In addition to asking Rome for more money to defend the Mediterranean, Philip also pressed for higher taxes from the people of the Low Countries to pay for their own defense. Castile could no longer send more money there. It had already done so intensively between 1556 and 1559 to defeat France. The Castilian elites were unwilling to continue paying for wars they did not consider their own. Their Flemish subjects, however, were reluctant to accept this tax increase, especially in a context of religious repression. Various political and institutional problems prevented Philip from achieving the tax reform he intended. What began as a revolt ended up as a costly and endless war that demanded an even greater financial effort from Castile and determined the rest of the reign.

After the Prophetic era ended, Islam quickly expanded and became intertwined with state authority, prompting early debates about legitimate leadership, true faith, apostasy, disbelief, and takfīr. As Islam developed into a state religion in the first two centuries, political rulers increasingly policed the boundaries of belief and employed accusations of apostasy to eliminate rivals. Takfīr thus emerged less as a theological judgment and more as a political tool, creating precedents that modern jihadi groups, including ISIS, would later appropriate. The chapter traces how jurists have defined takfīr and how it has been applied in practice. While absent from the Prophet’s lifetime, takfīr became a mechanism used by subsequent Muslim states to suppress rebellion and preserve political authority. Its continued use into the modern period, often targeting political opponents, reveals how ideology shapes religious interpretation and underscores the profound distinction between Islamic teachings and ISIS’s ideological project.

The outbreak of the 1641 Rebellion is the focus here. The chapter traces events leading up to 22–23 October but is especially concerned with how immediate understandings and assumptions about the rebellion were crucial in shaping it as a religious conflict. In particular, the testimony of Owen O’Connolly as the plot discloser, and the reaction of the Dublin government, especially its proclamation blaming ‘evil-affected Irish Papists’ for the rising, is examined as being fundamental for casting events in a religious light and for sowing early fears of sectarian massacre and expulsion. Those early days, weeks and months would be foundational for the course of the rebellion and subsequent conflict.

The conclusion offers the opportunity to reconsider the book’s main themes and to rehearse its central argument for the importance of religion to seventeenth-century Ireland, especially in understanding patterns of tension and conflict that were fully manifested in the 1641 Irish Rebellion. It also offers reflection on several potential avenues of future research, including the role of religion in early modern imperialism, especially the nature and justifications for violence, and about the place of atrocity and atrocity literature in building histories of the nascent British Empire, in which Ireland played a crucial, but as yet not fully understood, role.

The introduction brings the reader into the world of seventeenth-century Ireland. It offers a brief overview of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, especially the legacies of rebellion and violence that were present at the opening of the study in 1603. It considers broadly English understandings of and policy towards Ireland across a wide timespan, before introducing some of the key differences that emerged in the early seventeenth century. It offers a survey of important historiography and a reflection on source materials, particularly the 1641 Depositions and associated materials, before concluding with an overview of the book’s structure.

According to a famous story published in 1830 in the memoirs of the comte de Montlosier and repeated a year later in a biography of the duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt written by his son, Louis XVI was said to have asked the duke on 12 July 1789 whether the popular insurrection then underway in Paris was a revolt. ‘No, sire’, came the reply, ‘it is a revolution’.1 It is still usual to take the story to be indicative, first, of the categorical difference between a revolt and a revolution; second, of the new meaning imposed by the events of 1789 on earlier concepts of revolution; and third, of Louis XVI’s characteristic failure to keep up, both with conceptual innovations and with events in France. Before the French Revolution, it is said, the concept of revolution meant something circular and referred standardly to a process closer to the literal meaning of a revolution. In this usage, a revolution meant reverting to origins, going back to first principles, reviving something original by, in keeping with the same metaphor, reforming root and branch or, more simply, doing something radical.

Chapter Four explores the politics of sectarianism and statecraft within the context of the triangular relationship among the Ottoman state, the Safavid state, and the Qizilbash communities situated between them. The chapter examines how the Ottoman state and its Qizilbash subjects devised diverse strategies to navigate their religious sensitivities, sociopolitical realities, and fiscal imperatives. A new set of questions is introduced to challenge the prevailing notion that the relationship between the “Sunni Ottoman” state and its “non-Sunni Qizilbash” subjects was inherently irreconcilable and characterized by continuous persecution of these supposedly powerless, defenseless religious nonconformists. It reveals the existence of a range of policies and approaches adopted by the Ottoman state, from providing financial support to establishing quid pro quo arrangements, from accommodating Qizilbash subjects to resorting to surveillance and heavy-handed suppression and persecution of the very same populations. The chapter emphasizes that the Ottoman Qizilbash, as significant powerholders during this period, exerted their influence not only through practices of conversion and reconversion but also through negotiation, migration, intervention, and at times rebellion.

The Irish parliament was abolished in 1800 and those who supported its abolition were then and thereafter known as unionists. The 1798 rebellion, organized by Irish republicans led by Wolfe Tone, incorporating Catholic and Protestant and partly supported by the French, had alarmed the British. Most Penal legislation was gone by 1792 but Catholics were still not allowed to stand for parliament. Daniel O’Connell challenged this with a campaign culminating in Catholic Emancipation in 1829, and his subsequent campaign to repeal the union continued this constitutional nationalism. Various administrative, legal and educational reforms in the 1830s dismantled Protestant privilege some more. Meanwhile, the population of the poorest continued to grow, surviving precariously on the potato, until over a million died in the Great Famine of 1845–1849, and another 900,000 panic-emigrated. The small and unsuccessful Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 expressed a physical force nationalism that O’Connell had disavowed, and kept the focus on Irish grievances.

By 1850, the Irish language was in serious decline all over the country.

This chapter provides a critical analysis of the material scope of NIAC and is divided into seven sections. The first explores the material concepts of NIAC pursuant to both CA3 and APII,  and explores how the drafters understood these  concept and how it has been interpreted in practice. Second, it examines the concept of NIAC contained in Additional Protocol II of 1977, looking at how its distinct identity emerged, as well as its specific material elements. The second section explores some of the legal and operational challenges that arise from the existence of two categories of NIAC, and in particular how the activation of APII can fragment the applicable legal regime, resulting in fluctuating levels of protection during NIAC. The fourth section undertakes a comparative analysis of the material scope and associated threshold of NIAC pursuant to the Tadić definition of NIAC (CA3) and that contained in APII, in order to identify areas of convergence and divergence. The fifth section explores how developments in both customary and conventional IHL applicable during NIAC have influenced its material scope and, in particular, the level of organization armed groups require in order to qualify as a Party to a NIAC. Following from the conclusions of sections four and five, the sixth section assesses the continued relevance of the distinction between CA3 and APII NIACs in practice.

Even with emancipation firmly in view as a goal of ending the civil war, Lincoln had to struggle against unsuccessful and even uncooperative generals and officers, and against public opinion which was inflamed by the sensational arrests of prominent anti-war democratic dissidents. Through 1863, his public utterances and writings were aimed at explaining the overall object of the war and justifying actions he had taken to pursue that object. Nevertheless, he was willing to listen to peace overtures, and even to meet with commissioners from the confederacy. But there were moments of discouragement, particularly when it seemed that he might not gain re-election to the presidency. Those fears were largely dispelled by the military successes of Ulysses s. Grant, and Lincoln was able to proceed to a triumphant conclusion of the military campaigns in 1865.

Abraham Lincoln entered onto the presidency even as the breakaway southern confederacy was in the process of detaching itself from the union. Lincoln undestood this as a defiance of the constitution and an undermining of democracy (as represented by the election of 1860) and he initiated war measures to suppress what he would recognize only as a rebellion. He was careful not to agitate public opposition by billing this suppression as an abolition campaign. Nevertheless, union forces met with repeated defeats, and Lincoln was frustrated by over-mighty generals who believed that they knew better than he what was at stake. This frustration nudged him further toward incorporating some form of abolition into his war plans.

The Revolution is often remembered in the public consciousness for doing away with censorship, yet the reality was somewhat different, especially when it came to remembering the decade of 1789–99. This chapter analyses how such representations across genres from ballet to fait historique were censored both laterally and bureaucratically from the calling of the Estates General in 1788 through to the coup of 18 Brumaire in November 1799, passing through cities like Nîmes, Brussels, Dijon, Tours, and Bordeaux, alongside Paris. After the initial relaxation of censorship in the early 1790s, it soon returned and there was a stark rise in bureaucratic censorship during the Directory. However, audiences, playwrights, and theatres throughout the Revolution were prepared to use the stage to reject the official view of political progress, at times leading to an overt rejection of the regime in place and bringing major cities to the brink of rebellion.

The military revolt and widespread rebellion that overtook north India in 1857 was, arguably, the most significant challenge to the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Given the global historical significance of 1857, it is not surprising that the events of that year have been subjected to intense scrutiny by historians – especially as that fateful year began to loom large after 1900 as “India’s First War of Independence.” Historians have long noted that the first serious blood spilled in 1857 occurred in the military garrison town of Meerut, north of Delhi. And historians almost always point to the catalyzing role of local women – usually described as “prostitutes” – of the cantonment bazaar, who were said to have provided the spark that set the cantonment on fire. But who were these women? Surprisingly, despite 170 years of historiography, this question has not been asked till now. It is at the heart of the present study.

In an era steeped in national stereotypes that bled into slanders and hatred, the English were notorious in later medieval Europe for three things: drunkenness, bearing a tail and killing their kings. But it is with the implications of another alleged propensity – for waging wars of conquest that sought to turn neighbours into subjects – that this chapter is largely concerned. By the later Middle Ages, the bellicose reputation of England’s kings reverberated across Christendom. Jean Froissart (d. c. 1405), the chronicler of chivalry who visited the court of Edward III, noted that, because of their great conquests, the English were ‘always more inclined to war than peace’.

This chapter examines the relationship between the king and his ‘ordinary’ subjects and asks whether such a thing as ‘public opinion’ evolved over the period to play a role in politics. For medieval historians, ‘the public’ used to be synonymous with the nobility and gentry. They were the section of the population that had some formal role in governance and had time outside of the demands of labour to devote to political questions. However, recent scholarship has emphasised that most if not all people in later medieval England had access to texts, could hear them read aloud and discuss their contents. This has led to a reappraisal of the later medieval public, towards an expansionist view that includes people below the ranks of the gentry as politically aware and engaged.

In this chapter we apply the theoretical model we introduced earlier to the behaviour of leaders to find out what alarms them, and under what conditions they are able and willing to order repression. We do not argue that we can accurately predict and explain every act of violence and repression. But we show how it helps us understand empirical patterns of repression. This model can inform our assessment of when we are most likely to observe human rights violations. To explain how context shapes human rights violations, we concentrate on why political regimes influence leaders’ threat perceptions and why democracies have the best human rights records, and why they do not always guarantee the protection of everyone’s basic rights. We outline the influence of mass dissent and of socio-economic factors. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of how context shaped respect for human rights in six countries.