Origins of Violence

John Docker is Honorary Professor in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney. He is the author of The Origins of Violence (Pluto, 2008), 1492: The Poetics of Diaspora (2001), Postmodernism and Popular Culture (1994) and (with Ann Curthoys) Is History Fiction? (2005).

• Dedication: this book is dedicated to Ned CurthoysPreface, Acknowledgements, and Contents PageIntroduction 1. Genocide as Ancient Practice: Chimpanzees, Humans, Agricultural Society2. Genocide, and Questioning of Genocide, in Classical Greece: Herodotus and Thucydides3. Genocide, Trauma, and World Upside Down in Ancient Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus and Euripides4. Utopia and Dystopia: Plato and Cicero's Republics5. Victimology and Genocide: The Bible's Exodus, Virgil's Aeneid6. Roman Settler Imperialism in Britain: Narrative and Counter Narrative in Tacitus' Agricola and Germania7. The Honourable Coloniser8. Was the Enlightenment the origin of the Holocaust? Conclusion: Can there be an end to violence?ReferencesIndex

'From primatology to ancient Greece and Rome to the Bible, early-modern Europe and the Enlightenment, Docker's profound and original analyses provide a deeply unsettling narrative of the longevity of human practices of group violence'