Many historians consider the Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648, to mark a watershed in European international relations. It is generally agreed that Westphalia brought to an end more than a century of religious conflicts and marked the beginning of a new era in which secular power politics was the prime motivating factor in international relations and warfare. The purpose of this volume is to question this assumption and reconceptualise the relationship between war, foreign policy and religion during the period 1648 to 1713. Some of the contributions to the volume directly challenge the idea that religion ceased to play a role in war and foreign policy. Others confirm the traditional view that religion did not play a dominant role after 1648, but seek to re-evaluate its significance and thereby redefine religious influences on policy in this period. By exploring this issue from various perspectives, the volume offers a unique opportunity to reassess the influence of religion in international politics. It also yields deeper insights into concepts of secularisation, and complements the research of many social and cultural historians who have begun to challenge the idea of a decline in the influence of religion in domestic politics and society. By matching the relationship between conflict and religion with this scholarship a more nuanced appreciation of the European situation begins to emerge.

Professor Holsti examines the origins of war and the foundations of peace of the last 350 years.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. For victims of persecution around the world, attracting international media attention for their plight is often a matter of life and death. This study takes us back to the news revolution of seventeenth-century Europe, when people first discovered in the press a powerful new weapon to combat religiously inspired maltreatments, executions, and massacres. To affect and mobilize foreign audiences, confessional minorities and their advocates faced an acute dilemma, one that we still grapple with today: how to make people care about distant suffering? David de Boer argues that by answering this question, they laid the foundations of a humanitarian culture in Europe. As consuming news became an everyday practice for many Europeans, the Dutch Republic emerged as an international hub of printed protest against religious violence. De Boer traces how a diverse group of people, including Waldensians refugees, Huguenot ministers, Savoyard office holders, and many others, all sought access to the Dutch printing presses in their efforts to raise transnational solidarity for their cause. By generating public outrage, calling out rulers, and pressuring others to intervene, producers of printed opinion could have a profound impact on international relations. But crying out against persecution also meant navigating a fraught and dangerous political landscape, marked by confessional tension, volatile alliances, and incessant warfare. Opinion makers had to think carefully about the audiences they hoped to reach through pamphlets, periodicals, and newspapers. But they also had to reckon with the risk of reaching less sympathetic readers outside their target groups. By examining early modern publicity strategies, de Boer deepens our understanding of how people tried to shake off the spectre of religious violence that had haunted them for generations, and create more tolerant societies, governed by the rule of law, reason, and a sense of common humanity.

This book provides an overview of the history of religion and war, and a framework for analysing it. Ranging from ancient history to modern day conflicts, and touching on both religiously incited violence and pacifism, it offers a nuanced view on these issues that have had such weight in the past, and which continue to shape our present and future.

This book assesses the service of Henri de Ruvigny, later earl of Galway, in France until the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685, his central role in transforming Ireland in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, and his service of the British monarchy as administrator, military commander and diplomat. The analysis rests on underutilized sources in French, shedding light on a hitherto overlooked civil servant in this crucial period of Irish and British history, wrought with constitutional crises, but also on the Protestant International and the lesser-known fronts of the war of 1689-1697.

The resurgence of violent terrorist organizations claiming to act in the name of God has rekindled dramatic public debate about the connection between violence and religion and its history. Offering a panoramic view of the tangled history of war and religion throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, War and Religion takes a hard look at the tumultuous history of war in its relationship to religion. Arnaud Blin examines how this relationship began through the concurrent emergence of the Mediterranean empires and the great monotheistic faiths. Moving through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and into the modern era, Blin concludes with why the link between violence and religion endures. For each time period, Blin shows how religion not only fueled a great number of conflicts but also defined the manner in which wars were conducted and fought.