• Uses new and interdisciplinary approaches in gender history.
  
• Considers the issues across time, from the classical world to the twenty-first century.
  
• Covers a wide range of locations, including Africa, China, Europe, India, Latin America, the Middle East, and Russia.
  
• Academically and theoretically innovative.
  
• Includes work by authors from different countries and different disciplines.
  
• Helps readers to understand violence both as a diagnostic for deeper, more complex historical structures, and as a performative act that can be read symptomatically.

Shani D'Cruze is Reader in Gender History at Manchester Metropolitan University. She was co-editor of the journal Gender and History between 2000 and 2004. Her main publications are on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century social and cultural history of violence, crime and gender and the gender history of the nineteenth-century family.

Anupama Rao is Assistant Professor of South Asian History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her interests are in Indian nationalism; anti-caste struggles; caste, gender and the family form in nineteenth- and twentieth-century western India; historical anthropology; the anthropology of violence; human rights and feminist and critical theory.