The Birth of British Self-Defence: 1604-1904

Abstract

This article examines the discourse of self-defence as it emerged and developed in the British context after the introduction of self-defence as a legal term in English common law in 1604. Twentieth-century self-defence discourse is comparatively more well-researched than previous periods, but this study suggests that the concerns, contours and characteristics of current self-defence discourse were established much earlier, growing in the seventeenth, flowering in the eighteenth and maturing during the nineteenth centuries. The study traces this development by examining self-defence books published in Britain between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. This covers a 300-year period from 1604 (the year that the legal precedent for self-defence was set in England) to 1904 (the year in which publications on jujutsu mark an orientalist reconfiguration of a hitherto Eurocentric self-defence discourse).