British Journal of Criminology 51(3)

Human Evolution, History and Violence: An Introduction
Manuel Eisner

This special issue brings together original contributions by scholars from various disciplines that examine how evolutionary and historical research can advance our understanding of violence. In combining archaeological, anthropological, biological, sociological, and historical research the papers outline a perspective that transcends the conventional boundaries of criminology. Its core feature is the idea that we need a better understanding of the interaction between the evolutionary forces that shape the universal mechanisms associated with violence, and the ways in which social institutions, beliefs and structures of daily life control or amplify the potential for violent action.

A Change of Perspective: Integrating Evolutionary Psychology into the Historiography of Violence
John Carter Wood

Despite lively debates in many related fields about whether biological and evolutionary approaches can contribute to social and cultural investigations of human behaviour, historians have rarely confronted this issue directly. The historiography of violence is a partial exception, but there has been relatively little interdisciplinary exchange on topics central to both historical and natural-science analyses. Nevertheless, historians of violence have relied upon two concepts—‘social roles’ and ‘social construction’—that have been subject to constructive critique and revision from Darwinian perspectives. This article concludes by arguing that greater incorporation of evolutionary psychological perspectives and approaches into social and cultural analyses of violence (whether historical or contemporary) has much to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of physical aggression.

Violence and Society in the Deep Human Past
Ian Armit

The past two decades have seen important changes in the ways in which archaeologists perceive interpersonal violence in the past. Prehistoric archaeology in particular provides a unique long-term perspective on the development and institutionalization of violence in human societies, adding a further dimension to the work of cultural anthropologists studying more recent non-state societies. Evidence can be drawn from a range of sources, including material culture, settlement patterning, iconography and (crucially) patterns of trauma in human remains. The interpretation of such evidence remains inseparable from wider contextual understandings of prehistoric social forms and practices. This paper considers the specific role of archaeological evidence in establishing a broader historical context for the study of violence.

Retaliatory Violence in Human Prehistory
Christopher Boehm

Homicide often spurs lethal retaliation through self-help and this response is widespread among human foragers because brothers are often co-resident in mobile bands. The roots of this behaviour can be traced back to the shared ancestor of humans, chimpanzees and bonobos, which had strong tendencies to form social dominance hierarchies and to fight, and strong tendencies for alpha peacemakers to stop fights. As well-armed humans were becoming culturally modern, they were living in mobile egalitarian hunting bands that lacked such strong peace makers and lethal retaliation had free play. This continued with tribal agriculturalists who were equally egalitarian, but they tended to live in patrilineal communities, with the males staying put at marriage, and people with such fraternal interest groups developed elaborate rules for feuding. State formation finally brought centralized social control sufficient to put an end to feuding, but self-help killing still continues in certain contexts in modern society.

Biology and the Deep History of Homicide
Randolph Roth

Social science historians are discovering deep patterns in the history of homicide rates. Murders of children by parents or caregivers correlate inversely with fertility rates and appear to be a function of the cost of children relative to parental resources and to parental ambitions for themselves and their children. Murders among unrelated adults correlate with feelings towards government and society. These patterns may represent facultative adaptations to variable or unstable habitats (including social habitats) that may favour the nurture or neglect of children in the first instance, or cooperation or aggression among unrelated adults in the second. Human neural and endocrine systems may have evolved to facilitate such shifts in behaviour.

Killing Kings: Patterns of Regicide in Europe, AD 600–1800
Manuel Eisner

This paper examines the frequency of violent death and regicide amongst 1,513 monarchs in 45 monarchies across Europe between AD 600 and 1800. The analyses reveal that all types of violence combined account for about 22 per cent of all deaths. Murder is by far the most important violent cause of death, accounting for about 15 per cent of all deaths and corresponding to a homicide rate of about 1,000 per 100,000 ruler-years. Analyses of trends over time reveal a significant decline in the frequency of both battle deaths and homicide between the Early Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century. A significant part of the drop occurred during the first half of the period, suggesting that the civilizing processes assumed by Norbert Elias started between the seventh and the twelfth centuries. Finally, preliminary analyses suggest that regicide has a significant ‘autoregressive’ component in that the murder of the predecessor and the pre-predecessor increases the risk of homicide for the current monarch. It is suggested that such bundles of regicide may be interpreted as part of extended periods of civil wars and feuding that accompanied the state-building process. The paper concludes by suggesting several individual and contextual risk factors that may be involved in the risk of regicide.

Violence in Non-State Societies: A Review
Amy E. Nivette

Anthropological sources on non-state, tribal societies offer a wealth of evidence on violence that can expand the spatial and temporal gaze of criminological research. Reviewing this literature allows for a more comparative analysis of patterns of violence and challenges contemporary notions of social change and order. This paper provides an overview of the most relevant anthropological evidence on patterns of violence in non-state societies. Specifically, trends and overall levels of violence, age and sex patterns as well as social and environmental factors are reviewed in order to determine whether contemporary concepts and patterns of violence are universal or culturally specific. The findings presented here indicate that violence in non-state societies is a ubiquitous but culturally varying phenomenon used by males and may be related to interdependent social organizations and networks of exchange.

Criminal Justice, Coercion and Consent In ‘Totalitarian’ Society: The Case of National Socialist Germany
Eric A. Johnson

Scholars and layman alike have long assumed that the Nazi regime kept the German people in line by employing heavy doses of coercion involving arbitrary justice and lethal repression meted out by dreaded organizations of the Nazi criminal justice system such as the Gestapo and so-called Special Courts. Between the late 1980s and early 2000s, this view was challenged by a number of scholars who gained access to and analysed previously unavailable archival evidence and who became convinced that the Nazis did not rule primarily through coercion; rather, the Nazi regime was popular with most Germans who gave the regime their voluntary consent. Most recently, however, new proponents of the original view of Nazi support based more on coercion than consent have become popular again. This article employs an unprecedented combination of different types of empirical evidence to determine which view best characterizes the support for the Nazi movement during the Third Reich. The main types of evidence employed are quantitative analyses of thousands of archival files generated by policing and court bodies in three Rhineland cities and thousands of written questionnaires involving Jewish and non-Jewish German people who had resided in cities and smaller communities across the Third Reich.

British Journal of Criminology, May 2011: Volume 51, Issue 3