Violence is a word seemingly meant for theorizing, being as abstract and thus as capacious as any category can be. And indeed the history of its use has only confirmed the all-encompassing character of violence, which can now name almost any kind of action or affect: physical, psychological, and even ideological. And yet this term is also deployed to name the most distinctive and visceral forms of cruelty and suffering, such that it is difficult to treat it merely as another abstract category. Shifting uncomfortably between the particularity of pain and the generality of an intellectual category, violence has until recently been ill served by scholarship. The necessities of justice, for example, have meant that violence is rarely the subject of law in its own right, but used only as a euphemism for some degree of murder or charge of battery. And since historians are especially seduced by legal terminology, perhaps because they have traditionally described and justified power, their efforts to mimic the law by finding some party responsible for something have tended not to deal productively with violence.