Prehistories of the War on Terror examines the longstanding American project of classifying enemies who challenge U.S. power abroad as terrorists. To do so, the volume brings disparate episodes of U.S. military empire-building into dialogue across time and space. From settler colonial wars in the nineteenth-century American West to twentieth-century wars of conquest in Asia and the Pacific, the collection’s essays argue that the United States has drawn both materially and ideologically on older systems of empire in the conflicts through which it has waged the present-day War on Terror. Attending to the local histories from which these conflicts emerged and examining the effects of U.S. intervention in these sites, contributors analyze the cultural frameworks for understanding and remembering past conflicts that confirm, challenge, or refigure the logics of the War on Terror. This volume reveals how contestations over sovereignty, extraction, and inequality must be suppressed and flattened in public discourse to maintain a coherent vision of a totalizing War on Terror. Together, the contributors illustrate that there was no single road that led to 9/11 or the War on Terror. Rather, they argue that we must follow multiple paths into the past to fully understand our present and to fight for a more just future. Contributors: Moustafa Bayoumi, Joo Ok Kim, Janne Lahti, A. J. Yumi Lee, Naveed Mansoori, Karen R. Miller, Kalyan Nadiminti, Tim Roberts, Colleen Woods.

First published in English in 2007 under title: The history of terrorism: from antiquity to al Qaeda.

This collection of essays offers a fresh perspective on the definition and origins of terrorism, broadening the field to include slave revolts and urban tensions, and considering how the "war on terrorism" had already matured by 1870 as a way to justify often bloody campaigns against labor unions, nationalist freedom fighters, and reformers.

This collection of essays begins with the premise that violence, in its relationship to order, is a central element of history. Taking a broad definition of violence, including structural and symbolic violence, the contributions move beyond the problematic of civilization’s mitigating or foundational role, instead seeing violence as inherently social, and, perhaps, socially inherent (if variable). The question then becomes what forms of harm are authorized or banned in which social orders and how they change over time. Beginning with a theoretical introduction, this interdisciplinary volume includes seven papers representing cultural anthropology, history, archaeology and international relations. The papers range from China to the Americas and from the 2nd millennium BCE to the 21st century CE. Some deal with long-term developments while others focus on a single time and place. Many treat the issue of the visibility/invisibility of violence, while all in one way or another deal with the role of violence in the re-production of community. Together, the volume aims to paint, with a few strokes, the outlines of a deep historical anthropology of social violence. The volume is based on the proceedings of a symposium hosted at Brown University.

Though the history of terrorism stretches back to the ancient world, today it is often understood as a recent development. Comprehensive enough to serve as a survey for students or newcomers to the field, yet with enough depth to engage the specialist, The Routledge History of Terrorism is the first single-volume authoritative reference text to place terrorism firmly into its historical context. Terrorism is a transnational phenomenon with a convoluted history that defies easy periodization and narrative treatment. Over the course of 32 chapters, experts in the field analyze its historical significance and explore how and why terrorism emerged as a set of distinct strategies, tactics, and mindsets across time and space. Chapters address not only familiar topics such as the Northern Irish Troubles, the Palestine Liberation Organization, international terrorism, and the rise of al-Qaeda, but also lesser-explored issues such as: American racial terrorism state terror and terrorism in the Middle Ages tyrannicide from Ancient Greece and Rome to the seventeenth century the roots of Islamist violence the urban guerrilla, terrorism, and state terror in Latin America literary treatments of terrorism. With an introduction by the editor explaining the book’s rationale and organization, as well as a guide to the definition of terrorism, an historiographical chapter analysing the historical approach to terrorism studies, and an eight-chapter section that explores critical themes in the history of terrorism, this book is essential reading for all those interested in the past, present, and future of terrorism.

“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity—and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others. Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and speculate about what those findings tell us about our earliest ancestors. We are obsessed with prehistory—and, in this respect, our current era is no different from any other in the last three hundred years. In this coruscating work, acclaimed historian Stefanos Geroulanos demonstrates how claims about the earliest humans not only shaped Western intellectual culture, but gave rise to our modern world. The very idea that there was a human past before recorded history only emerged with the Enlightenment, when European thinkers began to reject faith-based notions of humanity and history in favor of supposedly more empirical ideas about the world. From the “state of nature” and Romantic notions of virtuous German barbarians to theories about Neanderthals, killer apes, and a matriarchal paradise where women ruled, Geroulanos captures the sheer variety and strangeness of the ideas that animated many of the major thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. Yet as Geroulanos shows, such ideas became, for the most part, the ideological foundations of repressive regimes and globe-spanning empires. Deeming other peoples “savages” allowed for guilt-free violence against them; notions of “killer apes” who were our evolutionary predecessors made war seem natural. The emergence of modern science only accelerated the West’s imperialism. The Nazi obsession with race was rooted in archaeological claims about prehistoric IndoGermans; the idea that colonialized peoples could be “bombed back to the Stone Age” was made possible by the technology of flight and the anthropological idea that civilization advanced in stages. As Geroulanos argues, accounts of prehistory tell us more about the moment when they are proposed than about the deep past—and if we hope to start improving our future, we would be better off setting aside the search for how it all started. A necessary, timely, indelible account of how the quest for understanding the origins of humanity became the handmaiden of war and empire, The Invention of Prehistory will forever change how we think about the deep past.

'Timelines' details major conflicts of the 20th and early 21st centuries presented as extended timelines. Arranged in chronological order, each spread looks at a key date in the conflict, and features cross-references to related spreads.