Chapter 7 covers David’s moral downfall and the disastrous implications for his family, including the rape of Tamar and the rebellion of Absalom. The closing pages of 2 Samuel look back and raise further questions about who David was and the kind of God who was involved with him.

Chapter 1 introduces the geopolitical and scientific–colonial context of eighteenth-century Mauritius, primarily from the perspective of its governance. Mauritius was a French colony, and a very expensive one to run. It was managed by the Compagnie des Indes (CIO) until 1763 and then, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (and dissolution of the CIO), was purchased by the French crown. By setting out the hidden dynamics of empire, this chapter provides a detailed discussion that explains why Mauritius was primarily a stopping-off point in the period under review rather than an island of commerce. A key finding concerns the internal divisions within the island over its management and policy, which is an important revision to prevailing assumptions in the historiography that such interests would be divided between policymakers in the metropole and those in the colony, where each has been assumed to represent a unified view. Hence, it examines the various experiments in colonial autonomy undertaken on Mauritius between the 1760s and the 1780s, including the complex alternatives relating to the agents who tried to build networks through alliances with local actors and Indigenous populations in the Indo-Pacific region. Lastly, this chapter spotlights the use of enslaved people in various projects in the island.

The legal and constitutional relationship between Ireland and England (and latterly Britain) was unclear for many centuries. Although Ireland enjoyed a good deal of legislative sovereignty under Grattan’s Parliament from 1782, the Acts of Union in 1801 set up direct rule from Westminster. During the nineteenth century, there was a campaign and draft legislation for Irish Home Rule (which Dicey, an ardent unionist, vehemently opposed). This campaign is worth reconsidering in the Brexit/Scottish independence context, given the varied legal and constitutional arrangements that were explored and vigorously debated. However, Home Rule never came about, rendered pointless by subsequent events. Since the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and devolution in 1998, Northern Ireland has a had a variegated but pragmatic settlement of consociation and compromise quite different from the traditional British constitutional settlement. The EU has played its role in the peace process, providing structures for its continuation. Brexit now presents considerable challenges for Northern Ireland and the Republic.

Chapter 7 delves into the reformers often-futile attempts to solicit potential non-official allies such as the Lancashire textile manufacturers and Anglo-Indian planters who sought access to raw cotton and land freeholds. While it initially seemed that the mobilization of the mill owners might deter arbitrary colonial governance, they failed to back the reformers’ radical efforts to alter India’s bureaucratic apparatus after the Uprising of 1857. Disappointed on a second front, reformers were also compelled to condemn the European planters whose exploitative tactics resulted in agrarian disturbances. As Manchester cotton lords in the 1870s continued to harp on the inequity of the colonial import duties levied on their textiles, reformers accused them of weaponizing free trade and stifling Indian competition. Recurrent famines also brought the efficacy of laissez-faire governance into question, which in turn led a faction within the East India Association to espouse a racialized variant of conservationism.

War came to Iran despite its declared neutrality. Ottoman and Russian forces attacked or occupied the northern regions, while Britain expanded its control in the south. The young king, Ahmad Shah, was ill-equipped to rule as rival political leaders emerged. American missionaries documented the devastation of war as Iran suffered from famine and the influenza epidemic. The conclusion of World War I did not bring much support to Iran as its concerns were rebuffed at the Congress of Versailles. A coup brought political change and the end of Qajar rule. The military commander Reza Khan positioned himself as the new leader of Iran, even after the political defeat of the republican movement. Tribal disarmament and state control followed the end of war and the rise of a new monarchy. After the war America considered new opportunities for involvement in Iran.

In 1941, Iran watched its neutrality violated as Allied forces launched an amphibious attack on its borders. The invasion was described as a justified and necessary incursion on a country accused of harboring a German fifth column and of accommodating a small community of Italian and Japanese nationals. The offensive also proved the most efficient way of opening and controlling supply lines to the Soviet Union. America also deployed a large contingent of troops and several advisers. While Iran remained a hub of espionage during the war, the impact of the occupation had a serious impact on the daily lives of Iranians, who grappled with food shortages, imposing foreign soldiers in their communities, and a typhus epidemic. Iran emerged as a relatively small, but vital, player in the international conflict. However, it suffered tremendously, as the war generated domestic instability and unrest.

William I’s ‘Harrying of the North’ was a military expedition against local rebels and a Danish invasion force in the winter of 1069–70. It has been regarded since the 1870s as a uniquely savage treatment of the English inhabitants of northern England, wantonly destructive of life and the means of sustenance, and tantamount to genocide. Such views derive from the two fullest medieval accounts, by the early twelfth-century historians Symeon of Durham and Orderic Vitalis. However, neither was an eye-witness, both were at work two generations later, and both had their own agenda in describing the destruction of the North and William I’s cruelty. The Harrying should instead be seen as a routine military operation which took place, unusually, in the depths of winter, and so had unusually severe consequences. More strictly contemporary accounts from Evesham and Beverley reveal a regional but probably localized famine and a refugee crisis. Further, the record in Domesday Book (1086) of many Yorkshire villages as ‘waste’ should be read as referring not to physical destruction but to the absence of surplus values accruing to landlords, and not caused by the Harrying alone. The Harrying of the North was no genocide.

The role of climate (including abrupt changes and extreme weather) in modern-era violence and conflict has received considerable attention in the past two decades from scholars in multiple fields, yet the mechanisms underlying (and even the reality of) such a role remains contested. Concern over projected climatic changes as a trigger for intensified violence, including mass killing and genocide, nonetheless continues to propel research. Data limitations are frequently cited as a challenge, yet comparatively few studies have turned to the millennia of human history documenting a broad range of violence against diverse social and environmental backgrounds. This chapter reviews evidence for ‘pathways’ by which climate may have contributed to violence and conflict in the Ancient Near East and Egypt. It emphasized religious, ideological, and ethnic dimensions that may have been catalysed by the psychological and material impacts of extreme weather to promote violence and conflict. In particular, we study state-enacted violence by the Neo-Assyrian Empire (909-611 BCE) and internal revolt in Ptolemaic Egypt (305-30 BCE). Newly available ice-core-based dates of explosive volcanism allow the examination of societal responses to the ensuing hydroclimatic shocks (also potentially ‘ominous’ volcanic dust-veils). These can be shown to closely precede documented increases in violence and conflict, including external warfare and internal revolt.

From Antiquity through contemporary times, depriving populations of access to food, water and other means to sustain life has been a central tool of genocide. The deliberate withholding or destruction of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population can be used to pursue policies that systematically target groups with an impact equal to, and potentially even more widespread than, acts of killing. However, the acts that produce and sustain starvation are treated as lesser crimes than killing. When described as famine, these calamities are often presented as natural or unintentional crises of hunger or low nutrition. Drawing on historical examples that range from ancient Carthage, colonial famines, the Nazi Hungerplan, Communist agricultural and political policies, manipulation of humanitarian aid during the war in Bosnia, and genocides in the 21st century, this chapter considers the complications of assessing intent and formulating responses to mass starvation. It offers a wide-ranging overview of the critical concepts, legal developments, and key issues at stake when deliberate deprivation is imposed on a people as part of genocidal policies.

This chapter lays out key questions and concepts in the book. It discusses the author’s concept, the atrocity of hunger, the intentional starvation of a group through the denial of access to food, and it includes more than just the embodied experience of starvation: the physical and mental suffering that humans undergo due to the physiological effects of starvation, as well as the transformation and breakdown of families, communities, and individuals whose lives and core beliefs are shaped by starvation. It is also the process as experienced by individuals, households, and communities as they move from food insecurity to a state of starvation. It outlines that the coping mechanisms employed by the Jews during this experience provide a window into their everyday life during the Holocaust. This chapter lays out the role of food access as a key factor of survival and frames this question squarely within the framework of genocidal famine. It lays out the differences between the three cities under consideration: Lodz, Warsaw, and Krakow.

This chapter discusses the conclusions of the book including examining the connection between surviving the Holocaust and food access in the ghettos. It discusses the challenges to core values that people in the ghetto faced as they sought adequate food for survival.