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SoSe 24: Gun Culture and Gun Violence in the Early Modern World

Stephen Thomas Cummins

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Handguns proliferated at an astonishing rate in the sixteenth century. From being a rare avant-garde innovation upon Ottoman and European battlefields, adapted from Chinese technology, they cascaded into everyday life in many regions. States often enthusiastically distributed handheld firearms, hoping to extend their authority and battle-readiness across territory, but then reacted in dismay when confronted with the social consequences of an armed populace. Firearms accompanied both Spanish and Portuguese imperialists as well as European colonists in north America. They also became quickly a technology used widely across Eurasia by, for instance, the Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman imperial armies. Gun manufacturing and proliferation were a set of globally connected processes, with various hubs and connection to the global extraction and trade of commodities. This course will not concentrate primarily on either military or technological history, although these will naturally be important foundations and reference points. Rather, we will concentrate on the cultures of handheld firearms and gun violence in everyday life (or, at least, beyond the classical battlefield). We will explore the origins and nature of attitudes towards handguns and their possession, as well as their integration into practices such as hunting. We will study early attempts at the control and limitation of firearms, including licencing and training, as well as local resistance to such prohibitions. We will examine case studies which may include the arms industry in northern Italy, militia culture in the German speaking lands, notable handgun assassinations, the ‘arquebusier angels’ of seventeenth-century Peru, and the connections between gun culture and imperialism in the Americas more generally. On a slightly more general level, we will also explore the possibilities and challenges of using contemporary social issues as the basis for topics of historical research. close