless, clear argumentative threads connect all parts of the whole, and it is on these that I will focus.

Carroll focuses on local conflicts and how they were influenced by their larger contexts, whether political, social, economic, or religious. He makes particular use of what he calls “ego-documents” (see 17–18, 373), that is, first-person reflections such as diaries, journals, or chronicles, whose relative plenty distinguishes the early modern from the medieval period. He supports his primary sources with an impressive troll through the secondary literature in all the relevant languages. First and foremost, he demonstrates that rates of interpersonal violence (captured in the common metric of the number of homicides per 100,000 of population per year) did not fall uniformly or consistently in the post-medieval period; they rather increased across Europe from the middle of the sixteenth century and peaked in the first half of the seventeenth, before steeply declining in the eighteenth. Taking a star turn here, but by no means unique, is Italy, whose turbulence poses serious problems for theories based on claims of a linear decline of violence (3). Law and punitive justice did little to curb the rise of interpersonal violence and were not at all responsible for its fall. Disputants pursued their enemies in whatever ways were available and likely to be helpful, whether these led to litigation or violent self-help, or both. High rates of litigation, therefore, do not mean that states were successfully suppressing interpersonal violence. Quite the opposite: litigation rates in fact track quite well with rates of homicide (see inter alia 4, 183, 249).

Carroll explains his evidence with a story in which medieval systems of dispute management, that were predisposed towards mediation and settlement (e.g. but not exclusively the highly regulated system of feuding in late medieval Germany), were upset by political changes or disruptions (i.e. wars), or by economic transformations that sharpened competition for resources and status. Political conflict gave local enmities new outlets and languages for expression, added energy to them, and frequently overwhelmed long-standing local mechanisms for containing conflict. Economic and demographic changes likewise placed traditional methods of social control under strain. Older elites, faced with competition from people taking advantage of economic growth to climb up the social ladder, either lashed out at them or were attacked by them.

Adding to the toxic mix, Carroll argues, was a culture of honor that appeared first in Italy and then spread across Europe. This culture too sharpened local disputes and made it more likely that they would turn violent, since fears about social status and relationships, loss of face, etc. became for many men (and women) quite literally matters of life and death. The rules of civility that emerged from this culture were not an antidote to violence; they often fueled it, since failing to adhere to them could easily be interpreted as (and could be deliberately wielded as) a slight (see e.g. for Italy 110, for England 369).

Early modern states, far from capturing and controlling personal enmities, all too often fueled them and inclined them towards violence. New and insecure states, e.g. in sixteenth-century Italy, resorted to assassinations, executions, and extra-judicial terror; these actions legitimated the resort to such tactics not among elites but across the social spectrum (see e.g. for Italy 120, for Germany 155). Violence likewise spiked when states inserted themselves into previously marginal areas. These upset delicate local equilibria; simply by offering new opportunities for office, patronage, or reward they increased the stakes and therefore levels of conflict in local societies (see e.g. 285 on the seventeenth century Languedoc). And law was not simply the state’s tool. People on the ground used law for their own purposes, to pursue their enmities and to get the state to carry out their dirty work for them; legal action could provoke an honor-based, violent response. And what the law said shaped how people carried out violence. In Venice, for example, cuckolded husbands who responded violently had, to be treated leniently, to demonstrate that they had been driven by jealous fury; this naturally affected what they did to their victims (123). Available legal resources included the local jurisdictional claims of churches; a constant thread throughout the book is the strategic and tactical use of asylum rights for disputants looking for safe places to hide, from which to launch negotiations, or within which to fight duels (see e.g. for Italy 56–64). Carroll does not, however, see confessional difference after the Reformation as itself a primary driver of violence; in the Empire, for example, members of different confessions seem to have coexisted peaceably well into the seventeenth century. It was the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, in his opinion, that upset fragile local equilibria and made the resort to self-help in private disputes more necessary and more lethal (179).

In short, Carroll’s book argues that violence did not need to be overcome for modernity to be achieved; it was a product of modernity itself. It was only as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth that things began to change, as violence gradually ceased to be useful for social and political advancement. The creation of standing armies increased the patronage available to princes and provided another route for social competition and advancement—and abolished the class of underemployed soldiers available for hire in local disputes (262). In Italy, larger states progressively devoured their smaller neighbors; this eased border disputes and limited the career opportunities for fractious marcher lords and bandits (137). In the Empire, traumatic experiences of violence led large numbers of people to decide that order provided by a strong state was a supreme public good (262). One symptom was a revival of Stoicism that prioritized self-control to mitigate the problems of civil conflict (394, 404). Carroll goes so far as to argue that in the end, “Society and the social contract were born out of the violence that came in the wake of the Reformation and the Renaissance cult of individual honor” (465). Even these changes, however, could not prevent the outbreak of violence when local actors felt wronged. In France, an Ancien Régime legal system, that had promoted stability by taking a transactional approach to justice, ultimately provoked a backlash by those without the power to buy or influence outcomes that by the end of the eighteenth century brought down the regime itself (314, 462).

This student of medieval violence can only envy the rich source base that makes this kind of sweeping, comparative, and at the same time granular investigation possible. The book is not, however, without problems. Carroll often seems to take readers’ knowledge of the larger political context affecting his local disputes (e.g., the Italian Wars, the English Civil Wars, the Thirty Years War) for granted. At times, he offers long streams of (admittedly highly entertaining and/or disturbing) conflict stories with little analysis; I often felt that I needed more interpretive help to make sense of all the information I was getting. The explanations he does weave in occasionally seem a bit pat and undeveloped, e.g., on the end of aristocratic feuding in the Venetian borderlands: “It was the development of the concept of a European balance of power and adherence to a more rule-based international system that rendered marcher lords redundant” (130). And his cultural arguments sometimes seem to be carrying more argumentative weight than they can support. The Renaissance “cult of honor,” for example, or the neo-Stoic revival: how far down the social scale did these penetrate? How much structural transformation can we really ascribe to changes in elite attitudes?

While he is very careful to define “enmity,” Carroll leaves some other key terms, whose meanings are not necessarily trans-culturally fixed, undefined, e.g. murder, violence, public order, or, crucially, the state (which, despite its importance to his discussion, does not even rate an index entry). His medieval baseline is a bit one-dimensional; a great deal of what he points out in the early modern period can be found there (e.g. violence provoked by economic expansion and concomitant social mobility; local actors using the law and courts to pursue private enmities). Finally, some might see Carroll's arguments for the impact of neo-Stoicism and similar ideas about elite self-restraint in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and for the creation of the idea of the “social contract,” as perhaps just a different version, displaced in time and context, of the old argument for the “civilizing process.”

These critiques notwithstanding, Carroll has produced a book that makes and secures some very important points about the relationships between politics, economics, culture, local enmities, and violence in early modern Europe. He clearly demonstrates that violence did not ebb with modernity, and that the political, economic, and religious developments, increasing state power and the rules of “civility,” in fact provoked more of it. He thus renders the old teleological arguments about the decline of violence across the period even more untenable than they already were.