The Conquest of Death

Abstract

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.