The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism presents a revaluation of the major narratives in the history of terrorism, exploring the emergence and the use of terrorism in world history from antiquity up to the twenty-first century.

The essays collected in this handbook constitute the first systematic analysis of the relationship between terrorism and modernity on a global scale from the French Revolution to the present. Historians and political theorists have long asserted such a link, but this causal connection has rarely been rigorously investigated, and the failure to examine such a crucial aspect of terrorism has contributed to the spread of unsubstantiated claims about its nature and origins. Terrorism is often presented as a perennial barbarism forever lurking outside of civilization when, in fact, it is a historically specific form of political violence generated by modern Western culture that was then transported around the globe, where it was transformed in accordance with local conditions.

This handbook offers cogent arguments and well-documented case studies that support a reading of terrorism as an explicitly modern phenomenon. It also provides sustained analyses of the challenges involved in the application of the theories and practices of modernity and terrorism to non-Western parts of the world.

The volume presents an overview of terrorism's antecedents in the pre-modern world, analyzes the emergence of terrorism in the West, and presents a series of case studies from non-Western parts of the world that together constitute terrorism's global reception history. Essays cover a broad range of topics from tyrannicide in ancient Greek political culture, the radical resistance movement against Roman rule in Judea, the invention of terrorism in Europe, Russia, and the United States, anarchist networks in France, Argentina, and China, imperial terror in Colonial Kenya, anti-colonial violence in India, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, and the German Autumn, to right-wing, eco-and religious terrorism, as well as terrorism's entanglements with science, technology, media, literature and art.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Invention of Terrorism: The Emergence of a Mass Media, a Transatlantic Public, and the Terrorist Tactic in 19th century Europe, Russia, and the United States, Carola Dietze
1. Acting like Harmodius and Aristogeiton: Tyrannicide in Ancient Greek Political Culture, David A. Teegarden
2. The Radical Resistance Movement against Roman Rule in Judea, Kai Trampedach
3. Instrumental Terror in Medieval Europe, Warren Brown
4. Isamili Assassins as Early Terrorists, David Cook
5. Early Modern Forerunners of Terrorism in Europe and Nineteenth-Century Historians, Johannes Dillinger
6. “Thugs and Assassins,” “New Terrorism” and the Resurrection of Colonial Knowledge, Kim A. Wagner
7. Situating the Reign of Terror in the History of Modern Terrorism, Ronen Steinberg
8. Making Terrorism Thinkable: The Philosophy of the Act and its European Reception, Klaus Ries
9. Terrorism's Target: The Emergence of the Mass Media, A Global Public, and Modern Terrorism, Carola Dietze
10. Time Bombs: Terrorism, Modernism, and Temporality in Europe and Russia during the Long Nineteenth Century, Claudia Verhoeven
11. The Science of Destruction: Terrorism and Technology in the Nineteenth Century, Simon Werrett
12. Propaganda of the Deed: The Emergence of the Radical Weapons Manual in the Late Nineteenth Century, Ann Larabee
13. “The Beauteous Terrorist:” Russian Women and Terrorism in Literature at the Turn of the Century, Ana Siljak
14. Anarchist Terror in Fin-de- Siècle France and its Borderlands, Vivien Bouhey, trans. Cory Browning
15. China and the “Anarchist Wave of Assassinations:” Politics, Violence, and Modernity in East Asia around the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Gotelind Müller
16. Terrorism against Modernity: The Amakasu Incident and Japan's “Age of Terror,” 1920s-1930s, Mark Driscoll
17. An Archive of “Political Trouble in India:” History-Writing, Anticolonial Violence, and Colonial Counterinsurgency, 1905-1937, Durba Ghosh
18. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization: “Oriental” Terrorism, Counterinsurgency, and the End of the Ottoman Empire, Ryan Gingeras
19. Manufacturing Martyrdom: Terrorism and Salvational Sacrifice in the Fascist Iron Guard in Interwar Romania, Constantin Iordachi
20. The Evolution of Jewish Terrorism, Ami Pedazhur and Arie Peliger
21. Anti-Colonial Terrorism: Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood to 1954, Mark Sedgwick
22. Manifestations of Imperial Terror in Colonial Kenya, 1890s-1960s, Timothy H. Parsons
23. Terrorism as an Artifact of Transition in Post-Cold War Latin America, Carloa McAllister
24. In Defense of Mother Earth: Radical Environmentalism and Ecoterrorism in the United States, Keith Mako Woodhouse
25. Modern Rebels? Irish Republicans in the Late Nineteenth Century, Niall Welehan
26. Global Terrorism and Transnational Counterterrorism: Policing Anarchist Migration Across the Atlantic: Italy and Argentina, 1890-1914, Richard Bach Jensen
27. Twentieth Century West Balkan Terrorism, from Sarajevo to the End of State Socialism, Mate Nikola Toki
28. Terrorism as Third Front: Anti-Imperialism and Transnational Radicalization of the New Left in Italy and West Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, Petra Terhoeven
29. Western Europe, Second Front in the War for Algerian Independence (1954-1962), Linda Amiri, trans. Cory Browning
30. Religious Terrorism at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century, Mark Juergensmeyer
31. The Islamist Terrorist as the New Universal Enemy: Discourses on Terror at the United Nations, Pinar Kemerli
32. Women Terrorists in Postcolonial Conflicts, V. G. Julie Raja
33. “Deeds, Not Words:” Right-Wing Terrorism in Twentieth-Century Europe, Michael Sturm and Daniel Schmidt
34. Cyberterrorism: Understandings, Debates, and Representations, Andrew Whiting, Stuart Macdonald, and Lee Jarvis
Epilogue: Shock and Awe: Toward a Theory of Terrorism, Claudia Verhoeven
Bibliography
Index