The traditional narrative around violence that many readers will be familiar with, inspired by Norbert Elias’s ‘civilising process’, is that as the state assumed a ‘legitimate monopoly of power’ in the course of the early modern era, violence declined. The state compelled its subjects to become more disciplined and more pliant, norms that were eventually internalised so the state’s external coercion gave way to individual self-discipline. After the state tamed violence within—by disarming and punishing its subjects and then waging war on its enemies—it then proceeded to inhabit and police the international order by putting an end to piracy and slavery. This western-centric narrative of the rise of the modern state is decisively challenged in this collection of essays on violence in the early modern world. That era was not, the editors (Erica Charters, Marie Houllemare and Peter H. Wilson) argue, a ‘random collection of barbarous brutalities, but rather a period in which violence was used brutally as well as rationally’ (p. 2). We are presented with thirteen case-studies, as well as an introduction that defines violence, the early modern and the global. The case-studies are predominantly non-Western histories of violence, although some of the essays touch on Europe and North America, and some of them cross over into what would normally be considered the modern era. There are two goals here: deliberate attempts on the part of the editors to redefine the early modern from the mid-fifteenth into the early nineteenth centuries; and to inject war and violence, an often-neglected topic, into the field of global history. The case-studies are thus meant to demonstrate ‘how a global methodology can shape one’s understandings of the early modern period and its relationship to violence’ (p. 7).